Tales of the Aggronaut

My Bloody Corvo

June 4, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was largely all about the Dishonored franchise for me and making some serious progress through large chunks of it. I wrote a bit about Dishonored 2 and Parsec the other day, but to recap… Parsec is this really cool streaming client that allows you to play games with exceedingly low latency from another machine. When combined with the fact that I have traditionally done most of my single player gaming on my downstairs laptop… this ends up being a revolutionary change for me personally. Dishonored 2 was the first game to release that my GTX 960M graphics card and 4th gen i7 processor could not handle. I could not under any circumstances get the game to run at something I would consider “playable” and as a result I just didn’t play the game. A little less than 2 years alter… with me stumbling onto Parsec… it was absolutely the first game I attempted because I hated that I never got around to playing it.

The reason being that I love the Dishonored setting… and in truth it is probably as close to my ideal game universe as I could possibly assemble. It has steam punk machinations, crazy tentacled whales, a cruel god that bestows dark gifts, and the ability to rack up an insanely high body count. I love the lore and mythology of the world and the fact that it hints at things… and often times doesn’t tell us all the details. There is a point in one of the games where it mentions there are currently eight individuals with the outsiders mark… but then never fills in the details of who those eight are. Even after consulting the Wiki… there are a bunch of options but nowhere near enough to make up that entire gathering. So just knowing that somewhere out there is another super powered being that you have not encountered makes every discussion you get into… feel a little more suspicious. In my mind there is a universe where Dishonored and Bioshock could co-exist… and unfortunately while they don’t link up neatly I would love to see some larger setting that connects the dots between the two.

I remember when I first started playing Dishonored 2 I was not super keen on its design ethic. Gone were the mist shrouded gloomy streets of Dunwall… which were replaced by the sun bathed all too real deprivations of Karnaca. I found it so much harder to skulk about and take out my targets from the shadows and was ultimately forced to change my play style in a way that used a lot more distraction than I was used to in the original game. I also found the story largely incomprehensible because I had fallen for one of the great flaws of the Dishonored series. Arkane studios expects that when you play one of their games… that you have played every other piece of content in that series. For whatever reason I never actually played the Knife of Dunwall or Brigmore Witches DLC, I think in part because I didn’t want to really play as Daud… someone I looked at as the bad guy of the first game. The truth is Dishonored is a setting where everything is nuanced. Daud was no more bad guy than Corvo was a good guy… they were just pawns in a larger tapestry being set in motion by the Outsiders uncanny knack for bestowing his mark upon deeply flawed and broken people.

The problem with not playing these two DLC episodes however is that the events leading up to the start of Dishonored 2 took me completely off guard and I was introduced to a character I knew nothing about… or in truth a pair of characters… Megan Foster and Delilah Copperspoon. So while I found the entire experience of Dishonored 2 enjoyable… it felt way less engaging than the first one did. The other problem I have with Dishonored… is I am a high body count sort of person and the games love making me pay for my actions. Effectively you can play the games in High Chaos or Low Chaos modes… and your actions cause massive ripple effects on the ultimately ending of the game. That means there is traditionally a good ending and a bad ending… and if I am left to my own devices… I always get the bad endings. I tend to see anyone who stands in the way of my goal as someone I need to slice my way through… and as a result I end up building a world bathed in blood that produces a rather disappointing ending.

Knowing that I would ultimately want to play through Dishonored 2 again in as low a chaos manner as possible to see the other ending… I decided to go ahead and play those two DLCs that I had skipped. Now immediately after playing Dishonored 2 I would have said that I enjoyed it greatly but that it is was nowhere near as good as the original game. The DLCs are that difference because after having completed both of them this weekend… it immediately turns my opinion of the second game on its head because the entire experience becomes as deeply nuanced as the first one felt. Essentially Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches are a prequel to the events that happen at the beginning of Dishonored 2 and without knowing any of that lore… it feels really bad. Afterwards however… the end result feels glorious and triumphant as the pieces click into place and you can see this entire story happening behind the scenes that you as Corvo knew nothing about.

