ps4 Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Virtual Reality

January 7, 2016 by Belghast

Next Big Thing

It feels like for the majority of my life, “Consumer Virtual Reality” has been roughly five years away…. or at least that is what the pundits are consistently saying. Granted I have been hearing this for the last three decades of my life. The 90s were really the era of this being the big thing, thanks to the popularity of movies like Lawnmower Man and the weekly reminder of just how amazing the Holodeck could be on Star Trek the Next Generation. The problem has been however that what we are actually capable of delivering, versus what we are expecting… has been a pretty huge gulf to cross. The first time I touched anything I would consider virtual reality, were the extremely expensive Virtuality arcade machines from the roughly 1991. You can see a screenshot of the type of graphics it delivered above. Sure it felt cool to be wandering around a fully immersive 3D world, but the amount of disconnect between your actions and the half dozen polygons that represented your hand… was pretty massive. The funny thing about this game is that apparently it was built on the Amiga 3000 as a hardware platform, which I guess only serves to show you just how advanced that system really was.

I guess for me Virtual Reality has been this failed promise for so long that I have doubted that it would actually really arrive. I threw in a few other examples in the collage above like Sega Holosseum from 1991 that chose to go down the smoke and mirrors route of creating the approximation of holograms, rather than trying to wrap you in a virtual landscape. In many ways it worked better, and playing the game felt like the 3D Chessboard from Star Wars. Then we had the famous Nintendo false step of the Virtual Boy from 1995, that came with the least ergonomic way of playing the game. I think the suggested method was to sit it on a kitchen counter or something…. and lean over to use it. However for MOST of the people I knew that had one they would end up laying on the couch and letting the console rest on their face. There were a bunch of negative effects of seeing the equivalent of gameboy quality graphics in red and black…. and the few times I used it I wound up with a nasty headache. Around 2003 I remember a good friend of mine having 3D glasses that hooked to the PC and provided 1024×768 screens for each eye, but this ended up working the hell out of the video card… and the framerates suffered. So basically… there have been a lot of technologies that have arrived telling me that Virtual Reality is here…. only to not really be the case.

Arrived at a Cost

It was roughly around this time last year that I got to play with the Oculus Rift for the first time. At Pax South I was scheduled to do a media demo of Elite Dangerous, and the marketing guy asked if I had ever used a Rift, and upon hearing that I had not shuttled me towards one of the two machines that had them. Granted there were around ten machines in total in the booth, and only two of them were hooked up and capable of using the Rift which immediately made me a bit suspicious. Firstly… I suck horribly at space shooters…. and they loaded up a dog fighting scenario for me to play where I was put up against a computer ship. The demo ended when either I killed the ship… or it killed me. Needless to say my demo probably took twice the amount of time needed as the other players, but it was really somewhat amazing the first moment when I realized that while chasing this ship…. I could look up through the top of the canopy to trace its movement. There was still the strange uncanny valley as I watched a set of hands move in the cockpit that were not my own. The computer was furiously trying to guess what my hand movements might look like based on the controls I was pressing on the real world HOTAS setup. After I destroyed the ship I asked the Marketing folks some questions, one of which was what sort of hardware they were running this demo on. Not surprisingly they had it running on an Nvidia Titan X which is still currently a roughly $1200 video card…. so I started to temper my expectations.

Yesterday the prices were released for the first generation of the Oculus Rift released for public consumer consumption. Granted at this point there have been several development kit models available for those daring enough to brave the potential issues of dealing with beta hardware. I guess in my mind the price point that seemed reasonable was around $300, because that is what the Samsung Gear unit retails for… and what the supposed price point of the Sony PS4 VR unit will be. I was not insanely shocked however when the pre-order price ended up at roughly double that amount $599. If that $600 price tag were a turn key solution that you simply plugged into the HDMI out on your existing PC, then I guess in truth that would probably be well worth it. However for the bulk of us… we are likely running hardware that is significantly less snazzy than their requirements. The minimum requirements listed are a Nvidia GTX 970 which is essentially a $350 video card. However I would not expect full performance in games like Elite Dangerous on anything lower end than a 980 ti… which pushes you into the roughly $650-700 price range on a video card. So before you have touched the rest of your computer set up at all… you are out $1300 in just the Rift and a high end video card. As much as I love this pipe dream, it is simply too expensive of one for me to even indulge the thought of.

