Tales of the Aggronaut

IntPiPoMo 2018

November 2, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday did not go according to plan, and as a result I wound up not making a post at all. Essentially I woke up at 5:15 yesterday morning and by the time I finished showering and checked into the world around 5:30 I noticed that we had a major system down at work. This caused me to leap into crisis mode and instead of going upstairs to blog, I went upstairs to remote in and try and assess the situation. As such you got a brief tweet stating that there would be no post and I moved on with what turned out to be an eleven hour day. I had intentions of making a post last night, but by the time I made it home I was mentally soup. I had some awesome tamales from the coney place down the street and largely avoided any mentally strenuous activity.

The only problem with this is that I missed out on making a post for an initiative that has been going on for several years in the blogosphere… but that I have never actually participated in. Everyone knows about NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, where you are challenged to crank out 50,000 words worth of cohesive prose that can in theory get edited into a novel that makes sense. I participated in that initiative back in 2013 and wound up live blogging it as I progressed through the goal of writing 50,000 words. You can see the rough and unedited form here in a series of posts that I started cross linking at some point. The sad part is I never really made it much further than this… there is a google doc floating out there with some edits done but I feel like at some point I largely just need to nuke this from orbit and rewrite the entire thing.

IntPiPoMo plays on the statement that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if NaNoWriMo requires you to crank out 50,000 words…. then IntPiPoMo asks you to post 50 pictures/screenshots/whatever during the month of November. This initiative started back in 2011 and has changed hands a few times until it landed in the lap of my good friend Chestnut who was insanely helpful during the recent running of Blaugust. Admittedly I have never really set out to participate since I felt like it would be cheating… given that my blog is already super screenshot heavy. During the month of October as an example I posted just shy of 100 pictures associated with my blog posts. However she indicated that this didn’t matter and that I should sign up anyways… and as a result I am going to be supporting this process with Aggronaut. If you also feel like participating then you should totally check out her post outlining all of the specifics. There is a very short sign up process and an image seen above that you can incorporate into your side bar as I have done with mine (albeit scaled down a bit since my sidebar is narrow).

One of the things I am sorta known for is my nonsensical storage of screenshots. I have a network attached storage device full of loosely organized screenshots from the various games I have played, and at some point I wanted a way to just randomly pick a few shots from the pile. I thought this was an easy way to do a post when I wasn’t necessarily feeling up to writing something more well formed. The idea being I have the tool pick a few screenshots and then write something about each of them. This is largely something that I built for my own purposes but if you are interested I threw it up on GitHub at the suggestion of a few folks. If you are interested I highly suggest you grab the source code and download Visual Studio Community edition to compile it yourself just to make sure it is completely safe. If you don’t feel comfortable with that I have uploaded a compiled and ready to run version of it out on TinyUpload.com. If you get stuck on trying to decide what screenshots to use on a given day, a tool like this might come in handy.

As an example I decided to use it myself this morning and grabbed 3 random screenshots from the stack. This one is from the PC Beta of Destiny 2 and I largely know this… because the file is named “Desktop Screenshot” because annoying the only way I can get Destiny 2 to capture is by running it Borderless Windowed and capturing it with Nvidia Experience… which probably has another name for the screenshot functionality but I don’t know what it is. I am consistently annoyed that I cannot use a more proper capture technique to grab Destiny 2, but regardless that has nothing to do with the screenshot itself. I have dozens and dozens of screenshots of the “warp” graphic from Destiny 2 because I think it is so damned pretty. This is probably one of the first ones I captured during that PC Beta, and it is making me want to go equip that ship again in the live game for nostalgia sake.

This is a screenshot from Everquest Landmark Alpha… and I am not sure if this was the first reset or the second reset. I am pretty sure this is from the first alpha because I believe I had a better plot when the first major reset happened. Regardless I miss the hell out of this game, because quite frankly it was one of my favorite building games. I loved the tools that it gave us to build really interesting shapes… and then create templates off of them. I also loved the way that you could harvest with a group… and all get the loot that was harvested by any one member of that team. I remember running around with Lethbridge and Rae running amok harvesting everything in sight and all reaping the benefits. I wish someone would functionally reboot this idea in a modern crafting game. Part of the reason why I have a dislike of Daybreak is admittedly because deep down inside I blame them for the death of Landmark.

One of the cooler things about Legion were the hidden artifact appearances. One of them for the Warrior involved finding a shield that looks like Deathwing in a cavern full of Kobolds. What made it frustrating however was that it was a random chance sort of thing, and you had a single chance each day at getting it to show up. It became a ritual on my Warrior to log out at the cave every night, and then check it first thing in the morning and again that night just in case it was on the daily reset cycle and not on the server time cycle. I even had a macro that would tell me whether or not the shield had showed up… just to make sure that I didn’t miss it. The day that it finally showed up for me was extremely exciting, and as a result I took a screenshot for my blog before actually looting it.

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.

Five Sixty

October 30, 2018 by Belghast

I had a really great night, largely because over the last few days I have allowed myself to break free of the turtle a bit and communicate with other people. Sunday this was me hanging out with Warenwolf doing some stuff in the Dreaming City. During the first part of last night it was me hanging out on Discord with my good friend Grace while we were doing completely different things. I am not exactly sure what she was up to but I spent my time running strikes and heroic story missions in Destiny 2 to knock out two more powerful engrams for the week. I’ve talked briefly about this but it really is so much easier to get geared now than it was before. There seem to be an endless supply of opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams to drop. I am not sure what the mechanics are behind it, but I have a buff that says it allows for the dropping of Prime Engrams, and to the best of my knowledge in spite of getting several of them… I have never seen it disappear. Apparently there was something I did called “Prime Attunement” that gave me the buff but for me… it largely just showed up without me realizing it.

