Zelda-Like Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Mythic Invitational

April 2, 2019 by Belghast

My wife spent the weekend sick and I think has passed whatever she had onto me. So the end result was last night both of us came home from work completely dead and ready to go to sleep. We managed to last until around 8 pm before hitting the sack, and then slept the entire night through without interruptions. This is not exactly normal for us and as a result I feel a little weird after getting all of that sleep. As far as gaming went I managed to complete the daily key challenge in Anthem before logging out… thankful that you can bank keys for a later time. Shortly after that I attempted to play some more Breath of the Wild and managed to get the outfit needed to sneak into Gerudo Town… but could not stay conscious long enough to actually do that thing. It was around this time that my wife showed visible signs of succumbing to sleep… when in truth I had been quietly nodding off the entire time we were sitting in the living room. Basically I had a very unproductive night gaming wise, but I hope the sleep helps because she sounds miserable… and I am starting to feel that way.

This weekend I got wrapped up in the Magic the Gathering Mythical Invitational happening at Pax East, which is weird considering I generally bounce off of all e-sports streams. However I watched most of the finals on Sunday strangely compelled and finding myself actually rooting for one of the players. What was interesting about this specific format is that it all happened inside of MTG Arena, meaning there was no need for a judge and limited stalling tactics… the end result being very rapid matches given that most of the mechanical stuff was being taken care of by the game. What was also interesting about the roster specifically is it was a mix of Magic Pro League players, 8 Qualifiers that came up from the ladder play on Arena, and a mixture of notable streamer types. So this could have played out a bunch of ways, but if you were a gambler you probably would have bet on one of the battle hardened MPL players to take hope the trophy. However what happened in truth was something slightly more interesting. The final ranking looked a little bit like this…

Andrea Mengucci – MPL member
Piotr Głogowski – MPL member
Janne “Savjz” Mikkonen – Challenger – Mostly known as a Hearthstone Streamer
Ondřej Stráský – Challenger – Top 8 MTG Arena Qualifier

So yes at the end of the day Magic Pro League players took the first two slots… however they absolutely gave them a run for their money. Savjz especially played some matches that could have gone either way and like so many Magic matches it wound up coming down to card draw and top decking. I think this even more than probably anything was a chance for WotC to show that Arena players could in fact compete in the MPL and I wonder if at some point in the future we will see all MPL matches played out using the Arena client. The difference in speed was noticeable as well as the match being way easier to follow for the viewers at home. When watching a normal Magic match, things are happening so fast that you are largely entirely reliant upon the announcers to tell you what is actually happening. Here you can see both sides and the what the players have in their hands as well… and as a result it leads to way more tension as you know what the other player has as an answer to the play that the active player is about to make.

The other cool thing about the tourney is it gave them an opportunity to show off the cosmetic changes to the client including the introduction of special full art skins that you can get for various cards. The game also launched without card sleeve art that is so popular in games like Hearthstone. Throughout the game play they announced redeemable codes over Twitch that allows the players watching at home to pick up some of the things. Here is what I believe is a full list of the codes that are redeemable.

StarterStyles – The Pack Shown in Screenshot
SparkleDruid – Druid of the Cowl
SuperScry – Opt
ParallaxPotion – Revitalize
FoilFungus – Deathbloom Thalid
ShinyGoblinPirate – Fanatical Firebrand

Additionally they are starting to add the cosmetic rewards to various events. Now the interesting thing about a cosmetic is that if you don’t already have the card… you seem to also get the card when you collect its appearance. During one of the various redeems I did not actually have a copy of whatever card it was granting me and the game made a note that I was getting one of that specific card. I fully expect that there to be more cosmetics surrounding the release of the War of the Spark. That is probably a whole other topic however and I am running out of time this morning so going to wrap this post up. I really think Wizards of the Coast finally understands what it takes to make a viable product for the internet age, and I look forward to seeing what happens surrounding the Arena client and future tournaments. This was probably quite literally the first time I cared about anything e-sports related, so good on them.

Clones of Fort Tarsis

April 1, 2019 by Belghast

The other day I noticed that there were three NPCs with the same face standing in line at this meat shop. I figured it was probably just a weird occurrence with the NPC generator putting the same model all clumped together accidentally. However last night I noticed that there were 4 standing in line… and when I turned the corner there were two more. I made a post on twitter about this and by the time I got back to the game as I had simply alt tabbed out, they were ALL within the frame of a single screenshot. Sure there are subtle differences between each of them but they ALL have the same face. This leads me down a path that I was talking about in Slack the other day… but there is no such thing as a random number generator. Effectively you try your hardest to create randomness with a computer, but you will never quite get to truly random because in my experience trying to write them over the years… they have a tendency to get stuck. This makes me wonder if a lot of the loot generation within this game is suffering from a stuck sequence. Imagine if you will a D&D encounter table… with the really interesting encounters happening towards the top of that scale. Imagine also that you have percentage dice that for whatever reason don’t want to roll anything higher than a 85. I have no clue why loot is as fickle as it is, but a when you see things like our six clones it makes you wonder. Additionally not in this shot there are two kids running around with the exact same face, so this may be fairly common in game and I just didn’t notice it until recently.

