Games Archives - Page 361 of 687 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Dolly and Dot Are My Best Friends

August 14, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the launch of Battle for Azeroth the new expansion for World of Warcraft, and as I said yesterday it sort of snuck up on me. Blizzard was doing a global release for the first time in my memory meaning that while a lot of the world did in fact get the game on August 14th… the United States got it in the evening of the 13th. So it was in fact midnight CEST on the 14th for Europe but for me personally it launched at 5pm my time. I was not however sitting at the keyboard waiting for the gates to open as it were… because it was 5 before I managed to get to town from work. That then triggered the whole list of things I need to do when I first get home as well as nomming some tasty noms… finally ending up at the keyboard around 6ish.

At that point I was pleasantly surprised that I got right in with zero queue or waiting. There were reports of folks having some issues with the login server, but thankfully I had none of those issues and effectively sailed right in. I even tempted fate about 8:30 last night and decided to swap from my desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs… and even at that point I was able to log straight in without much issue. I am not sure if this is a smaller than normal launch day, or if they were just really that prepared for the launch. Whatever the case it went smoothly and collectively myself, Grace and Mor decided to get the desert zone out of the way first and spent the rest of the evening roaming around Vol’dun.

For my troubles I managed to get my amulet-of-not-artifact-power to level 2 just barely shy of level 3, collected 2 pieces of the upgradeable gear that has talent point unlocks on it, and dinged 111 with about halfway to 112. I consider it a very productive night given that I did not take any time off from work and really didn’t “grind” that hard at anything. I believe both Grace and Mor are further ahead than me, but at some point I will catch up and hopefully reach the first dungeon unlock, though in truth I didn’t notice if there was one we could queue for already or not. I am surprised at just how much story there is in this expansion… like not just text story but I seem to be drowning in really awesome cut scenes. If the rest of this expansion carries on the same way as the beginning has… it is going to maybe be one of the better expansions in World of Warcraft history even with the questionable PVP narrative.

The above video is going to be a bit of a spoiler, but if you care to watch… it features my favorite moment so far in Battle for Azeroth. Meerah the awesome Vulpera responsible for driving the caravan around Vol’dun serenades her pair of Alpacas. Dolly and Dot are the best and are probably going to be the break out hit from this expansion. It reminds me a lot of the singing Quaggan from Guild Wars 2, and is similarly memeable. Meerah herself was apparently voiced by the very amazing Deva Marie, so extra awesome bit about the quest. ~Dolly and Dot are my best friends~ ~they pull my wagon through dunes of sands~ ~they have small teeth and they love to eat…~ then sadly the song is cut off by a mean ole troll who doesn’t appreciate awesomeness.

I am hoping we get a lot more Meerah, Dolly and Dot as I go further into this zone.

Follow Up to Yesterdays Post

As a follow up to yesterdays post about Monster Hunter World PC… when I took a break to move downstairs to the laptop I decided to fire up the game there to see what sort of settings I would have to play on to get the game functional. What you are seeing is MHW on Low settings and 720p resolution and even then… I was only managing to see about 25 fps. For reference the gaming laptop I have is in the top bar of the site but also linking it here. As far as the stats go… it has:

Intel Core i7 4th Gen 4720HQ (2.60 GHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 2 GB GDDR5
16 GB Memory
1 TB HDD
128 GB SSD

The game is effectively unplayable given that I am only seeing 25 fps in town and even then it wildly fluctuates down into the teens and up into the thirties. Essentially hopefully you can make your own determinations as to how well the game is going to run on your system between the two baselines I have given you. Now the positive is… steam does allow you to return games if you end up trying it out and it simply not working at all. Personally right now I am streaming Monster Hunter World through Parsec on my gaming desktop upstairs when I am playing downstairs on the laptop. This is honestly the way I am gaming most of the time these days and is probably going to keep me from upgrading that laptop anytime soon.

Monster Hunter World PC Thoughts

August 13, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend I played a significant amount of Monster Hunter World on the PC. This morning I am going to talk a bit about my thoughts related to it and why it maybe isn’t the dumpster fire that the internet seems to think it is. First off you are not going to get much general Monster Hunter commentary since I have belabored that point at length on this blog. I love the game and think that for the most part everyone should give it a shot on whatever platform seems most comfortable for you personally. I played the hell out of it on the PS4 and only backed off a bit when I got bit by the Elder Scrolls Online bug again… which has moved recently into desperately trying to prepare for the World of Warcraft expansion. Basically don’t ever take me moving on from a game as a reason not to play it because quite honestly I am fickle as hell when it comes to game. I play a lot of different things and shift wildly between them as the mood suits me.

