fps Archives - Page 20 of 23 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Division PC Impressions

February 20, 2016 by Belghast

The Hard Data

This weekend is another beta test of The Division, and from the sounds of it… this is a much larger pool of testers than the weekend of Pax South. That Sunday and Monday after Pax South I managed to play quite a bit of Division on the PS4, so this time around I decided ahead of time that I would be trying it out on the PC just to get the broad feel of how the game performs on multiple platforms. When it comes to PC gaming… a lot of your experience rides upon your hardware. For the purpose of this test I decided to try playing it on both my gaming desktop upstairs, and my older gaming laptop. I knew pretty much that the laptop would not perform well at all, but I was still curious to see if the game could reach a playable state on it. So as a result I thought it was probably best to start by listing the important stats of my two gaming systems… so you can use that hopefully as a judge of how the game will perform on your own systems. Since this is also an online game… I opted to take a quick speed test this morning just to use that for reference as well.

Gaming Desktop

AMD FX-6300 3.5 ghz 6 cores
16 GB Ram
MSI GTX 960 4G Gaming Edition Video

Gaming Laptop

Intel i7-3630QM 2.4 ghz 8 cores
16 GB Ram
2X Nvidia Geforce GT 650M in SLI Video

Internet Speed

The Gaming Desktop

TheDivision 2016-02-19 18-02-25-22 — Gaming Desktop – 1080P Medium Resolution

When I first booted up this game, I have to say I had an inordinate amount of difficulty getting it to run. The problem is the fact that you cannot get to the video and graphics quality settings until you wade through the character creation step. This is unfortunate, since as an MMO gamer primarily… the character creation process is super important to me. Initially the game launched in such a way that I thought it was trying to split the image between my two monitors. I did the Alt+Enter trick to drop it to windowed mode, and then Alt+Enter again to attempt to fix the resolution. However this time I had no mouse input, and could not really touch anything on the screen. After exiting the game and reloading I was finally able to get in and through the character creation process, which is locked down and pretty minimal at the moment. However if you hit randomize enough times you can get a character that you can live with at least for the purpose of this test. Upon entering the video settings…. I realized that for some godawful reason the game was trying to by default run in 4K. I simply do not have a machine capable for 4K gaming, and I think it was just freaking the hell out on my machine and monitors. After dialing back the game to 1080p I started getting a fairly reliable 50-60 fps with dips into the high 40s as you can see in the first screenshot of this post. At least on paper that seems like a really playable framerate, and I give them credit for making the game look gorgeous even on the Medium settings I was running.

TheDivision 2016-02-19 19-06-47-55 — Gaming Desktop – 1080P Medium Resolution

The problem being that the game was not really playable even though I was getting roughly 60 fps. It suffered horribly from some bad hitching anytime I moved into a new area, or often times in the middle of combat. I can’t really call it rubber-banding, because there was no time rollback component but it felt quite a bit like rubber banding in MMOs where you hit this hard wall of lag… and things lock up before the world unfreezes and catches up. This is not too horrible when you are simply running around the city and you enter what I can only assume is a new “zone”, but this is deadly when it comes to combat and encountering mobs that are causing your screen to freeze. Now my friend Jabberant said that he played all last test on the PC and did not experience any of this… so it makes me wonder if this is simply a case of network congestion or some sort of bottle-necking happening on the server farm. In any case it does not bode well for the enjoy-ability and stability of this game at launch. Another friend suggested that I turn off VSync and this to some extent lessened the severity of the freezes…. but they were still very much there anytime I moved into a new area, or encountered hostiles on screen.

