Tales of the Aggronaut

The Division Impressions

February 2, 2016 by Belghast

Bad Christmas Simulator

I have to say I was pretty sad when I found out that The Division beta would be going on the same weekend I would be in San Antonio at Pax South. So when I heard that they planned on extending the deadlines, I have to say I was pretty pumped. The Division is one of those games that has looked good on paper up, but I have been really questioning as to whether or not I will like it. Call of Duty for example, is one of those series that I enjoyed when it first came out, but as it has evolved I have become less and less interested in the continued military operator fantasy. I think a lot of it has come from the fact that every game seems to use exactly the same guns. I mean I get why this is the case, since these guns are real world guns… that they are just trying to replicate in a game. So when I started thinking about The Division versus Destiny…. I have to say I lean heavily towards crazy space guns over things that can actually exist in the world I happen to live in. However I am also a huge fan of post apocalyptic settings…. and The Division seems like it might deliver on a near future version of that. So to say I was fraught is an understatement, then over the weekend I ended up talking with a couple that told me who much they liked it, coming from a heavy Destiny background. So when I got home Sunday night, I went upstairs started the hefty download.

So when I got up yesterday morning I finally got the chance to play the game. I really was not sure what to expect, and I guess in all of the screenshots and video I had not really gotten it through my head that it was a third person shooter. This has honestly been the biggest challenge for me when playing Warframe recently, because I am generally bad at playing a shooter from a third person perspective. Third person definitely makes things easier to move around, but when it comes to aiming a gun…. I just find it awkward. The fact that this is a game that relies heavily on ducking behind the next patch of cover, it almost HAS to be third person to make that work. In many ways it reminds me of Gears of War, in that you are constantly rolling forward trying to move up on mobs while at the same time staying in safety. The problem with that is… I am just not that kind of a player. I tend to be very run and gun… and sure I use the hell out of cover but I am constantly zipping in and out of it. This game feels more like a tactical RPG at times than it does a pure shooter, and I am not quite sure how I feel about that. You have to understand… that I have never played any of the other Tom Clancy branded games, because that player fantasy never really appealed to me. The fact that this game is an MMO Shooter of sorts… is really the part that places it in my wheelhouse rather than the content matter.

The Systems

The thing that I really want to talk about is just how damned good this games mapping system is. When you pull it up it brings up a holographic representation of the area you are in, and it has various objectives marked. You can go talk to an NPC inside each of the bases that gives you a situation report on the area, and as a result creates these little highlighted markers. As you are running through the world, you can see every single blip on the map… but you get special visualization for whichever objective you happen to have highlighted. In the various screenshots I am posting today, there will be these orange lines running down the street, and these serve to show you the best route to the location you are trying to reach. This makes movement through the very dense sections of New York city pretty manageable. What it does not take into account is that in many cases you can actually cut through buildings to get to your destiny and in doing so find all sorts of hidden resources. As you are roaming around there are lots of caches that you can find, and these have everything from resources to weapons, and it feels like looting structures in a zombie survival game. I am still not 100% certain what some of the resources are used for, but the obsessive side of me cannot leave a single bag sitting un-looted.

Tom Clancy's The Division™ Beta_20160201101723 — Ramshackle Bases

The gameplay for the most part resolves around expanding your reach and setting up these bases of operation in new areas. At first you start out on the banks of the Hudson River, and you push into the city with the first mission based around driving away the hostiles and reclaiming a base. From there you start retrieving people from the impromptu medical center set up in Madison Square garden. So you rescue a virologist to take back to your base, and then that launches a sequence of quests that involve collecting additional resources to help set up your medical facilities. The problem is for me at least that I cannot seem to stay on track, and that even though I have a giant orange line leading me to the objective…. I keep ending up going off the rails and looting every building that I happen to come across. The other issue that I am having is that I struggle how to identify who is just a harmless bum roaming down the street…. and who is someone that will actually kill me. I ended up wandering down this alleyway, without much options for cover… and next thing I know a patch of what I think are harmless survivors… ended up opening fire on me. In the middle of the batch was apparently a major boss that straight up killed me. So while the mapping system is amazing, the threat assessment portion seems to be kinda confusing at least for me… since everyone including me… dresses like they just came from a shelter.

