Tales of the Aggronaut

Big Patch Time

February 21, 2019 by Belghast

I am still sick this morning, but I am hoping I will feel better throughout the day. At this point I have taken off a day and a half and in my position that only worked because I had a couple of very light days meeting wise. This is the worst part about being sick as an adult the feel that you need to keep working through it or else things will fall apart. This is complicated by the fact that I have something silly like 400 hours of sick leave banked… but if we take more than 40 hours in a six month period human resources seems to freak out about it. That means in practice that I try and ration my usage just in case something goes horribly south like last January when I got the actual name brand flu.

I am still playing a not insignificant amount of Anthem. At this point the Origin client has me at 33 hours since the spreadsheet launch last Friday. Were it not for a handful of circumstances that got in the way of my gameplay that number probably would have been much higher. Still that is a fair amount of time to log into any game during its first week, and in part a good deal of why is that I have been sitting on the couch trying not to die from horrible feeling. The last two days have allowed me to log more time than I normally would have into a game like this and as such I am further along in the storyline than I probably would be otherwise. I am sorta sensing I am either near the end or near some sort of a bit confrontation… and because of this my natural delaying tactics have kicked in and I seem to be doing anything other than playing the main story quest. I’ve done this at several points now… where I completely farmed down everything else that was available to me other than the main story quest and I am going through that pattern once again.

As far as my loadout of choice goes… you can see what I have equipped at a high level in the above screenshot. Firstly the combo I am leaning heavily on is Inferno Grenade to apply a status and Pulse Blast to detonate said status. Both items deal a lot of damage on their own, but when combined they do a fair job of destroying the Scar bigbois. If you can land the grenade and the pulse blast at medium to close range you can often times two shot them. As far as weapons go my loadout of choice there tends to be either an Auto Rifle or a Light Machine Gun for slot 1 and a Marksman Rifle for slot 2. This gives me a good combination of up close melting power with the ability to pick off targets at range if I so choose. The reason why I go Marksman over Sniper is the fact that if I run out of primary ammo… I can still kill things up close and personal with a Marksman Rifle whereas I really cannot with a Sniper. I am currently suffering a drought of Inferno Grenades and since the Blue Pattern doesn’t seem to exist in the game right now I don’t have a crafting option to make up for it.

Last night a little over 4 gb patch landed and it took forever to download… which at first I thought was Origin being Origin… but in the end I realized that it was my gigabit ethernet card being dumb again. I have this bug that if I ever need to cycle the router… my network card for some reason drops down to 10 meg mode. The only way to get it back to its full speed is to disable the NIC and re-enable it again. Once I went upstairs and took care of that the patch finished in seconds. You can see the full patch notes here, but there are a large round of major tweaks. The first big noticeable one for me personally is the above screen that you now see whenever you hop in your Javelin. It simplifies your gameplay options rather than the weird pick an icon on the map method that previously was employed. It greatly streamlines the process which I appreciate, and definitely makes it easier to get into QuickPlay or Freeplay faster.

As one of the folks loving the game… it feels real bad to see a lot of the free floating sodium that seems to be surrounding this game in the content creator community. I am not entirely certain what they were expecting, but the camp seems to fall along two lines… either the game isn’t as good in the moment to moment gameplay as other titles on the market or that the game doesn’t have the rich storytelling that Bioware is known for. There is a third camp of trolls that just like pointing out bugs in games and being an asshole about it, but I don’t really consider them to have any merit since we live in a magical time where one massive patch like the one that rolled out yesterday can fix a ton of them in a single pass. I feel like the first two however have merit, but I think it is more likely a case of misplaced expectations rather than problems with the actual game itself. What I went into Anthem expecting was something that felt like Mass Effect Multiplayer combined with some story building and a bunch of characters on the same tier as Doctor Chakwas, and that is more or less what I received.

In truth what I got was a game that felt way better than Mass Effect multiplayer, and a cast of characters that I feel are way more engaging than Doctor Chakwas was… that ultimately weave a story about this new world that I am interested in exploring. I never expected the gunplay perfection that is Destiny, but what I gained instead was the ability to move freely and think in all three axis to solve combat problems. I think there is a lot of depth here in what we can do and the builds that we can create, and it also gives them a ton of room to grow the experience over the coming year. They have already stated that they intend on adding new gear and new Javelins, which will keep remixing the experience. The only glaring problem I see right now is the fact that there are only two strongholds at launch, which based on my experiences with FFXIV patch cycles… two is never enough dungeons to keep players from getting bored out of their skulls. With QuickPlay being the equivalent to the FFXIV Roulette system… players are going to have the dungeon they like to play and the dungeon they really hope they don’t get which is always the case.