The Gaming Laptop

TheDivision 2016-02-20 07-18-58-75 — Gaming Laptop – 720P Low Resolution

Now just a bit of a foreword… I did not expect this game to be playable on my laptop. My laptop is a Lenovo y500 and at this point that model range is over three years old. At the time it was hot shit, featuring one of the only laptops I knew with available SLI. Instead of an optical drive, it features a second hot swappable video card that fits in the multi-bay, and as a result I can still run a lot of games that I should not theoretically be able to run on a GT 650M video card. I have had decent luck by ratcheting games down to 720p instead of the native 1080p resolution, and I can play things like Dragon Age Inquisition that way… that otherwise choke on this machine. As a result I thought this would be a good test of just how well this game might run on an aging system. Firstly I was not shocked that initially I was getting 10-15 fps at 1080p but upon dropping the graphical settings to low and the resolution to 720p I was able to achieve fairly reliable 25-40 fps even in combat. The problem being that at 6:30 am on a Saturday morning… the servers should be under as little load as they will ever be during this weekend test…. and I was still seeing significant stalling and freezing anytime I moved into a new area of town… or entered combat. So this seems to be a general problem with the game, and not necessarily limited to my desktop upstairs. All of which tells me… the PC client needs some serious tuning before it is ready for prime time. Given that “prime time” in this case is Seventeen days away on March 8th… this is a little worrisome.

TheDivision 2016-02-20 07-23-58-54 — Gaming Laptop – 720P Low Resolution

All of this said… the game was shockingly playable on this old hardware. It felt pretty much like playing Destiny on an XBox 360. Sure the world looks like a blurry mess, but the core gameplay itself was pretty solid… apart from the whole freezing thing. I could in theory see myself playing this on the laptop without much issue, and even games like Warframe cause me to make resolution concessions to be able to run them downstairs from the comfort of my couch. I also have to say that as far as controlling the game… I am MUCH better at playing it with a mouse and keyboard, largely because even after all the time spent with Destiny… I am MUCH more accurate with a mouse than I will probably ever be with a controller. So given that Laptop graphics cards generally run an entire generation behind as far as performance goes… that would mean my laptop is the equivalent of an SLI GTX 550 setup…. so a 660/670/680 range video card in a desktop should be able to give equivalent performance. Basically meaning that if you have an old machine, it won’t look pretty but the game should at least still be playable.

PC versus PS4

TheDivision 2016-02-19 18-34-54-70 — Gaming Desktop – 1080p Medium Resolution

There are positives and negatives about both systems. You can read my original thoughts about last beta test, where I talk more about the game-play than the nuts and bolts. A lot of those statements still apply for either version. Largely where I stand at the moment is… the concept of being able to play from my laptop is really nice… but even then I was consistently plagued by problems. The Division on PC will be a viable game at some point, but my fear is it will be months after release and a couple of patches later, which is honestly what I have come to expect from the MMO gaming launch cycle. These sort of games are rarely if ever 100% on the PC at day one, and I fear that The Division is going to be another case of that. The Playstation client however just worked flawlessly. I didn’t need to get in and fiddle with resolutions or slowly and painstakingly ratchet things down until they reached a level of performance I was happy with. Instead I just booted up the client and played the damn game. As someone who has always favored PC as the platform of choice… I have to say it sounds really damned odd to hear myself saying that. Sure there are problems with PSN and such, and I fully expect it to be flaky a bit around launch day to. However once you get into the game it just works, and works well. Sure there are issues with some muddy textures on the PS4, but the game runs without hitching in combat or movement or anything of the sort. So right now I am still very much up in the air about purchasing this game, however if I do… I will more than likely be picking it up on the Playstation 4. The ability to simply turn it on and play without having to worry about framerates and resolutions… is extremely appealing. Additionally there is the problem of this being a heavily PVP game… and at least on a console I know all of us players are on even footing. With the PC… this is absolutely going to be a game where your system will control how well you can play. On low settings…. aiming on encounters is really difficult because the further away from you the mob is… the more it just sort of blends into the background. Running on high resolution and sharp textures is going to give an advantage to anyone who can afford the system to run it. So largely for my impressions… I am a bit disappointed in The Division as PC gaming experience…. but I know that I can always fall back on the PS4 and still be happy as a clam.

