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Week in Gaming 11/1/2015

November 1, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Summer

This is the week where we finally started to see some colder temperatures. Its funny that this has been the case for the last few years… that October for the most part has still be warm and sunny and if we still had our pool open… we probably could have swam in it all month long. We still have yet to see a freeze but this past week it was regularly in the 40s, when the week before it pretty much never dropped much down past the 70s other than the early morning. As a result this means our hibernation instincts are starting to kick into overdrive. We recorded the AggroChat podcast Friday night, which left us with all of Saturday to do whatever we wanted. The end result… is that we pretty much just stayed inside apart from a mad dash out of the house around 4 pm to run a few errands. I am perfectly fine with a weekend like this… my wife however has some inborn instinct that tells her that we if did nothing over a weekend… that the weekend is somehow a failure. Me… I see those as the most wonderful weekends ever.

Destiny

I had all of these plans to play some themed games for Halloween… but those plans pretty much died yesterday. Instead I ended up working on my Warlock and getting it to 21 from about level 8. I have to say the Warlock is growing on me over time… and I really really like Nova Bomb as a super goes. It is this awesome mix of the way the Havoc Fist super and Shadowshot super feel, where I can deliver death from above… but at a target instead of jumping down in the middle of everything. Having played all three classes… I have to say they have done an excellent job of giving them all something really neat and special about them that makes it rewarding to play. The hardest thing for me so far however has been adjusting to the Warlock jump. It just works so different than all of the others… and while I am starting to get the hang of it… I still have zero desire to do any of the platforming encounters with it. We will see when I get to the dreadnaught if I can figure out how to do the various chasm jumps with it. Hunter is simple… double jump, and Titan is similarly simple… you just have to sort out when you want to hover over your target before you land. Warlock… is just fiddly and annoying and I never can seem to do the sort of jump I need when I need it.

The secret of my success honestly was getting high enough level to where I could break out my Stranger’s Rifle and I plan on riding that puppy up as long as I can. That weapon is just so damned amazing… and I am ultimately going to have to sort out the process for getting the modern version of it. Sadly I don’t have much faction with Future War Cult, which is ultimately required to get the No Time to Explain exotic. As it stands right now my hunter is running up Future War Cult faction, but since I don’t play him nearly as much as I do my Titan it is lagging behind. I did manage to get my hunter up to 285 light, and I can now consistently him 297 light on my Titan. Getting 300 and beyond items just seems to be the problem, and I still decode so many 260ish items that are just trash. While I don’t mind so much if they are weapons… since I am consistently struggling to keep enough weapon parts on all three of my characters… but armor… I have more than enough to share. I want to take a moment to talk about how much I love the Bungie.net website for swapping stuff between my characters, and the fact that you can do it in the middle of a game play session. This is a really amazing feature.. and I have heard there are chrome plugins that streamline this process considerably.

For the last several weeks I have been on this mission to grind as many strikes as possible to get Exotic Engrams… and there was a method behind my madness. There was one weapon in this game that I wanted more than anything else… and that was.. the Zhalo Supercell. From the moment I saw it in a video, I loved the look of it as some sort of futuristic AK-47/Bolt Action Hybrid thing. What I loved more about it was the functionality of being able to chain lightning to all of the mobs around your target. The only problem being… I never seem to get weapon engrams. I get Helms and Gloves… and the occasional Chestpiece… but have pure hell getting any sort of weapon to drop. So you can imagine my excitement this Friday when Xur had none other than the Xhalo Supercell available. The only negative of course is that all Xur weapons start at 280 instead of the 290 that they are usually dropping for me as. I have managed to pour enough stuff into it to get it to 287 which will have to do for the time being. I love this gun, and more importantly I love the way it rips through mobs that always frustrated me. I’ve noticed when the lightning procs… it can hit Phalanx and Knights even if their shields are up which makes this gun freaking amazing. When I wrap up my post this morning I think I am going to stream/record for a bit and talk about some of my favorite weapons currently.