It also humanizes the character of Daud… who was not a good man but also not anywhere near as evil as he seemed to be at face value. He was a man who spent his last hours trying to repair the damage he had set in motion. The high chaos ending of Dishonored 2 shows you that Corvo is just as flawed a human being as Daud was, and that ultimately each of these people bestowed the dark gift… are on a bit of a course towards self destruction. I am trying not to be super spoilery about the events of these games… in case someone reading this has not played them. Much like the Mass Effect series… I feel like Dishonored, the DLC and its sequel are must play games. These days you can pick them all up for pretty cheap and I highly suggest you spend a couple of excellent weekends doing the single player thing wrapped up in that world.

At this point however I have moved on to Death of the Outsider rather than an immediate second playing of Dishonored 2. I’ve just barely started and so far it seems extremely interesting because the character of Billie Lurk is now one that I feel familiar enough with to be able to experience this story in full. Prior to playing through the DLCs to the original game however… that would have not been the case. This gets back to the great flaw of this series… in that you cannot simply drop into a new title without having experienced all of the old content. There are going to be so many things you simply never get explained… because Arkane took the time to explore them in depth in another title. I am secretly hoping that the Bethesda show this weekend shows us yet another excellent title in this line of games. We talked a bit this weekend about how amazing the Dishonored-verse would make for a role playing game. There are so many locations that are hinted at in the games that we never get to see, so I feel like the world can keep expanding. I do however hope that the next titles are going to be like Death of the Outsider, in that they take a character connected to the events we have already played… but not someone we have already explored the story arc of like Corvo or Daud.

Dauntless Thoughts

June 1, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I am going to talk a bit about a topic I had originally planned on doing so earlier in the week. Dauntless is a game that I have a brief history with because I got to play it at a Pax South shortly after it was announced. I was supremely bad at this game having never really played a Monster Hunter title before and never quite grasped the concept of being able to heal myself up… and wound up getting downed over and over. Enough times that I fear I was probably the reason why my playtest group of randos failed to take down the encounter. If I am remembering correctly I think we were going up against Quillshot, but I could be completely wrong. The game sparked curiosity in me, but never enough to pay my way into the alpha or beta testing process through a founders pack. Time moved on and Monster Hunter World was announced… at which point I remember saying that Dauntless ultimately had to hit market before that game to be successful. I signed on to play the console version of MHW and everything else is history… with me not being completely indoctrinated into the cult of hunting monsters for fun and profit.

In the meantime however Dauntless has “released” on PC, and I say that in quotes because it claims to be in Open Beta. However if you open the floodgates to all players…. and publicly announce that you are not going to do any more resets… then your game has launched albeit in a super buggy state. I would also argue the moment they started taking money from customers… they also launched the game but that is a whole other discussion. On May 24th I joined the madness as folks bombarded their servers generating queues in the hundreds of thousands. I’ve heard of some folks who had to wait eight hours or more to get through the queue… only to get disconnected and have to deal with the process all over again. I personally lucked out in that I left the launcher running on my Desktop and by the time I made it home from work on Friday I had made my way through the queue and was ready to sit down and play the game.

At it’s core Dauntless is Monster Hunter… but simplified. I am sure this is not exactly the definition they would like me to use… but instead of Hunters we are Slayers and instead of Monsters we are fighting Behemoths. Ultimately Dauntless feels what happens when you create a Monster hunting game… without over a decades worth of history to draw upon. Monster Hunter World feels rich and vibrant in part because it stands on the shoulders of over a dozen different games and a massive back catalog of creatures to draw from. Comparitively Dauntless feels extremely simplistic as if the Monster Hunting concept is drilled down to its most basic concepts. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially for folks coming from the PC who might be completely new to the genre but even after getting used to a single Monster Hunter game I find that Dauntless lacks a lot of the nuance and subtlety that World had.