FPS Evolved Genre

February 10, 2016 by Belghast

Thoughts for Motiga

One of the aspects of Pax South 2016 that felt strange for me, was the complete and total lack of Motiga and Gigantic. I cannot fully express how much of my experience this game was in 2015. I had a great time hanging out with the Motiga crew thanks to Lonrem brokering a connection, and then kept dragging people to the booth to play Gigantic. It felt like the sort of MOBA experience I had been looking for. When I played a tanky character, it felt like playing an MMO tank. When I played a ranged character, it felt like playing a really good ranged shooter. I feel like hands down they were the belle of the ball last year, and when I heard about their layoffs in december, and the fact that they were not on the roster for 2016… I started to get concerned. Since coming back from Pax last year I have been lucky enough to have access to all of the alpha and beta events, but I have to admit I didn’t really play much of it. For the longest time it just played lousy on my then Geforce 750ti video card…. and now that I have at least upgraded to a 960 I am wondering if maybe it would perform a little better. As of yesterday however I am really starting to worry for the folks at the company, because according to a Gamasutra article the just underwent some pretty significant staff reduction in a last ditch attempt to get more funding to finish the game.

Now that the NDA has lifted I don’t have to worry quite so much about how I talk about Gigantic. I really need to reinstall the game and see what its current state happens to be. The biggest problem that the game had was that its back end systems were not quite as polished as the front end game play. Matchmaking was a big issue, and the fact that in order to get valuable feeling matches… you realistically needed to hang out on testing ventrilo and and form some sort of a custom game. The last time I attempted to boot up the game I sat in a matchmaking queue for thirty minutes and then finally gave up. My friend Rae apparently has played it more recently, but ran into a pretty elitist player base… with her catching shit for not doing the right thing at the right time. This is one of those games that is so damned close to really good…. but I worry that maybe they missed their window by a year. I’ve always said that in order for this game to be really popular it needed to be first to market, since it is essentially launching an untested IP. The awesome thing is though, that the characters…. well… for lack of a better term have character. They are interesting and are animated in a way that they spring to life. This game has what League of Legends has… but so many other games in the MOBA genre have lacked… personality. I really hope that they can pull this off, but as always I worry about the folks that were just let go. This game deserves its time in the sun, and I think it will flourish on consoles…. quite possibly more so than on the PC that already has a fairly entrenched first person MOBA genre. The critical date however is that they HAVE to beat Overwatch to launch, or they are pretty much toast. Even thought those two games are vastly different in feel… players are still mentally lumping them all together in this “fps evolved” genre of folks taking the FPS template and doing new things with it.

Overwatch Beta Returns

Speaking of the 500 lb gorilla that Gigantic has to beat to market… as of yesterday the Overwatch Beta is back on, and with it has also returned much gnashing of teeth as more folks failed to get in. At this point I am pretty much resigned that I will not likely get to play until open beta testing at some point. For a brief period of time I thought that maybe I had access, because in the launcher the install button suddenly started showing up for me. The only problem being that it was grayed out, and not clickable. I am guessing this was a temporary glitch because later that evening when I popped into WoW to do my garrison gold farming… it was back to hiding the install button again. The truth is… even if I had beta access I probably would not be playing it much. My recent return to Elder Scrolls Online has taught me that… maybe I am just not a good beta candidate these days. I absolutely blame the almost two years of regularly ESO testing for my diminished desire to play after getting to the veteran ranks. I quite literally had burned myself out on all of the newbie content, so that the thought of alting my way through it again just felt painful. I poured my heart and soul into that testing experience, because I wanted that game to be the best damned game it could be… and honestly judging it today through very clear eyes… I think it turned out pretty great.