Later in the evening I got together with SquirrelPope who assisted with one of the quests that I had outstanding and taught me the ropes of the Ascendant Challenge much like Waren had with the Blind Well the night before. Apparently the game took my desire to get a Tigerspite to heart because I now have three of them… none of them sadly with the god roll. I’ve managed to get my light level up to 560 which is still a good ways off from the cap of 600… but nonetheless a lot of progress. I am still very much in the phase of using whatever gear happens to be the highest light level, and that is probably going to be the case for awhile since I figure the grind will slow down significantly at this point. I am not exactly sure when Prime and Powerful engrams stop giving the huge boost that they do now. I will admit a lot of my slingshotting level was was the fact that I picked up Horror Story at 600 light. At some point I will probably start working on my other classes and that slingshot will be similarly handy for them as well.

One of the things that I have to talk about briefly is how great the collections tab is. As you run through the world and get items to drop they flag as being collected. If said item is a static roll, aka a pre-forsaken item you can always reacquire it from the collections tab at a reasonable light level. Right now I am 560 light and everything in the collections tab is showing as 540 light for reference. There are tabs like this for armor, exotics, ghost shells, sparrows, ships… basically anything that takes up vault space that you may or may not need to keep forever. At some point I need to have a great cleaning of the vault as I shard tons of items that I can get back from the collections tab. Similarly I need to start trying to finish the sets, seeing as you can still get most of it from planetary vendors. There are a few items that I got on the console that I never managed to get on PC, that I would really like to add to my collection.

The Blind Well

October 29, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about catching up on the Destiny 2 storyline and progressing to the official end game stuff… even though I had been at the level cap and slowly gaining gear for a bit. As I mentioned before, I somehow completely lost the main story quest thread, and did not realize that the quests themselves were being presented as adventures in the Forsaken Shore area. I have to confess that I largely ignore adventures… which is a thing I am ultimately going to have to stop doing given that they seem to be a way of unlocking upgrades for the new sub classes. So if I want to be the superest hammer bro with the superest hammer… I need to start doing them more often. Once I got the hang of it I enjoyed the whole choose your own adventure aspect of hunting down the six barons that are in no particular order. Each of the fights was fun, and a lot of them I failed miserably the first time… that is until I managed to catch on to whatever the gimmick of the fight happened to be.

Upon defeating the final boss of the expansion, you are sent on a sequence of events that ultimately reward you in unlocking a brand new patrol zone called the Dreaming City. The first two screenshots are from areas within this zone and while it is gorgeous… functionally it reminds me a lot more of the dreadnaught since there a bunch of little activities interwoven within the zones. I started working on bounties for Petra Venj which lead me to encounter an event called the Blind Well… which is finally that Court of Oryx/Archon’s Forge style event that I had been asking for. It however feels a lot more like the opening event of the Leviathan raid than either of those. It does however seemingly has the chance of dropping Last Wish raid weapons, because on one of the times through it I managed to get one to drop that I will talk about in a bit. Huge thanks to my friend Waren for helping me get through this, but it also seems like the sort of thing like Court of Oryx that once you coax people into summoning that you end up doing a bunch in a row. We did several Rank 2 and a couple of Rank 3 Wells before I needed to wander off and do other things.

Now I had heard a ton about the Tigerspite, and it was on the short list of weapons I wanted to get for certain. The highlight of the evening however was getting one to drop at 555 from Blind Well. Unfortunately this is way lower light than my Horror Story but I already love this weapon… so it is probably going to see a lot of play. I wish I had enough time to grind out another 600 Horror Story so I could use it as infusion fuel on this thing. Granted it is far from the best set of stat perks as mine rolled with Dynamic Sway Reduction and Under Pressure which takes an already accurate weapon and makes it feel like a laser beam. The “God Roll” seems to be Kill Clip and Outlaw, but the thing I have noticed in Year 2 Destiny 2 is that these randomized rolls… still feel good when you don’t get an ideal combination. I’ve encountered very few that were just complete garbage… and honestly its more than specific perks are just not that good… like Field Prep on anything but a sniper rifle or maybe a scout for example. While not necessarily hive themed… this design reminds me a bit of touch of malice.

Currently the highest I can manage to hit light level is 549.3 according to DIM. As it stands I think I have two more activities that reward powerful engrams… doing 2 more strikes and doing the Ascendant Challenge in the Dreaming City. I read up on that last night, but given it was Walking Dead night I didn’t make any attempts. Supposedly it is soloable… but I might try and coax someone into helping me through it this week. The strikes however should be easy enough to grind out whenever I get home tonight. Pending I get lucky, my hope is it pushes me to a solid 550 which is not bad for my first real week of paying attention to Forsaken content. I have no clue what level I need to be viable to raid based shenannigans and such. The Rank 3 Blind Well was a little on the tough side for example, but I sorta equated it to a Rank 3 Court of Oryx… which if you are not geared enough is doable but not easy either. I’ve been focusing heavily on getting acclimatized to Dreaming City, but I also feel like this is a bunch of stuff in Forsaken Shore that I have not seen either.