Tales of the Aggronaut

No Man’s Sky Thoughts

August 13, 2016 by Belghast

This morning was an absolutely glorious morning, in part because of a massive cold front that blew through over night. It is suddenly 70 degrees outside with a lovely breeze, rather than the usual over 100 degree madness that has been happening for weeks. As a result we decided to get up and walk over to daylight donuts for breakfast and then take it into the backyard and eat it on the patio. After the generally shit week that I had, I needed this little bit of respite to maybe start to recover. It is not that anything really went wrong… just the stress of entirely too much maximum level adulting. The week was one with several adulting raid bosses, and the progress made on them were mixed. However I am now happy to chill out on the sofa with a cat precariously balanced between my arms trying to find a way to snuggle while I type. So far it is working but I have a feeling at some point she will wander off because my hands are engaged in something other than serious petting action. Other than all of this… yesterday a game was released that I had been waiting anxiously for since it was first announced at E3 during the Sony PS4 reveal show, or at least I think that was when I first saw it. No Man’s Sky promised to be the space exploration game for me. Elite Dangerous looks awesome, but it is entirely too fiddly for my tastes. I don’t want to have to care about learning to pilot a ship through the vast expanses of space, or learning how to dogfight when there is no “up”. I just want a Star Trek away mission simulator that lets me wander around the cosmos and land on interesting new planets to explore. No Man’s Sky seems to be exactly that, but before I get into the good parts I need to talk about the bad.

Lots of folks are having trouble playing this game on the PC now that it has been released. I am not sure what happened during the process of the launch but the “minimum” listed specs seem to have been thrown completely out the window. I know Tamrielo has already returned his copy through steam because on his pretty hoss machine it simply would not give him more than 10 fps. First lets go over the minimum specs that were released for the game.

OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel Core i3
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 480, AMD Radeon 7870
Storage: 10 GB available space

I’ve played it on two of my machines… first on my Laptop

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: 4th Gen Intel Core i7
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 960m

On this machine I had to bump it down to 720p/medium to get stable framerates in the range of 30 fps, with the occasional dip into 15 territory. However nVidia experience claims that this machine does not meet the minimum requirements to play the game, whereas instead every single category above technically outstrips what the suggested minimums are.

My upstairs gaming machine has the following specs…

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: AMD fx-6300 3.5 ghz
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 980

As one would expect the beefier graphics card means that I am getting significantly better performance, but not massively so. I am running the game at 1080p/medium and I get severe dips from the 60fps to 30fps and it is extremely erratic. What this feels like to me… is a game that was rushed to make last minute changes and is extremely poorly optimized for the PC. From the sound of it… everyone that chose to get the PS4 copy seems to be just happily playing away. Those of us on the PC are trying to find that precarious line where the performance to pretty balance is reasonable. The biggest confusion point that I am seeing thought is having a big badass system doesn’t necessarily make a difference. It is almost totally random who can and cannot run this game. As a result I highly suggest you purchase the game through steam, that way if for whatever reason it does not work for you… you can return it to get a full refund. I believe GOG does the same thing, but I have never actually returned a game there so I am not sure how fast or easy that process is. Essentially this is definitely a “buyer beware” title… and if you simply want to play it without much fussing then I suggest you check out the PlayStation 4 copy.

Now that all of that is out of the way…. the game is really pretty and feels like you are exploring alien worlds. It has this feeling of minecraft, starbound and elite all throw together in the a mixer and some weird hybrid came out of the process. The key thing that stood in the way of me playing Elite or Star Citizen… is that my player fantasy has nothing to do with flying a ship. I could give a shit about actually flying anything… and would be perfectly happy just taking “taxis” between planets. What I want is the exploration of new and interesting places, and that is the fantasy that NMS hones in on. There are going to be folks that complain that this title is entirely too “walking sim” for them, but the couple of planets have all been filled with rich and interesting environments for me to explore. Right now my biggest problem is the lack of inventory, and lack of understanding how to increase said inventory. There is just so much I don’t know how to do, and so many items I pick up that I don’t have a clue what they are even for. What is the most interesting to me is the fact that when you encounter an alien race, you don’t know how to communicate. You learn language through finding these knowledge stones, and each of them teaches you a single word in another language. Now I have yet to see what actually happens when you know some words… because I absolutely lost faction with a race by patting them on the head.

