Games Archives - Page 331 of 687 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Prone to Rant

April 9, 2019 by Belghast

I love it when a game makes me seem like a whiny madman. I regularly read reddit, but very rarely comment about anything. However my frustration levels with Anthem have been growing to the point where I occasionally want to vent. I mean I try my best to keep this blog fairly positive, or at least balanced… but the Anthem reddit has been a salt mine since release so I figured it was a safe place to vent my frustrations. After today’s patch still announced no relief to the loot woes… I wound up venting at the nearest thread basically stating that apparently Bioware considers the current state of the game to be working as intended. To which I threw this lengthy comment.

So they have stated that loot isn’t where they want it to be. However it has been 52 days since the launch of the game and there has been a constant drumbeat from the player base that “loot is broken”. They have “accidentally” fixed loot twice to much praise from the players, so I find it hard to believe they do not understand which levers need to be pulled to give us what we actually want.

What I do believe however is they do not understand the kind of game that they built. They seemingly created Destiny with Flight… but with the loot system from Diablo 3 without fully understanding what makes either game tick. In Destiny… Exotics are these rare drops that feel super special when one happens, but that only works because every Exotic Weapon that you get is a curated roll and in the case of the armor that has some variation you have a way of re-rolling the stats. Diablo 3 on the other hand has a lot of variation in the loot and with that a bunch of crap items that are immediately going to get sharded… but the drops are plentiful which makes up for the fact you are going to keep very few of them.

If they want to continue to be Destiny with Flight and Diablo 3 Loot… then they need to make the tweaks and turn on the fountain of loot that makes that concept work. Either that or they need to change Legendaries so that they drop as perfectly curated rolls for optimal play if they want them to still be as rare as they are currently. The current combination is an incongruous mess.

I don’t want to abandon hope… I really don’t. However after gearing up all four Javelins to Masterwork level, and with the very limited content that is currently available there isn’t much for me to do right now other than decide either to walk away and cut my losses until “Year Two” and everything magically gets fixed like it did for Destiny, Diablo and The Division… or to keep slamming my forehead into the brick wall until I am dizzy enough not to care about the lack of legendary drops in GM2.

I had heard the term “Reddit Gold” before but never really understood what it was. I had to get Ashgar to explain to me how exactly it works because I legitimately had no clue. Apparently someone paid money to give me an award for that post? Anyways the funny bit about this when I got home and I did my daily run of trying to get a key and then doing a stronghold to use said key, the game decided to actually drop a legendary.

It is actually a fairly good legendary at that, if you are the type of person who enjoys playing with sniper rifles. I run with Siege Breaker for one reason and one reason only… it can freeze targets. Otherwise I would probably never use a sniper rifle in this game, and unfortunately because I know I squandered my luck on this drop it will probably be another week before I see something else. There was someone in the comment thread that theorized that they are working on some sort of a Stronghold challenge similar to Nightfalls in Destiny 2, and that maybe it would reward guaranteed legendaries. There is still supposed to be a large patch in the works for some point this month, so I guess we will wait and see. In the mean time I am trying to decide if doing dailies to get crafting materials and crappy decals is worth logging in on a daily basis.

Since I complain that Anthem is a game that wants to be Diablo 3 but doesn’t exactly understand Diablo 3 Loot…. I decided to play some actual Diablo 3. The last few nights I have been hanging out before bed working on my Crusader on the Switch version, and last night I wound up playing while upstairs in my office piped through my Elgato HD. I find it weird that my default method for playing consoles right now is through a capture card, but it more or less works other than the fact that it doesn’t take amazing screenshots of the switch given the amount of upscaling that happens. Over the weekend I finally beat the main story and now I am focused on running Rifts and doing bounties. Over the last two nights I have worked my way act through act doing a full set of bounties… only to realize that apparently the season that I started playing on is over and that didn’t count towards the normal seasons journey achievement. Ultimately I am progressing too slow to really be worrying too much about seasons in the first place.

