Games Archives - Page 355 of 691 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fragmented Gameplay

October 22, 2018 by Belghast

This was a busy weekend, largely because I spent most of it not in Oklahoma. We opted to take a fall break trip down to Dallas, and in some ways it was a really awesome trip… but in other ways it was not. When we left town on Friday morning it was raining, and for the most part did not stop raining until some time over night. This made for a very cold and wet trip, combined with lots of moments when it was raining so hard that I could barely see the road ahead of me. This became more stressful when I was crammed between two lines of K-Rails and the two lanes of traffic felt super squeezed together. We made it there safely, but the trip took way longer than it normally would have given the circumstances. Under perfect conditions with zero stops, we can make it to Frisco where we were staying in the hotel in roughly 4 hours… we were not under perfect conditions, and we stopped constantly to roam around. Friday was largely spent meandering around hitting various places along the way.

This made for a very compact Sunday, trying to get everything that we normally have to do on a Sunday done as well as anything triggered by being out of the house for two days. This mean’t that most of my gameplay yesterday was in several fragmented chunks which largely involved running Headless Horseman in World of Warcraft on all of my tanks, and leveling in Destiny 2 as I had yet to hit the level cap nor really make much traction in the story. I am a little weird when it comes to approaching Destiny content in that I prefer to level up independent of the story, and then grind through the story knowing that anything that happens to drop will potentially fuel my later item level grind. I largely took this screenshot because occasionally I forget that I end up getting paired with local people through Bungie’s matching algorithm that factors connection quality above pretty much anything else. Notice the player GerthBrooks… which made me chuckle at first and then was a little disturbed by it. For the uninitiated, Garth Brooks is also an Oklahoman and while his girls were in High School literally lived in the same town as I do.

Another thing I found out this weekend is that Escalation Protocol is really damned good for leveling… as there were groups I managed to get in the same instance with that were farming the level 7 boss. This thing drops some shaders, but also a chest that requires some sort of key that I am going to have to figure out. Upon some quick googling it seems like I simply didn’t do much content in Warmind, and as a result don’t have any keys to open these things with. The truth is that I largely bounced hard after grinding up my second account worth of characters upon the PC release. I managed to stick it through until the Curse of Osiris expansion, but the repetitive nature of that content left me annoyed. I will admit however that so far Forsaken seems really cool, I picked up and did some more of the story last night.

My highest priority however is to sort out how to do the Festival of the Lost content before it disappears. I had enough of the cash shop second chance currency to pick up this sweet corrupted ship. Past that I hear there is a better version of the infinite forest that I need to check out, that has a chance of dropping what appears to be a really sweet auto rifle. I contemplated playing God of War, but with the fragmentation of my play time… I focused on something that I could drop in and out of quickly rather than something that would require my full attention for long periods of time. Depending on how tonight goes… will determine if I return to Destiny for Festival stuff, or play some Dad of War. Regardless I managed to hit 50 the new level cap and am at 500ish light, so now to finish the story and get geared again. The lack of weapon options are driving me insane right now… but it is forcing me to use combinations that I never would have before. I’ve been getting a lot of play out of sidearms since they game keeps dropping them for me.

Boy…

October 19, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I decided to test out the wireless ethernet thing a little further, this time focusing on the official Sony Playstation Remote Play app, to see if the connection improved its functionality. In the past it had behaved a lot like Parsec was where it had momentary blips of connectivity, where the sound would drag a bit while the stream was trying to catch up. In truth it happened an awful lot more than Parsec normally does, generally happening every couple of minutes. That said the entire time playing the Remote Play app felt very obvious that there was a bit of lag introduced into the system. For example I could not really stand playing Destiny other than material farming, because I had to lead the shots by a significant margin to try and actually hit anything. As such I only really played RPGs in this fashion that didn’t require me to do much in the way of fine motor skills.

With the connection change however it is not really noticeable that I am not sitting at the Playstation 4 upstairs. Sure I am only able to stream back 720p due to the fact that I don’t have a PS4 Pro… but apart from that one constraint it felt like I was actually upstairs playing the machine natively. I spent most of the evening playing Dad of War… sorry that is all this game will ever be called to me personally. I will comment a bit about the game itself later, but as far as the gameplay experience over Remote Play I put in roughly three hours and never once had a bobble or a hiccup in the connection or anything I could possibly attribute to slowdown or input lag. In fact the game felt silky smooth and largely made me forget how I was doing some nonsense in the process of playing it.

As far as the game itself… it reminds me an awful lot of the way that Horizon Zero Dawn felt in ways that I am not entirely certain if I could explain. Basically Dad of War is Horizon Zero Dawn if you instead were playing as Rost, and spent all your time running around with young Aloy. There are so many ways in which Kratos interacts with Atreus, that remind me of those early interactions between Rost and Aloy. Sure the core of the games themselves are very different, whereas HZD was a big open worldish exploration game… and thusfar Dad of War seems to be largely following a predetermined path with various objectives adjacent to said path. The short period of time I have been playing however makes me feel like playing HZD again.