The coolest moment so far has to be when I finally repaired my ship, and decided to lift off of the planet and out into space. I watched as the horizon got darker and darker until all of the sudden I broke through the atmosphere and could see the stars around me. Similarly awesome was the moment when I realized that landing on this planet… I had to be super careful about my angle of entry. If you come in too straight you absolutely start to burn up in the atmosphere damaging your shields in the process. So that mean’t I had to skim along carefully descending slowly enough to avoid taking damage, but that also meant that this was no means a quick process. There are consequences of pushing off planet, and I burned through all of my fuel on the first planet using my ship to explore. Each time you thrust off the surface it takes resources, ones that you cannot easily replenish without significant time spent exploring… which in itself costs resources because the environments are usually hostile and stress your life support systems to where they need recharging as well. There however is a central loop that I find enjoyable of exploring and gathering and exploring and gathering. In fact last night I absolutely lost two hours of time playing this game. Not that I was aware that I spent time… but I thought I had maybe spent fifteen minutes playing, until I looked up and realized that two hours had passed. So if the issues of the launch can get ironed out, I have a feeling that this is going to go down as one of those Minecraft like experiences that just keeps building upon itself.

So final advice is… pick it up definitely. However if you have a Playstation 4, you might lean towards that for your purchase. Otherwise definitely purchase it through a provider that is going to allow you to return the game on PC if for whatever reason it does not like your machine.

Pokemon Go Frustrations

August 12, 2016 by Belghast

Bad Polling

A few days ago I did yet another one of my super-non-scientific polls about Pokemon Go. I got far fewer results than I had hoped but in the end got 38 total votes… and you can see the results here. Ultimately I was curious to see just how well Pokemon Go is doing among my twitter timeline a little over a month after the initial release. I knew my usage of the app had morphed a bit, and I was curious to see if everyone else had as well. The slight unfair comparison here however is that with the staggered launch, some folks like most of South America just literally got access to the application. As always I tried to create a bunch of categories that summed up what I thought of as the possible endpoints… but ultimately missed a few. The results look something like this.

Actively “Catching Them All” Every Day – 11 Votes (29%)
Only Playing When You Go Someplace New – 5 Votes (13%)
Playing Rarely if you Remember – 10 Votes (26%)
Still Installed but not Active – 6 Votes (16%)
Uninstalled: May Check Later – 2 Votes (5%)
Uninstalled: Got It Out of System – 1 Vote (3%)
Never Tried It: Not For Me – 3 Votes (8%)
Never Tried It: Still Interested – 0 Votes (0%)

Now I have no baseline here, because I should have taken a poll like this shortly after the launch, but it feels like that rarely playing number is probably higher than it would have been early on. For me personally I am in this awkward place of still playing, but not nearly with the same gusto that I once did. The attraction of Pokemon in the first place is the collection of new and interesting “mon”. So when I play the actual game I spend most of my time capturing critters either to keep in my own collection or to wonder trade them off just to see what I might get in return. The first few days of playing Pokemon Go felt like this, with me constantly finding something new and interesting around every corner. However at this point I have caught 85 of the 150 Pokemon available in Pokemon Go and of that list… Ditto, Mew, Mewtoo, Zapdos, Articuno, and Moltres are largely just myths at the moment. That means I have roughly 60% of the 144 that are reasonably available right now. Even then you have to discount the fact that Mr Mime, Khangaskhan and Farfetch’d are not available to me in the United States, which drops the total of available Pokemon down to 141. Then you factor in the fact that I am in a Grass Type dominated area and pretty much every Rock and Fire type Pokemon is rare as shit here… and can pretty much only be summoned with a Lure or Incense my total reasonable list of available Pokemon shrinks further.

I Choose You Venonat #257!