Still on the Fence

Right now I am not sure if I am on board or not. I played enough to decide that I mostly liked it… but I still struggle with whole third person thing. The big boss fights are pretty hectic, but I have learned that for the most part… I simply need to find a hidey hole and kill mobs until the boss finally comes to me. It isn’t nearly as heroic as rushing in and dodging bullets…. but it seems to be more consistent than trying to run around and stay alive at the same time. The other big take away…. is that gear is really damned expensive. I am used to being able to buy upgrades pretty quickly in games… but I have sold a lot of random crap that I have found out in the world, but have been able to afford absolutely nothing. One of the things that I love about Destiny is that I am constantly getting new weapons to play with… and if this game ends up keeping the same set of weapons around too long I am going to get bored. What makes MMOs interesting for me… is the whole aspect of constantly upgrading gear. I have learned over the years that characters get stale for me, when I stop getting upgrades. So while I am getting drops that are upgrades are mostly armor, but I have yet to get a single interesting weapon drop. So I think in the long run that might be an issue if the beta test is relevant to how the rest of the game is going to feel. The other big problem for me is that I have a feeling that if folks get this…. we are going to be spread out between PC, PS4 and Xbox One… and I am certain that there will not be cross platform play. Right now I am leaning towards the PS4 version… but I have a feeling that most of the AggroChat folks if they got this… would be playing it on the PC. So now I just have to decide…. do I pick this up or do I wait, and while making this decision I should probably see how nice the pre-order bonuses are.

Pax Deconstructed

February 1, 2016 by Belghast

Not Prepared

It turns out Illidan was right…. I was not prepared. This morning I thought I would break down some things I learned this weekend while at PAX South. Overall I had a fun time, but there were just some things that didn’t quite work out as planned. The first year it felt like I had a lot of my time planned as I had numerous media appointments to attend to. This year I was going for what ended up being the polar opposite, and that didn’t quite work out either. Over the course of the weekend I walked roughly 25 miles, and either I have the beginning of the PAX Pox… or my allergies are just going haywire now that I am back in Oklahoma. I am so insanely sore, and in truth I lacked the stamina for this conference. Before the first year I had been walking every single day, and for the most part I took it all in stride. This time around I am thirty pounds heavier and have not been walking at all… and it took its toll. Both Friday and Saturday I was up by 5:30-6 am and out at the convention by 8. Then after wandering around largely aimlessly trying to sort out what to do for several hours…. I ended up leaving around 4pm each day and going back to the hotel room and crashing. The first day this was largely due to a general lack of parking downtown, and having several of the major garages booked out by another corporate event. On Saturday however it was absolutely due to the fact that I was simply “PAXed Out” and too tired to keep going.

The other thing that did not phase me during year one, but absolutely did during year two were the crowds. There was this strange thing going on, where there were fewer big games at the convention…. but the crowds were so much bigger. A prime example of this is the fact that on Saturday we were trying to find a table in the gaming area to play board games. This area was over twice the size of it was during year two… but every single table was full with zero signs of anything opening up. Similarly every other room in the convention seemed packed… the Jam room… the Arcade room… the Intel PC Gaming room… all were just packed with people. While the first year did not bother me at all when it came to crowds…. this year definitely did. It makes me pretty certain that there is zero way I could handle the type of crowds that a PAX prime has. By the time I left at 4 pm, on top of the exhaustion…. I just needed some peace and quiet and a place to sit down and chill. I realize I could have probably gotten this in the AFK room…. but given that every other area was packed…. even the first aid station, I figured that would also be completely packed. I don’t want to give the impression that I did not enjoy myself, because I absolutely did… it was just a much harder convention for me than the first year. Year one was this super chill event, and it has just gotten considerably bigger.