Right now I just want to hit 70 so I can gear out in the Thorns set which is hands down my favorite way to Crusader… and a play style that I thought would translate well to handheld mode. By the end of the night I managed to hit 58 and just a little bit away from 59, which means right around the corner I will start being able to collect Deaths Breath and finish unlocking the rest of the stuff in camp. Additionally it means that I will be able to start Cubing some of the low level drops that I have gotten like the Heart of Iron that I managed to get during my 40s. I am still only playing on Hard and have not ratcheted up the difficulty at all… but without Haedrig’s Gift I feel like that ratcheting process is going to go way slower as I try and painstakingly collect a set of Invoker gear.

It would be nice of Haedrig’s Gift worked for pretty much any character to be honest, season or not. The highlight of the night was seeing my very first Menagerist Goblin on the console and it dropped one of my favorite pets… the Flaming Skull. At some point I will have to test out how grouping works as I know a handful of my friends have the copy on Switch. That said this is largely a before bed solo grinding game for me as I find it incredibly relaxing. I do however wish there was a way to link your Blizzard account and get some sort of cross play going on. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing anytime soon unfortunately.

Outward and Blades

April 8, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I do not have a ton of great screenshots because for some reason over the weekend GeForce Experience decided to stop doing its thing. So the majority of the time when I thought I was taking a good screenshot… I got nothing at all which is insanely maddening given that I rely on these screenshots for this blog. This weekend I tried a couple of new things, firstly Outward which is billed as a survival game published by Deep Silver and developed by Nine Dots Studio. For me personally however it is something completely different. Playing Outward reminds me of how it felt to play Everquest. I don’t necessarily think this game was intending to be one of the many Everquest nostalgia titles out there, but in my hands it ends up being the best one so far. I am not entirely sure what exactly throws it in this category, but a large piece of it is the fact that you have no minimap and the overworld map you do have does not show you where your character actually is at any given time. This means you need to sort your own directions out by following the compass rose or by moving around based on landmarks.

Additionally I have been thrust into a world where I don’t quite understand the rules, and I realize this will fade over time… but for now everything is interesting and dangerous. I have no clue what might be around the next corner and if it will end up killing me. Lastly the game has a system the requires you to venture back into the wild to do a manner of corpse recovery in the form of your backpack that is ultimately left behind when you die. All of these things combine to provide a much truer experience to how Everquest felt as a brand new player than anything to date, and I am pretty certain that was not at all what this title was going for. I think the design goal was to have an RPG rooted in the survival game tradition with extremely challenging stamina based combat that makes you choose your attacks carefully. It succeeds at that, but I honestly don’t think I would have spent nearly as much time playing it this weekend were it not for the fact it was playing upon my memories.

In the above screenshot I remember not noticing that I had a disease for a really long time… because it was the common cold and not the insane life drain disease that I had gotten before. The common cold mean’t that my stamina regeneration was greatly impacted… which also lead to me taking a death in the cave just in front of me. Little things like that sneak up on you in this game and honestly make it feel way more cruel and brutal that any other similar game. The story is pretty bleak so far as well given that you are effected by a blood tax due to the fact that your ancestor turned away some religions pilgrims… that ultimately became the majority power in the setting… things are pretty harsh. After returning from being shipwrecked… the townsfolk demand 150 silver within five in game days or they will repossess your house. So you are set off on a path of either finding a way to earn that money, ignoring it and letting your house get taken… or finding a way to do a favor for one of the locals big enough to get some debt relief. It is a call to action, but sort of a maddening one… that caused me to restart the game a few times until I sorted out how best to play it.

The other new game that I tried out this weekend was Elder Scrolls Blades which promised to be a mobile Elder Scrolls Experience… which admittedly was something I had been throwing a little side eye towards since the original announcement. I’ve played Bethesda mobile games before and was greatly concerned about what monetization methods would be built into this one. Ultimately the choice landed on a timer based system that locks your loot behind a gate of either waiting for it to open or paying to open it immediately. Additionally the first chest you get has a wide array of stuff that is actually useful to you including a significant weapon upgrade. The chests that I found following that initial tutorial chest however largely included unexciting common rarity junk, that admittedly is probably useful for the games in built crafting system… but nothing hear as exciting as getting item drops that you can equip.