What this means in practice is that I end up going weeks without seeing anything new. Since finding new things is my core reward cycle in Pokemon, it really drags down my desire to keep playing. There also seems to be a huge gulf that you fall off into after level 20. I am just shy of dinging 21, but it has taken roughly a month of casual capturing to get me through the level. I wish the app kept general stats of how many of each Pokemon you have caught because I am absolutely certain that if you added up the number of Pidgey and Zubat caught… they would together be around one thousand… with Zubat making up the lions share of those. That is the core problem I am having is that I would say at least 60% of the Pokemon that I see on a daily basis… I cannot really muster the care to even try and catch. This means I still get vaguely excited when I see my hundredth Venonat or Doduo because they aren’t yet another Rattata. Even then I have caught enough of each to evolve four into Venomoth and three into Dodrio. The other big challenge that I am having is the extreme heat going on right now, which severely limits the amount of time I am willing to go out hunting for critters. The heat index the last few weeks has been hovering in the 110s, and that really is not conducive to going out and catching them all. So instead I am mostly limited to checking my phone quickly when I pull into a parking lot, or on my way walking into work.

There is also still the problem that a lot of the world is a complete and total wasteland with nothing interesting in it. We talked about this a bit on the podcast, but the game only seems to reward you for going to places literally everyone else is going. So that means once a hot spot is found, then that becomes the prime real estate that EVERYONE goes to… which only cause the problem to snowball. There is an open air mall here, and a handful of parks… that are sheer madness over lunch with people hanging out in the cars idling with the AC on near the pokestops that have lures running on them. The game favors high cellular activity so much, that most of the rest of my area is completely devoid of anything of interest apart from random basepop trashmon. The other main issue with this is that the game fails to capture the exploration aspect of the original source material. In Pokemon I knew that going out into new areas, meant that I would be getting a new mix of the available critters. So simply going over a zone, meant that while I might have 40% of the Pokemon be something I recognize, there would be 60% that were new and interesting. That simply does not relate to the real world version with Go, because no matter any amount of reasonable movement around my area provides me a significantly different assortment of “mon”. I can and have traveled an hour in roughly every direction from my home base… and still see exactly the same mix. This tells me that their “regions” are just too large and generic, and there are not that many valuable sub region feature sets identified. Oklahoma is a grassy wasteland to Niantic, so for the most part we get exactly the same assortment regardless if we are hanging out at a lake, or in the rocky canyon maze of Chandler Park.

High Pop Zones

I feel like at some level they decided that the games works well in San Francisco and New York… so it must work great everywhere else. The problem there is the bulk of this country has nothing in common with San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, etc. Most of the country is not a high population center, but instead a tapestry of smaller cities and wide swaths of countryside. In those places the experience is miserable. I have it far better than so many of my friends, but still it is maddening to roam around and see three things on the new “sightings” radar, and none of them are actually interesting. There are so many reports that Pokemon Go usage is declining… and I can absolutely see it. The game is extremely fun for the first few weeks, but once the new wears off… if you are not one of those players motivated to go out and capture gyms… then there really is a constantly shrinking pool of interesting game play. Right now as it stands they need to seriously adjust the reward systems in this game, and tweak it so that if you happen to go someplace that literally no one has ever gone before… you should be rewarded with something awesome at the end of that journey. The game itself is about getting out, exploring and more than anything moving. Right now I feel like it does an extremely poor job of incentivizing me to leave my house, because if in my walk I only encounter two Pokemon it feels like a waste of my time when I could simply be chilling out and playing some other game. They need to find a way to reward players for going to big social hubs, but also find ways to make it rewarding for players to get off the beaten path. As always I am curious to hear your own thoughts. I didn’t include any screenshots because I always hate trying to integrate in cellular format vertical screenshots into a blog that tends to favor landscape mode.

Bumbling Around

August 11, 2016 by Belghast

Yeti Power

After a Tuesday night spent chasing Legion Invasions and being an Illidari, I felt like last night I needed a nice relaxing night of being a completely different sort of Demon Hunter. By nice and relaxing I mean a night spent pushing rifts and causing anime style rocket explosions as I cleared entire rooms at the same time. It is strange how Diablo has morphed over the years for me. Originally it was that game that I wished I could play with friends… but didn’t have stable enough internet to be able to play it. Then it when the second game was released it absolutely become a game I played almost exclusively with friends. When three was released, I was in a place where I was largely soloing and found it a less than amazing experience. Now several years later each time a new season is launched it becomes this focusing force that brings a bunch of us back together for another trip happily through the paragon and gear grind. For most of the night last night I was joined by my fairly regular demon slaying buddy Grace, and we also managed to snag Thalen and bring him along for the fun. The night as a whole was pretty great because on our first tag team attempt at bounties… a Menagerist Goblin spawned dropping this extremely awesome Yeti pet named “The Bumble” for me to go wandering with. Additionally I was able to knock out several pieces of gear off of my list, and I finally managed to get the last of the three legendary gems needed for this build. The highlight of the night however was getting an Ancient Yang’s Recurve to drop… which admittedly made Grace super jealous. However because of this it is now my duty to tag along in any D3 madness to push hard for folks so they too can get their sweet ancient drops.