Tam however was completely right about me and QuickPlay. Right now when I don’t necessarily want to engage in something seriously… I hop into QuikPlay because in general in my experience it tends to put you in towards the end of a mission. I’ve joined literally moments from getting awarded treasure which also feels odd… but more often than not is an easy two blue items and a small bit of experience. Last night I experienced my first time that it dropped me in from the very start of the mission, but even then it felt pretty chill because it wasn’t MY quest completion riding on the line. I knew that if I needed to bail I could exit out at any point, but in practice worked my butt off to make sure that the other player got through the mission. It is so weird how when I join other players I tend to do way better than I do when I am completely solo. I think it might simply be a case of having already experienced the mission and intrinsically knowing where I should and should not go in order to complete it.

Ultimately I am still having a blast playing the game. I suggest you push past the criticism and give the game a shot for yourself on Friday. Right now some of the biggest critics also seem to be some of the biggest supporters of Anthems competitor The Division 2, so I question their motives. Seeing as Division 2 releases almost exactly one month after Anthem… I am wondering if they are concerned that a success for Anthem would pull away players from The Division. In my case at least after playing both Demos… I was way more engaged with the story and interactions in Anthem than Division 2. I personally hope both launches are successful and that they both find their communities. I realize there are a limited number gamers and due to the unrealistic expectations of investors… it turns a game launch into a zero sum experience, but I just wish it didn’t cause so much salt and hyperbole.

Regularly Playing: February 2019 Edition

February 20, 2019 by Belghast

For most of this month I have been battling some respiratory crud that keeps circulating and recirculating through the office. I’m currently in another under the weather spell which means that my gaming habits are a bit off. However it is approximately that time again where I should post what all is in circulation at the Belghast household during the month of February. For those who have not seen this post before, it is essentially my process of semi-monthly truing up the sidebar of the blog and talking about the various games contained within. I am notoriously bad at sticking with series but one of my 2019 goals is to try and keep this up to date throughout the year.

To Those Remaining

Assassin’s Creed Origins – PC

I legitimately do not expect this game to stay on the list much longer. I’ve reached the point where I am a few hours away from the end of the game and as such going through my stalling tactic that avoids actually playing it out. I think part of this is my wanting a story to not be over, and part of it is knowing how frustrated the ending is going to make me since it will be forcing me to NOT play my actual character. One way or another however I expect by March this one will drop off the list. For now however I spent a significant amount of time early in the month and late January playing this so it stays on the list.

Destiny 2 – PC

I’ve not played nearly as much Destiny 2 this month as I probably would have liked. I spent a lot of time logging in and back out again because for whatever reason it did not seem to scratch whatever gaming itch I was having at the time. A lot of this lost time went to Assassin’s Creed Origins, which really did hold me in thrall for a few weeks there. I am sure at some point in the near future I will return to being active again, but for now I am logging in doing a few objectives and then logging right back out. Still keeping it in the rotation but my weekly play time has decreased significantly.

Dragalia Lost – Android

The thing this game does better than pretty much anything else I have seen… is keep a constant flow of content coming out that makes you want to pop in and participate in each and every event. Right now there is a Valentines event that isn’t really my jam… but I am still participating regularly and I applaud them trying to break up the formula. Most of the story in Dragalia Lost is completely nonsense… so when you create an event that is almost entirely story driven… it is equally nonsense. However it has served as a great way to stock up on some of the rarer items that you can purchase with the extremely easy to obtain “rose” currency. It has however made me burn down my stack of skip tokens so that is a bit of a negative. Still playing… still engaged.