Another huge positive from this week is that one of the Armsday orders was the above Suros DIS-43 Scout Rifle. One of the rolls available had full auto… which makes this gun freaking amazing. It has good impact, solid range and really great stability which makes it pretty much the perfect scout rifle for me. This has now completely replaced Hung Jury in my current weapon load out. My Hung Jury essentially has maxed range which is nice… because I can use it much in the same way as I would a sniper rifle, but the Suros DIS-43 is just a much better all around weapon. I noticed it was available for Armsday orders again this week, and I put in for another one… so hoping that I can end up getting a third one for my Warlock. I have two of these now and they are just excellent. Hoping that everyone managed to get in on the full auto version from this past week because man… I am really enjoying it. My only problem with Suros weapons… is that I really don’t like the Red and White paint job. So this is another case that I would love to be able to repaint my weapons… like if I could put a Dead Orbit paint scheme on this thing… it would be perfect.

Secrets of Grindea

Another title that I played this week was Secrets of Grindea to get prepared for the Friday night podcast. I of course talked about this at length on the podcast, but this is a game where I went through a few different phases with it. At first… it didn’t really grab me. This was my pick for the month, and I largely picked it because some of the game footage I saw reminded me of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana. The early gameplay however… is kinda boring, and the first “boss battle” on the bridge felt a little uninspired. That was quickly followed up by the Giga Slime boss… which was absolutely brutal to do as a melee character. So I have to admit that knocked a lot of wind out of my sails as far as this game went. I did however manage to pick it back up this week and saw the game that I had not quite gotten to yet.

All I can say is… boy was I wrong to doubt this game. The quests are cute, and a parody of traditional RPG tropes…. without being cruel or slapstick about it. It is kinda a sly nod and wink to the fans of this genre… saying “we know” rather than trying to rub your face in it. We talked about this on the podcast, but this is essentially the game I had wished Citizens of Earth was. It is well written, has some interesting and often times hilarious characters, and presents a world for the grown up fans of the original Zelda games… not necessarily the same audience those games were targetting. The boss fights are really challenging, but each of them have a trick or a pattern that once you figure it out it becomes doable. That said I do think this game might have significantly more challenging encounters than Zelda did, because the above Hydra was essentially the point where the game broke me. After talking with my friends on the podcast… there was essentially a pattern that I was missing that hopefully means I can get in and wreck it now. There was not a single boss that did not take me multiple attempts… other that the first bridge encounter mind you. The game does a great job of check-pointing your progress so you start pretty close to where you died allowing you to get right back into the action and try again. Even though this is early access… I highly suggest checking it out… though admittedly you might just wait for the final version.

Devilian

The other game that I spent some time playing is Devilian, that was having another beta test weekend. I still have issues with the game, at least in the style of the character classes… and their gender locked nature. That said I do actually enjoy playing it, and I think it is a cool take on a normally Diablo clone environment. It feels like something different, and I find it significantly more challenging already than anything I saw in Diablo. Diablo gameplay felt “cheap” at times… where bosses would just straight oneshot you if you were unlucky or lacked the armor/skills to deflect the blows. This game requires you to react a lot more quickly to things happening and dodge out of the way of incoming damage. I’ve already encountered a boss that I just cannot currently beat, and I am hoping to come back to it once I have picked up a few more levels. I have this feeling that the boss is designed for multiple players to take him down… because he is right there out in the open rather than hidden behind a bunch of mobs.

The game is really damned pretty, and I will give it marks too for running extremely smoothly. I am still getting used to its somewhat quirky control scheme, but it makes sense. If I were in the permanent test group I would probably be playing this more regularly but with only having weekends to play it… it somewhat disincentives my time spent. My ultimate hope is that Trion has more control over this one than they do over ArchAge and that maybe just maybe they can get some of the changes in that will make the game more enjoyable. Like for example the game is desperately in need of some inventory management tools… like sort and compact. It feels so odd to be playing a game without those things at this point. I doubt the whole Gender locked classes thing will ever be solved, because that will mean a TON of art and animation work to get there. In truth, as I look at the other classes… it is highly unlikely that I would play any of them other than the berserker in the first place. I am just not much for ranged classes… and I have zero desire to play a character with a habitually open shirt. In truth I wish there was some sort of a “tanky” character like the Crusader in Diablo 3. That would probably ultimately be the class for me.