The other thing that happened last night is that I attempted the “Numlock Trick”. One of the more annoying things in Diablo 3 is that most builds have some sort of buff that they want to cast essentially anytime it is available. The goal of the build is usually to get enough cooldown reduction so that you can keep it up 100% of the time. For the Multishot build I am using for my Demon Hunter, it is focused largely around getting keeping Vengeance up 100% of the time… and right now I have it close enough that I maybe have a second without it up at any given time. The other day I heard something mentioned in a build video talking about “using the numlock trick” on one of these buffs… and I had to investigate to satiate my curiosity. There is apparently a strange glitch in the game that allows you to essentially constantly be spamming a button press. I mean in theory you could do the same thing with hardware macros on a keyboard, but this just sort of “works”. The idea is to bind the 1-4 hotkeys to have a secondary key which relates to Numpad 1-4. To toggle on autocast for any of the abilities you turn your Numlock key on, hold down the keys you want to autocast and then turn off your Numlock. Just like that the key keeps repeating over and over… which causes some weird behavior. Firstly if you are holding any key the cast will not fire… so if you are holding force move or the left mouse button down… just ease up on it to let the next cast go off. Secondly… it has the strange behavior of interrupt abilities like identification or teleport. What I do to get past those is to start the channeled cast, and then hold any key. In my binding I have S set as an alternate bind for Shift… which is to stop moving and hold still. Holding this down while channeling works well to keep my auto casts from interrupting whatever ability I want to do.

The other “strangeness” that happens is that any time you shift games, and sometimes when you just downgrade difficulty it can turn the autocasting off completely. In this case you just flip back on numlock, hold your keys down, and turn it back off to set the glitch back up. Now that I know this exists… I am wondering what other uses can be had for it. Supposedly folks use this regularly for Taeguk builds on the monk side to keep the stacks. In theory I could do the same trick to make sure I am evasive fire shots in with my hunter, to build hatred and keep up the damage shield. For the time being however I am keeping it simple and only using this to try and keep Vengeance up as often as possible as well as my Companion ability. I was always horrible at using these cooldowns, and tended to save them until I reached a point where I had a lot of elites to attack rather than just constantly using them knowing that I had another cooldown just around the corner. I need to spend some time working on achievements so I can catch up to the point Grace is currently in the seasonal journey. I am still not sure if I am going to go for the stash slot this time around… but for the moment I am going to keep playing so long as the game feels fun and fresh. Tonight however I have earmarked to go do Broken Shores scenario on my various alts… because I have yet to actually see the new cinematics.

We Are Prepared

August 10, 2016 by Belghast

Unplanned Plans

Last night did not go as I actually thought it would. Yesterday was the patch that allowed folks like me who purchased the digital pre-order of Legion to roll Demon Hunters. Firstly I want to take a step back and acknowledge just how damned brilliant this idea is. Sure there were demon hunters everywhere yesterday, but the total number running through the intro quests felt reasonable. I realize they have gotten much better at instancing since the days of the Death Knight and Wrath of the Lich King… but still it seems rather smart to forcibly split up the population into waves. There are still lots of folks who prefer to do physical copies of games, especially one with a long tradition of having awesome physical copies. I guess the hope is that by letting some folks into the content early, that will mean that there won’t be quite the launch day crush on this single zone. Now stepping forward again, I had planned on playing a completely different Demon Hunter last night… as I continued working on my seasonal character in Diablo 3. This was largely due to the fact that I fully expected the servers to be burning down around me, and the game to be essentially in an unplayable state with Demon Hunters, Broken Shore and the Legion Zone Invasions all starting last night. I got home relatively early, and while waiting on pizza to arrive I thought I would pop in and at least create a character. For whatever reason when I boosted the Mage I just picked a name from the stable of names I have used in other games. Even though it made zero sense… I named said mage Belglaive… a name that would later be ideal for my Demon Hunter. As a result I also did a little renaming yesterday to shift my Mage to be Belglacial since I highly favor frost spec… which freed up the name for my demonic Night Elf. The other name in the running of course was the one I used on the beta server “Belblight”.