The People

For me at least this con was absolutely about the people. The folks that were in attendance were… Ashgar, Thalen, Paragon, Rae, John her brother, Tick, Dallian, Damai, Rowan, Sctrz, Genda and his wife, Exale and Maovis. This at least was the number of people that I actually managed to meet up with at least for a period of time. The problem is that it is really damned hard to have a meaningful amount of time with fourteen different people, that may or may not be in the same place. I felt like I was constantly trying to meet up with different groups of people and failed miserably at spending much time with any of them. Then there were other folks that I meant to meet up with, but never actually saw. Early on I had every intent to try and meet Fynralyl and Psynister on the way down, or Beau and Leala… but I simply ran out of mental bandwidth to try and juggle everything. In theory I could have come up with ways to make it happen, but in trying to keep my schedule super flexible…. I spent a good deal of time simply doing nothing. So the truth is next year… a bunch of things need to change. While I hate having every moment of the day scheduled out, I feel like I am going to have to make some hard and fast appointments so that I can feel like I actually made the most of the weekend. I also plan on making some more media appointments because they did a great job in the first year of breaking up the day… and also giving me a quiet place away from the crowd to sit down and talk about games with the developers. To facilitate that however I am going to have to really get my shit in gear and get that Media pass.

Now that I am home… I just feel overloaded. On top of the sore throat and sore everything else…. I am just feeling like I need to hide out from the world for awhile. It is situations like this that make me realize that I am in fact introverted, regardless of how hard I try and be extroverted. The happiest moments of the weekend for me, were introducing people to Ultimate Chicken Horse, sitting in the board game area and playing Codenames, or just chilling out and collecting street passes with Dallian early in the morning. Had I been able to do more of that I probably would have been fine staying considerably longer, but there was one period where I walked non-stop for two and a half hours trying to sort out what the hell we were doing…. and after that, I was pretty much beat. Essentially I think the key for me to be able to function at this bigger PAX Prime is to have better planning, which is not exactly a strong suit of mine. I tend to do best when I roll with the punches, but there are far too many punches in this case to be able to roll with them. I will say it was amazing to get to hang with all of these people in person, but I just feel guilty that I didn’t get to spend all that much time with any one of them.

Next Year

All of this said… I am absolutely going next year. This is the only PAX that is really viable for me to attend. Also we have made it into and event that my wife actually looks forward to for completely different reasons. The big thing for me is going to be sorting out the parking thing. That first day… was a huge damper on the weekend, and it made me super paranoid about finding parking on Saturday. I think I am going to try out the bus system next year, that way I can get downtown without having to drive… which also makes me less paranoid about partaking of adult beverages. Next year I also need to take more photos… because in the entirety of the weekend I only took five or six. I think the biggest thing however is going to be scheduling actual lunch and dinner times with different groups of people so that I feel less like I abandoned folks. I got to spend the least amount of time with Rowan and Sctr and Genda and his wife, but in both cases I get to the Dallas area more often than I do San Antonio, so hopefully I will be able to meet up with them on another occasion soon. The biggest goal however is to be a much smaller person by the time PAX 2017 rolls around, because that thirty pounds and lack of regular walking made the biggest impact on my enjoyment. Once I made it back to the hotel each night, I was just dead to the world. I am so thankful that I ended up taking today off from work, because if I had to roll back in after travelling yesterday, and just the sheer exhaustion of the convention…. I am not entirely certain I would be able to function.

Of Chicken Horse

February 7, 2017January 31, 2016 by Belghast

More Friends

After crashing extremely early last night, I ended up getting up fairly early. From about 5 pm onwards I didn’t really get proper sleep, and mostly just laid there quietly until shortly after 6 pm. The result was me getting to PAX and parked at around 8 am. The parking situation was much improved, and that at least took one worry off of my mind. By the time I got through the random bag fondling that they have been doing upon entering this year… Dallian was milling around in the Coffee Shop area. So we sat there for a good while fiddling with street passes while waiting on others to show up. I am not sure why I have been obsessing about street passes, but that has really felt like my overarching goal. I guess part of it is the fact that I realize I will not have access to this many in one place… until I end up going to PAX next year. So I spent pretty much any free time clearing out one batch of streetpasses and playing the picture puzzle and find mii game. I am up to 392 Mii characters on my 3DS which is a significant boost to the 90 or so I had before coming this year. Before coming this year I had completed zero of the slides… and after this year I have seven fully unlocked.