As far as content in Anthem goes… they have at least roped me in with the whole Elysian Chests thing. At a minimum each night I do whatever the daily challenge is that rewards a key, and then run at least one Stronghold to open that chest. So far I have gotten a bunch of shitty crafting materials and a handful of extremely lackluster vinyls. The ones you purchase off the shop apply a design to the majority of your lancer, but the ones you get for free… are in general a sticker on your shoulder and maybe something on your helmet. Again very disappointing as compared to what I went into that system expecting. However the limited nature also triggers my desire to catch them all before they disappear. I am certain that at some point in the future this game will pull its head out and become extremely fun, and I sorta want to make sure I don’t have pangs of regret by not getting something cool along the way. After a very long dry streak I did manage to pick up a Legendary version of the weapon I use for priming targets, so I am super excited about that. I would have probably rather had some defensive stats on it, but I will deal with it as is because it is lime green and not orange. I also wish that 50% physical damage was not limited to the weapon, but oh well you cannot control the rolls in Anthem.

Other than Anthem I spent a significant amount of time playing Breath of the Wild on Cemu, and have cleared my second Divine Beast. I did the Zora Beast first and then since it seemed to be the next closest worked my way through the Goron area. I found the second Divine Beast way easier than the first one, but I am not sure if it was simply that I went into it knowing what to expect or if it was simply that the fight was much easier. There was a mechanic that I glommed onto pretty fast during the second boss that largely trivialized the encounter, so maybe it would have been rougher had I not tried that. Now I have made my way over into the Gerudo are and am trying to figure out how to sneak into the town. I’ve already seen the next encounter which is apparently a giant robo Camel? So effectively you have an Elephant, a Salamander/Lizard thing, a Camel and a Giant Birb? I say Salamander largely because in Japanese games they tend to be fire aligned, and a lot of other lizard types are lightning aligned.

Regardless still having a blast finally getting deep into this game, and key is one small tweak that made the experience immediately better. There is a plugin for Cemu that allows you to disable weapon durability, keeping you from having to play the game of constantly swapping weapons. That one tweak changed the experience from something I bounced off of out of the frustration of trying to keep finding more decent weapons to use, to something I have dug into hard and am loving. This was my biggest complaint when the game released, and not shockingly once it was gone my experience felt so much better. When playing on the Switch I made a conscious decision to go for the Zora area because I had read online that you could get a repairable weapon there. So much was my focus on trying to stay fully equipped that I altered my path just to make sure I could keep some reasonable gear. Take weapon durability out of the game and I just wander freely without a concern of getting into an area and not having any weapons. It has been a liberating experience, so much so that I really think there should be a toggle in the official game to disable the stupid durability system. In the meantime however I have Cemu and it gives me that functionality.

And finally… I have seen the second credit roll of Stormblood and am officially ready for the release of Shadowbringers. This one was way shorter than I was expecting, and largely entailed a single quest chain. So here is where I am going to complain about Square Enix because they have started doing something that drives me insane. There have been a few quests towards the tail of Stormblood that involved a bunch of cut scenes and multiple phases… all without checkpoints so if you fail at any point you have to complete the entire sequence over again. I absolutely failed the final quest of this expansion a few times until I sorted out the dance of the fight, and each time… it forced me to play through a sequence that was largely on auto pilot and un-fail-able… before getting to the REAL fight. They need to quit this shit and divide things up into multiple quests. That said I did enjoy the tail end of Stormblood quite a bit and I am looking forward to Shadowbringers continuing things. Overall I think Stormblood was a much stronger expansion than Heavensward was… however nothing holds a candle to just how great the post release content was for A Realm Reborn. Stormblood however was way closer to that, so I am hoping this means a return to wider themes. Based on what I saw at Fanfest Tokyo, I am guessing that is absolutely going to be the case. Heavensward had its moments, but there was way too much horrible Elf politics for my tastes, and the Dragons were not much better.

How was your weekend? Do anything interesting in game or in the real world? Drop us a note in the comments.

