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Anthem Demo Impressions

January 28, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I am going to talk for a bit about the Anthem Demo that a good number of us participated in this weekend. If you did not have access to the demo or one of the many friend codes that were floating around… the truth is what you missed more than anything is a lot of frustration. However the game that was buried under that layer of frustration was apparently good enough to keep us engaged and trying to log in over and over. I want to talk a bit about my expectations for the game before going into it. First off this comes from the pedigree of Bioware, so I expected a great world with good character development above pretty much everything else. Mass Effect was not a series known for its amazing gun-play, but instead the interesting things you encountered along the way. My ultimate hope was that Anthem could be a game that was fun to the Destiny players, The Division players and the Warframe players and act as a unifying vehicle that was “a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll” and create an experience that felt familiar and enjoyable to all of them. Essentially my hope was that it could be the game that folks rallied around in my community rather than having a group of us split loving Destiny and another group split loving Warframe.

Connection Issues

So lets get the bad stuff out of the way first. This is a screen a saw a lot of this weekend… otherwise known as the 95% freeze. The game would load fine into Fort Tarsus the social lobby, but as soon as I picked a mission and attempted to start it the screen would freeze with 5% of the loading bar to go and stay there indefinitely while consuming near 100% cpu and gpu. Now the weird thing about this is… I am used to these sorts of bugs happening on the PC version of games… but it was apparently fairly ubiquitous across all three platforms the game is appearing on which leads me to think this is infrastructure related. There are individuals however that seemed to be completely un-phased by it… so I am also wondering if there is a connection/location based component. Whatever the case the only way to get past it was to go into Windows Task Manager and kill the Anthem process, and then upon loading back into the game you would be prompted to join the expedition already in progress… at which point you could load into the mission.

Experience and Loot Issues

Last night I started being hit by a different bug, where I could not return to base from a Free Play mission. This was remedied by killing with Task Manager and then when prompted to rejoin the mission… saying no. The only problem with this however is that in doing so I sacrificed all of the experience that I had gained while doing the mission. This is the second major problem with Anthem… everything in the game is considered to be a “match” and nothing is rewarded until you successfully complete said match. That means if you get disconnected and for some reason cannot rejoin that session… you are going to loose out on all of the achievements and experience that you gained from that mission. The only consolation prize here is that loot that you picked up seems to be independent of this annoying cycle, that said… it isn’t ACTUAL loot until you have been through the exiting a mission screen to turn those generic loot indicators into physical items. So I knew I had a few blue items in my inventory but had no clue what they were until I had joined another freeplay session… which again required me to kill the game, relaunch and join the abandoned session… before finally exiting out of a free play session successfully so I could acquire the stuff that I had looted in the previous rather length session. This is some horrible nonsense… loot should not live in this transitory state until you have successfully jumped through the right hoops… and also the exp you have gained should not be held hostage by buggy connection code.

Flight and Movement

Now we move to something that is both one of the biggest strengths of the game… and one of the biggest weaknesses if you happen to be playing with a Mouse and Keyboard. Freedom of movement is a massive part of this game and it feels awesome to be running along and simply lift off into the skies flying towards your next objective. I think the overheating mechanic does a good job of giving you a reason why you can’t simply fly around in GM mode like you effectively can as soon as you get a flying mount in an MMO. It is cool that you can dive quickly down to cool yourself back off or fly through a waterfall to get the cooled buff to extend your flight time. Those are all really great mechanics… but the mouse and keyboard controls feel awful without a significant amount of tweaking. Huge credit goes to my friend @_KateyLee for providing me a link to a post on the Mouse Sensitivity forums where they worked through a bunch of different configurations. Ultimately just zeroing out all of the sliders related to flight and swim movement seemed to provide me a good baseline… from there I will tweak things up when the real game launches until I reach the most comfortable setting for me personally. However if you also felt like flying and swimming was a horrible experience… you might just try dropping the sliders down to zero and seeing if that works for you too.