Elder Scrolls Online – PC

Another game that is sort of holding on by a thread is Elder Scrolls Online. While I love this game I am just not playing nearly as much as I probably should be of it. I need to start the Morrowind content because it would give me a sense of grounding in the story that I need to keep logging in on a nightly basis. That said I have had plenty of games on my plate so I am fine with a few of them slipping off the easy to reach shelf for a moment. I need to buy that 1 TB SSD/M.2 drive I have been contemplating because I don’t have a ton of space on my current boot drive. I think this is a game that would DEFINITELY be improved by an SSD given how much loading happens. A big problem with me and this game right now is knowing how long it is going to take before I load all of the way into it.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I’ve been going through a bit of a renaissance here this month as I finished leveling Blue Mage to the level cap of 50 and am a single dungeon away from being caught up with the story. That said… Anthem happened and sorta threw any time that I would be devoting to Final Fantasy for a loop. However I am starting to feel like I am back in the swing of things. I am focusing on the Samurai since tanking for strangers seemed like a bit too far off the path for me to wander. Weirdly I find the dungeon queues for DPS to be massively improved over what they previously were… so maybe that isn’t a horrible choice. Samurai is a really fun class but it still very much feels like I am “alting”.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

Still in the regular rotation but not spending an awful lot of time there on a weekly basis is Magic the Gathering Arena. I’ve participated in a few events this month with the release of Ravnica Allegiances and all in all still enjoying the format. The biggest problem I am having at the moment is that formats I am likely to enjoy the most… Pauper and Singleton are dominated by degenerate decks like Rat Colony or Persistent Petitioners. Both of which are entertaining the first time you encounter them… but end up with me just conceding out of the match so I can move on with my life. I is not that the decks are unbeatable… it is just that it isn’t worth my time to go through the motions. What makes it worse is the mechanics of MTG Arena make them super easy to field given that if you have 4 copies of a card in your library you effectively have an UNLIMITED number of that card in your library since the system can only keep track of 4 copies. That means instead of forcing someone to burn through 24+ common tokens… they have to use 4 at most. I should build up a proper standard deck and just play that format, but for now I only really play MTGA when I am not feeling like anything else.

Monster Hunter World – PC

Another game that is holding on by a thread is Monster Hunter World, and it isn’t for lack of wanting to play… but more a case that I have a wealth of other games to play right now that all function similarly. I consider Anthem, Destiny and Monster Hunter to all be filling the same basic niche of the MMO-Lite style of game. For now I am devoting those efforts to Anthem, but I am sure in the coming months some of that time will be spent killing monsters. When some of the console exclusive quests start trickling over to PC I am sure I will come back in and participate in them again. That is a major problem I have with the PC version right now however is the staggered release schedule. It should have been their goal to catch the PC up at a hyper inflated rate so that they could have events going on in both locations at the same time. However Capcom seems to be fine with leaving PC as a less than equal version of the game… which I find maddening. I am hoping with the expansion that all of this shakes out and they can both be on equal footing once and for all.

Pokemon Go – Android

I have to admit that the only thing really keeping me engaged with Pokemon Go right now is the fact that Android Wear integrates with it. What means my TicWatch E is constantly logging steps made and giving me credit so… I spend most of my time hatching eggs. That means I am also using my backlog of friend gifts as a repository for getting more of the eggs that I want to hatch. At this moment I spent some coins on the store and am hatching ALL the eggs at once so I can clear all 9 slots for more friend egg hatching nonsense. Side note… I love my TicWatch E and at some point should probably write a post about it since I have been using it for months after my formerly beloved Pebble Time stopped synchronizing with my phone.

To The Returning and Brand New

Anthem – PC

This is the new hotness in my life and I am loving the game. Seeing a lot of negative reviews floating about and I keep thinking that they are playing a different game. Flying around in a mech suit has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. There were some folks that loved the Valkyries from Robotech… but for me… it was all about the Cyclone armor. In the Rifts pen and paper game… it was all about the S.A.M.A.S. and the Glitterboys. In Fallout I have sought out wearing Powered Armor as soon as I could possibly get a suit. So as a result there may be a player fantasy that Anthem is providing that fits neatly into my wheelhouse. I am having a blast and look forward to seeing what the world as a whole feels about the game on Friday. I think the big publication game reviewers in general consider being bitter fucks about everything to be “on brand”, so as such I largely ignore them. Instead when it comes to games… my focus tends to be how my friends with similar play styles are feeling about a new title.

