Fallout 76 Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Shock to the System

November 13, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I had the day off and I am sorta thankful for that. It means that I missed driving in the first snow of the season. It isn’t that the roads would have been slick or anything… it is just more a case of folks acting crazy in inclement weather. As a result I stayed home and dealt with the air conditioning folks doing our winter maintenance checkup on the system. I also spent a good deal of time playing various video games and also making a batch of Chicken Tikka Masala. My wife unfortunately did not get the day off and as such I wanted something to warm up her belly when she got home.

While waiting on the folks to get here, and while they were doing their thing… I played a lot of Diablo 3 on the Switch and have moved on into Act 2. I like this port of the game quite a bit, but as I have talked about… mobile gaming just doesn’t fit that cleanly into my life. If I have access to my other machines I would probably rather play them… and the switch is just heavy enough to be awkward to play while laying in bed. However I heard last night that apparently the Switch version is what Tamrielo needed to really get into the game as he now has a Necromancer in its 60s… which is significantly higher than I think he has ever gotten a character before? The controls feel good, but for someone who is super used to how things work on the PC… it is taking a lot of adjustment. I equate it to someone reciting a poem you know in a foreign language… you understand what they are saying but there is a lot of translation happening.

As far as most of the day… I spent a good deal of time playing Path of Exile… and I really need to figure out how to leave public channels. I also decided to spend a little money with the game and bought one of the supporter packs that they are just about to phase out when the new expansion releases. I figure at this point I have gotten enough joy out of the game that I really should pay something for it. This gave me a bit of cash shop currency which I then used to get a better looking weapon and shield… though I am wishing I had gone with something else for the shield because it does not match the outfit at all. Basically my gameplay tends to revolve around Molten Strike, Blade Vortex and Leap… everything else is largely superfluous and as such I am completely cool losing W as a keybind to give me back the move forward functionality I am used to in Diablo 3. I flirted briefly with binding leap to spacebar, but ran into issues with the game needing a close all windows keybind to replace the spacebar I took. Once I figure out a decent option for that I might go back to spacebar for leap since I prefer having a movement key bound there.

As far as Monster Hunter World goes… I am in an odd place where I need some Kirin+ items… but for whatever reason do not have access to High Rank Kirin. I spent a good chunk of the night trying various quests to try and whittle down whatever it takes to unlock the High Rank version of the fight, but failing miserably. Essentially I need a couple materials to get the last of my layered armor pieces from the Kulve Taroth event… and I am not sure if I will still be able to do the turn-ins after the event or not. I know that I can craft Kulve Armor without issue, and have gathered up more than enough mats to make a full set of that once I farm up the Elder Dragon gems. I’ve been sitting at Hunter Rank 49 for awhile now, which means that I have to take down a Tempered Kirin. Last night I made several attempts and while one came super close… there is always the problem of someone fainting. In this particular run it was me that failed… but in others I managed to stay alive 100% of the time and someone else got the carts. Ultimately I will get through this… but in reality I just want the parts from it and could care less about moving my Hunter Rank higher at this very moment. Time to research what exactly I need to have already completed to unlock the needed High Rank hunt.

There are so many games right now out that I’ve not had a chance to really devote much time to. On the 16th another one gets added to that stack in the form of Let’s Go Eevee… because Eevee is way cooler than Pikachu. I need to figure out a better way to spend time with the switch because I have quite the backlog right now… because I have not devoted anywhere near enough time to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate or Starlink Battle for Atlas. The only problem with Switch games is that they look like crap on my 4K setup upstairs, and they are not quite comfortable to play in bed. So I need to figure out a happy middle ground where I feel comfortable playing the games and will also be willing to give up playing something on the PC. Yes I realize these are the first worldiest of problems.

Also in the extreme stack of games that need attention… Fallout 76 launches I believe tonight? Look when someone says Midnight I never quite know if they mean which specific night/morning. I believe it launches tonight at Midnight EST, but when I popped in a moment ago to take screenshots the servers were up. I am wondering if this was by accident, or if they are just going to let people trickle in that happen to try it. Sadly I have work, but I can in fact verify that everything from my B.E.T.A. character is there and functional… minus one turret that I placed on my base. I am not sure if it got blown up, or if something glitched and it fell below the world or something. Regardless Fallout 76 is either launching tonight… or has already launched and it will be tonight before I get to give it any attention. I had a lot of fun with Kodra and Tam running amok, and now I am left with the decision of… do I play my already level 10 character from beta or do I roll something fresh.

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.

Yoinking Yang

September 25, 2018 by Belghast

It is always staggering how much difference a few pieces of gear make in Diablo 3. I went from being unable to really function… to being able to push Torment X without much issue. I could potentially go higher but I have not really pushed myself. As of this morning I did a solo 40 just to verify that I was wrecking things as fast as I thought I was… and of course upgrade that blood shard capacity. Last night after a mythic+ in World of Warcraft I dropped back over into Diablo 3 and with a whole lot of Grace’s help started running content to attempt to get drops. Over the course of numerous rifts and greater rifts I managed to start piecing together the set that I should be using to make the Unhallowed Essence build work.

This is where I am at as of this morning, with everything acquired minus Wraps of Clarity and the Focus ring. From there I need one of those doodads that adds a slot to a weapon… and to reroll a bunch of my gear for more optimal stats. Then of course there is the game of trying to swap out your normal items with better ancient versions. Regardless however I am functioning so much better than I was and can finally stand on my own two feet again. I was in this awkward spot for too long where I could survive the higher torments… but just couldn’t kill anything fast enough. That all changed once I got a handful of items and started finally being able to keep up with Grace and her Necro pushing machine. The funny thing is… she STILL doesn’t have the ring she needs to make her set completely work… and I have somehow managed to get almost nothing but ring drops myself.

Another thing of note that I thought I would talk about this morning is my plans for Fallout 76. My good friend Shiana pinged me last night about what I was planning for Fallout and also for Anthem. He knows me too well, in that he didn’t phrase the question as to IF I was playing… just where I was playing. As it stands right now I plan on doing both on the PC since that is the more comfortable platform for me personally. As far as Fallout 76, when they announced that you could run a private server… I set my mind on trying to acquire one of these. My hope is that TypeFrag will offer one since I like their group funding model that allows people to chip in if they so choose to the server rental fees. We use that for the Teamspeak server that we use for recording AggroChat, and it is nice mostly because it means I am not footing the entire bill on my own.

Regardless of who is paying I plan on having a server with as close to a PVE ruleset as the game allows me. It will be a nice chill carebear haven with as many of the toxic influences filtered out as possible. Basically I think this game is going to be amazingly fun pending you can gather up the right mindset of players that are willing to work together and build interesting communities. The nukes will of course exist, but the hope is that we nuke areas of high mob population and not players… and sorta treat it like a raid zone since it will cause interesting stuff to spawn in from what I have read. If you want a chill place to play Fallout 76 and are cool with a no PVP ruleset, then this oasis may be the place for you.