Tales of the Aggronaut

Madness Setup

February 23, 2018 by Belghast

I spent most of last night running around hanging out with my friend Grace and doing low rank hunts with weapons I have never used before. The revelation from the night is… I really like hammer. The only problem there is I need to get better at timing my uppercut to boop things in the snoot. However I did notice I can break a leg nice and fast as well in a pinch. All in all I dig the weapon and want to play with it more and have upgraded through to currently the rarity 5 ore hammer, and am just a little bit of farming in Elder’s Recess away from the Rarity 6 version that is in parity with some of my other weapons.

I did make a solo attempted at Nergigante and got frustratingly close. I had the monster limping and with a skull icon hovering over its head… but that last phase had some brand new tricks up is sleeve that I struggled dealing with. Namely a combination of knocking shards down from the ceiling and the prolific use of dive bombing. I feel like I was pretty damned close to finishing… when he managed to pin me against a wall and get my final faint. After 36 minutes of fighting that asshole… I simply didn’t have another attempt in me so the rest of the night was fun low rank nonsense with friends.

I’ve had a few people ask me about my gaming set up, namely the fact that I am piping all of the audio for all of my systems through my PC. The primary reason for doing is for comfort while shifting between PC based voice chat like Discord and console specific offerings like Playstation Network party chat. It allows me to comfortably have one set of headphones that I like wearing and flip back and forth between platforms without much hassle. Since I had talked a little bit in the past about what I did to accomplish that, I thought I would just diagram out my entire setup this time. Yes I did do this in visio… mostly because I thought it would illustrate it the most clearly.

I like the concept of having all of my systems “on tap” and easily accessible. Namely I started down this path because I wanted to at least in theory be able to capture video and images from any console that I chose without having to swap a bunch of cables. The earliest version of this set up revolved around a 5 port HDMI switch which was relatively cheap on Amazon. As I added in a few other systems that I wanted to capture from… I had to eventually seek out a bigger option and finally landed on an 8 port HDMI switch option from Monoprice. It was more expensive than I would have preferred but the options for something with that many ports were super limited.

This 8 port switch feeds into the business end of my Elgato Game Capture HD, that I picked up for I think $30 on Craigslist. At some point I would love to upgrade to one of the more modern models, but for the time being it does what I want it to do and was nowhere close to the $150-200 price tag of an upgrade. Next up we need to defeat the HDCP lockout, or at least I wanted to… because I hate the concept of PS4 arbitrarily telling me when I can or cannot record something. This is done using a cheaply constructed HDMI splitter… so cheap that it unintentionally strips out the HDCP signal coming from the console and turns it into a open signal that the Elgato is capable of recording.

This splitter also serves the purpose of providing me a latency free copy of my video feed that goes directly into the television, as well as the leg that finally connects up to the Elgato and winds its way into my PC through USB. The first time I streamed with my new arrangement after getting the 4k television… I realized I had a problem. I had been relying entirely on the television speakers to give me access to game audio. The problem there is that while broadcasting my voice through my Yeti setup… I would end up picking up a fair amount of background audio from the game leading to a questionable feedback experience.

So the problem at hand was figuring out a way to feed the audio from the gaming systems into my headset so that I could comfortably chat away with an open mic… without causing all sorts of auditory dissonance for anyone listening in. The only audio out from the television was an optical out port which meant that I would need some sort of a digital to analog converter to step it down into something I could feed into the line in port of my PC. I eventually settled on this device from amazon, and in the grand scheme of things it has been working excellent.

I had to do some fiddling in the television but I now have the audio being broadcast over the built in speakers and out over the optical cable. This allows me to wear a headset if I choose to or just turn back up the volume on the television and listen to the playback there. This also has the weird quirk of allowing me to pick up all of PSN voice chat and bypass their default state of not recording any of the voices. All in all I am pretty happy with the way things are set up apart from one minor thing.

Right now I have a second monitor hooked to my gaming PC and it feels awkward to cram everything that I want to interact with while playing a game over onto that monitor. At some point I am contemplating re-engineering this entire set up to be able to include a second machine to game capture. That unfortunately would result in a top down rethink of the way I have everything set up because all audio would be piping through a second setup. I think at that point I would have to upgrade to the Elgato Game Capture HD60 pro to give me more options. So all of this is why I generally just say “I am doing some nonsense” when people ask me how I have things set up.

Angry Spiky Boy

February 22, 2018 by Belghast

Before I start this mornings post I have a deep burning question for my readers that may be more in tune with the Monster Hunter lore than I am. What are the flags representing that are displayed in Astera? There is one more banner that is not displayed in this screenshot that makes up the main sail of the ship I happen to be standing on currently. The only theory I have right now is that maybe that sail is the banner of the first fleet, and then each additional flag from left to right is the other four fleets? The symbols are the ones that we see on the loading screen, but those literally mean nothing to me… but I am guessing they are part of the monster hunter lore? The most prominent one that we see on a regular basis is the Sapphire Star displayed on the far right banner which sorta lead me to believe that maybe it is the symbol of the fifth fleet that we are part of. I’ve poked around a little bit online but have not really seen much talk of this heraldry.