Overwatch Frustrations

October 29, 2015 by Belghast

Overwatch Hype

On Tuesday October 27th Blizzard opened the doors of Closed Beta for it’s highly anticipated shooter called Overwatch. As you might expect, the internet as a whole quickly lost their shit and reverted to a state of chain refreshing the battle.net account page to see if they were among the lucky few to get granted access. What I did not expect however was all of the infighting this process called as folks essentially called down a pox on the house of those who did manage to get in. It is one thing to be frustrated that you did not get into whatever the hot new Beta happens to be, but it is an entirely different to wish harm upon those who did. There were even a few folks who decided to flail about declaring that their not getting into Beta shows how little Blizzard cares. Others talk about how they should have earned access with this or that deed. At first I thought to myself… are we really this entitled? Because seriously… there have been some serious entitlement issues going on over the last few days.

Then I noticed something else happening that disturbs me even more. For those mere mortals like myself that do not make a living off gaming… then absolutely it would be entitlement. However for the folks that make a living through creating content related to Blizzard games… I started to read this impotently lashing out… as cold hard fear. When you make your money by presenting the freshest content on your Stream or your YouTube channel… you are in essence relying on being able to play whatever everyone else is playing. Not having access means you are missing out on all of these eyeballs that are now suddenly flocking to the internet to gaze into the window at those chosen few who get to play whatever game they want to play. Right or wrong… Blizzard is essentially saying who is really important to the future of their product and who is not.

The Hunt for Eyeballs

I am a shitty Streamer and an even worse YouTuber… but the most eyeballs I have ever had on my collective “stuff” is when I happened to get into the first wave of Alpha invites to Trove. I got to be one of a handful of people playing around with that game, and broadcasting it to the world and it was really noticeable. It is 6:30 in the morning right now… and one of the Overwatch streamers has over 10,000 viewers at this hour. During prime time… Overwatch has consistently been the highest watched game on the network. When you tune into one of these streams, especially the ones going on during the day… you will see a who’s who of internet celebrities fighting each other. Whether or not they intended it… Blizzard did essentially judge who was important to them and who was not by determining who got into that first wave of invites. That can be a pretty harsh reality check, especially if you have essentially devoted your career to supporting Blizzard products.

What worries me more however is what this says about the current state of video games in general. I remember how I felt the first time I got into a Friends and Family Alpha program… or FFA. I remember the excitement, and the desire to tell the entire world… but the reality that was I was bound behind a very serious Non Disclosure Agreement. I remember for one of these FFA programs I had to fax in a signed copy of a thirty page document back to the studio before being granted access. What made this work is that the company could literally focus on testing the game… rather than having to showcase it to the public 24/7. Sure it is frustrating to be in a thing that you cannot share… and sure it sucks for streamers especially to need to play something that they cannot show off to their viewers. However I think the model worked pretty damned well because up until these last few years it has been the model that almost all of the games you can think about nostalgically have been released under. It lets testing happen beyond the prying eyes of the public and bugs get fixed before it is ready for people to see it. The problem is… we the gamers have started to feel that there is something dishonest about this process… and that if a company isn’t completely transparent in every single minute action that they take… that it must be the sign of something horrible going on behind the scenes.