This is most noticeable in the Behemoth design which feels less like you are fighting an unpredictable living creature and more like you are going through the motions of a World of Warcraft style raid encounter. Behemoths attack in patterns that end up making the encounter feel more predictable. Sure it might be technically challenging to perform the right ability at the right time, but it never really feels like I am trying to read the monster so much as simply responding to a very obvious tell that is happening before each attack. There are several encounters where you just sorta stand back and let the Behemoth finish its nonsense before getting back in an engaging again. The combat also feels fairly formulaic in that I mostly focused on breaking each one of the weak points similar to how we might fight Kulve Taroth, in order to get maximum rewards at the end. Once you have taken out all of the weak points however… the fights largely feel like you are hitting a wet bag of hitpoints with no real visual way of knowing how close you are to winning. Sure the monster tacks on visible damage, but it doesn’t actually seem to make the fight any different, and when a monster runs… they just sort of blink to another area of the island rather than giving you the opportunity to stun and continue the fight. There is never a point where the monster seems to be tired… or limping or otherwise effected by your actions but instead just unceremoniously falls over whenever you have depleted its invisible health bar.

Another challenge with Dauntless is that it feels very limited in scope. You don’t really have world to explore but instead a chain of disconnected floating islands that have no more personality than a walled arena. Sure there are a few resources out there that you can gather to make potions, but there is no real joy of exploration as every single game mode revolves around taking down a specific monster. My favorite mode in Monster Hunter World for example is their version of Expeditions where I can roam around interacting with everything on a map without actually chasing down a Monster… or if I get the urge I can take one out at my own pace. Dauntless has effectively four game modes… quests that you are given by your trainer, patrols, expeditions and pursuit. The quests obviously have a specific scope that generally revolves around introducing you to a new monster that you will be hunting. Patrols involve dropping into a specific zone and facing off against a random monster that lives on that island… giving you some bonus armor and weapon crafting bits to account for the non-targeted nature. Expeditions do a very similar thing… but this time you get a cache of crafting materials used for making potions and such. Pursuit gives you the ability to focus in on a single monster that you want to hunt… with a slightly lesser bit of armor and weapon materials since you know exactly what you are going up against. The problem is… all of these modes are essentially the same apart from the reward package. Behemoth is the game of dropping from weird looking airships onto tiny islands to fight monsters.

I don’t want to give the impression that Dauntless is not an enjoyable experience, because it absolutely is. The problem however is that the one area the game really shines… is only due to the fact that Capcom and the Monster Hunter team really don’t understand how the internet works. I’ve railed on just how annoying the grouping experience in Monster Hunter World is… in that it involves shifting back and forth between lobbies and quest boards… with no real system to let you easily join a party with some of your groups and go off and do stuff together. Dauntless has this all covered with a solid chat interface and friends lists and the simple ability to form a group with people and then queue to do stuff. There is nothing I have encountered that does not support simply queuing for it… which is absolutely not the case in Monster Hunter World. Kulve Taroth is a great example of how contorted the alternative can be… in that you have to find a lobby where people are running that encounter and then hope there is enough room in an active group to be able to get in and fight the monster. You could absolutely have the misfortune of joining what looked like a fully lobby where only one team of four players is actually doing the event… and everyone else is off doing random stuff. Dauntless is simple… if you want to do something with a friend you simply invite them to your party and then start an activity… no fuss no muss.

I feel like at some point in the future… Dauntless is going to be a truly great game. The problem is… it needs time to bake. Sure it has been in development for several years now, but it needs time to gain the same level of richness that the varied Monster Hunter experience has. All of the weapons feel simplistic in comparison to the wide variety of play styles available in Monster Hunter, and there is the huge problem of not actually having a ranged game at all. This was the point at which a few of my friends checked out of Dauntless because they were bow or bowgun mains in Monster Hunter. The problem is after doing some of these fights… the mechanics and encounters really are not balanced in a way as to support a ranged player which is probably going to be an issue moving forward. I like the game quite a bit and have spent a bunch of time playing it over the last week and some change, but it isn’t quite ready to support the level of devotion that I gave to Monster Hunter World. This is likely going to be one of those once or twice a week games for me, because I am extremely curious to see how it evolves. Unfortunately in the meantime though… it lacks a lot of features and cannot really properly be throned as “the PC Monster Hunter”.