Reality Sets In

The problem I have is that I have a $200 video card, not a $600 video card… and it is unlikely short of winning the lottery that I will ever be able to bring myself to spend that sort of money. I am sure as time goes on, people will get better at writing VR game experiences, and additionally the cost of the hardware itself will come down by the time it reaches the third or fourth generation of the Rift. For the time being, Nvidia gave some numbers that said rendering a game for a VR headset requires roughly seven times the amount of resources. So essentially I have ruled out the Oculus Rift as something I will ever be able to afford. I know my friend Scopique has been playing with some android VR options that supposedly allow you to create ghetto VR for the PC, and I am anxious to see how well these work out for him. Personally I think my first likely footsteps into this is in the form of the Playstation VR, and I linked in a video above to show off that unit and a few of the games. I already have the necessary hardware, namely in the form of a Playstation 4, and if the headset itself ends up being around $300 or even a little more… that becomes within the realm of possibility. Given that I managed to get my PS4 for only $200, that would make the total outlay for the system in the $500-600 price range which seems reasonable.

Essentially I am going to be happy as hell for anyone who manages to pony up the money to get a Oculus Rift. I’ve been watching another friend Qelric do videos every now and then showing off her beta hardware. I hope she can somehow end up getting one of the production units, so I can continue to live vicariously through her experiences. The problem is… that pricetag… is pretty damned steep regardless. The other big problem I have with the Rift so far is that I am not really seeing the killer apps other than Elite Dangerous. Most of the games she has played with feel more like “tech demos” rather than fully fleshed out rich gaming experiences that would sell a unit. RIGS on the other hand on the PSVR seems like exactly the sort of fun multiplayer hardware pushing experience that will get someone to add a headset to their Christmas list. I think the Oculus Rift right now is a true “enthusiast” experience, but isn’t quite “consumer virtual reality” just yet, and it is going to take manufacturers building games for the platform to finally make it worth the purchase price. In the time between however… I am going to continue being interesting in every bit of news I can find. From what I am hearing the units are apparently sold out through May 2016 delivery, so it seems like plenty of folks are willing to plunk down for purchase, and I am anxious to see the sort of experiences especially the youtubers and streamers showcase using the magic box.

License Portability

September 18, 2015 by Belghast

Golden Age of Ports

MortalKombatVersions

This morning is going to be yet another stunning example of “Bel Wants a Thing that Will Never Happen”, but I am going to roll with it anyways. One of my big frustrations over the last several years is when I end up repurchasing the same game for a different platform. For example I owned Fallout 3 long before Steam existed, but because I wanted the convenience of being able to play that game without having to rummage for discs every single time… I ended up picking the game of the year edition on a steam sale. But more often than this there are games that I have on the PC that I wish I could play on a console, or on a console and wish I could play on a PC. Last night there was a discussion about the new Shovel Knight patch, and one of my immediate thoughts was… man I kinda wish I had that on my 3DS since I have taken recently to bringing that to work to play. Sure it isn’t terribly annoying to repurchase a $20 game, but it certainly feels it when you are talking about a $60 game. Now we get to my wish… portable licensing. What I mean by that is the ability to swap licensing between various game systems that a game is available. Don’t want to play Borderlands 2 on your PC anymore? Fine trade that license in for the PS4 copy, and when you tire of that the Vita copy.

The problem is you are immediately going to tell me… “but Bel this is how game companies make money, by releasing their game on every possible platform in the hopes that you will play pokegame with them and buy them all!” Sure that is how things seem to work currently, but is that really a good model? For years there was a significant amount of work porting games between consoles. The Sega Genesis was a vastly different system than the Super Nintendo… and we constantly saw massive differences between the games that ended up on both platforms. I took the liberty of snagging two screenshots of two different versions of Mortal Kombat II, from the golden age of porting games to multiple platforms. You can see a bunch of graphical differences between the two based on the limitations of each architecture. What has changed is the fact that console manufacturers do not have the same sort of pull that they used to. PC Gaming became a major contender as has handheld platforms, and while console manufacturers still desperately cling to the notion of “exclusivity” this is a dying concept. Systems are designed from the ground up to be essentially easy to port code to, because they know that the keys to their success is a huge library of popular games.

