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Anthem Spreadsheet Launch

February 18, 2019 by Belghast

Anthem “Launched” on Friday and I spent my weekend having a blast playing the game for real. However unfortunately the bulk of the people who pre-ordered the game will not be able to experience the game until this coming Friday the 22nd. This is what I would call a spreadsheet launch, and I talked a bit about it on Friday because if you purchased a month of either the $5 or $15 flavor of EA Access then you were able to play this weekend. The $5 price point gave you 10 hours of gameplay… and then I was a sucker and went with the $15 dollar double special secret access that just gave me the game one week early. At this point according to Origin I have spent 17 hours playing, and the majority of why I went with that version over the $5 variant is it allows me to just not care about how much time I happened to be spending.

The challenge this morning is how do I condense the feelings I am having about the game into something resembling a proper blog post. The quick summary is that I like the game an awful lot, so much so that I went to sleep each night dreaming about playing more of the game. I am good and properly hooked and for the moment it is an equivalent experience to how I felt about Destiny when I first got my hands on it. The world is insanely intricate and all of the concerns that I had from the Demo about Freeplay being fragmented with invisible walls… turned out to be misguided. From what I can tell all of those barriers that were thrown up during the Demo were to simply keep us out of the content that they did not want us to visit. Roaming around Freeplay in the final game provides a seamless experience that lets me traverse from one side of the map to the other.

First off lets talk about the map, because I have heard concerns about it seeming like it is very small. I am not able to zoom out far enough to get it all in one screenshot, but I can get a fair amount of it… which makes it seem on the small end. However exploring it…. feels completely different because the map has a lot of verticality to it that is not often there in similar style games. The same area may have a high path, a middle path and an underwater or cave based path all traversing the same ground giving you a lot of fenestration and cramming more detail into a square of map than you would normally have. This is awesome when you are freely roaming the map… and less awesome at times when you need to find an objective and have no clue at all what level of the infrastructure it might be on. At least one of the Tombs that you end up having to track down a ways into the game will frustrate you as you try and find the opening to an underground cave system that contains it.

The next piece that I want to talk a bit about is the Story… which is exceptionally good… but something I cannot really talk about in detail for fear of spoiling the game play experience. I’ve said the game is “very Bioware” which apparently means different things to different people… in response I have gotten Glitch Memes and Romance questions. What I ultimately mean by that is that it presents a really interesting world with a level of depth rivaling the Mass Effect series and is populated with a bunch of characters that I already care about. Through the conversation dialog… I am asked to make a series of decisions similar to the Paragon/Renegade system and I have a feeling that these change what happens in the world. There are definitely story paths that I have seen that seem as though they would not have occurred were it not for the previous choices I made. Additionally the characters are aware of each other… and choices made with Character A end up creating options for Character B… which again creates that “Bioware Feel”.

The gunplay is enjoyable, but I will say that the weapons do not feel as memorable as they do in Destiny for example. What is memorable however is the way that you move through combat and the various options that you have to embellish your play style. You are given a dodge… but why dodge when you can just double jump into the air and engage your thrusters to jet over to a safe distance from whatever attack is just about to land. The demo had significant issues with Mouse and Keyboard movement, but these have all largely been ironed out for the release and the more I play it… the more addictive the freedom of movement has become. If I want to get somewhere the game gives me the means to do it… and it feels completely different than a traditional MMO where you are mostly just flying high above the content and avoiding it entirely. There are lots of things in the air that can ruin your day and force you to deal with them, and instead your flight capabilities seem as a method of augmenting your other means of traversal.

All of these combined make the gameplay experience addictive, and make me want to keep climbing back into that suit and going out on another adventure. There is something about the launch sequence that is just enjoyable… seeing your javelin waiting for you to hop in. The fact that you cannot view your loot or swap gear in the world ends up with a gameplay loop that sees you going back to the Fort every so often, just to fiddle with your equipment before heading back out into the wilds again. I loved playing Patrol mode in Destiny, and as such Freeplay is very much my jam if I just want a solo experience. Thankfully most of the world events seem to be doable solo, which allows me to roam around collecting loot and doing objectives until I decide to get more serious about progression. If I want to play with other people there is the delightful freeplay option which mimics how I play Monster Hunter World with what I call “SOS Roulette”, where it dumps you into a random group that isn’t full and from what I can tell… it could be pretty much any activity.