I want to be able to walk into Overwatch and have the game feel free and exciting, and be able to experience the new player rush along with everyone else. Sure I would love to be able to play the game when the whim hits me right now, but I am not going to be the sort of hard core tester and bug reporter that they really need right now. In this sort of game, balance and gameplay statistics are key… and they need a sheer volume of data to sift through to be able to shape their design decisions. So for me… who is going to maybe play the game once a month… I am not exactly a great resource and if you replaced me with someone who is going to stream the game every night… you would be far better off in the end. I’ve developed this aversion to playing games before they are officially released. Now granted… I still do regularly…. but I have begun to learn my lesson. Torment: Tides of Numenera for example is absolutely available to me to test because I backed the project…. but I have zero desire right now to do so. I want to play the finished version of the game, when it is “ready for primetime” and not have to sift through crippling bugs. Maybe my tolerance for “broken games” is less than it used to be… or maybe there are just so damned many things that I want to be playing that spending my time on an unfinished product feels like a waste. In any case… I am a bad beta tester, and will continue to be super happy for those who are getting invited and enjoying their time playing games like Overwatch.

Kitten Assist

January 25, 2016 by Belghast

Helping Hand

This is becoming a pretty regular occurrence in my office, where Kenzie decides to “lay” behind one of my two monitors and then spend time poking her head out under the bottom and bopping things with her paw. This morning she has been desperately trying to drag my phone that is attached to a usb cable towards her… which is making me rethink the placement of that charger cable. For the most part this weekend we hibernated to avoid the cold, and while we had nothing to deal with like the blizzard folks on the east coast… I am not equipped to handle 20* temperatures that well. The biggest news of the weekend is that we got our new dishwasher set up on Saturday. Its stupid but right now it feels like we are purposefully dirtying dishes just so we can “play with it”. I know it sounds like we truly are deprived of fun when you put it into those terms. The truth is… we’ve gone without a dishwasher for a very long time. The order of business was to rinse things out, and set them in the sink… until we had enough there to warrant washing dishes. Now we simply dump the dirties in the dishwasher as we dirty them…. which is making me have to rewire a bunch of my internal processes.

We also used this as an excuse to buy new silverware… and by silverware I really mean stainless-steel-ware because it is not like we are the “good silver” type. I am getting used to not eating on a mishmash of seven different patterns that we have had since college, but it is taking some doing. A few years back we standardized on one set of dishes and gave away the equally mishmash set of plates and cups and bowls that we got in college, and I guess it was time for us to do the same with utensils. So we are now eating with the best forks target can buy! Well not exactly… there were apparently ritzier sets available. The whole experience is just strange… its like I have to reroute how I exist in the kitchen now and it is taking some getting used to. One of the themes that you can catch running through the blog is that “bel doesn’t handle change well” so… it will take a few weeks before I really can tell you if I like it or not.

Crusader Weekend

I spoke a little bit about this one but on Friday night I got carried hard in Diablo III. On the night season 5 opened, several of us ran around together as a group… but one of that group has eclipsed the rest of us by a huge margin. On Friday night my friend Carth was nearing 500 paragon levels, and I am almost certain that by the time I am writing this today he is probably around 600 given his meteoric rise. Me however… I was sitting at only around 10 paragon when I joined the madness that was our leveling binge. Over the course of roughly three hours I got drug up in level to a point where I was actually somewhat functional. During that time I pieced together what was a pretty damned good set of gear, and Saturday morning I managed to wrap up the last few requirements for the season 5 chapter 4 rewards. At this point you can check out the particulars on my Diablo 3 profile, but there are still a handful of things that I am working on upgrading. Damai linked me this build and I am following it to some extent, but there are some places where I plan on diverging… namely on the choice of weapons.