What happened in reality is that both myself and Grace spent the rest of the night playing World of Warcraft and participating in the zone invasions. I casually quested my way through the Demon Hunter starter content while eating dinner and then after getting dumped into Stormwind I was given the quest to do a Legion event. For those who have not done them yet, it seems like Blizzard has learned a lot from the past events. The ones that stick out in my mind the most is the Undead Invasion event that happened just ahead of the launch of the original Naxxramas and the release of Wrath of the Lich King. In those events items spawned in a handful of zones, and it was a mad dash for players to scramble over to the area to get enough completion on it to be able to qualify for loot. I ground these hard enough to get a set of gear for pretty much all of the armor types… sadly the leather set is stranded forever on another battle.net account but I still regularly wear the plate set that largely looks like a blue and brown judgement recolor. The problem with the event however was the fact that you were in constant competition with other players for spawns, and that it also caused you to camp zones until you got everything you needed. I spent so many hours out in Azshara… the good version not the one the version the Goblins later wrecked.

Maybe Space Goats Weren’t Unreasonable

What happens in the Legion Invasion event however is that at any given time there will be two “hot zones” in the world where invasions are happening. When I started playing last night those were Tanaris around Gadgetzan and Northern Barrens around The Crossroads. The part that I did not quite catch onto however is that each character can complete both of the active zones, and does not need to wait for the event to “start”. What happens instead is the moment you cross the zone boundary, you are stuck in an instanced version that is currently in phase one of the event. It seems as though all you really need to do is to be in zone as each of the phases shifts, and I am uncertain how much actual participation you need to do. There have been many times I was still flying to my destination when the event transitioned into Phase 2 and I have still managed to get full credit every time. Upon completing Phase Two you receive a Small Legion Chest and upon completing the Final Phase you receive a Large Legion Chest. From each of these a handful of things can drop, but the bulk are item level 700 weapons and armor, as well as some of the currency of the event Nethershards. It also seems like any time you take one of the “bosses” of the event that spawn and are marked with a Skull, you receive somewhere between 5 and 10 Nethershards per kill. In theory if you are wanting to maximize your earning, you would probably want to roll around as a team and focus entirely on killing the skulls as soon as they spawn. The only problem there is that they have mechanics… one of which was an version of old school Kazzak that essentially becomes invulnerable when he kills ten players. All of these Shards can be turned in for goodies including a Pet, full appearance sets, and individual weapons at the Captive Wyrmtongue <Reluctant ‘Quartermaster’> that can be found in Stormwind, Orgrimmar and occasionally out in the field as well. I know for example he spawns in Tanaris near Gadgetzan during that invasion.

Now quite possibly the coolest part of this event is that it appears to be level agnostic. To test this theory Grace grabbed her level sixty mage and brought it over to Tanaris where she was able to complete the event, with every mob appearing to her as though it were around her level range. When she opened the chests instead of rewarding item level 700 gear, it gave her gear appropriate for her level. That means players who are not even at the current level cap are going to be able to participate in this invasion, unlike the pre-launch events in the past. The best part is that it seemed to “just work” and if this is an example of how well their new tech works to auto level players to the content… I am pretty impressed. I know all of the zones in Legion function in this manner, and that you can start in pretty much any place while leveling through and complete the content in your own order. It is my ultimate hope that maybe just maybe this tech eventually trickles down to the older zones. Now the possible negative here is that I still love being able to solo raid content… so the hope is that maybe they can come up with some version of the “unsynched” style of play that we can do in Final Fantasy XIV. In any case it was a fun night of swapping alts and then flying across great stretches of the contents trying to reach where the legion invasions were happening. The two “hot zones” swap out every four hours, and largely right now I am looking at them as a good way of playing catch up on the gear for my characters. Only one of my characters is in the 700s item level wise, so pretty much everything I pick up from this event is an upgrade. Right now I am largely focused on getting the Warlock and the Demon Hunter geared out… because I have this feeling that they are rapidly going to become my alts of choice.