Another thing that I am deeply thankful for is the fact that the game does not appear to care at all about levels when it comes to grouping. I’ve been paired with level 20s while at level 5… and I still felt viable and that higher level character didn’t feel like a ringer. This is a good thing given that those of us who were willing to spend that extra $15 are going to have a full week of play time on the folks that will be joining us on Friday. Right now among my friends you can see that Naithin is leading the charge with what I can only assume is bordering endgame item level, with Lex not very far behind. My only real complaint right now is I would have liked there to be a clan or guild system at launch, but I am at least happy that it is apparently on the near radar system wise. Grouping seems fairly seamless and there were moments this weekend when I happened to be running a mission and did not realize until after the fact that someone from my friends list had joined. It isn’t like there is much in the way of player to player interaction, and as a result that makes the whole grouping experience feel awesome for folks that end up preferring solo game play.

The only bit of a advice that I will throw out there is that if you played a lot of the demo like many of us did… your first Javelin choice is legitimately that… your first and ONLY Javelin choice for 8 levels. As such this mean’t I incorrectly thought I was picking my first spare Javelin and wound up playing the first 8 levels of the game as a Storm… which is fun but not really my jam. I am a Ranger through and through and once I got to level 8 the game started to feel very much like home again. All in all I am hooked and enjoying the experience greatly. It seems to be a game that splits the difference between many of the different looter shooter titles out there, and as a result has a style of play for pretty much everyone. As a long time Destiny Titan player… the Ranger appeals to me greatly because it feels like a similar game play style. However if you want to survey the battlefield from a distance… the Storm does an awesome job of that. Basically… I heartily recommend this game when the ACTUAL launch happens on Friday.

Some parting links for players… firstly I have a Roster that I have been collecting names on since Origin doesn’t have a way of importing users from other more popular gaming services.

Also Namaslays/Jewel has started up a Discord Community called The Anthem Collective so there is that if you are wanting another way to meet players. I have joined but I am also super bad at keeping track with Discords so I will probably be a super infrequent user, and mostly rely on it if other grouping opportunities peter out in the end game. I am super happy with what I am seeing so far, and am curious what my other friends that are playing think. I am hoping we see a bunch more Monday morning posts about experiences.

Anthem Friend Exchange

February 15, 2019 by Belghast

Well here we are… it is officially the day that Anthem launches… and by launches I mean if you paid a bunch of money you can get access to the game today. I know several of us did this thing ahead of purchasing the PC version, because in doing so it gives you a discount off the game purchase price in the first place. The only problem is things are way murkier than they have been in the past. There are now two tiers of Origin Access… the $5 a month basic customers and the $15 a month customers. We are now in an era when you need a spreadsheet to explain when exactly you get to play the damned game. EA support of course did this thing… and while I am grousing about it I do not necessarily blame Bioware for this apart from the fact that they allowed themselves to get bought years ago.

So if you are dumb like me and went ahead and ponied up for a month or two of Premier… then you can start playing Anthem legitimately today at 9 am Central Standard Time. I will unfortunately be at work and given that we have freezing rain going on outside I have no clue what my commute is going to look like. As such I will probably get a super late start tonight and am hoping the servers are stable by the time I actually get home. If you have Origin Access basic… aka the $5 a month that used to be the only thing that was available… you get to play a 10 hour head start. Something of note… if you are in this camp Origin loves to not fully close games. I had this happen to me with Andromeda and saw all of my hours tick away while I slept. Make sure the executable for Anthem is good and dead in Task Manager to prevent this from happening to you.

For everyone else… you get to start playing next Friday, which is kinda screwed up that the folks who are paying the $15 premium are going to get one full weeks worth of game before the folks who simply ordered the game. This is a frustrating situation and I am weak as fuck for playing into the “buying early access” game model. The real question is… I have no clue what this is going to do to the grouping dynamic and how far of a gap between characters is completely reasonable. We didn’t really pay attention to levels during the demo but wound up largely within a level or two of each other given the very limited range that was possible. We all mostly capped out at 15 by the end, and while I think we pulled in someone who was around 10… it wasn’t really a noticeable issue.