Marketing Cycle

The big problem is… we bore of games before they are released. There are games out there that seem to have permanent alpha and beta cycles, and as we go through seeing them displayed on our screens for two years… then the final release just seems lacking. There have been numerous times on AggroChat for example when someone brings up a title… and I have to ask “wait that actually released?”. There is this constant battle to control the hype cycle about a game, and make sure that your product is getting enough spin among the social media influencers. So when a game like Overwatch goes into one of these lengthy beta cycles… the company needs these streamers just as much as the streamers need the game to showcase to their viewers. They need those all important eyeballs peeping their wares… and getting excited enough to plunk down their hard earned money to purchase goods in it. The frustrating thing about it… is it feels like we are always in a hype cycle for something. It becomes much like the American Political system… where the candidates… or games in this case are always running for the next election. The market at this point is simply saturated with new titles that all sound interchangeable. MOBA with FPS roots… FPS with MOBA Character Styling… FPS gameplay MOBA spirit… the marketing spin that gets applied to games just seems meaningless after awhile.

Where I really start to get frustrated however is when this hype machine starts hurting people. Sure watching someone have an internet meltdown is entertaining while it goes on… but behind the screen is someone obviously in pain. I am not coming out to support those tantrums… but I am coming out to say that for all that is good and right in the world… lets stop hurting each other over a game. I have been just like you among those people frantically checking my battle.net account each time a new wave of invites comes out. So I get it… I get the desire to play that new shiny game. I’ve done this cycle over and over, and will continue doing this cycle until the games industry changes the way it works. Even if I want something really badly… I make it a goal in life to be excited for the people who are having good things happen to them… rather than being that selfish person who is lashing out at others because they got left out. I get the frustration and fear especially if you make your living from this sort of thing…. but having a meltdown in front of your followers isn’t going to help either. The truth is… we are eventually all going to get in… and the additional truth is… most of us will play a handful of games and then move on to the next shiny thing. This is not as important as we happen to be making it out right now… and within a years time… this will feel like another silly incident in the gaming community. What will stick around however… is how people feel about you and the way you have treated them. So lets just be awesome to each other while we wait for the next hype cycle to spin up.

Future Disappointment

October 21, 2015 by Belghast

Future Is Disappointing

I am home sick today fighting some sort of flu like chest crud, and as a result I am taking a bit longer than normal to knock out a blog post. It will soon be evident that today you will be unable to escape the fact that this is “back to the future day”, or at least the day that Marty McFly supposedly went forward in time to. While I have a heaping helping of nostalgia about Back to the Future in general, I have to say the future is always a bit of a disappointment. If you asked my thirteen year old self, what the future would be like… he probably would have bought into the fantasy of Back to the Future 2. At the very least I expected to have flying cars, and to have colonized the moon… but what happened instead was potentially stranger and more interesting. Futurism is almost always inherently wrong. We envision the future as delivered by the things we can dream about today. As new technologies evolve they shape that vision, and we are historically bad at guessing what trends will look like in five years… let alone ten… or in the case of this vision of the future twenty six years. Something odd happens when you place a goal on the horizon… people tend to start working towards that. So in a swell of nostalgia… we have actually seen hoverboards, self lacing shoes, and even the goofy pepsi bottle… because this movie TOLD us to make it.

This happens all the time and more often than not we don’t even notice. The bright colorful ubiquitous Verbatim 3.5″ floppy disks I am sure look like they do, because almost the exact same thing existed on Star Trek as a means of reading and writing data. Similarly the iPad looks an awful lot like the handheld LCARS tablet device carried on Star Trek the Next Generation. The internet as we know it… seems to have patterned itself off of the futurism of William Gibson. The reason why this happens is that technologists are generally geeks… and geeks love geek culture. Even if you don’t mean to… we are all subconsciously influenced by the things we love. The problem is… in the case of Back to the Future… none of the technologies that have showed up are really “true”. They are media stunts that have been created to prove that it “could” be done, but not necessarily something that is a widely accepted and adopted technology. The flying car for example, for the majority of my life has always been ten years away. The problem is that ten year mark never actually arrives… and my big concern is that we just are not investing enough in the future as a whole. Our space program is in shambles, and the corporate sector is constantly focusing on what brings them profits six months down the road instead of six years. It feels like we have stagnated, and most of what we are getting as far as innovations go are just constant iterations on the same ideas. This makes me concerned that the future will never actually arrive… or at least when it gets here it will be Shadowrun instead of Star Trek.