Even though I generally hate the term Toxic Masculinity, not necessarily for its intended meaning, but more the negative reaction that I tend to have mentally to hearing it… and translating it to “being male is bad”. Dad of War is very much a game about Toxic Masculinity. Kratos wants to be a better “father” than he is capable of being. The game takes painstaking effort to show you all of the times he has the instinct to embrace his son, but for whatever reason cannot and instead focuses on something Atreus did wrong instead of comforting and assuaging his fears. He wants his son to grow up “strong” like he is, and it reminds me so much of every time I saw a father trying to relive their own glory days through their kid via sports. I’m sorta afraid that if I had kids I would feel something similar about all of the geeky things that I did along the way growing up, and wanting to try and force said kids into loving the same things I do.

I have some feelings about how this story is going to play out, but I am going to keep them to myself for now. I just feel like we are telling the final tale of Kratos, and witnessing the birth of the next figure that the series will focus on. I have a feeling that the game as a whole will be a very unexpected emotional trip. Ultimately yesterday I realized that since I am not currently engaged in an MMO that is sapping all of my time… that I should spent some time catching up on the single player games that I either never attempted to got distracted while playing. Example I made a significant amount of progress into Assassin’s Creed Origins but got distracted by some other shiny MMO flavored object that crossed my path. For now I think I am going to spend most of my time playing through Dad of War and after that… probably set my sights on another single player game that I failed to play… maybe loop back around and finish up AC Origins.

Glutton Axe

October 16, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I had the day off and spent a good deal of it playing Monster Hunter World. I allowed myself to get distracted by seeking out a weapon that was shockingly easy to craft. Essentially I had been trying to determine which of the switch axes I would go after first. The clear obvious choice is the Diablos one… the problem there is I really don’t want to go right back to grinding Diablos nonstop to get the parts I would need for it… which are again are Majestic and Black Spiral Horns. Instead I decided to set my sights considerably lower, on something I could probably farm up in my sleep.

The Jagras line doesn’t exactly have a ton of amazing weapons, but in the switch axe department it is a pretty reasonable option. Its low point is it is only a Rank 6 weapon, but based on its stats it should probably be Rank 7? It has hidden elemental sleep, and when transformed into sword mode has exhaust damage. If I remember correct that means that when hitting the head the exhaust damage can KO the monster. All that it really required me to do was kill a nonsensical number of Great Jagras… since that isn’t exactly a monster I hunt on the regular. However with minimal farming I managed to get the switch axe crafted and play around a bit with it. It will at least hold me over until something awesome drops from Kulve Taroth at some point.

The other mission is still very much active however, and I did kill several Rathian yesterday, enough to I believe get all of the Spikes that I needed. Now I just have to wait for a Rathian Ruby to drop before crafting that final Gunlance. As Ashgar posted yesterday, I do probably intend to make the Zorah Magdaros one as well, since I have already crafted the first version of it. I believe I just need another Zorah Gem before being able to craft the Rank 8 version. That would give me Long 4 and Normal 4 to play with and get used to both. Then again I hope I get a decent Wide 4 weapon to drop during Kulve Taroth. I fully expect to be farming the hell out of that event when it finally goes live. I think hammer is going to be a much better option to breaking things than Longsword was on the console.

Spectacular Failures

October 15, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things I greatly enjoy about Monster Hunter World is that failure sometimes looks amazing. Success or fail, when you end a hunt you get a screenshot. This is one of the many failure shots from Xeno’Jiiva that I have from the weekend. However this one is actually well after I had beat the fight the first time, but was forced to keep farming for parts. Often times the best looking shots come from colossally failing at an encounter. This one is from when multiple people fighting Xeno and not noticing it was about to explode… so three people got carted at exactly the same time ending the hunt.

Immediately upon downing Xeno’Jiiva for the first time I shot ahead to 29, the next level cap. This is something that happened last time as well given that I did a lot of grinding and hunting while capped at the previous level. I immediately turned around and got into the hunt for Double Bazelguese at which point I lept ahead to 41… once again something that happened before since I did a lot of hunting while avoiding trying to fight Xeno. Now I am slowly working my way up to the next cap of 49… which is Tempered Kirin… something I am not looking forward to at all.

That said I am slowly watching back up to where I was when I stopped playing the PS4 release. All of the grinding of Nergigante and Xeno’jiiva was to be able to craft Extermination’s Edge the long sword I had been using prior to the restart. I talked the other day about crafting the Diablos hammer, and the recent event let me craft Wyvern Ignition another “end game” weapon. Similarly over the weekend I managed to craft the Fiendish Tower the final form of the Deviljho lance, giving me a forth end game weapon.

Right now my mission is to craft another item that in theory will be an end game weapon. I’ve been farming the hell out of High Rank Rathian because I need an excessive number of Spikes and a Gem to be able to craft Royal Burst. I’ve seen so many people using this Gunlance, so in theory I figured I would craft it and try it out. Wide Range weapons seem to be en vogue, however what I am reading is that you cannot get wide shelling 4 without getting a lucky drop from Kulve Taroth. Instead I am going to give a shot no pun intended at normal shelling. From there… the next missing is probably going to be to farm a bunch more Deviljho so I can turn the stage one Sword and Shield that I crafted into the final form by gathering up yet another Gem. From there… I need to sort out what Charge Blade and Switch Axe that I want to work towards. Basically… this is Monster Hunter for me… hunting monsters, making weapons… hunting more monsters. Regardless I feel like I am in a pretty great state for when the Kulve Taroth event comes in November.