There is no world where I would ever use the pig sticker with its constant squealing. The entire point of using it, is to have a fast attack speed… and technically my current sword already has a faster attack speed than the pig sticker. Most of the weekend past Friday night was about me figuring out just what I could do on my own. I can solo Torment VIII pretty easy, but it is slow enough going that for bounties I have decided to just stick to Torment VII as they go so much faster. While recording the double AggroChat this weekend, I managed to do one full circuit of Torment VII bounties and while I added a few paragon levels I didn’t really get much loot to write home about. At some point I plan on trying to solo more greater rifts to increase my blood shard count, but right now I have done through level 30 without much issue. I really hate doing timed events… they just bring out all of the horrible anxieties in me, so in truth greaters are not exactly my favorite thing to do in the world.

Rhino Prime

The other big happening of the weekend is the fact that I managed to finish up both my Rhino Prime and my ArchWing. The only problem is that I have a silly amount of things that now need leveling. I still have not capped the Lex sidearm, or my Drakgoon, Boltor, Latro… or even my Dual Skana. The frustrating thing about all of that is that I really don’t know how best to level them. This is one of those games where I really like running around with other people and playing it… but have not really enjoyed soloing much at all. So whenever I had a “solo” moment this weekend, I fired up WoW and did Garrison stuff or popped into Diablo 3. I need to sort out a solid and reliable way for leveling, and I thought just maybe it would have been a low level survival mission. While I got lots of loot from it… I didn’t exactly get lots of levels and only managed to put four levels on the Rhino frame.

I am in this strange state of limbo where I think I might want to like Warframe more than I actually like it. I absolutely enjoy playing with my friends, but unfortunately without also playing it solo… I am falling massively behind. The friends who are really super serious about playing this game… are playing it all of the time as their primary game right now. Which means I will always be behind in my ability to actually help them out in missions. It gets frustrating sometimes when you realize you are being carried hard… and there isn’t much you can do about it. I was slow abandoning the bow, and as a result I am struggling to play catch up with my other weapons. The bow is this awesome solo weapon…. but pretty useless for group activity. The problem there is that I feel like the non-bow weapons are less useful for soloing… so when I am stuck going through missions by myself to level them it feels like a sub optimal experience. So as a result… I really didn’t play much warframe this weekend because I am still sorting out my feelings about the game.

Literal Pay to Win

January 23, 2016 by Belghast

Actual Pay to Win

One of the bogeymen of the MMO industry for years has been the concept of “Pay To Win” or the fear that those with the most money can end up with the best stuff. The cycle of what makes an MMO has been right or wrong built on this illusion of a meritocracy. The general idea being, that if you work hard and get really good… you can have the best items in the game for your efforts. The problem with this is that it in itself has always been a lie. Last night I spent several hours hanging out with friends playing Diablo 3, and during that time I simply was along for the ride… getting carried so unbelievably hard that during greater rifts I was gaining a paragon level damned near every-time my friend Carth killed something. Nothing about this situation is me actually having any real merit, but instead was a situation of I knew someone who was willing to drag me along for fame and glory while at the same time increasing their own magic find chances. The same has always been the case with raiding in general, that it is more about who you have an “in” with and that can get you into this or that raid… rather than pure skill. However these games are built under the pretenses that these obstacles need to be there in order to maintain the social order, and keep the gamers from rioting.

In the past when there has been even an hint of “Pay To Win” there have been riots in the streets. The problem being that, there are many games right now with ways to shortcut your way to victory. Granted in many cases they don’t take you all the way there, and you still have to do a lot of things to truly catch up. It has become perfectly acceptable for games like World of Warcraft or Everquest II to sell character boosts, that allow you to jump instantly to an end game equivalent level and be decked out in equivalent gear, saving you the time of actually leveling. So the question is… why is this acceptable but it is not acceptable to sell armor and weapons? I’ve been mulling over these questions while playing Warframe over the last few weeks. The truth is… that game is absolutely a pay to win scenario. If you were to spend multiple thousands of dollars on that game, you could in theory have the absolute best in slot gear for every single frame. The funny thing is that while I know this is the case… it doesn’t actually hinder my enjoyment. I don’t feel like I am somehow being robbed of my experience, but instead I know in the back of my head there is always an out… if I ever get down a path that ends up being too grindy.