Gunplay

Another big part of a game like this is how the moment to moment gun-play feels… and to this I can give the game a resounding “okay”. It feels passable and quite honestly this game as a whole feels like they took the Multiplayer components of Mass Effect 3/Andromeda and built a brand new game around them. I never really thought that any of the weapons in a Mass Effect game were terribly inspired feeling, but they got the job done and I guess that same admonition carries forward to Anthem. I liked Assault Rifles and Shotguns in Mass Effect, so it is zero shock that my default loadout so far for Anthem is an Assault Rifle and a Shotgun. I am hoping as we get into the wider game that we will start to see a greater breakout of weapons… because right now we have a couple of different variants of the weapon types but there is a general sameness to the way they feel. The bar that I hold a game up to is Destiny, and the gun-play in Anthem is nowhere near as fluid or tight as that. It however feels better than I remember Mass Effect Andromeda feeling… which in itself felt a lot better than Mass Effect 3… so baby steps?

Exploration

Where the game excels is in exploration… the world while relatively small in the part we have actually seen… feels massive because every inch of it seems to be peppered with things to explore. While out in free play mode which is this games version of “patrol mode” I got a tip from my handler about activity happening in a certain area… that there was a shaper relic that needed silenced. So I moved over to that area of the map and went through a sequence of fighting things and collecting orbs until I finally silenced the relic. This awarded me a chest and a bunch of experience points, but also had the unexpected side effect of now opening up a new area of the world map which lead to the ruins that I am exploring in the above screenshot. This eventually lead me to a boss fight where I took down an elemental titan, which again counted as a world event with its own rewards. This is the sort of thing that happens in game is that one thing chains into another thing and another and means that the world feels extremely fluid and rewarding to explore. Since I tend to spend most of my time in these games solo… this means I will have a rich experience that is unfettered by walling up anything interesting in the game behind group content. Just in my short time playing I have encountered a ton of areas that would be thought of as Lost Sectors in Destiny terms, that are hidden behind a waterfall or at the bottom of a lake or quite honestly in plain sight as you happen to be zooming past it. This game is exploration porn and the suit gives you enough tools to be able to get pretty much anywhere.

The Suits

Another huge positive of the game is that the Javelins all feel different. In Destiny for the most part it is all about gun-play with your supers and abilities adding flavor to the experience… which quite honestly the jumps being the biggest differentiation between the classes. In Anthem the Ranger is effectively your Destiny style class with grenades and a super and a weird weapon ability… mixed in with a wide range of weapons. As a result I really really love the Ranger because it is what I was looking for in a game. However the other classes are playing totally different games… with the Colossus being sort of a Reinhardt shield tank that happens to have the heaviest weapons but pays a penalty in movement because of it and completely loses the over-shield in favor of a physical barricade. The storm is legitimately a caster and will spend most of its time in the air casting elemental attacks down on opponents rather than spending a ton of time shooting the weapons. The interceptor feels like Zero from Borderlands… and is a literal Ninja and moves and has attacks that feel completely appropriate for that sort of game style… but has a massive penalty to the amount of harm it can soak up. When you are running with a balanced party the game feels extremely cool as each of the abilities feed off of each other, and in turn they all feel completely reasonable when moving around solo as well… but also sort of dictate a different way of approaching problems.

Fort Tarsus

Now we are going to loop back around to another negative. While gorgeous as evidenced by this painting like screenshot from in game… Fort Tarsus does not feel great to explore. Now I realize a lot of the functionality was turned off completely during the demo… as we were constantly reminded any time we tried to interact with anything. However shifting from third person suit mode to very slow first person human mode feels awkward and weird. I mean I get what they were going for… they were trying to create a clear delineation between “mech mode” and “operator” mode. The biggest problem that I tend to have is how freaking slow I move while running around without my suit. The layout means that I am going to be traversing this location over and over as I do the functional things that are required to play the game… which also means I am going to hear that same partial Bhangra synth loop over and over and over… side note if you stand there it doesn’t actually go anywhere and just keeps looping over the same little sample. At a minimum I would like to see them give me a sprint option.