The Height Poll

If you follow me on twitter… or any other network that my twitter re-syndicates to… you may have noticed a poll that I sent out yesterday. Some people called it the strangest gaming poll they have seen… and I feel like maybe I need to supply some explanation. I am tall in real life… sitting around six foot four inches. This is tall enough that you realize that the world was not built for someone of your height. I am constantly banging my head on ceiling fans, the occasional low door frame, and have to be super careful when getting in and out of cars. As a result when I play games… especially MMORPGs I tend to play significantly shorter races. My first character in Everquest was a Dwarf, and I have had an affinity for little races including my current Lalafell in Final Fantasy XIV. In a conversation with another friend I found out that she was short… and had a similar experience… preferring to play taller races. So that got me thinking… which lead to the poll wondering if this is common place or if we are outliers. I thank everyone that voted in the poll, because it produced the image you see above. If anyone else wants to join in the question you can either click the link above or the image to launch into the strawpoll.

One thing I left off the poll is the folks who are medium height and prefer to also play medium height characters. I am assuming that a lot of those people voted “no real preference”, but in truth I was mostly interested in the relation between the extremes. It turns out that I am apparently not the normal, at least in terms of this question. Based on the poll it seems like the majority of players either have no real preference or prefer to stick with their same height regardless of the games they are playing. Only a few of each type preferred to play the opposite of whatever they are in real life. I guess that says a lot of things, and mostly that people tend to be happy with themselves. For me at least when I play a character in a game I tend to create a revised version of myself, where I fix the things that I dislike about myself… creating a “Ultimate Belghast”. I guess if I were being completely honest with myself… were I to “fix” my height I would not actually go “short” but instead trend towards medium. For a man it seems like six feet tall is about the sweet spot… the point at which the entire world seems to be built around that height. I’d never have to worry about leaning down in hotel showers so that the shower head can hit me… never have to worry about banging my head on things… and wouldn’t have to constantly search for “tall” sizes. Four inches doesn’t seem like much of a difference but in terms of functioning in the world it really is. Nonetheless I thought it was an interesting poll question and it was awesome that folks were willing to take it.

Gaming Muggles

October 20, 2015 by Belghast

Non-Gaming Spouse

@ModeratePeril I'd actually be interested in hearing about this and how you balance gaming with a non-gaming spouse.

— Jumpscare Jessica (@heyitsliore) October 19, 2015

Last night I kinda barged into an interesting conversation on twitter between some of my fellow TGENerates. This morning I thought I would write a bit about it, in a very non-standard blog post for me. While I don’t refer to her as a Gaming Muggle… I guess that would probably be a potential term for my own spouse. She doesn’t identify with the term gamer, even though she owned an Atari, a Nintendo, and currently plays more mobile games than I will likely ever play in my life. However because she tends to play spider solitaire or sudoku… she doesn’t consider it gaming. The truth is gaming left her when it went three dimensional, and what I mean by that is… she is capable of dealing with two dimensional planes and moving objects across them. However since her eyes never fused completely, she struggles with depth perception type tasks… especially in the virtual world where there are far less visual queues so to where an object is in relation to other objects. So I can remember her happily playing Tetris Attack in my college apartment, but once we moved to the Nintendo 64… that era was pretty much dead to her. My wife however is absolutely a geek, and we actually met due to our at the time shared IRC addiction. We were introduced by a man in Belgium, even though we grew up thirty minutes apart.