The game itself feels like a really weird point and click adventure game… with the addition of real time combat that feels awkward and non-intuitive. My instinct is to click on the mob with my finger to swing my weapon at that body part. Instead you have to press and hold and then release to swing your weapon. You guard by pressing and holding on the shield icon… that isn’t on your screen all of the time and seems to only appear roughly a second after stopping attacking… making the whole experience feel a little stilted. The purpose of all of this appears to be to go on missions and complete objectives… like in this case I was saving some prisoners that you can see caged in the central image of the above triptych. Then you go back to town and use the resources that you just got to rebuild the town. The only negative is… this is fairly time consuming and requires something close to 20-30 minutes per iteration rather than the normal 5-10 minute loop that I expect out of mobile games. This is definitely something you would play on your lunch break… rather than something you might pop open while waiting in line somewhere.

The other big problem that I encountered is that while I have a fairly modern phone that has feature parity with all of the current flagship models… I apparently was ineligible for app install. If you are curious here is a supposed complete list of devices the game is available for… which seems to be missing a ton of devices it can technically run fine on. So when you encounter a situation like this… you don’t really have to sit and take it or at least not if you are an android user. Sure Google Play is the most common app store and the one in general you want to use for most purposes. However there are a bunch out there that will let you install literally anything you want on any device you want… whether or not it will run is a completely different challenge. Personally I tend to favor APKPure as I have had a lot of luck with that app in the past and it has some built in patcher support similar to Google Play. Functionally this is going to be a two part step… firstly you need to enable installing apps from unknown sources and secondly you need to download the APKPure app to your device. After that you can install Elder Scrolls Blades on your device and log in with your Bethesda.net launcher account. If everything worked as expected you should be able to try out Blades on any device not listed on the official list. For me it ran perfectly fine on my ZTE Axon 7… though admittedly it is a significant battery drain taking me from 100% to 79% before completing the first tutorial quest… which admittedly was like 20-30 minutes worth of game play.

I will probably poke my head into the game a bit more, but I am not entirely certain if it is really for me. I was expecting Mobile Skyrim… and what I got was a traditional mobile device game. Once I reset those expectations I am sure I will probably enjoy the experience and add it to my before bed roster of mobile games.

Borderlands Still Fun

April 4, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I did the thing I have been doing every night and spent enough time in Anthem to unlock another key, and then ran a stronghold in which I managed to expend two of the three keys I had banked. I actually got a purple quality emote, which is a major step up from the various dross I had gotten prior to that. After that I was somewhat listless and ended up landing upon installing the newly released Borderlands Game of the Year Remastered edition that should be showing up on whatever service you happen to own the original Borderlands through. I remember reinstalling the original Borderlands shortly after the launch of Borderlands 2 and thinking to myself that the game in general felt really dated. However this version allows me to push it up to glorious 4k resolutions with graphical clarity… which is awesome and helps to distract me from the fact that it largely has a monotone color palette.

I have to say that I am happy that games are now pushing us beyond the “everything is brown and grey” era of shooters that we were stuck in for so long. Hot pinks and purples absolutely belong in the wasteland, so I feel like it would have been great if they could have maybe splashed a little color here and there for this re-release. That said they did a dutiful job of up-sampling all of the textures so that they pop… the only negative is… it makes me realize how limited the geometry of this game is at times. All of that said does not detract from my hot take of the night: Borderlands is Still Really Fun to Play.

I did not make it terribly far into the game, but I have already noticed a handful of quality of life improvements. For example I did not remember the original borderlands having a mini-map, which was one of my complaints about questing through the game and feeling like I always had to keep popping up my large map. Borderlands is a game without a lot of freedom of movement, and more or less you are travelling down fixed paths… which means in order to get form point A to point B there is pretty much one correct path that you needed to take to get there. Having the minimap makes me significantly less frustrated as I snake my way through a series of winding tunnels to a plateau… that does not have an obvious visual path to help direct you there.