Fallout 76 Thoughts

May 31, 2018 by Belghast

If you have been completely disconnected from gaming media then you may not have known there was a pretty significant announcement yesterday from Bethesda, or at least a very tantalizing teaser. The truth is this started several days ago when they began a live stream that simply focused on a color test pattern with a vault boy bobble head beside it. During the stream various weird things happened and you can see a run down of these clips over on Polygon. There were apparently over 2 million people who at least watched some of the stream and at the very end… we were treated with a teaser for a new game called Fallout 76.

This morning I am going to dig into some of the details of the trailer. It opens on an old pipboy setting off an alarm that plays Take Me Home Country Roads which gives us I believe the location of the vault… as 76 was rumored to be a “control” vault in Virginia. The song itself says West Virginia… but the majority of the topography that it describes is actually in Western Virginia. As the image continues to slide into frame we can see a clock denoting that it is October 27th of 2102… 6:34 in the morning if that matters. This is significant because this places Fallout 76 is the earliest fallout game to date. Here are some important dates in the fallout universe…

The Great War – Saturday October 23rd 2077
Fallout 76 Trailer – Monday October 27th 2102
Fallout 1 – 2161
Fallout 2 – 2241
Fallout 3 – 2277
Fallout New Vegas – 2281
Fallout 4 – 2287

Basically Fallout 76 is taking place 25 years after The Great War that started and ended the same day as the bombs fell. In theory Vault 76 was supposed to open 20 years after the destruction of the world so that folks could go reclaim the wastes. So we are left with a conundrum… because if you see the scene with the Reclamation Day celebration, it does not look like those are leftovers from 5 years ago. If you look at the balloons there are some with air and some without… so unless balloons work vastly different in the post apocalyptic world that would lead me to believe this is a few days after the Reclamation Day party…. which would make a sort of sense given that it would be 5 days after the 25th anniversary of the Great War.

There is a poster on the wall showing that Vault 76 was created to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the founding of the United States, which syncs up with the Mothership Zeta references from Fallout 3. Past that I am not sure what else can be gleaned about it other than I just think its cool to see all of the things we have found from other games still in a relatively new state. Granted 25 years have passed but I think in the most part we are seeing a vault before the systems start to break down. In truth probably the same Overseer is in place that was put there the moment the folks went into the vault, and most of the administration is likely all the same. Sure there might have been some children of the vault in that time frame but for the most part the people who are exiting are the ones who entered in the first place. According to the Citadel records there were supposedly 500 individuals in the control vault giving you a nice big number of potential people to go out exploring the wastes as.

In this shot you see Jangles the Moon Monkey and on the bed is a fedora and a fully loaded backpack, which tells me that we are seeing the player character just about to embark out of the vault, gathering up their stuff. This syncs up with the final shot in the trailer of a person in a Vault 76 jumpsuit slapping on a pipboy… likely the one from the table and preparing to leave. Again most of these establishing shots seem to exist for fan service, so we can see what the vault looks like before things start going to hell. All of the things we regularly pick up as junk are shown… from an Abraxo box to some Sugar Bombs… and of course the ever present Nuka-Cola.

There is a trophy case that is way too blurry to read at 1080 p or lower resolution, but I was able to crank the video up to 4k and capture a decent shot of what at least one of the awards says.

Outstanding Achievement Award

In appreciation for your commitment and dedication to our isolation program. Sacrificing many so some can live.

The Excellence in Bravery award is a little harder to read but it seems very similar… and you can notice at the top of the shot an award for the “Annual Vault Halloween Costume Contest” which I guess might explain why there is the head of what looks to be some sort of a gopher mascot character on the top of the bookcase in the image with the 1776-2076 poster.