License Portability

There are certain games out there that you know will ultimately end up on every single platform. Take the example of the new Tomb Raider game that Microsoft claims to have exclusivity over. They have not so subtly chosen their words every single time they have talked about and used the specific phrasing of “exclusive for holiday 2015”. That means a few months after Christmas 2015 you will end up with a new launch for the PS4 and PC and whatever other platforms seem to matter at the time. Essentially what I am proposing is to cut through this bullshit and simply sell licenses that you can move back and forth between the platforms. I can see this going down one of several different ways, but not all of them are terribly easy to implement. The best scenario is simply that if you purchase the game directly from a developer, you can create an account that allows you to log in and get a new license for whatever platform you happen to play the game on. That means you are paying a non-discounted rate for the game, directly to the game developer cutting out the middle man… and for that you gain the privilege of playing that game on whatever platform you happen to desire doing so. There are a lot of logistics with this one, but I could see it working for someone like Ubisoft that already has their own gaming infrastructure in the form of UPlay. That would actually turn that system from being a liability into being a positive for users, because as of right now… there is no reason for UPlay to exist other than to annoy us.

Another option would be some sort of a license swap scenario, where you trade in one license key for a new license key for the system of your choosing. This honestly would work similar to PC software that allows you to install on a fixed number of machines. In these cases there is almost always an online tool that allows you to unbind a license from a specific machine and install it fresh on another to allow for things like system rebuilds. The problem being that right now there is no real way to make sure these licenses are leaving circulation, as in once a game is granted through a system like PSN, it becomes harder to revoke the game since you are having to deal with a third party company doing it for you. The final option I would suggest is probably the easiest. When you own the game on any platform you could purchase heavily discounted copies of the game for other platforms. My theory is that you would ultimately end up paying something along the lines of 15-20% of the cost of the original game to get a new copy of the game for another platform. The problem here is that a system like this would be rife with potential abuse. What is to say that I don’t buy the game on the PS4, and then get a discount key for my friend to play on their Xbox One. The worse case scenario is after market sales of said discount keys. None of these solutions are perfect, but I feel like if someone actually solved this solution… it would be a huge marketing point for any games they produce. I have several PCs, a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS, PS Vita, Android device, and iOS device if you limit the search to only the more recent systems. It would be amazing to play the gamesI want to play on whatever systems they are available… without going bankrupt doing so.

FFXIV for PS3 Closeout

March 22, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #49 – Road Trip Fantasies Type-0

During this show we are joined by our normal cast of Belghast, Rae, Tam, Kodra and Ashgar as we devote the majority of the show to lots of different things Final Fantasy. We talk the release of the Final Fantasy XV Demo and how this has sent Tam back into the 90s. We talk Final Fantasy Type-0 and how we are enjoying this very different Final Fantasy Offering. We also talk about how the Final Fantasy franchise going to more “on rails” games turned several of us off the franchise for awhile. Ashgar beats Ori and the Blind Forest and talks a bit about his feelings regarding the ending. Tam talks about his enjoyment of Dreamfall Chapters and how it isn’t really required that one has played the previous games. Rae talks about her new Noms website, where they plan on making a recipe a week and reflecting on what the various authors think of it.

I talk about my current funk with my World of Warcraft raid and how the frustrations there are harshing my enjoyment. We also delve into a deep session once again where we talk about the differences bertween WoW and FFXIV raiding. We also have a session of “Tam Told us So” now that the news about crafting specialization has taken some of the focus away from us all becoming Omni Crafters. I talk about my return lately to Elder Scrolls Online and the conversion to a Buy To Play system. I talk about a game I did not expect to like but find myself begrudgingly enjoying, and that is ZMR: Zombies Monsters Robots. Finally we close out the show with some discussion about the League Championship Series and the introduction of the new roaming support champion… Bard.