I am hoping it will be simple to help pull players up and do group content together regardless of the level gap. This gets into the other major problem with Anthem… there is no guild/clan system going in at launch. This combined with how dodgy the Origin client is in general has made me contemplate some sort of alternate way of collecting people who are going to be playing and also occasionally available for grouping. As such I set up a google sheet this morning to start collecting Origin account information. Because I didn’t think of a better way to handle this… there are two parts to the system… the Sign Up Form and The Roster sheet. I will be manually copying entries from the Form over to the Sheet… which is honestly the only way I could think to do this without either manually sharing out the Roster or giving everyone Edit access which would go horribly wrong.

Why would I do this thing you ask? Well it is simple… Origin is this walled garden disconnected from the other various gaming networks. It for whatever reason does not seem to understand that we want to group up with people we might know from other platforms and as such has no way of importing users or getting suggestions from other platforms. There is no twitter or facebook integration, and most certainly nothing like the Steam integration that Epic Games Store has. So you are stuck trading ids with people on a one by one basis and I figured something like this… would allow a large number of us to catch up in one pass and turn the friends list in Origin into something that is actually useful. Right now at the time of posting the sheet only has my information but I will be updating it throughout the day and keep posting new names at least once daily after that.

So to summarize:

Hopefully this smooths out the bumps given that this is a bit of a new venture into MMO territory for the Origin client given there was no integration between Origin and SWTOR. If you think this is a really dumb idea, then I am more than willing to accept those comments. If you think it is a good idea however… fill out your info and lets get ready to fly some mech suits!

The Will of the Moon

February 11, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about me trying to recuperate from whatever crud I had on Friday. I’m feeling better as a whole but still not feeling 100%. I’ve referred to this weekend as a name brand beta, because when a company throws a special test that most of the world seems to be invited to it definitely comes off as more marketing ploy than actual test of the game infrastructure. Overall the game performed flawlessly other than an apparent known memory leak bug, that I never quite encountered because I didn’t play longer than the requisite two or three hours that it takes to encounter it. The missions that I ran were rather enjoyable, and I fully expect to at a minimum play through the story content and unlock all of that. I make no guarantees about how long it will take me given that it took me a good two years before I reached maximum level in the original game.

I still question how well the game fits my play style, but at the moment I am looking at it for a purely single player experience given that I know going into it that none of the other AggroChat crew will be playing it. They all for the most part bounced off of the original Division, and primarily for the bleak story beats. I think the fact that we were effectively working for the various communities that we discover makes the flow of the story feel better. However as Kodra pointed out on the podcast, it does leave us a question of why exactly we are still an agent if there is no organizational structure left? I mostly view that trope as the lone lawman in the wild frontier sort of approach. I will say the game improved massively after I turned off the HDR, given that I was only able to SEE the HDR effect upstairs in my office and not while playing remotely through parsec… and as such it made everything extremely washed out and hard to pick out details.

The game I spent the majority of Saturday playing was Assassin’s Creed Origins and I have reached a point where I am staring down the barrel of the ending. However I am extremely frustrated by what appears to be the ending that is unfolding in front of me. Now I have said for some time that my opinion is that when this game was originally planned the ultimately design was that you could play it as Bayek or as Aya since the two characters at least on some level are interchangeable and have the same reasons for engaging in the main story plot. For sake of budget I assume they cut one character so that they would not have to animate two copies of everything, but the problem with this is… that every time you are forced to play Aya it is like stepping foot into a level one character.

What I mean by that is through the course of the game you make a lot of stylistic decisions about what weapons you want to use and what talent points to sink into. Then each time you are throw into playing Aya you are forced to return back to the character that lacks the ability to customize anything. So spoilers time… but I just went through a sequence where it appears that I am saying goodbye to my character Bayek… aka the one that I have spent the last 40 levels customizing to be exactly the way I want him to be… and being forced to do the ending of the game with Aya the level 1 blank slate. This makes me really not want to do any of the ending and just call it good enough… returning to playing through the fun part of the game which is doing random quests out in the world. Maybe this isn’t exactly what is about to happen… but it certainly seems like I am just about to be forced into beating the game as a proxy. Please note… I like Aya as a character and would have been fine playing her… if I could actually control what sort of gear and talents she had.