Characters and Story

The demo does not really give you a lot to go on. You are essentially sent on what feels like a side mission to recover a relic and then deal with the ramifications of using this weird tech. However the brief amount of time that we got to spend with characters, makes me extremely hopeful for how this game is going to feel as a whole. I already care about Zoe the mechanic who keeps my Javelin running and has a casual back and forth about how we are ALL her favorites. Matthias my Arcanist also seems like someone I am going to be perfectly fine getting to know better through the course of the missions. The dialog itself seems to be a simple A or B set of answers… or in Mass Effect terms… Paragon or Renegade. However so far in the most simple of interactions… Zoe at the forge for example seems to remember what I have said before and use it in later dialog so there is some manner of branching already in place for the few instances it has come up. NPCs that seem to remember our past interactions is going to go a long ways to making me feel more engaged with the game world as a whole. This was something that would have helped Destiny quite a bit… if the NPCs remembered our past adventures.

In Summary

As a whole I am really looking forward to playing Anthem legitimately, and I am booned that each of the AggroChat crew seemed to find some element or specific javelin that they really enjoyed. I am hoping this very rough weekend helps them make the necessary tweaks for a successful launch. Next weekend there is going to be another demo, but I think this time the floodgates are going to open a bit further. I am going to hope that the various connection issues have been ironed out and that my tweaks to mouse settings continue to provide me a better than default experience. If so… I think Anthem is going to be a great experience. That said I am preparing myself to weather the storm of a rough launch, and I have to give Bioware a lot of credit for taking to social media and Reddit early this weekend and trying to stay in constant communication as they were working through the issues. This scores me a lot of points that they were being open about the struggles, and in the grand scheme the fact that they are listening is going to win them points with the community as a whole. Ultimately this isn’t going to be the game for everyone… and if you already bounced off this style of game then it probably isn’t going to be the one that causes you to see the light. However it does already appear to be welding the breach between the Destiny and Warframe factions of AggroChat, so I have hope that maybe it will be something we can all play together.

So if you took the time to play it this weekend, what were your thoughts? I would love to hear them.

Fun Police

January 23, 2019 by Belghast

Yesterday during the day I posted a list of Ravnica guilds in order of my likelihood to play them. For the uninitiated the guilds themselves simply represent the various two color combinations that are available in Magic the Gathering. So instead of saying you are playing Black and Green… a lot of players simply say that they are playing Golgari as a not as short as saying GB sort of shorthand. The truth is I think it goes deeper than that and is instead a sort of tribalism that allows players to indicate that they are in fact “in the know” and part of the community. Whatever the case… they exist and I have certain proclivities. Here is my ordered list of guilds in decreasing likelihood that I would play that color combination.

Golgari – aka Green and Black
Gruul – aka Green and Red
Rakdos – aka Red and Black
Orzhov – aka White and Black
Selesnya – aka White and Green
Boros – aka White and Red
Simic – aka Blue and Green
Dimir – aka Blue and Black
Izzit – aka Blue and Red
Azorius – aka Blue and White

Later that night Kodra chimed in with a comment that I expected him to make at some point.

Stop hating on blue

— Kodra (@kodra22) January 23, 2019

You notice that pretty much on my list every combination that includes the color blue is sorted to the very bottom as in general it is the color that I am least likely to play at any given time. Also note that pretty much any combination of Black and Green gets sorted pretty high given that those are my favorite colors to play. So why then do I hate one specific color of magic. The truth is I hate what it stands for… which is control magic. The challenge of the color pie is that in modern magic every color has specific themes that it excels at. Black for example plays with dead things, and also things that are just as likely to backfire and harm the player as the opponent. Green wants to go big and go fast and stomp stomp stomp stomp. Red wants to burn you… GIVE ME FUEL GIVE ME FIRE GIVE ME THAT WHICH I DESIRE! White does a bunch of things… but mostly small creatures with tricks, flyers and ways to prevent damage from being dealt. Blue on the other hand… while it also has a bunch of flyers… it excels at the magic of denial.

Now I will admit that pretty much every color has some form of denial built into it. Green is good at blowing up flyers and artifacts, Red can nuke stuff… black has a lot of straight up death to a creature cards, and white can throw creatures into time out exceptionally well. Blue however just has a lengthy library of ways to keep you from actually doing anything. If a control player is doing what they are intending to do… they effectively shut you down from being able to cast anything. This means that one player is having fun tormenting you… and the other player is frothing at the mouth and wanting to flip the damned table. Blue players tend to couch this commentary as that they like doing tricky things, but those tricks are played at the expense of someone else’s fun.