FFXIV For PS3 Closeout

Yesterday we spent the day mostly roaming around, in an effort to get out of the house more than anything. Tis the season for post Christmas clearance in all the various stores as they start closing out one seasons stuff in preparation for summer. This is generally an awesome time to pick up all sorts of random bits, but more often than not I am hunting for Legos. I’ve already found several sets deeply discounted and I have reached the point where I really don’t pounce on something until it is at least half off or more from the original price. In my journeys yesterday I noticed that it seems like all of the Target stores are closing out their PS3 copies of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. This creates a unique opportunity for players who have been on the fence about playing the Game. Throughout my journeys yesterday I found it between $6 and $10 for a boxed copy of FFXIV PS3. Now if you act very quickly you can turn this PS3 copy into a PS4 copy with several caveats.

Firstly this offer goes away on March 31st, so you will have a limited amount to time to actually do it. Secondly you have to have a PS3 or access to a PS3 to make this work. You have to log your PSN account into a PS3 and bind that PS3 to your account. Then you have to boot up FFXIV and log into the game, thereby registering your PSN account to your Square Enix account. Finally you have to go into the Mogstation and you can click the link that should now appear at the bottom of your account screen. This should give you a code that you can then enter through the Sony Playstation store on your PS4 to get a copy of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn of PS4. This is a ton of hoops to jump through but it should allow you to get a copy of FFXIV ARR for really cheap. There are some caveats here… firstly when you claim your PS4 copy, it nullifies your PS3 copy. Secondly this does not give your account a PC License, which would be a separate purchase. I did this some time ago myself but I had forgotten all of this bullshit that you have to do until yesterday when a friend was trying to make this work. I normally play on my PC but I like having the option to play on PS4 especially since you can remote play through a Vita or PSTV. Granted the controls are kinda wonky, but it would be well worth figuring it out for leveling and crafting as such.

City Building

Another game that I have been playing around with lately is the confusingly named Cities: Skylines. It seems like I was suffering the same confusion that so many other gamers seem to be… that Skylines was somehow connected to the Cities XL and Cities XXL franchise. That colon apparently is there to somehow differentiate the games, because they are in fact from two different companies. I had played XL in the past and was not terribly impressed, so when I say the buzz about Skylines I for the most part ignored it. That was until I actually watched some game play footage and saw that the game was essentially everything I wanted the last couple of Simcity titles to be. Overall the game feels very much like a logical successor to Simcity 2000, which was really the last big city building game that I enjoyed playing. If you take the concepts from that game, and bring them up to modern standards you have the Skylines interface. The game strikes this balance between trying to have mind bending graphics and being pleasant to look at and play with.

I took this screenshot because I am pretty damned proud of getting my first upgrade. Apparently in the years since I have played Simcity 2000, I have gotten pretty horrible at city building. The biggest problem I am having with skylines is that it seems difficult to figure out how best to build the roads and utilities to conserve space for zoning. The above city is actually my second attempt at creating something viable, and so far it is working okay. My first city was a complete mess because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I have a feeling that this second city will also be a learning experience as I try and figure out how best to optimize putting in an electrical grid and such. All I do know for certain is that skylines is definitely a way to lose an hour without realizing it. I started playing this as my wife was getting ready to leave yesterday morning, and next thing I know she was ready. I feel like I need to watch some people playing it to figure out how best to do things again. The standard grid that I used to build in doesn’t appear to really work here. If nothing else this feels like the true “next best city building game.

Wrestling with DRM

October 11, 2014 by Belghast

Laptop Weekend

Here in Oklahoma it is a rainy nasty weekend. I pretty much rained all day yesterday, and this morning when I went out to get breakfast I ended up completely soaked. As such I have declared this weekend a “hang out on my laptop while curled up in blankets” weekend, and so far it has been pretty glorious. Unfortunately a good chunk of it has been updating my laptop, since it has probably been six month since I have regularly played down here. All in all it is not going terribly badly as I have had both my Vita and phone to play on while the laptop downloads patches and such. I have to say I have so much frustration over allowing myself to get sucked into a mobile game.

Years ago my wife and I used to play a game at the state fair that involved throwing tokens in the path of a sliding shelf that pushes coins off of the edge. I had always enjoyed this game, and that first year at the state fair we spent way too much money getting the swing of it. We played for hours and after about $50 spent all we had to show for it was a bullet keychain. In successive years I got better and started learning the little tricks, like you can trade in the crappy little gifts for more tokens to collect these poker chips in order to buy bigger prizes. That second year we walked away with a nice sized stuffed animal, and I think the third year we walked away with like five as we had figured out how to game the system.