As far as activities of the night, we spent a bit of time fighting with the multiplayer systems. I was under the impression that if I logged in and joined the squad session… that would be something easy for other squad members to do. However as the evening drug on we realized that all of us had done this thing… and we were in two completely different squad sessions. There were two players in one and four players in the other… so nowhere near the session cap of 16. Making life even more challenging was the fact that the group of two could not join the group of four without getting a network error. The four of us in the first session had to join the newer session, so it makes me wonder… do sessions eventually time out or something of the sort?

Mor and I spent a good deal of time farming nonsense, before a few of us decided on trying to get past the Nergigante roadblock. Ash had recently arrived at that step in the quest, and Kodra with a little bit of leg work was able to get there as well. So the three of us combined with Tam decided to make a few attempts last night. For the uninitiated, Nergigante is a fight where you simply cannot get hit. There is a one two punch move that he pulls off that first stuns you in place and then decimates you. If your team members are fast enough they can throw some crystal burst at him to distract him from pummeling your friends. However we were not always fast enough. The above screenshot is of Nergi just about to pound poor Ashgar into the ground.

Similarly here is a screenshot of him completely wrecking my world. The problem is you have three faints before the quest fails, and unfortunately things seem to go from “perfectly fine” to “oh god why” at a moments notice. I’ve been told that this fight is a little bit more predictable solo with only you and your Palico to worry with and the buffer of two faints for yourself instead of having to share a pool for the entire group. I will probably try this thing tonight, but whatever the case the fight feels really stressful because I simply cannot get in and deal much damage before needing to roll out to safety. At first I wondered if ranged fighters had a better time of it… but since I have been playing bow quite a bit lately for fun… I am guessing not. The biggest problem I personally have with bow is the lack of ability to dodge out of the way in the same manner as I do with longsword.

I’ve been on high center for the last two weeks and would really like to move past Nergi and on to other fights. So in theory tonight if I actually make it home from the current icemageddon, I will likely spend the evening working on trying to get through this one on my own. In other interesting news… Byf has started releasing lore videos for Monster Hunter World. The first one came out yesterday and talks about the fall of what seems to be a pretty technologically advanced civilization that existed in the Monster Hunter universe before the current relatively primitive one we have currently. Byf and Myelin were a good deal of what made the original Destiny so special for me, because they dug deep into the lore and assembled the fragments into a cohesive narrative. I am hoping that Byf can do the same for Monster Hunter seeing as I am coming in so late into the series. There is clearly a bunch of interesting stuff here, and I am looking forward to learning more about it.

Bludgeoned with Adorable

February 21, 2018 by Belghast

I have been a horrible person and should feel bad. One of the usual suspects missing from the Monster Hunter madness has been my good friend and often partner in crime… Grace. Her original line of logic was that she was going to wait until the PC release, and I was largely cool with that because when I started playing Monster Hunter World I absolutely intended to do what I did with Destiny 2. That is to restart when the PC version came out and focus on that from that point forwards as my primary platform. However the longer I have played Monster Hunter World the more I have doubted if I could actually do this thing.

Quitting Destiny 2 on the console and restarting on PC felt like it was a no brainier… and at the end of the day I was not really giving that much up. However I already feel way more attached to what I have on Monster Hunter World than I ever did to a handful of weapons that I easily regained the moment I started grinding things out again on Destiny 2. The other core problem is the fact that there is no announced date for Monster Hunter World for the PC. When I decided to restart Destiny 2 only a month had passed since the launch of the console versions, and really… it allowed me to redo all of those things I maybe should have done differently.

When Monster Hunter World finally launches on the PC something along the lines of six months or more will have passed and that is more than enough time to get acclimatized to a game and pass the threshold of being willing to give all of that up to go elsewhere. In part Monster Hunter World feels more like an MMORPG than Destiny 2 did, and those are the sort of games that you really move into. I love my gear and my weapons and having to give all of that up would feel extremely alienating. While I might have every intent of trying out the PC release, I have a feeling I would bounce pretty hard without my stuff. Now in Destiny 1 I reached this point and it was in part why I had so much struggle getting any measure of traction on the Xbox One client. I am not saying never to Monster Hunter World on the PC… just that I doubt it will become my primary platform over night.

As a result Mor and I have been waging this guerilla campaign of deluging Grace with pictures of Palicos and Poogie. Last night for example I sent her the above image of the two Palicos in my room playing harp music for me. I think the final straw that broke her with adorable… is when I sent one of the Tailrider Safari cutscenes. Whatever the case she relented and downloaded the game last night, installing it and joining the madcap community of folks playing Monster Hunter World. When she first started Destiny I made the mistake of trying to drag her around to experience all of the content that I loved. However this wound up with a really choppy experience so for the most part I am going to be around to answer questions, but try my level best to just let her experience this game.