You can get a link to my current PC build up in the menu of this site but for those reading via RSS I will summarize the high points. The relevant information:

I technically have an SSD in this system but have long since run out of space to run games from it… so for the most part I linked the drive that the game itself is running on. For sake of reference I attempted to screenshot all of the relevant graphical settings I am using.

Essentially I set the resolution to 1080p and attempted to max everything out to see what sort of gameplay that would give me. For the most part I get 60 frames per second, with the occasional dip into the 55ish territory as you can sometimes see sub 60 numbers in the lower left hand corner of these screenshots. However it feels very smooth given that I personally cannot seem to differentiate between about 40 fps and 60 fps that well. Ultimately I wanted to throw these numbers out there however I have a 5th gen x99 setup running a still fairly beefy GTX 980 graphics card. Your mileage may vary wildly if you are using a system less capable than that, but I am not really sure how far below.

The game looks infinitely better than it did on the PS4 and had I the time this weekend I would have installed it on my laptop to see what sort of concessions I needed to make it get it running on a far lower end machine. The laptop being a 4th Gen i7 which is the generation of processor in the recommended settings, and a mobile gtx 960M… which given the rules of mobile cards means it likely performs about the same as a desktop 700 series since the desktop did not get the 800 series. Regardless it is further testing I want to do so that I could give some estimates of what the game would run like and look like on a lower end machine. The truth is I played most of the weekend on the laptop, but I did so using Parsec streaming off of my gaming machine upstairs. I still am deeply in love with that software.

The biggest takeaway for me personally is just how phenomenally good the game looks on the PC. On the baseline PS4 everything felt very muddy for lack of a better word. There were lots of moments when everything seemed like there was a thin coat of vasoline on the lens and you couldn’t quite focus on anything specific. This means that a lot of the vistas in this game were completely lost to me and might as well have been static background images. However on the PC there have been numerous points where I just stop and stare the the scenes in awe of just how cool everything looks. I have a hard drive full of screenshots already and according to steam I am only twelve hours into the game.

It is highly likely that this is an experience that the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro players have already had… but for use plebs still stuck on the lower end machines in this generation… the difference is extremely noticeable. Now all of that said… my awe of the game comes from a console player getting to see the world I already love in much higher detail. From the general standpoint of a PC gamer… the game still has some wonky stuff going on in the way that the world looks and it is the same sort of stuff you see in a lot of console ports. Textures don’t always look as crisp as you might expect and what appears to be in focus versus blurred out is all over the place. Notice in the above image who the background appears so much crisper than the character in the foreground for example, just random goofy stuff that you don’t notice in motion but do notice when the action stops.

One of the weirder revelations for me personally is that the game is completely connected into steam groups… and seems to rely on your steam friends list and the groups you are a member of in place of the clan system. This means that I already happen to have a Greysky Armada group ready to go and you can see me up in the gathering hall flying the colors of our guild… even taking into account the custom imagery we uploaded for it from FFXIV. The only problem here is… I think those of us who have lots of groups and massive friend lists at this point… are maybe bogging down the network? It seems to take forever to bring up a friends list dialog, or to browse the sessions that your friends are in. This seems to have improved over the week, but is still way more sluggish than it felt on the console.

The real problem however is that the network connectivity seems to be extremely fickle, with Match Making generally not working at all… and the browsing of existing sessions working about as well. You are going to see this window a lot with a 50382-MW1 error being throw which is essentially the “cannot connect” generic error message. Spawning your own instance however seems to work reliably well, and joining an instance a friend is in also seems to work fairly well. I’ve managed to play with my friend Wolfy at several points during the weekend, but just go into the situation expecting things to be less than reliable. I feel like the PC is a leap forward overall given that it allows you to integrate with your existing list of Steam friends… but the overall way that grouping works in Monster Hunter World is still extremely awkward. This is one thing that Dauntless has going for it, is that grouping as a whole just feels more natural.

If you want to see me fail miserably at a hunt and mash the shit out of my keyboard and mouse here is the stream from Sunday morning. The keyboard is getting more comfortable as I go but I will say it was a challenge to get used to after being fairly comfortable with the PS4 controller. For the most part I have rolled with the default keybinds, but you can in fact remap most everything. The only thing that I really have changed is that the initial set up for Longsword was Left Mouse for basic attacks, Right Mouse for thrust, and Ctrl Key for Spirit Blade… which was functional but not exactly fitting with the priority that I have those attacks. I swapped Right Mouse and Ctrl to give me something that feels more natural given that I rarely actually thrust, the only negative however is that it makes it more challenging to do the leap out of the way slash attack. My fingers are long however and for the most part I can hit any ability that I need to. Your mileage may vary given how comfortable you are reaching into odd spots on the keyboard. I do however need to sort out something other than F1 + Number to get to the quick bar items because that really doesn’t work for me right now.

