Today is the official start of developer appreciation week in Blaugust Reborn, but I am not sure if I can muster any measure of a post that requires that much forethought. I am not entirely certain if I am just dealing with allergies or if I have picked up some sort of a summer cold… but whatever the case I am miserable. I wound up going home around one yesterday when the meeting that I had to be there for… got rescheduled. I am in that state where my throat is so raw that it is gagging me, which is not super fun to randomly find yourself in that state. I’ve largely been avoiding doing anything serious and instead just casually leveling on the warrior.
It is unfortunate because I know I have friends who are chomping at the bit to chain some dungeons… but I am just not confident in my ability to function in a group setting right now. At this point I have finished Vol’dun and managed to get 113.5 roughly in levels and 5 in artifact power. I have not done the faction campaign stuff at all, and in truth have largely been avoiding it. I went into this expansion expecting for it to be pvp all the time… and have been pleasantly surprised by the lack of faction nonsense that I have had to deal with at this point. I am afraid doing the faction specific campaign will ruin that little bit of joy I am having.
I am absolutely loving seeing what the Troll Empires were like during their strength rather than the broken down outposts that we usually encounter in game. I say outpost… because seriously Zul’Gurub feels like a backwater as compared to Zuldazar. The temple city is amazing… even though I keep finding myself getting lost trying to traverse it and remember where the various things are that I need to interact with. I spent ten minutes last night trying to remember how to get back to the throne room for example. We largely picked Vol’dun as a way to get the desert content out of the way, since those zones tend to have a lot of oppressive sameness. However as you can see from the above screenshot… there is a lot of stuff going on in that zone that makes it feel less like the traditional MMO desert.
The outfit I am wearing is supposed to be plate armor… so I am not exactly sure why there is a prominent target telling the monsters fighting me where exactly to strike. I am sure on male characters this looks like awesome troll armor, but instead I sorta get a cool looking dress…. with midriff exposed. I started playing my Orc Female characters largely because I got tired of the Horde Hunch, where pretty much most of the traditional male horde races have a hunched over thing going on. It has been a great experience other than dealing with the fact that so much of the plate armor has weird pieces missing for no apparent reason. Maybe I am secretly protected by the mystical power of the male gaze?
I am trying really hard not to transmog as I level, but that may or may not last much longer. I wonder if you poke her in the belly if she will go “Tee Hee” like a really gruff orcish Pillsbury Doughboy. Video linked for the sake of anyone who has no clue what the Pillsbury Doughboy is… and why you would be poking one.
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.
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.
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.