I will admit I have always been more than a little jealous of “gamer couples”, and seeing them in the various games I have played exploring these virtual worlds together. That said I know in the case of my wife and I we would probably just drive each other insane. We are both extremely good at the things we do… we just get to the same conclusion in vastly different ways. For example when we clean the house we tend to divide and conquer, each taking specific rooms. The reason being if we are trying to clean the same room at the same time we just end up getting in each others way. My fear is that in gaming the same would be true, with her taking one path, and me taking another… but ultimately ending up in the same location at the end. She has this inborn sense of direction that I have always coveted, because I have to navigate based on landmarks… and get completely lost when those landmarks are missing or have changed. I can enter a subdivision and within minutes have no clue which direction I am going anymore… and somehow she can magically tell me exactly what our heading is at any point during the trip. So I think she would honestly probably be far better at navigation than I would even in the virtual space.

Keeping Grounded

Over the years I have come to realize that having a non-gaming spouse is actually a big benefit for me personally. Everquest was essentially my first MMO, and it bit hold of me hard. Essentially the ability to explore a fantasy world was the sort of thing I had always craved, and giving me an always on persistent world to do it in… was absolute crack. The truth is that for most people that got really hooked on that game… it was in fact like a drug. There were more than a few people that I know that changed almost everything about their lives to adjust to doing things in Everquest. The ones who had it worse in a way were the ones with spouses also addicted to that game. I watched my friends alienate other friends, blow off jobs, and ultimately destroy relationships because of it. While playing I watched more than one marriage disintegrate, as some folks simply forgot to keep checking into the world. Bills may or may not have gotten paid, kids and animals may or may not have gotten fed. There was a bit of a dark underbelly to that game, and as a result it made me realize how lucky I am to have someone to forcibly pull me out of some of those mires.

To answer Liore’s question… how does one balance? Well having that person that isn’t doing the thing that you are doing… helps me at least realize that there is a world other than the games I happen to be playing. It isn’t exactly easy sometimes, especially considering that the reason why I game as much as I do is because my spouse is often busy with her own work. My wife is a rockstar teacher and because of that ends up spending upwards of eighty hours a week working on this or that item for her classroom. She takes it all super seriously, and because of that they have piled on so many extra duties. So there are a lot of times where I am busy with a game, and she is busy with lesson plans… and we are in completely different rooms conversing over instant messenger. It works… because we know we are in this together. The relationship is in the little things, and the fact that for the most part we “get” each other. I made the comment last night that “marriage is a strange thing… you never really know what is going to work… until it does” and that really is the case. I don’t know how or why it works… but it does and we have been together nineteen years… and married seventeen.

Complimentary Differences

I think the reason why we work is because on some levels we are completely and utterly different people. There are times it feels like the only thing we share in common, is our love for each other. I love Horror and Science Fiction movies… and she loves Home Improvement Television and Crime Dramas. She is very religious… and I am pretty deeply anti-religion in general. But the strange thing is… or differences make us stronger as a whole. We are unlike most couples in that from the moment we go together we were pretty much a team. Hell in college we pooled all of our resources into a joint bank account and pretty much supported each other, and I know married couples that have never had a joint bank account in their lives. This common sense of struggle together means that pretty much everything is tackled as a team. So if I don’t know how to do something, and she does… and then sometimes she doesn’t know how to do something, I do… we have a wider range of skills that make it easier to tackle things. I think the fundamental truth is that we have faith in each other, to do the things that we know we can’t ourselves.

What also makes it work is that for the most part we “get” and respect the things we choose to do. While I may not understand the concepts my wife is teaching… because Math has always been my weakest area… I get why she needs resources that her school cannot provide her, and never begrudge getting those items regardless of cost. Similarly my wife doesn’t necessarily understand why I love Star Wars or Lego.. or the countless game franchises I do… but she is constantly on the look out for things she knows I will like. The other day she found me an awesome R2-D2 skull cap that I plan on rocking this winter when it gets cold. She has also come home with Legos that she happens to find on sale somewhere, thinking I would like them. Similarly I am constantly searching for whatever things she is into, and have gone to silly lengths to track down whatever it is that she is hunting for. So while I might have a “muggle” wife… she certainly knows the important bits, and at the same time reminds me that there is a world just outside our door as well.