Don’t get me wrong I have played control before and fiddled around constantly with my “Mill” deck for years. For the uninitiated “Mill” is a deck style named after the card Millstone that forces the player to place the top two cards from their library into their graveyard. One of the alternate win conditions in Magic the Gathering is that when one player cannot draw a card they lose the game. So in Mill you are playing a constant stream of cards that force the player to discard over and over until they have nothing left. Right now there is a card called Persistent Petitioners that if you have 4 of them in play… can force the player to mill twelve cards at a time. Sure it is weird and entertaining the first time you encounter it… but if you keep encountering it the fun wears off for everyone but the person playing the deck. Ultimately the reason why I do not enjoy Blue… is because too often the fun of a control player comes at the expense of everyone else.

Of note this is also why I generally do not like broken combos like Krark-Clan Ironworks that if encountered you might as well just concede and move on with your life. There was an unlimited combo in Amonkhet that involved players creating a bajillion cat token creatures. The first time I encountered it… I let it play out just to see how nonsense it could get. Notice the opposing player has an army of token creatures… and is at 183 life to my 15. Once again this was entertaining the very first time I encountered it, but not at all from that point forward and if I even got the whiff on the wind of someone playing this combo… I could concede out and move on to the next match hoping for something more manageable. The players who love combos like this feel a sense of gratification for breaking the game… and everyone else just feels like the game is dumb for allowing something like that.

The times I am happiest playing Magic the Gathering is when you have some random back and forth interactions, the type that you see often among brand new players. I love two people sitting down with a bunch of random jank and hoping to succeed, and I guess that is why in general I prefer draft formats for the randomness. I’m working on a pauper singleton league at work as I have said before, in part because those constraints do a lot of things to stamp down power combos. If Arena had a format where they literally gave you a randomized deck that aligned to some basic color themes… that would probably be my favorite format ever. I think ultimately I am chasing the joy we felt first playing this game when we absolutely did not know any better and had six of us sitting around a table playing in a grand melee.

Giza and Memphis

January 22, 2019 by Belghast

Today we return to my normal nonsense. Yesterday felt really weird, but not as weird as I guess I expected it to feel? I am still very much engaged in Assassin’s Creed Origins… or in the way that I play it… Egyptian Skyrim? I’ve made it to Giza and can now die happy… or actually at this point I have made it past Giza. Climbing to the top of the pyramids was an interesting challenge as you effectively had to work your way from gap in the capping to the next gap all the way up to the top. That is one of the bizarre things about this game… in some ways it feels very much like Breath of the Wild where it seems like you can climb everything in your view… until you suddenly can’t. When the game wants to cut off a route it makes something un-climbable which just feels really odd considering the rest of the game you are pulling off crazy moves that would be impossible to actually do in real life.

One of the mechanics that I both love and hate is the torch, because I am having to use it an awful lot here in Giza as I explore the depths of many tombs. It feels cool because in theory the torch shows about as much as you would expect from an actual torch. The negative however is the game knows this… and regularly presents you with rooms that have dimensions that do the torch no favors, and in those situations I find myself working around the edge in a vague attempted to not fall into some pit or something. So far I have not actually encountered an actual pit, but by god my mind knows that the moment I stop being vigilant… BAM A PIT. Additionally I love that the game shows me actually equipping weapons… but it really shows the nonsense of my inventory as I am equipping two different bows… a sword and shield… and a giant freaking battle axe.

Another thing we need to continue talking about is how freaking gorgeous this game is. I’ve always been enthralled by Egyptian history… and roaming around all of these locations in virtual avatar form is amazing. Memphis is pretty much how I imagined it… a swampy mess. I also love the fact that there is a dedicated croc hunter in a vague attempt to keep the waterways clear enough for the people to safely traverse. I am not entirely sure why I am on this single player kick, but I am going to roll with it at least until Anthem starts going through its pre-release posturing early next month. I will say… all of this is really making me want to pick back up Witcher 3, which is even less linear than Assassin’s Creed Origins… and quite literally something I could play for six months and never have seen everything. The biggest thing about this game…. is I am always happy to return again the next night.