Friday Smorgasbord

March 29, 2019 by Belghast

Anthem Loot Issues

First up in the Friday Smorgasbord is some more Anthem discussion. I have been playing pretty much every night since the patch drops and at a bare minimum completing the steps required to get a key to unlock a “cosmetic” chest. That is in quotes largely because I am still getting way more useless tier 1 materials than I am actually getting decals or materials. At least they came out and stated that there are no armor pieces in the Elysian Chest, which is I think in part what we were all hoping to get. The vinyls have all been super lackluster at least compared to some of the other vinyls available in the game. On the loot front there is an article from Paul Tassi at Forbes that pretty much sums up what is wrong with the game right now… it is literally all about the loot. He suggests increasing the drop rates by 300 to 400% and then still questions if that would be enough for the sort of game Anthem actually is… but the Devs apparently don’t understand that it is. RNG can be amazing or it can be a harsh mistress. For example Wednesday night I had a grand ole time where I managed to rack up three new legendaries during the course of the evening… a component actually for the right class from a GM2 Legendary Mission, and then two new weapons… one each from GM2 Strongholds. This still felt stingy to me, but at least was something. Last night however I walked away with nothing really of use from doing two legendary contracts and a stronghold all at Grandmaster 2 level.

There are so many things in this game that just feel bad as the player once you reach what currently passes for an end game. The truth is there is nothing that would normally be classified as end game. The game has no PVP so no super serious equivalent of the Trials of the Nine would ever exist in Anthem. Similarly there is nothing along the lines of a Nightfall and there is most definitely not a raid that can be completed weekly with a group of other players for a shot at amazing rewards. There are no weekly bounties that you can complete that guarantees you an item that will be an upgrade, and we are completely missing something similar to exotics that have a guaranteed curated roll. So what is left is a lot of grinding and perfecting your builds, which is maddening when it is entirely dependent on the slow trickle of Masterworks and Legendaries. I have friends that are doing GM2 nightly… that have yet to see ANY Legendaries and consider me extremely lucky that I have had multiple. While the game desperately needs a true end game… the more pressing problem will always be the loot and until they open the floodgates no one is really ever going to be completely happy.

Divine Beast Vah Ruta

I eventually took a break last night and returned to my Cemu Breath of the Wild play session. When I was last playing I had been working my way into the general area of the Zora kingdom to tackle the first of many Divine Beasts. I am not sure if there is a chosen order, but the furthest I managed to get with this game before setting it back down again… was to head in this direction. So last night I made it through the sequence of annoying lightning attackers to get to Zora land and made my way about collecting Lightning Arrows. I set about collecting the arrows while avoiding the Lynel… which went fairly quickly given that pretty much every tree in the vicinity had at least three stuck in it. There were a few times I had to duck out of view and wait but managed to get it taken care of then glided my way down to where I was meeting Sidon to make the run on the Divine Beast. I made it through the sequence surrounding disabling the “defenses” and started on the first level of the dungeon before I finally called it for the night. I do like that Breath of the Wild pretty much just lets you do a save state wherever you happen to be in the world. I greatly appreciate its mobile roots allowing me to pretty much abandon ship whenever I need to. So tonight I am likely to return and actually finish the first of the Divine Beasts because I am finding the gameplay way more compelling when playing it on the PC… I am weird like that.

Borderlands 3

I had to work yesterday and was in meetings… so I completely missed what apparently was a mess of a reveal at Pax East. However I did manage to watch the nice and pristine YouTube videos later that afternoon. I have to admit at first I was not super impressed with what I saw, but largely this was due to my own false expectations. In my mind when I think of Borderlands 1 and 2 Trailers… I am actually thinking of the Game Intro sequences which are absolute masterpieces. I forgot what a Gearbox Borderlands reveal trailer actually looked like… and judging it by those standards this one is a better trailer than the ones that came with either 1 or 2. For example the original Borderlands Trailer… feels absolutely nothing like what we think of as the Borderlands Style. Then with Borderlands 2 we pretty much got a very similar type of reveal trailer as we just saw with Borderlands 3… like shockingly similar. So by those comparisons… Borderlands 3 comes out just fine.

I feel like there were probably story beats that I completely missed because I never played the Telltale Games spinoff game. What I was hoping for was some semblance of the story beats that we would be seeing in the new game. For me what makes Borderlands as a series special is a mix of the interesting characters, quirky humor, almost MMO style questing, intersting gunplay, the faucet of loot, and a bunch of interesting character class choices. The trailer doesn’t really give me much to go on other than there are a bunch of guns… one lady can become shiva, another pilots a mech and then you have two gunner classes that while visually different didn’t do much to actually distinguish themselves from what we saw. There were characters shown that I recognized as being part of the Tales from the Borderlands series but that I don’t know much about. I would be lying if I said I would not be playing it, but I am also not nearly as hyped as I thought I would have been at this point. I am sure as more tangible information comes out about the game I will get more so.