To Those Departing

Ashen – PC

This game while super interesting… just did not stand the test of time for me personally. I stalled out and never wound up returning to it. This was not helped by the fact I went through a week where the Epic Games launcher kept crashing constantly for me. I probably will return to it at some point because I still find what it is doing interesting, it just lost out to other games that were holding my attention a bit better.

Far Cry 5 – PC

Ultimately I beat the game and as a result it fell off my radar. At some point I will probably play through the Zombie Survival mode of the game just to see what it is all about. However I more or less moved on to Assassin’s Creed Origins and as a result this is dropping off the list. You can follow down some of my post about the game to track my sentiments, because while I loved a lot of the experience it had real flaws when it came to the forced narrative. Still would absolutely play again… and it makes me want to spend some more time in Far Cry 4.

Minecraft – Windows Store

Not shocked at all to see this dropping off the list because this tends to be how I play Minecraft lately. I will go through an obsessive building phase for a few weeks… and then stop playing altogether for several months. Still a great game and shocked at just how evergreen the experience of virtual legos ends up being for me for the long run. I do not care at all about the survival aspects and tend to play the game mostly on creative mode. I return to this when my mind wants me to build something… and exit again once I have finished tinkering with it. It serves a glorious purpose in my life and I am thankful to have it. Playing Minecraft calms me.

Summary

All in all there was not a ton of movement this month, but I will say there are a bunch of games in danger of dropping off the list come next time. I also know that Division 2 is looming on the horizon and I am not sure where it will fit into the entire apparatus since it is launching roughly a month after Anthem. All in all… question to the readers. Do you enjoy this column of sorts or do you wish I would just drop it and do normal posts in place of them?

The First Loop

February 19, 2019 by Belghast

At this point I am trying to keep my blog fairly spoiler free given that the game is not out yet for a ton of people. I still find that concept really odd, but I am pushing past it because I see that as an EA thing and not necessarily a Bioware thing. When I have a major fork in the road coming up in a game I tend to spend a significant amount of time avoiding it. I am not sure why I do this thing but it happens constantly. I am in the final stretch to the “end” of Assassin’s Creed Origins… but have not played the game since I realized that. In Anthem I knew something major was about to happen, but I was not exactly sure what… and as a result I spent most of my evening avoiding playing through the only quest that I happened to have in my journal. As a result I spent a lot of time roaming around last night in Freeplay mode while watching Umbrella Academy, which seems pretty great so far. However given the events of the quest that I had been seemingly avoiding… I wish I had done this at the beginning of the night rather than the end of the night so I could see more of the story.

Anthem threw me its first loop, because up until now most everything had largely been predictable. I was not expecting what happened last night to change the entire tempo of the game from this point forward… and I like that a lot. So often my wife and I will be watching something on television… and I throw out a random statement as soon as I get the idea a thing is going to happen. The other night it happened during one of the medical procedural that she likes to watch, and they were setting something up… and I blurted out what I thought they were setting up. In the end it turned out to be exactly what I was thinking because earlier in the show they had set up a character only to kill it off, and talked about a specific medical procedure as an offhand reference. This happens with games as well that often times I can see the train coming before it arrives at the station… recent example when FFXIV introduced the “Shadowhunter” character I pinged Tam who was further along in the story than I was at that point and made my guess that turned out to be completely on the nose.

As such I really appreciate it when a game can throw me for a loop and in hindsight all of the clues were there waiting for me… but I didn’t piece them together because I was too engaged with the content to notice the signs. I love it when a game shocks me… and even though this is probably on the lower tier scale of shocks it was still an extremely good experience to go through. If you have played through the content to this point you will know what I am talking about. However please keep the comment section spoiler free in respect for the people who have yet to get their hands on the game. Some folks are stuck behind having played their 10 hours already, and another batch simply purchased the game and cannot play because they can’t or won’t pay the $15 tax to get immediate access. However I find it refreshing that the game can shift gears and change what sort of a story that is playing out in front of us. The fact that I am wearing my N7 decal (which I spent my accumulated coins on purchasing from the Forge) makes the above screenshot feel like a Mass Effect game seeing as I go with the green, red, black and white color scheme in that game as well.