So ultimately what does all of this mean? This is a new Fallout setting that is far enough out of band with the rest of the games… as to give it some legs to stand on its own. This is set 59 years before Fallout 1 the earliest entry in the franchise and 185 years earlier than Fallout 4 the latest incarnation. Jason Schreier the Game Developer Whisperer mentioned yesterday that the game would have some sort of an online component, and that this is what the Battlecry team in Austin has been working on.

From what I've heard, Fallout: 76 is an online game of some sort. Developed by BGS in both Maryland and Austin (formerly Battlecry) https://t.co/gUmNYtDXDS

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) May 30, 2018

A follow up tweet provides some additional details…

FWIW, as someone who really digs Fallout games, I'm optimistic about Fallout 76 (and stoked to see more). Might be multiplayer, but it's still gonna be a BGS game https://t.co/zv69B26xrI pic.twitter.com/gb0c9ACQLC

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) May 31, 2018

To make things even weirder… there is an Anonymous redditor on December 28th of 2017 posted “Fallout 76, a fallout themed rust clone coming soon”. This was largely ignored by the community however because who the hell trusts an anonymous poster on reddit? There have been so many things supposedly leaked there that turned out to be complete bullshit. However in hindsight… the person got the title right and if you combine that with the various comments from Schreier it has a little more weight to it. I guess the ultimately question is… is that a game I really want to play? I have never been a huge fan of the Rust/Ark/H1Z1 competitive survival game genre, so I think ultimately for me… it will depend on how much forced player versus player interaction is in the game. If there are straight PVE servers (or the ability to roll custom servers)… then yeah I will probably be happy as a clam to play this game.

Unfortunately I think I would have rather had just a straight MMORPG conversion of the Fallout universe ala Elder Scrolls Online than some sort of a survival building game. If I was putting on my wishing hat and going for broke… I would have loved for Fallout 76 to be a small scale group/solo game along the lines of Destiny/The Division set in the Fallout universe, where you roam around a big open world wasteland with MMO style player progression but a more drop in/drop out sort of ethic and seamless 10-20 player instanced pockets. Sure base building would have been probably a big part of that given they have really amazing tech to let us have essentially “player housing” but the focus would be on exploration and completing of story content rather than on killing other players. I really hope the progression is not based on killing other players.

I’ve devoted entirely too much time this morning to tearing into this… so what are your thoughts? Are you excited for the June 10th pre-E3 Bethesda press conference? Are you excited about the prospects of Fallout 76? Are you afraid this is going to be another fucking Battle Royale game? I have some mixed thoughts after more additional information has come out about it, but that said… I will still be watching on twitch as the official announcements are being made.

In Home Streaming

May 30, 2018 by Belghast

I have what one might call unusual needs when it comes to gaming. My primary gaming systems are all up in my office hooked up to the same 43 inch 4k television that I have written about in the past. That said I maintain a laptop downstairs that I can game on while hanging out on the sofa with my wife and either watching television or just functionally being in the same room. This has been one of the secrets of our marital bliss is the fact that several nights a week I hang out downstairs within easy talking distance rather than being completely sequestered up in my office all of the time. This means that I ultimately need to maintain two different gaming setups and end up splitting resources between the two of them.

The biggest issue with this equation is that gaming laptops are horrible. What I mean by that is that while yes they are more powerful than a normal laptop… they also have a greatly stripped down feature set of a gaming desktop. They usually run some sort of mobile specific version of a graphics card… which tends to perform roughly the same as one product generation lower. What I mean by that is my current gaming laptop has a 960M in it… which instead of performing like a GTX 960 it performs far closer to a GTX 760 (given that they jumped the 8 series of cards). Similarly the processors also suffer from this same issue with a mobile i7 greatly under performing a desktop i7. Then of course there is the fact that you are ultimately going to pay a significant premium for a machine that is pretending to be extremely high powered but that is a whole other discussion.