I am playing Roland… because I always play Roland or Axton or whoever the third game will have that fills the roles of the basic soldier plus gadgets. There is little wonder to why in Division 2 running around with a Turret feels so natural. The other take away from the night is that the gunplay in Borderlands 1 is nowhere near as good as I thought I remembered it being. In the meantime I have played Destiny… a game which takes obsessive gun feel to a whole new level. Compared to that… and quite frankly even compared to Anthem… Borderlands weapon design feels like an inaccurate mess. That said I am adjusting and learning to over compensate for the fact that none of the non-scope sights seem to actually bear down on the target correctly.

The other hot take of the night is that I really don’t care about Borderlands 3 being an Epic Game store exclusive title. Basically this is a financial decision and should not be looked at as anything else, regardless of whatever lame commentary the parties involved come up with. The harsh truth is Borderlands 3 will make way more money for the studio on Epic Games regardless of how many sales they make. Borderlands has always been a title developed in Unreal Engine, which means that on top of the 30% Steam cut… there is a 5% Unreal Engine cut. So the studio takes home 65% of every dollar made on Steam. On the Epic store they are completely waving this Unreal Engine fee and then also only taking a 12% cut, meaning the studio takes home 88%.

So in the simplest of possible math… if a game makes 100 million dollars… on Steam they would be taking home 65 million, and on Epic Games store they would be taking home 88 million. That is a difference that you just cannot ignore in the climate of studios trying to figure out how they are going to fund their next title. Especially given that Gearbox has had a number of pretty high profile flops since their last massive success in Borderlands 2. I mean do we need to summon up imagery of Battleborn, Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever? The difference in money a studio can get on Epic Games is just not something that can be ignore especially given that titles like Metro Exodus have proven that in spite of all of the grousing… the majority of fans will not care at all about the platform change. That title sold better than any of the previous titles regardless of the PC storefront exclusivity.

Where I take issue with the jump to Epic Games is in scenarios where pre-order packages have already started being sold on a specific platform. I feel like if you ever start taking pre-orders you are obligated to support that platform indefinitely. I think where this will backfire strategy wise is the fact that high profile titles have jumped ship long after pre-orders had started… will start making the customers question if putting in ANY pre-orders from now on is a good idea at least until things have stabilized a bit more. Personally the only games that I pre-order in the first place are ones that are giving me some sort of a perk for doing so… mostly a cosmetic outfit or a special gun… even though I know that these items will be long forgotten within the first few hours of gameplay.

Ultimately at the end of the day Steam has to come to the table with a better proposition to keep titles from leaving. As it stands if you are releasing a game built in Unreal Engine… you would be dumb not to go with the Epic Games store platform for your release. I think where I come from is maybe a different place than a lot of gamers given that I have traditionally mostly been an MMO gamer. Almost every MMO has its own launcher and does not originally release on Steam… in spite of the fact that many eventually do come to that platform. As a result my system is already strewn with single user launchers so an additional store front here or there does not really phase me in the least. Steam is already not the only platform I bought games through… if it is a UbiSoft title I tend to just buy directly on UPlay since I have to have that client regardless of where the purchase was made. Then there is Origin my least favorite storefront that I continue to begrudgingly use… because Bioware. I more happily use GOG, but largely because I have a bunch of older titles there… and my freebie copy of Witcher 3 had to be redeemed there.

Essentially while I favored Steam… I was not exactly a loyalist. If a company can make more money on Epic Games store… then who am I to halt them. I’ve seen a lot of “whelp I guess I won’t play the next Borderlands game” in my feeds, and that is fine if you truly feel that strongly. Me I will be playing it and enjoying myself because as I found out last night… Borderlands is still fun.

Oracle of Our Age

April 3, 2019 by Belghast

We all knew it was coming, but yesterday Kotaku’s Jason Schreier posted his break down on what happened during the almost seven year development odyssey with Anthem… formerly known as Dylan and formerly known as Beyond. The truth is I had not made the connection there to the original Dylan prototype that was shown off and Anthem… and I also did not make the connection to the leaked Beyond name and Anthem. I somehow thought both of those were scrapped concepts… and I guess in truth they ultimately were. If you have not had a chance to read the article then I highly suggest you do so. There are so many ways to write a post mortem of a game… but Jason always seems to land that perfect mix of giving damning evidence with a non-hyperbolic touch. In most of these tales the staff are the heroes struggling to make the best product they can while caught in a bad situation, and the tale of Anthem really is no different.