Lastly I spent some time playing Final Fantasy XIV this weekend and accomplished two things. Firstly I managed to get my Blue Mage to 50… which means I now need to find a party of blue mages to go collect the rest of the spells I have available to me given that everything else seems to come from a dungeon or trial. I spent the podcast grinding out mobs in Northern Thanalan and managed to push across the line solo. I also managed to get through The Burn which served as a bit of a roadblock since the final boss of that dungeon appears to be a PUG destroyer. I’ve now moved the quest line along to where I am failing miserably at a fight that is about four times longer than it really needs to be. Actually I have only failed it the one time and it was mostly because I didn’t catch on what was going on fast enough. I opted to play through the mission as a warrior instead of a samurai, but that also meant that I was not prepared for a burn phase, because I assumed I was simply trying to out survive the encounter.

I will likely poke my head back in again tonight and give it another shot. I think I am probably nearing the bridge between 4.4 and 4.5 and as such getting closer and closer to being able to understand what the hell is going on.

Lost Allagan Tankybutts

February 6, 2019 by Belghast

It feels lame when I say it this way… but I am been on this very slow path of trying to ease back into Final Fantasy XIV. Most recently I have spent my time leveling as a Blue Mage, but last night I decided to try and figure out what it would take to get unstuck in the main story quest. One of the frustrating parts about coming back to FFXIV is that generally speaking there are gear roadblocks in the way. This is not to say that the game does not give you ample opportunity to catch up… but you have to be playing to be able to exercise those options. If you have been like me and largely checked out for the better part of an expansion… you come back and find that what might have been good gear for the launch of the game… is no longer able to actually participate in anything.

This was the case with me who was largely in 310 gear when I checked out of Stormblood and slammed right into a wall called Castrum Fluminis in the main story quest. To be able to do this 8 player trial it requires you to have 335 item level… of which there are a bunch of ways to get, but all of which required me to actually be doing content. Then I was reminded of the fact that a new set of hunt seal gear went into the game. Last night I started the evening running around and collecting Centurio Seals…. only to notice that when I checked the total I had gotten… that I was apparently capped? I don’t remember doing that much hunting before I left but it was enough to get me into a full set of 330 gear. Shortly after this a very awesome guildie dropped a brand new 380 crafted axe on me pushing my item level up to 336 and over the line needed to do the trial.

However I took the chickens route out and decided to see what it would take to gear out my Samurai in an equivalent amount of gear. The answer? Roughly 1 million gil by the time all was said and done bought me a new weapon and a few strategic pieces of gear that pushed my total item level up to 336 as well. I completed the Trial as Samurai since no one actually expects much out of them considering they seem to have replaced the Dragoon as the lolclass in the minds of the populace. I do need to get back on the tanking horse… but last night was not the night. I did however get through the Trial relatively easily and pushed forward in the story until I hit one of the infamous “lots of cutscenes” warnings. Based on past experience this means thirty minutes to an hour and a half of stuff that is about to happen.

Given that it was fairly late in the evening already I took this as my queue to head on to bed. From what I can tell I am at the border between patch 4.3 and patch 4.4… and I have all of the content in 4.4 and 4.5 yet to go until I have reached the ultimate conclusion of Stormblood. So far they have thrown out a few surprises… but unfortunately the news of Shadowbringers has spoiled a little bit of the conclusion. I’ve still not watched the long form trailer that came out with FFXIV Fanfest Paris, and as such am trying to push through so that I can be up to date. I am trying to get back into playing an MMORPG again… but it just feels weird considering how much of the Destiny style MMO Lite I have been playing of late.

If my math is correct… tomorrow is the beginning of the Closed Beta test in Division 2. I will likely be pausing my MSQ progression to spend time checking that game out. Curious… who else will I be seeing there?