Unfortunately Dragon Coins by Sega is exactly this game, but made even more addictive. You take the already addictive coin pusher mechanic and attach it to a pokemon like monster collection and evolution minigame… and you have a recipe for constant mobile addiction. Right now I am cursing Liores and Aro for talking about this game on the Cat Context podcast several times because finally I got curious enough to try it. Now I am afraid I am hooked. Thankfully as far as games go this one doesn’t feel too egregious yet. There is a ton of “free” content to play and so far I have not encountered any roadblocks that absolutely required me to purchase anything. It at least gives me something to play when I am out shopping with my wife.

Wrestling with DRM

One of the things that I spent last night installing and updating was Dragon Age: Origins. Since I intend to be spending a bit more time downstairs I figured playing DA:O while catching up on television was a good activity. I did not even have Origin installed on my laptop, so I went through the motions of doing that last night and then set to downloading Dragon Age Ultimate Edition. For whatever reason the DRM on that game and I have struggled throughout the years. It worked miraculously well upstairs when I reinstalled it a few weeks back so I thought maybe, just maybe Origin had worked out the kinks. When I went to set it up on the laptop apparently there are still issues because while it downloaded the base Dragon Age… it did not seem to download any of the addons.

To make matters worse windows 8 does not appear to like the Dragon Age Updater program and it just simply is not running on my laptop at all. So all of the directions from the Origin support site for restoring access to your addons does not appear to work at all. What I finally ended up doing was manually copying all of the addons from my desktop upstairs to the laptop over the network. Now when I boot up the game it appears to see everything just fine. But I could see someone with less patience giving up long before we reached that point. Dragon Age seemed to be a problem child, because I never went through any of the issues while playing any of the Mass Effect games. So here is hoping the DRM scheme for Dragon Age: Inquisition is equally unobtrusive.

Of note for those who have not played Dragon Age: Origins before and would like to in preparation for the launch of Dragon Age: Inquisition… it is now apparently available for free from origin. This game is well worth your time spent, and going back and playing it has made me remember just how much I loved the original game as compared to Dragon Age II. Honestly I am not in the “I Hate 2” camp, but the first game is simply better in every possible way. I figure just playing through the first one is more than enough to introduce you to the setting and its characters and conflicts. More than anything that was what I was trying to do while replaying the game, is to remember all of the intricate struggles.

The Grim Dark Future has Tradeskills

One of the problems I am having with Destiny is the fact that you reach this point in the end game where your entire life becomes about grinding otherwise meaningless things. There are folks who will farm level 2 mobs over and over for five hours in the rare chance of getting drops, or return to previous content areas feverishly hunting for spinmetal or any number of other crafting materials. Unfortunately these are not extreme players, but representative of the expected gameplay that games at the end of your twenty level story arc. The end game of Destiny involves the collection of otherwise unimportant bits that you then use to upgrade your armor slots, in hope of getting enough “light” out of it to push yourself up yet another level. Right now my life is about getting Spirit Bloom, Relic Iron and Plasteel… so it has me wandering aimelessly through the hunting zones in search of ground spawn nodes and chests.

My tolerance for mindless grinding is considerably higher than that of my friends, so while I am still able to find fun in this process… most of them have long since tapered off their play time. I have managed to push myself up to level 25 after doing a ton of upgrading. The problem is even I am not sure how much further I care to take the game when the end result is so damned repetitive. I suppose I could start trying to do the crucible, but I didn’t really get into this game for its player versus player gameplay. I realize I likely expected something out of Destiny that it will never really deliver, but up until the point I hit 20 I have to say I enjoyed all of the content from that point on. I even enjoy running the patrol missions because they give me little bursts of purpose… I just wish the patrol missions had a chance of rewarding you the crafting materials you need to progress. That ultimately would be a massive improvement that would breathe new life into the game for me. As of now Destiny is that game I play while waiting on something else, either waiting on my wife to get home, or waiting on something to spawn in Final Fantasy XIV.

#Destiny #DragonAge #DragonCoins