What rings true about this for me at least is that I have a lot of friends in game development who have been willing to open up about the process behind closed doors. This is a trust I have not broken other than speaking of these moments in generalities about the industry as a whole without specifically naming names. Ultimately that is probably why I continue to get the treatment of folks willing to talk about them to me. However the anecdotes I hear tell me that the tale of Anthem or Destiny or Andromeda… are not unique to those specific companies but instead a problem with the industry as a whole. There is a manifest destiny that they can punch through any game development cycle with enough hours spent and enough midnight oil burnt… to the detriment of the employees family life and often times sanity.

I know folks who have left the games industry after finding out how generally unstable it is, and found a much better niche in the world of the corporate sector. Growing up… building games was my dream as it is the dream of so many people. My path however lead elsewhere as subtle circumstance after circumstance lead me to the comfortable safety of managing a group of developers. However these side stories that I have been trusted over the years have told me that I ultimately made the right decision. I could not handle the instability and the fact that the majority of folks who work on a title wind up getting laid off and having to find a brand new workplace in-between releases. Then there is the problem of only having specific locations where a group of studios tend to clump… and of those… the only one that is really palatable to me personally is Austin Texas.

The tale of Anthem weirdly gives me hope and renewed patience towards the game as a whole. If they could make the core mechanics of the game feel so good within effectively the last six months of production… imagine what Anthem would have been given another year of development time. I also feel hope because now the game as a whole seems to have been transitioned to the Bioware Austin live services team, and quite frankly I have a lot of faith in that group. Opinions may vary but I feel like they have done an excellent job with the growth of Star Wars the Old Republic, which is another one of those games that I return to regularly to gobble up the content that has been put into the game since my last visit. I feel like it is a better game today than it was at launch by a large measure, and this is in spite of the weird monetization schemes that the game has.

What I am ultimately hoping is that EA will give them time and space to grow Anthem into a really amazing game at some point down the line. The issues are large, but only really something that kicks in once you slam into the concrete wall that is the progression scheme. Shortly after the release of the post Bioware made what feels like a very hollow response, which tells me two things. Firstly they only read the bullet points that Jason Schreier claims to have sent over before publishing the article and wrote the piece entirely based on that. Secondly however it tells me that the points that were made rang true and set them on the defensive. All of this seems really odd given the level of transparency we have gotten from the community team about the state of the game, which makes me think this came from a highly disconnected corporate level instead.

Right now I am pretty much logging into the game on a nightly basis, but only long enough to do whatever challenge grants me an Elysian Key. The last couple of nights I have not stayed in long enough to actually run a Stronghold to open said Elysian Chests. However even the rewards that you get from these chests show that the order of operation has been to take a pat of butter and try and make it spread across an entire loaf of bread. So many of the vinyls that you get are lackluster or are simply resized and less cool versions of the ones that come from the paid shop. The team is struggling to add meaning to the game without having a backlog of content to put in place. I love the core of what this game is so hearing about the struggles and what they accomplished in spite of them… makes me want to stick around and see how things evolve.

That said I also don’t necessarily begrudge anyone who does not care at all about the heartache and struggle that the employees went through, and simply points at the bottom line that they paid for a finished game and didn’t get one. If you are in that camp… then it might just be time to cut your losses and return later when there is the inevitable patch that fixes everything and gives this game their “Taken King”, “Forsaken”, or “Patch 1.8” moment. The fact that I can rattle off a list of moments in Anthem’s direct competitors timelines where the games went from sorta crappy to pretty awesome over night shows that this is not a unique problem they face. Even Diablo 3, which is the title they kept holding themselves up to has their “Loot 2.0” moment that fixed so much of the game. I will be holding out for that day and continuing to poke around in the meantime. Feel free to just use this blog as a litmus test for when it is a good time to check it out again. You know without a doubt I will be making happy posts if that day comes.