Another thing I thought I would mention this morning is something that had been bugging me up until this point. In my friends list I would see players with backgrounds behind their name and could not for the life of me figure out how to set this. Copious amounts of googling yielded no results either with me calling it a Nameplate or even after getting the correct term a Banner. I realized in yesterdays post that my friend Naithin had one of these nameplates so I figured I would ask them about it. So in order to get to the above screen… you have to hop in your javelin and then click over to the squad tab that is shown on that screen. You will see a number of options and one of them is hold right mouse to change banner image, or I assume something equivalent will show up if you are on a console or using a controller. This will pop up this screen and give you a bunch of different pictures and backgrounds to choose from… I have no clue where the larger image is used but the textured background shows up pretty much everywhere in the game.

I think now is the time for us to talk about one of the glaring issues that Anthem has… it has a horrible UI. I am certainly hoping that none of my friends at Bioware were responsible for said UI, because I would feel bad in saying this. However it just does not behave in the manner that I would expect it to… and everything seems to be more cumbersome than it should be to interact with. The fact that I could not for the life of me figure out how to change my nameplate is a prime example of this. It required me to be on a very specific screen that I never actually clicked over to in order to find it. When I have set up a squad I have done so before actually getting in my Javelin, so it seems like an odd design decision to bury that option on a screen you can bypass ever going to. However I thought I would post it on the blog in case like me you were curious and clueless.

I spent a little time trying to play the Storm again last night… and nope… I am absolutely a Ranger through and through. I just feel squishy as a Storm as compared to how I feel in the Ranger. I know it is largely a play style thing… and my default play style is to get up and personal in the heat of the action and run around dodging incoming attacks. What the storm wants you to be is a hovering long ranged damage platform, that casts spells tactically on the battlefield below them. I should probably give Colossus another try and play with the slam all the shields nonsense it offers. When I hit my next unlock I will likely be spending it on that Javelin. However my true love will probably always be the Ranger. I hope you all find that Javelin that is the perfect fit for you as the game officially launches this coming Friday. Strong Alone, Stronger Together!

Anthem Spreadsheet Launch

February 18, 2019 by Belghast

Anthem “Launched” on Friday and I spent my weekend having a blast playing the game for real. However unfortunately the bulk of the people who pre-ordered the game will not be able to experience the game until this coming Friday the 22nd. This is what I would call a spreadsheet launch, and I talked a bit about it on Friday because if you purchased a month of either the $5 or $15 flavor of EA Access then you were able to play this weekend. The $5 price point gave you 10 hours of gameplay… and then I was a sucker and went with the $15 dollar double special secret access that just gave me the game one week early. At this point according to Origin I have spent 17 hours playing, and the majority of why I went with that version over the $5 variant is it allows me to just not care about how much time I happened to be spending.

The challenge this morning is how do I condense the feelings I am having about the game into something resembling a proper blog post. The quick summary is that I like the game an awful lot, so much so that I went to sleep each night dreaming about playing more of the game. I am good and properly hooked and for the moment it is an equivalent experience to how I felt about Destiny when I first got my hands on it. The world is insanely intricate and all of the concerns that I had from the Demo about Freeplay being fragmented with invisible walls… turned out to be misguided. From what I can tell all of those barriers that were thrown up during the Demo were to simply keep us out of the content that they did not want us to visit. Roaming around Freeplay in the final game provides a seamless experience that lets me traverse from one side of the map to the other.

First off lets talk about the map, because I have heard concerns about it seeming like it is very small. I am not able to zoom out far enough to get it all in one screenshot, but I can get a fair amount of it… which makes it seem on the small end. However exploring it…. feels completely different because the map has a lot of verticality to it that is not often there in similar style games. The same area may have a high path, a middle path and an underwater or cave based path all traversing the same ground giving you a lot of fenestration and cramming more detail into a square of map than you would normally have. This is awesome when you are freely roaming the map… and less awesome at times when you need to find an objective and have no clue at all what level of the infrastructure it might be on. At least one of the Tombs that you end up having to track down a ways into the game will frustrate you as you try and find the opening to an underground cave system that contains it.