All in all I am really happy with the PC port and especially if you have been waiting in the wings due to a lack of console… you should totally pick this up. From what I am hearing it is both the biggest selling Japanese Steam game of all time, and the biggest Steam launch of 2018 so far… so much of the issues that are happening currently are probably just compounded by that fact. As the crush of players coming in to hunt some monsters dwindles a bit… I think a lot of the network weirdness is going to mysteriously go away. It is 7 am CST and right now Steam Charts is showing 245,535 concurrent players… with an all-time peak of 329,333 which was also achieved apparently in the last 24 hours. Basically it is super popular right now and as a result there are going to be some growing pains. If you cannot deal with that maybe wait a month before picking it up, however the game does always default back to a single player state allowing you to get in and experience the game play regardless of the current network conditions.

If you found yourself on the fence about this title I hope this post offers some wisdom. Like I said I need to get in and actually install the game on my laptop to give it a lower end impression as well. I will try and do that over the coming days… but not likely tonight given that apparently Battle For Azeroth launches at 2pm CST? Talk about that game release sneaking up on me. I hope you have a great day and an awesome week.

Shovel Cow

August 6, 2018 by Belghast

I am in this really weird place because I am both disconnected and connected to World of Warcraft at the same time right now. I am disconnected from the storyline because of the events of arsonist Sylvanas, but I am also finding myself enjoying the simple act of leveling. On the alliance side I have one of every class up in the 100-110 range, but on the horde side I am severely lacking in a bunch of columns. As of right now I have a stable of 110s on The Scryers in the form of my Warrior, Paladin, Demon Hunter and Warlock and then a 110 Deathknight over on Eonar. That said there are a bunch of spots left in my roster to level something and with the introduction of the prestige races I thought it would be really funny to make a High Mountain Tauren Monk.

So lately I have been spending most of my time in game rolling around… figuratively and literally… on the Monk. The highlight of the weekend was when I found out that I had a one handed shovel graphic in my transmog collection and that if I turned both of my weapons into them… they would sling across my back. This only really works because monks don’t actually use weapons at all and they just sit there strapped across my back as I punch and kick things. Now I am also just realizing that I can probably do a shovel knight transmog of some sort on a heavy armor character.

I’ve always found the leveling game to be one of the stronger points for World of Warcraft and as screwed up as the 60-80 leveling bracket seems to be right now… I do feel like them slowing things down a bit and blunting the effect of heirlooms was probably a good idea. Sure it means I can no longer solo world bosses, but it also means that I can have an experience that feels a little closer to what it actually felt like to level something originally. I am still flying through the levels however, but the ability to sit down and finish an entire zone without the need to move on in order to satisfy the part of me that wants to be “optimal” is a good thing.

It had been years since I had finished the entire Hillsbrad>Arathi>Hinterlands crawl always dropping out of each zone at some point as soon as the next zone lit up as having a quest available. Now I am doing the Plaguelands which honestly I feel like is one of the zones that benefits the most from Cataclysm. However on the podcast this weekend we largely talked about the big problems with World of Warcraft storytelling… and eventually drew a conclusion that Cataclysm was the expansion that derailed what seemed to be an arc of really solid story. If you are curious the above embedded video is that show… but be warned we bash Warcraft pretty hard.

In other news… I appear to no longer be allergic to casters in video games. I recently started playing my Warlock a lot and have even been considering maining it in Battle for Azeroth. This weekend I started a brand new Nightborne Shadow Priest and spent a few hours really enjoying myself leveling it through the Ashenvale content. I am not sure what snapped inside my head but I actually sorta find casters relaxing. I’ve always said that “me and finger wigglers don’t get along”, and that was sort of my shtick. The truth however is that I never really enjoyed that style of game-play and recently something changed. I find myself enjoying this game of “can I kill it before it touches me” that I have never really gotten into before.

