Games Archives - Page 353 of 691 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Kulve Farming

November 7, 2018 by Belghast

This morning we return you to your regularly scheduled posts, instead of whatever yesterday’s post happened to be. I started typing in Google Docs… and it just sort of kept going on and on. Yesterday was of course election day, and a lot of my staging a post ahead of time was due to the fact that I was trying to get in and out of the polls in the morning quickly. As far as gaming goes I am still very much all over the place. Right now as it stands Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter World tend to be the staples that I play at least some of every single night. Over in Monster Hunter this largely involves getting into a Kulve Taroth group and trying to farm weapons and tickets for the layered armor set. At this point I still have a ton of pieces left to collect but this is way more of a goal for me than collecting gear, given that I already have enough glimstones for a full set of crafted gear. I am simply missing the various elder dragon gems needed to craft most of the pieces. That however can be done after the event.

As far as weapons go… I have been nowhere near as lucky as I was on the Playstation 4 version. I have literal pages of blue weapons which are fine… and can provide a specific element if I need one. However the above image shows off some of the weapons I thought were generally worth keeping around for the long haul. Probably the weapon that interests me the most right now is the Taroth Blaze “Numb” because it has nonsense Affinity, plus a Defense bonus… plus 450 Paralysis… and from the look of it it might have some white sharpness if I equip handicraft items. The other item that I am probably going to wind up using is the Taroth Sword “Mire” just because there are occasionally fights where decent water elemental damage are useful. I think the Sleep daggers might be useful to play with given how fast you can build up elements with that weapon type. The Water damage Lance is decent, especially with the level three gem on it. One positive is it does give me a Charge blade to play with… which is not a weapon type I have crafted any or messed with on the PC.

Another game that I have been poking my head into is The Division, largely because I wanted to see what it looked like on the new graphics card. However I noticed that I am really damned close to level 30 which I believe is the level cap. I really want to see what the game becomes when I finally reach that plateau and somewhere along the line I picked up a handful of set pieces ready to be equipped at that level. For now I am casually roaming around and killing stuff out in the world, and I find that relaxing and enjoyable. Previously I was focused on TRYING to level… and getting frustrated that it was going so slowly. Now I am just sort of running amok in the town and not paying attention to anything past that. It seems to be working and I have been spending a few hours here and there on it.

With the Diablo kerfuffle, I have also been exploring some other ARPGs just in case Diablo 4 really isn’t in the cards… or at least to have options to tide me over until it releases in a few years. The most obvious game directly competing with the Diablo franchise is Path of Exile, but I have never really been able to get into it. Coming back however it does feel considerably better, apart from the fact that you are given showers of loot… most of it not useful… and nowhere near enough inventory space to ferry it back to town. As such the loot itself feels a little frustrating, as does combat at time since it seems to vacillate back and forth between “nothing is attacking me” and “an entire screen of things is overwhelming me”. Right now however the biggest problem with the game… happens to be its community. In trying to settle in I started looking up the answers to a handful of questions and for the most part the community answer seems to be some derivation of “go back to diablo noob”. That is not helpful, nor is it making people want to stick around for very long. It has really interesting mechanics but a much slower pace, which can be both positive and negative. The lack of a forward walk button without giving up an ability slot… is also a little frustrating.

The game that appears to be more my speed when it comes to methadone for Diablo 4… is Torchlight II which admittedly is an aging game at this point. However it is also serving to prepare me for Torchlight Frontiers which looks extremely interesting and fun. Hey Perfect World folks… if any of you happen to be reading my blog… hook me up with a key? I love the setting of Torchlight, for example last night I was going through this awesome clockwork dungeon and since I play an engineer it felt really cool to be busting up mechs with a giant hammer. This also has the shower you with loot, most of it useless problem… but at the very least you can keep sending your pet back to town to sell it. This is another high point for this game is it allows me to run around with a Ferret friend. Super glad I installed it and definitely enjoying poking around in it again… even though I am largely confused as to where I left off in the story the last time I was playing.

Packed Weekend

November 5, 2018 by Belghast

I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.

Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.

I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.

I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.

Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.

Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.

As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.

Fallout 76 B.E.T.A.

October 31, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the opening of the Fallout 76 PC Beta and by Beta I mean… last minute stress test? I mean there are a bunch of periods between the letters of B.E.T.A. but it might as well have been “Beta”… but my frustrations over people misusing these terms can be a post for another day. The primary reason why I can tell these are Stress Tests and not necessarily bug squashing beta tests is the fact that all of the players have been funneled into a tight play window. So last night for example the test ran from 7 pm EDT to 11 pm EDT… and technically I managed to fire up the game a little bit before that because it seems like they went live a wee bit early. Thursday they are extending the window a bit given the issues that folks ran into last night allowing play from 2 pm EDT to 11 pm EDT… which honestly isn’t super useful to me given that is 1 pm my time and I will be very much at work. However I appreciate the effort and that seems like completely reasonable times for the EU players.