The next piece that I want to talk a bit about is the Story… which is exceptionally good… but something I cannot really talk about in detail for fear of spoiling the game play experience. I’ve said the game is “very Bioware” which apparently means different things to different people… in response I have gotten Glitch Memes and Romance questions. What I ultimately mean by that is that it presents a really interesting world with a level of depth rivaling the Mass Effect series and is populated with a bunch of characters that I already care about. Through the conversation dialog… I am asked to make a series of decisions similar to the Paragon/Renegade system and I have a feeling that these change what happens in the world. There are definitely story paths that I have seen that seem as though they would not have occurred were it not for the previous choices I made. Additionally the characters are aware of each other… and choices made with Character A end up creating options for Character B… which again creates that “Bioware Feel”.

The gunplay is enjoyable, but I will say that the weapons do not feel as memorable as they do in Destiny for example. What is memorable however is the way that you move through combat and the various options that you have to embellish your play style. You are given a dodge… but why dodge when you can just double jump into the air and engage your thrusters to jet over to a safe distance from whatever attack is just about to land. The demo had significant issues with Mouse and Keyboard movement, but these have all largely been ironed out for the release and the more I play it… the more addictive the freedom of movement has become. If I want to get somewhere the game gives me the means to do it… and it feels completely different than a traditional MMO where you are mostly just flying high above the content and avoiding it entirely. There are lots of things in the air that can ruin your day and force you to deal with them, and instead your flight capabilities seem as a method of augmenting your other means of traversal.

All of these combined make the gameplay experience addictive, and make me want to keep climbing back into that suit and going out on another adventure. There is something about the launch sequence that is just enjoyable… seeing your javelin waiting for you to hop in. The fact that you cannot view your loot or swap gear in the world ends up with a gameplay loop that sees you going back to the Fort every so often, just to fiddle with your equipment before heading back out into the wilds again. I loved playing Patrol mode in Destiny, and as such Freeplay is very much my jam if I just want a solo experience. Thankfully most of the world events seem to be doable solo, which allows me to roam around collecting loot and doing objectives until I decide to get more serious about progression. If I want to play with other people there is the delightful freeplay option which mimics how I play Monster Hunter World with what I call “SOS Roulette”, where it dumps you into a random group that isn’t full and from what I can tell… it could be pretty much any activity.

Another thing that I am deeply thankful for is the fact that the game does not appear to care at all about levels when it comes to grouping. I’ve been paired with level 20s while at level 5… and I still felt viable and that higher level character didn’t feel like a ringer. This is a good thing given that those of us who were willing to spend that extra $15 are going to have a full week of play time on the folks that will be joining us on Friday. Right now among my friends you can see that Naithin is leading the charge with what I can only assume is bordering endgame item level, with Lex not very far behind. My only real complaint right now is I would have liked there to be a clan or guild system at launch, but I am at least happy that it is apparently on the near radar system wise. Grouping seems fairly seamless and there were moments this weekend when I happened to be running a mission and did not realize until after the fact that someone from my friends list had joined. It isn’t like there is much in the way of player to player interaction, and as a result that makes the whole grouping experience feel awesome for folks that end up preferring solo game play.

The only bit of a advice that I will throw out there is that if you played a lot of the demo like many of us did… your first Javelin choice is legitimately that… your first and ONLY Javelin choice for 8 levels. As such this mean’t I incorrectly thought I was picking my first spare Javelin and wound up playing the first 8 levels of the game as a Storm… which is fun but not really my jam. I am a Ranger through and through and once I got to level 8 the game started to feel very much like home again. All in all I am hooked and enjoying the experience greatly. It seems to be a game that splits the difference between many of the different looter shooter titles out there, and as a result has a style of play for pretty much everyone. As a long time Destiny Titan player… the Ranger appeals to me greatly because it feels like a similar game play style. However if you want to survey the battlefield from a distance… the Storm does an awesome job of that. Basically… I heartily recommend this game when the ACTUAL launch happens on Friday.

Some parting links for players… firstly I have a Roster that I have been collecting names on since Origin doesn’t have a way of importing users from other more popular gaming services.

Also Namaslays/Jewel has started up a Discord Community called The Anthem Collective so there is that if you are wanting another way to meet players. I have joined but I am also super bad at keeping track with Discords so I will probably be a super infrequent user, and mostly rely on it if other grouping opportunities peter out in the end game. I am super happy with what I am seeing so far, and am curious what my other friends that are playing think. I am hoping we see a bunch more Monday morning posts about experiences.