While hanging out there and chatting… and waiting on the rest of the folks to show up we had a random encounter with a couple of awesome folks. The two of us were sitting at a table for four, and a couple came up and asked if we minded them joining us. When you play board games there is a convention of playing with the box lid standing up, to signal you are open to letting other people join your game. I wish there was something like that for tables, because I felt bad commandeering a table…. but I also wanted a nice place to sit while we waited. What followed was an awesome conversation about Destiny and the Division, and a bunch of other console and PC games rolled together. The funny thing is… we had this lengthy conversation all without introducing ourselves, and it took a fifth person joining the conversation to actually make that happen. Now I hope to actually keep tabs on Hatti and Rabbit over twitter, and maybe even interact more between now and next year.

Everyone Must Play

As the day went on we managed to catch up with Tick, Damai, Thalen, Paragon, Ashgar, Rae and her brother John… and eventually Rowan, Sctrz, and Genda and his wife. I believe when we were playing several rousing games of Code Names, we had ten around a table in the gaming area. I believe the game was chosen in part because it scaled nicely regardless of how many people happened to be playing it. While playing a rapidly snuck a few blurry pictures which I am totally using on my blog without talking to the individuals first. However of the several photos I have… I picked the one with the people in it that I didn’t think would actually care. I am also not naming anyone by name…. so hopefully no one gets cross with me. Today was a lot of trying to sort out what to do, after we played a half dozen rounds we ended up breaking up into smaller groups and never quite joining back together. I spent a lot of time circling like a shark trying to decide what to do… and alternately spending time with Exale and Maovis, who were cosplaying Venom Snake and Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China. Lo Pan was an insane hit, and we ended up spending a lot of time stopping so folks could take photos.

I think the highlight of the day was dragging people to the Ultimate Chicken Horse booth just like I had done to me. I cannot adequately elaborate on just how fun that game really is to play. It takes a few rounds to get into it… but before long folks are cheering at the screen or groaning when they fail to complete a level. There is something so deceptively simple about the game… and the iterative gameplay of each person adding a piece to the greater level keeps it fun and engaging. I think the best feature is the fact that there is a fixed number of attempts that everyone can make, and regardless of the outcome someone will be crowned a winner. I am already extremely partial to the chameleon who does this silly rainbow dance when you manage to win with him. I also do not mind at all the Raccoon, and my lanyard now sports a button since they apparently ran out of Chameleons. This is definitely going to be one of those games that I pick up immediately, and probably start buying for all of my friends so that they can join in the multiplayer madness. I forsee us talking about this game a lot on the coming AggroChat.

Parking Debacle

January 30, 2016 by Belghast

Pax Day One

The first day of pax was interesting, mostly because it started off on a bad foot. I wrote about yesterday how I failed to charge my cell phone over the course of the previous night. The positive of that however is that I learned my power bank does a phenomenal job of charging phones, and by the time it took me to drive from the hotel to the convention center it was sitting around 63% from the previous 15%. Last year there was a plethora of parking options up and down Commerce and Market streets, but unfortunately yesterday every single lot had a full sign. I finally ended up parking in a surface lot, having to pay $20 for 8 hours. On the way to the convention I stopped and chatted with one of the attendants at the garage I parked in last year, just to find out what time of the day it actually filled up. Turns out that some other corporate event is going on downtown, and that a company had booked pretty much all of the city run garages, greatly reducing the amount of available parking space. She said that today they would be open again, so here is hoping that I can get into the garage I am used to.

As far as the day itself, it took a little while to connect with everyone. I met up with Dallian in this coffee shop area near a giant Pax South sign, where we milled around until we joined up with Paragon and Damai… and eventually Ashgar. Since we had not heard anything from Thalen yet, we wandered into the con and around the floor. All the while I was on lookout for trying to sort out where exactly my first appointment was. Turns out it was downstairs at the river level…. which is not something I even knew existed. The rooms down there were super nice however, and in truth I liked them better than the area the Motiga suite was last year. When I went to scope the place out I got nabbed by Deanna from Perfect World, and ushered into their room to hang out while waiting on time for my appointment. They had this really great spread of brownies and other pastries, but unfortunately… I had just eaten a large breakfast at the hotel thinking it might be awhile before I found food on the con floor.