I think we can blame Final Fantasy XIV for this because that is really the game I first seemed to get into the caster thing, or at least the gameplay style of “dot all the things”. I had a shockingly enjoyable time leveling Arcanist and then Summoner, and put quite a few levels into my Thaumaturge/Black Mage as well. I went through this thing where I leveled every single class to 50 just to help get rid of a bunch of gear, and in doing that… I arrived at a sort of truce with playing a caster. Recently however that truce has turned into a comfort level that I have never really experienced before. I don’t necessarily get it myself and my friend Grace thinks I must be ill… but whatever the case I had a lot of fun running around on the new babby Shadow Priest this weekend.

Lastly… my friend Chestnut had this idea as part of Blaugust to do a bunch of mini podcasts asking some questions about how we got started. It took me awhile but I sat down yesterday after editing AggroChat and before I editing the weekly sermon podcast from the church my wife attends. I tried very hard to keep it under 10 minutes and managed to do so… which is a miracle in itself since AggroChat is sort of known for long shows. I thought I would share it here and I believe Chestnut has a master plan for some other use for these as well. Hopefully you have an awesome week and I am sure I will get back on doing some Blaugust related topics tomorrow.

Because Rocks

July 30, 2018 by Belghast

While we are still very much in Blaugust prep week, I am going to take the morning off and talk about some non-Blaugust stuff. First off the above embedded video is the YouTube version of this weeks Podcast where we talk at length about our feelings regarding Battle for Azeroth. Of the crew Grace and I are the only two that are really still connected to World of Warcraft in any major way, and the show itself became a bit of an extended version of the feelings we are both having. This weekend I spent a good deal of time prepping characters for the expansion since I had not really done that yet, and can abuse the event that is happening as a way to get some reasonable gear easily.

Unfortunately I made the decision to main Horde this expansion before I experienced the nonsense War of the Thorns quests… but as part of that decision I have been prepping my Warrior, Deathknight, Demon Hunter, Warlock and have been pushing up my Paladin. Now it had been awhile since I had done one of the class order hall missions, and I was immediately struck by now good tone wise it felt to be gathering up the paladins on either side of the fence to work together towards the goal of saving Azeroth. I am not sure how we got to this point where all of the past gains of the Legion expansion are out the window and we are back to a forced Red vs Blue narrative.

One of the things we talk at length about in the podcast is just how bad the Advertising campaign feels. Firstly we are divided as a nation and as a world by so many serious issues right now that it just feels irresponsible to be pushing more of that for the sake of selling your product. Secondly… in our experience World of Warcraft isn’t a dividing line but instead something that brings people together with the stupid artificial boundary between Horde and Alliance just being an inconvenience that maybe keeps you from playing with some of your friends. I tell this tale in the podcast but I figured I would talk a little bit about it in person.

When I went to take my ITIL training and eventually take the test, there was a significant amount of waiting around because of a scheduling mistake. This meant me and the trainer of the class had to sit around and hang out for a bit while waiting on my online time slot. During this we realized that we both had played World of Warcraft and were both raiders back in the day… but on opposite sides of the fence. Instead of it becoming a discussion about Horde vs Alliance… it became a discussion about our shared experiences leading guilds and raids and all of the weird things we had encountered in the process of doing that. We both immediately realized we had more in common in our experiences than different and focused in on those things… rather than some nonsensical artificial rivalry.

So as I find myself prepping for the launch of this expansion I end up thinking about the expansion that could have been. Had we continued the class fantasy and kept moving forward towards a unified Azeroth it could have been so amazing. Legion was probably the strongest World of Warcraft content to date and in part it was so strong… because the Horde and Alliance factored so little into it. There is a sequence in Stormheim that feels awful as you are forced back into the shoes of Red and Blue but everything else feels so good as you are working side by side with the other faction to face bigger evils. That is the World of Warcraft I want, where we take on things bigger than ourselves as we face what will be the obvious resurgence of the Old Gods.

I feel like Battle for Azeroth is the expansion that no one wanted, and I have arrived at this point by listening to my social media feed made up of a bunch of long time WoW players. Sure there are a few people I know who were excited for the War Mode… but only because they rolled on a PVP server to be with friends and don’t want any part of that nonsense and will be turning it off completely. It just seems like a weird gamble to triple down on the faction versus faction thing, when it felt so amazing to get away from it completely. I keep hoping that maybe they will throw us for a loop and that the factional nonsense is short lived, but I somehow doubt that.

I will be there with my hordelings hanging out with that side of my gaming family, but I am not going to be super pumped about it especially with the way that the early questing has gone so far. We are fighting a war “because rocks” and that we don’t want the other side to get any of these macguffins of ultimate power. Here is hoping that things get better from here.