So readers… what are you up to that is interesting? Playing anything great?

Friends through Food

January 17, 2019 by Belghast

I know I have talked briefly about this in the past, but we have been adopted by two of the neighborhood cats. First we had the cat that we refer to as “big boy” who comes running from several yards away when he sees us come out in the morning. He does this thing where he rears back on his hind paws to reach up and headbutt our hands and it is adorable. He wants food of course but I think he mostly wants attention, and I take a break from the coffee and blogging time to go give it to him when my wife shouts up that he is out there. He isn’t out every single day… but comes close to it and we know which house he belongs at and they have a doggie door so he is sorta on free roam as he likes. He apparently visits lots of houses during the day and ours is but one stop on his trip.

Over time we developed a second cat… that admittedly we refer to as “Two” because we are unoriginal and also have no clue where she belongs. This cat seems way more “permanently struggling” than big boy, and over time our relationship with her has improved. At the beginning she would run the second we got near the door… only returning once she was sure we were no longer around. Each day she would run away a little less… to this morning when she did not budge at all when we opened the door and only eased away as I walked out on the porch to set down some piles of food. I set out two piles since I know that her and big boy have a sort of uneasy truce… but cannot be expected to eat from the same pile.

From what I can tell she lives somewhere behind our house, as often times in the morning I will come into the kitchen and our backyard light has tripped. We have it on a motion sensor and I have looked out a few times and seen her back there and even when I have not… often times she shows up in the front of the house as soon as we turn the porch light on. We’ve built a little box full of blankets on the front porch in hopes of enticing her to snuggle in since it has been fairly cold of late… but so far no luck there. We’ve seen her hanging out on the porch and using it as a windbreak… but no actual snuggling.

I am sure however that at some point in the next few weeks/months we will reach a point where she is comfortable enough around us to stay while we feed… or even let us pet her. She has been super skittish but each day feels like a tiny victory as she becomes less so. I mean it is not like we need more cats… given that we have three indoor ones, but we are suckers for animals that look like they need taking care of. So as a result we now have our indoor family and our outdoor family… and someday maybe an amalgam of the two. For the time being however I am just trying to teach “Two” that we are pretty okay human beings that are setting this food out just for her.

On the gaming front, I am still engaged with Assassin’s Creed Origins, even though I had a bit of a fragmented night for reasons. I didn’t get out of work until almost 6 pm which put me getting home way later than normal… then I fixed dinner for myself and fixed dinner again for my wife when she got home around 8:30 pm. So as a result I got a bunch of little things accomplished in the game, but didn’t move the story forward much past opening up the next sequence of targets. I somehow doubt that those are actually the FINAL list of Targets however… because I figure there will be a final batch after those that represent the end game. These targets mostly seem like they serve a way to open up new areas of the game like Giza and Memphis for example. Still having a blast, especially in the weird amalgam of Egyptian and Greek culture that are sort of mashing together.

One thing the game does a good job of is what Pete mentioned yesterday in the comments… of showing just how insanely long the Egypt was a major world player. The period of Egyptian dominance that we think of in the history books started in roughly 3150 BC and concluded somewhere around 332 BC… which is 2818 years… so yeah no wonder we are exploring ancient ruins in a game that appears to be set towards the end of the Ptolemaic period of Egypt when it is effectively ruled by the Greeks. There are so many interesting themes going on in this game that I just sorta want to wallow in the world instead of pushing the story forward. I’ve helped out so many random people just as a diversion from moving the needle forward. The moment to moment gameplay feels really good and as such I am super happy to be out exploring new areas.

Last night I had to sneak my way up to the Lighthouse of Alexandria… because I assumed there would be a leap of faith… however it was a bit shorter than I was expecting. I halfway expected to have one that would take me down the entire length of the tower, but instead it just deposited me at a hay pile a few stories down. Maybe there is another post that I somehow missed on the climb up that would provide a more gratifying experience. All in all I am still very much enjoying myself and look forward to playing it over the upcoming four day weekend.