Livelock

Livelock_Screenshot_02-1024x576

I will of course be writing a proper piece for MMOGames.com once I have more stable internet, but I still wanted to talk a little bit about it this morning. I have to admit I was not really sure what to expect from all of the press announcements leading up to me actually getting to test it. I had a basic idea that it would be a top down shooter, but I was not really certain past that. I turns out that the game as a whole is a love letter to the twin stick shooters of the past, updated and infused with modern gameplay mechanics. So in my head it feels like Ikari Warriors meets Diablo meets some almost MMO mechanics. When the game is finished it will include three mechs that have specific niches, and in the discussion they mentioned tank/healer/dps holy trinity. It seems as you level up your character to 30 you unlock ways to swap up your abilities and make them more defensive or more damaging. I asked the ever important question about how big of a detriment a new player will be to seasoned players… and apparently the game is more skill based. Level 1 characters and Level 30 characters have the same health, and the upgrades to abilities don’t really crank up the damage value, but instead change the way they work. So in theory this might be a great game for impromptu co-op with friends. That has always been the challenge in our own little circle, that if someone was not there on the first night… it is often difficult to play catch up and be viable until everyone simply hits the level cap. The other nice thing about this game is that it is a straight up $19.99 game, and I grilled them a bit about future monetization plans. It seems like right now they have no plans to offer a whole bunch of DLC characters or anything like that… they are just trying to design a really tight three player co-op experience and that is in many ways refreshing.

Ultimate Chicken Horse

The other game I really want to talk about from yesterday is Ultimate Chicken Horse. Now this is a title we have talked about before on AggroChat on our PAX Prime Show. While Tam, Kodra, and Ashgar tried to explain the game to me… I didn’t really “grok” it until I was sitting there yesterday with a controller in hand playing it myself. The idea is pretty simple… you have a platformer that you compete with up to four other players. The level designs are pretty classic and relatively simple to complete. What makes the game amazing is that each round, each player gets a block that they can place somewhere in the level. Some of these blocks help the players out like springboards or platforms…. and others will kill the player like crossbows that fire arrows, or spiked floors. The goal of the game is the make the level difficult enough for at least one of the people you are playing with to die…. but not so hard that you cannot beat it yourself. If everyone beats the level… no points are awarded. If no one beats the level… no points are awarded. Things start to get really insane about five rounds in when the map becomes a field of death and destruction. I can already tell this is going to be one of those must own “go to” games for hanging out with friends. The best part about it is the fact that it does couch co-op and does it amazingly well. The only problem I am going to have is that I am not sure if it supports network co-op, and I simply don’t have a group of people to play it with on a regular basis in local mode. I am absolutely going to buy the game regardless because I want to support this flavor of insanity. If you get a chance, you should totally check it out when it ends up on steam shortly.

Ending the Day

The big problem with the day yesterday, was the fact that I was super paranoid the entire time about the crappy parking option I had. Previously the $10 lots were for as long as you cared to stay, meaning I could be there late at night without much issue. I talked to the parking attendant about the lot I happened to be in, and she mentioned that it was a privately owned lot and they were super quick to boot cars. So the entire time while roaming around Pax I kept looking at my phone to check when it was time to walk out and get the car and try and move it to someplace better. I finally headed out around 3:30 in the afternoon to do that, and in the time it took me to exit that surface lot… someone had already taken my space. I drove around Commerce and Market streets and all of those lots still showed the “Full” sign, so I circled back around to the lot I had parked in… which now had a barricade across its entrance as well. So everyone went off to Dave and Busters, and I instead went to the Hotel and played 3DS until my wife and friend got in a few minutes later. Once the traffic had died down we went out roaming for a bit, because we needed some pop to throw in the hotel fridge. The day took a lot more out of me than I realized, and I ended up crashing really hard about 9 pm. Over the course of the day I walked a little over 15,000 steps, which is something I am just not used to right now. It was fine and well while I was in motion, but once I got back to the hotel room… it took its toll. Overall was a really good first day, other than the parking bullshit. Next year I am going to sort out the bus system and just use it, because in theory there is a bus that picks up right outside this hotel and drops off near the convention center.