One of the core problems that I am dealing with right now is I am starting to reach the end of the viability of this laptop for any sort of modern gaming. Sure it can run older games just fine and does an admirable job at a lot of the MMORPGs that I enjoy playing, but I have a long string of games that just will not function on the device. The first game I encountered like this was Dishonored 2… which I still have not finished playing through because it simply will not run in anything other than the most potato of resolutions on the laptop. Traditionally the downstairs experience is where I play a lot of my single player titles… and with the inability to actually do this thing games like Dishonored and Assassin’s Creed Origins that will not run on the laptop at all just sit there un-played.

Steam In-Home streaming I thought originally was going to be a unique tool that I could employ to stream games from my Desktop to my Laptop and be able to skirt all of these problems. However after years of piddling with it… I still have issues. There are times where a game window may get stranded or launch in a weird resolution and with that not being an actual remote desktop tool there is little way to right the ship once it capsizes. I’ve read of individuals having good luck with Splashtop desktop/streamer but the latency there was so high that I simply could not handle it and now only use it as a way of remoting in to the gaming machine if I am absolutely in a desperate state. Even if I could get Steam In-Home streaming working… there was always the problem of not being able to easily run all of those games that I have that for one reason or another do not go through the client (I am looking at you Dragon Age Inquisition).

This is where in my travels yesterday I happened across a mention of a product called Parsec. The company effectively does a couple of different things, the first being rent virtual boxes that you can use to install all of your games on out in the cloud and then remotely connect to. The second is that they have very highly tuned and low latency streaming software that allows you to connect to a machine, be it one of their virtual machines or your home machine and play games off it. Lastly they add additional functionality of being able to play the couch co-op experience remotely through a social and online play system. While I was supremely jaded by my other experiences I gave it a shot last night.

The setup is pretty straight forward in that it requires you to install the parsec client on the host machine and the client machine. They have clients for Windows, MacOS, Android, Linux and Raspberry Pi 3… which gives you a few options for even creating your own homebrew Steamlink sort of device for streaming to a television. For me I wanted a pretty straight forward set up of installing the software on my gaming desktop upstairs and adding it as a host… that you can see in the client above. Yes I named my gaming desktop Serenity… I love me some Firefly. Then downstairs on my laptop I installed the client again but this time just connected to the Serenity computer profile by hitting play. Immediately I was presented with a remote desktop like experience that allowed me to pretty much launch whatever the hell I wanted to on my machine.

It was at this point that I just started testing all sorts of games… I played some Crucible in Destiny 2 with no noticeable input delay in a fashion that was comfortable enough to actually do competitive tasks. I played some Dauntless where I took down the stupid thunder lizard Drask that had been giving me fits before. Essentially any game that I launched was able to run just fine and in a completely playable and honestly beautiful state. I had some issues with Steam games at first, but after troubleshooting that came down to something I had done yesterday in trying to set up my iPad as a third monitor. Apparently the software that is involved with that does not play nicely with the Steam DRM. However after uninstalling and rebooting all of those steam games that I struggled with before like Dishonored 2 and Assassin’s Creed Origins worked lovely as well.

I am known for doing some silly things… but there is a level of madness with Parsec that I am not entirely sure if I am willing to go through. They have a blog post up outlining how they have managed to get a console working through the Parsec software and I would absolutely try this… if it did not involve two hardware purchases that I do not currently have. I have been wanting to get an Elgato Pro… so this might be something I do at some point. This would honestly be the perfect set up if I could somehow get all of my consoles playing through Parsec as well. I have wanted a sort of virtual KVM for consoles for years… and in theory I might be able to actually make this thing to work using Parsec. If nothing else however I thought I would talk about my experiences this morning in case someone else out there is looking to do something similar. I am greatly pleased with this process and I play on fiddling around with it some more tonight… maybe actually working on some of those single player games that I have failed to make much progress in. At face value though… I am supremely impressed with Parsec and will definitely be following their updates.