That is not to say that shortly after taking down the Great Jagras I did drag her through a Kulu-Ya-Ku kill for completely “pure pure” reasons as PizzaMaid would say. The Great Jagras costume for palicos is not exactly a good one… so instead I figured that a single kill of Kulu would get her more than enough parts to make that set of armor for her Palico so she could begin the process of dressing it in increasingly ludicrous costumes. As a result she is now the proud owner of a lute wielding fake moustache cat, and I think the barbs of the hook are officially set. The game is completely nonsense but has a charm to it that is undeniable once you experience it. I also think that while taking down that Jagras, she got a taste of the other side of the coin that makes the game super fun to experience.

Regardless… I should feel bad by bludgeoning my friend over the head with adorable pictures from the game until she caved. However I don’t really because this is absolutely the sort of game that she would love and was only waiting for an undetermined PC release date that might see her playing alone. For awhile I had said that Horizon Zero Dawn was worth every penny of buying a PS4 just to play it. I feel like Monster Hunter World is also sort of in that category, with the exception being that it also exists on Xbox One. The problem there is… my core base is on PS4 and as a result I see very little reason to play anything but the scant exclusives on the Xbox platform. Most Xbox exclusives eventually see a PC release apart from Forza and Halo, and in the grand scheme of things at least in that scenario I would rather wait. PS4 is my console and ecosystem of choice and I am pretty happy about that.

Dragon Quest Builders Thoughts

February 20, 2018 by Belghast

I thought I would take a bit of a break from the constant stream of Monster Hunter World posts to talk about something else that I’ve been playing. Dragon Quest Builders was originally released on the PS4 and Vita back in October 2016 in the United States. There is apparently also a version that runs on the PS3 in Japan, but seemingly that copy never made it over here. I remember being super interested when I first saw the trailer, but by the time it was released was deeply distracted by other things. Just scrolling back through my blog… on the month it released I seemed to be dabbling in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Destiny 1, Diablo 3 and a little bit of Skyrim. Basically it released while I was distracted by other things… and as a result I never actually got around to picking it up.

Scroll forward to February, a month where I am mostly in a Monster Hunter Shaped hole… and I notice that it officially releases on the Nintendo Switch. I’ve not really had any builder games in my life over the last few months, so in theory it was maybe a good time to dig into a new one. It is really hard to describe what Dragon Quest Builders is because it is this sort of beautiful amalgam of a bunch of different games. At times it feels like a Legend of Zelda game especially when you don a sword and shield and go out into the world to whack monsters. There are times when it feels like Minecraft because you are absolutely collecting resources and building up your base. Then there are times when it feels a bit like Actraiser where you are intervening in the lives of the NPCs that populate your village.

The story of the game is pretty simple at face value. The game world itself is that of Alefgard the world of the original Dragon Quest, and is essentially what would have happened… if we had failed and the Dragonlord won. It is also a world where over time the fledgling human populace has lost hope and forgotten the power of creation. You as a builder are granted the ability to look at a set of raw resources and gain inspiration in how they might be shaped into useful objects. As a result it is your place as the new hero… to start reclaiming the world through combat and creativity and push back the forces of the Dragonlord.

The world itself is divided up into a series of islands, and through the course of gameplay you can learn how to make teleporters allowing you to traverse between them for different resources. All the while you continue running quests for the NPCs that start showing up in the town you are slowly piecing back together. Placing blocks together in certain ways creates rooms that then the NPCs can inhabit, and you begin to create machines that they can then utilize giving you resources that then can be used as you go out venturing the “save the world”.

I’ve loved Minecraft since the moment I first watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of the game. The problem with Minecraft however is that it is awesome to go out and create things in… but it also doesn’t really have a point. Sure there is the whole Ender Dragon nonsense that was placed in game late… but really there is no sequence of events that you need to complete to “beat” the game. For me “beating” Minecraft is amassing enough Diamonds to be able to use full Diamond everything and not give a crap about it. However regardless of how cool you build your world out… it feels hollow because there are no NPCs inhabiting it.

Dragon Quest solves this problem by allowing you to build a world… that then comes to life as various types of NPCs come live in it. Sure you can get this sort of functionality with modding, but it always feels tacked on to the side of the game and not really part of it. Dragon Quest gives you a reason for your wanderlust and harvesting and allows you to keep coming back to a place you call home and in doing so help out the people surrounding you. This might be a subtle difference but it is the one that is the most important and is why I have been playing the heck out of this game each night before falling to sleep. I like that I can pick it up, do a few things and feel like I have accomplished something. If this sounds at all interesting to you, I highly suggest checking it out.