I am not really sure what all I can actually say about this game that hasn’t already been revealed. You need to set your expectations at “this is a Fallout 4 multiplayer mod without NPCs” and if you can sufficiently do that you will probably not be disappointed. The character creator is effectively the same one we are used to with Fallout 4 and I managed to cobble together a reasonable facsimile of Belghast fairly quickly before venturing forth into the world. There is a lot of weirdness going on with the game because at times… it feels like a much higher fidelity version of the Fallout 4 engine, then at other times the world feels like a nonsensical blurry mess even on “ultra” preset. I have a feeling there is some sort of a dynamic scaling functionality going on that I am hoping is something we can eventually disable completely. I would honestly rather have my frame rates dip below 60 occasionally than have the world freak out every so often.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is you are playing with a lot of other players… and this can be a bit of a rude awakening given some design choices they made. Namely when you first log into the game your microphone is completely open by default… and so is literally everyone else’s. At first I thought maybe I accidentally had a window open playing a video or something… because upon arriving at the character creator I had some dude keep saying “PRESS X FOR SEX!” and I could not figure out if this was some sort of edgy tutorial or what. Moments later I had a streamer ask the server to please not say anything racist because she was about to go live. It was around this time that I went to the menus and figured out how to turn off voice chat completely. Additionally I turned on the radio station… both of which are things that greatly improve your experience.

One of the things you have to realize about me and Fallout is just how much time I spent being a murder hobo roaming the countryside. So in truth the lack of NPCs really wasn’t that big of a thing for me personally… the game provides tons of feedback about what events happened before in an area in the form of found notes, journals, holo tapes that thankfully occasionally just start playing on their own without having to fiddle with the interface… and in the scattered computer terminals. Basically Fallout 76 is a game that wants you to read the story, and by doing so… gives us lore hounds something to chew on without getting in the way of the folks who just want to run amok in large packs. Occasionally you will encounter a robot that offers quests, but they largely serve as the only thing that would equate to the traditional fallout dialog options.

The game will put you through a sequence of tutorial steps that are designed to introduce you to how Fallout 4 worked… but if you are like me you will have probably already done those things the moment you find your first crafting machine. Sadly the game does not give you credit for already doing these things. So for example the Second Helpings quest… shows to Cook a Ribeye Steak and to optionally get a piece of Brahmin Meat. At this point I had killed a half dozen Brahmin and had at least ten cooked steaks sitting in my inventory. This is made more awkward in part because various folks will be doing various stages of the quest at the same time… and while it does not appear that you are actually competing with them for any resources… Bethesda made the poor choice to make it so that if another player is using a machine that they lock you out of also using that machine.

The long and short is… it was a fun game and I didn’t really have much in the way of actual interaction with other players. There were to the best of my knowledge no gankers roaming around, in part because the deck is stacked heavily against them in the game. That said I still probably will not get super serious about Fallout 76 until the custom server options are available and I can rent one for my friends to play on. If I had the option to play this single player… I probably would… which I realize completely defeats the point of the game. That said I do think it would be fun to run around with a group of friends and share resources in an environment where you can do things like dump stuff into a crate and not expect someone to come along behind you and take it all.

Death seems to largely be meaningless apart from the fact that you drop some crafting resources when you die. At first I thought you could simply go back to the place of your death and pick these up without issue… however it seems like ANY player can pick up your sack of loot because I got a note saying someone looted mine while I was running back to the corpse. It wasn’t a big deal because I didn’t really have any rare resources like circuit boards, but if I did… that would have been maddening. I’ve not really tried the crafting system out in part because I didn’t want to try building anything in a region where so many random players were roaming around. The positive is basically any town serves as a warp point, and all of them so far have had most of the crafting machines needed, so I didn’t necessarily find the need to build a base as of yet. I enjoyed myself and look forward to playing it legitimately, but like I said… probably won’t play super heavily until I can get my own server or join the server of someone else that I trust.

Five Sixty

October 30, 2018 by Belghast

I had a really great night, largely because over the last few days I have allowed myself to break free of the turtle a bit and communicate with other people. Sunday this was me hanging out with Warenwolf doing some stuff in the Dreaming City. During the first part of last night it was me hanging out on Discord with my good friend Grace while we were doing completely different things. I am not exactly sure what she was up to but I spent my time running strikes and heroic story missions in Destiny 2 to knock out two more powerful engrams for the week. I’ve talked briefly about this but it really is so much easier to get geared now than it was before. There seem to be an endless supply of opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams to drop. I am not sure what the mechanics are behind it, but I have a buff that says it allows for the dropping of Prime Engrams, and to the best of my knowledge in spite of getting several of them… I have never seen it disappear. Apparently there was something I did called “Prime Attunement” that gave me the buff but for me… it largely just showed up without me realizing it.

Later in the evening I got together with SquirrelPope who assisted with one of the quests that I had outstanding and taught me the ropes of the Ascendant Challenge much like Waren had with the Blind Well the night before. Apparently the game took my desire to get a Tigerspite to heart because I now have three of them… none of them sadly with the god roll. I’ve managed to get my light level up to 560 which is still a good ways off from the cap of 600… but nonetheless a lot of progress. I am still very much in the phase of using whatever gear happens to be the highest light level, and that is probably going to be the case for awhile since I figure the grind will slow down significantly at this point. I am not exactly sure when Prime and Powerful engrams stop giving the huge boost that they do now. I will admit a lot of my slingshotting level was was the fact that I picked up Horror Story at 600 light. At some point I will probably start working on my other classes and that slingshot will be similarly handy for them as well.

One of the things that I have to talk about briefly is how great the collections tab is. As you run through the world and get items to drop they flag as being collected. If said item is a static roll, aka a pre-forsaken item you can always reacquire it from the collections tab at a reasonable light level. Right now I am 560 light and everything in the collections tab is showing as 540 light for reference. There are tabs like this for armor, exotics, ghost shells, sparrows, ships… basically anything that takes up vault space that you may or may not need to keep forever. At some point I need to have a great cleaning of the vault as I shard tons of items that I can get back from the collections tab. Similarly I need to start trying to finish the sets, seeing as you can still get most of it from planetary vendors. There are a few items that I got on the console that I never managed to get on PC, that I would really like to add to my collection.