I am guessing based on what are the villains that we are going to see a way more raider-centric storyline than we did with Borderlands 2. The biggest problem with my general sense of disappointment after watching the trailer for the first time… is that I was ultimately expecting this instead.

Anthem Patch Day

March 26, 2019 by Belghast

Today is in theory a big patch day for Anthem that should be clearing up a lot of the ills that the game has. However I am not exactly holding my breath. What I mean by that is I am certain that there will be in fact a patch today, Game Update 1.0.4. What I am doubting is if it will fundamentally improve the situation for those of us stuck in the limbo between Grandmaster 1 and being able to feel viable in Grandmaster 2 and beyond. What is needed to fix this is Legendaries, and not only that but viable Legendaries. Both patch 1.0.3 and the server side loot tweaks were supposed to give us some remedy, and while I have seen a greater frequency in Masterwork drops it has done nothing to help fill my screen with lime green. Ultimately knowing that today’s patch was on its way served to disincentive me from playing the game at all… because why should I invest any time at all in a largely broken loot system when if I just waited a week there would in theory be some fixes.

Game Update 1.0.4 for #AnthemGame will release Tuesday, March 26th on all platforms. We'll have Update Notes tomorrow as well to go along with the download going live.

FYI: We also have scheduled server maintenance tomorrow from 6:30am – 8:30am PDT/9:30am – 11:30am EDT as well.

— Andrew Johnson (@UNTDrew) March 25, 2019

I think where I am with this game is that I really enjoy the moment to moment game play, but now that the progression train has slowed I am struggling to stay invested given that there is such a limited pool of content available to players. I think the Elysian Caches will help somewhat because it gives a long tailed chase mechanism… and quite frankly what better reward is there than things that make your Javelin look awesome. So that alone will make Strongholds worth running again. Additionally there are the Legendary missions that should produce some replayability of existing content and given how enjoyable some of those story missions were… I can see that helping as well. Quality of life changes like being able to see what World Events are active at any given time will also be a welcome change. The main problem I foresee is that the game really needs fresh content to add to the mix, because as it stands three Strongholds just isn’t enough… when a good deal of us have every line of dialog in them all memorized at this point. I would prefer never to hear again about not wanting that omelet.

I will of course be checking it out tonight and I am hoping that I am wrong, but I am sort of trying to tamp down my expectations so I don’t turn into one of the heaps of rage that inhabit the main reddit. Once again I highly recommend LowSodiumAnthem if you are hoping to stay a fan of this game rather than wading into the mire of hatred of the official Reddit. Bioware Devs post on both locations.

What I wound up spending most of my time last night doing however was playing some more Breath of the Wild via Cemu. The screenshots don’t exactly do it justice of showing off just how damned good this game looks running in 4K resolution. I am consistently impressed by just how good it works, but then again… the developers of Cemu have been tweaking and refining this for roughly two years now with a lot of community modding support that adds in compatibility fixes. I’ve surpassed where I was progress wise from the Switch and have put in around nine hours of gameplay so far, almost all of it stable. The instabilities thusfar have involved encountering something I have not seen yet and having the emulator pause to build shader cache. There are in theory downloadable shader caches that would fix this problem… but I have not really spent any time investigating how to get my hands of them.

Essentially everything about this process is sort of caveat emptor… but seeing as I have done this level of nonsense many times in the past it didn’t worry me too much. Suffice today however there has been copious amounts of virus scanning before I interacted with anything that I acquired in this process. This is probably the first time however that I have seen modern emulation give a game that is on a current platform a run for its money… or in this case greatly improving the visuals. I know there is similar magic you can do with a 3DS emulator, but thusfar I have not really had the horsepower to really make those games perform to their fullest at 4K resolutions. However if you are interested in that sort of nonsense then I would point you at the Simply Austin Youtube channel to see examples of what can be done. It is so bizarre to me how far emulation has come from the days of me trying to play Final Fantasy V on ZSNES and having to apply a frame skip to get some semblance of something playable, to being able to run modern games on high end PCs.

Please note… that while I totally support emulation, I don’t do so as a dodge to getting free games. I have a closet full of classic game systems, and in the case of both Cemu and Citra the Wii U and 3DS emulators respectively I have owned all of the games that I have tried playing. Especially in the era of struggling game studios… they need you buying the games instead of figuring out ways to get free copies. I didn’t exactly have clean hands throughout my high school and college years, but now I think in part I buy so many games as a way of making up for my former warez peddling past. If Nintendo for some reason started releasing these games on PC… I would likely lose all interest in emulating them in the first place. However I somehow doubt that is ever going to happen, and as a result… Nintendo consoles will always be the most widely supported emulation platforms.