Money for Time

“Pay to Win” in the case of Warframe is a bit of a misnomer, because in the purest sense that would mean you are getting something with your money that no one else can get without stepping up to the plate and spending an equal amount. There are lots of games with lootbox grab bags…. and these always seem super insidious to me… I am looking at you Rift and your mounts. Warframe however just feels honest about it. You can farm a planetary boss over and over until you get all three parts of a Warframe to drop… and then purchase the equivalent blueprint off the market for in game credits, or you can just bypass the entire process and pay 200-400 platinum to have it in your grubby hands right then and there. You are paying to speed up time… because there is the act of actually grinding the components… and then gathering up the materials through running missions on planets. Finally there is the actual time of crafting the thing. Each of the three sub components take about 24 hours to craft, and then the final Warframe craft takes between 2 and 3 days depending on if it is a normal or a prime frame. So if you absolutely have to have something right then and there…. you can pay a premium to get it delivered into your hands.

What I find more interesting though is just how thriving the secondary market is when it comes to purchasing items. There are so many things that you can trade in this game, and for almost every single one of them there is a secondary market. Players are limited to a specific number of trades per day, but you can often times find what you are looking for in the secondary market for prices cheaper than the official shop. So while you can’t actually buy the Prime Rhino Warframe from the shop right now, you can find a player that has collected the four component pieces and essentially pay them platinum for the act of farming it for you. So the cycle is interested, in that those who have the time to run missions over and over to farm up complete pattern sets…. can easily turn that time into money. The folks who don’t have the time, but can afford to spend some money… can turn that money into the resources that help them play the game more efficiently. It is far from a utopia, but it is nowhere near the apocalypse that most MMO players would predict.

Two Way Street

I think the key to this feeling overall “fair” is the fact that it is absolutely a two way street. There are lots of times in MMOs where the “house” steps in the middle and offers a not entirely fair deal to both sides of the equation. For example in the case of the World of Warcraft token… it is not literally a case of one human selling a commodity to another human. Instead there is an algorithm in the middle, that buys tokens from players for a floating amount of in game gold… and then sells that token back to players who want to use it in lieu of subscription time. The problem is… this formula takes human nature out of the equation, the thing that makes the whole experience interesting. In games like Rift and EQ2, that have direct exchange of subscription token to currency between two players…. the patient player can wait out the best possible deal. There were many cases where I sat on a token for weeks until I found someone who absolutely had to have that token right then to continue their substitution, and wound up getting a premium for it. Similarly I am sure there are players who took advantage of market surplus to stock up on tokens when they were cheap and ended up spending far less in game currency as a result. The reason why that felt better, was that there were options… that you were not essentially dealing with a vending machine that took its on theoretical cut.

What I think I like the most about this situation in Warframe is that it feels like I have a lot of options. I can go much more slowly and solo the planets trying to collect the items I need, or I can pester my friends to run it with me multiple times . I could go to the aftermarket and hit the trade channel and look for the items I need to finish out a blueprint set. Or if i am really desperate I can simply open my pocket book, but in all cases I have several different paths to the end goal, and as a result I don’t feel nearly as trapped as I often do in other games. For example right now I would love to have a Moose in World of Warcraft, but the raid I have connections with… that can easily get me one… happens to run at the same time as we record AggroChat. Do I want a moose because it is some status symbol, that somehow places me above other players? God no… I just like collecting mounts, and I like the idea that it looks like a normal group mount but can also fly. If I could plunk down money and pick that mount up on the store… you can bet I would rather than trying to do the copious amount of social engineering it will actually take to get me that damned mount. Warframe…. I can take either path. I can work with friends towards a goal… or I can simply grease the wheels and get everything I feel like I want faster. In truth… I feel like we as players are far more scared of “Pay to Win” than is really warranted.