RPG

Jedi Survivor Early Thoughts

by

Good Morning Friends! I hope this week is excellent. Last week was a kick in the teeth as far as weeks go, so by the time I reached Friday evening I was just too exhausted to start anything new and unfamiliar. So as a result I did not get engaged in Star Wars Jedi Survivor until Saturday morning, as I wanted to start the game with fresh eyes and a good perspective on life. I am playing on PC and I had a really good experience playing at 1440p and at the default settings which are a mix of High and Epic. I did not have any significant instances of slowdown other than one place on the first real planet where there is just a massive volume of particle effects.

That is absolutely not the case for everyone. Digital Foundry who obsesses about PC detail and performance has decreed this the worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023. When we recorded the show on Saturday night I found out that Tam was bit by this problem. My system is fairly beefy with an 11th gen Intel i7, RTX 3080, and 16 GB of ram… but so is his with a Ryzen 7, RTX 3070, and 128 GB of ram. Both are systems that should have run the game at 60 fps at 1440p without any issues. It did on my machine but it absolutely did not on Tam’s which led him to refund the game on Steam and pick it up on the PlayStation 5. Basically, I am throwing this out there so if you are on the fence… maybe wait a bit on the PC version of the game.

When you boot up the game, it is going to give you a warning message stating that the game is best played with a Controller. If you are most comfortable with a keyboard and mouse, then I would ignore this completely. I remember the first game having this warning as well, and I took its advice and bounced off the game pretty quickly. It was not until I stuck to my guns and played the game with my more greatly preferred mouse and keyboard input that I made it all the way through the game. Essentially I am telling you to take this with a grain of salt. There is one thing that frustrates me greatly though. While you technically can change some of your keybindings on the PC, you can’t change all of them. For example, I want to change dodge to something other than tab… because that feels like a keybinding decided upon by Joe in Accounting. So if you play with Mouse and Keyboard there are going to be some things you are just stuck with.

At this point, I don’t want to talk a ton about anything that would venture into the territory of spoilers. The game is gorgeous and manages to do something that so few games do. It allows you to pick up effectively where you left off without having some narrative device that caused you to forget everything you learned in the previous game. You effectively start with all of the movement and traversal abilities that you had at the end of Fallen Order and rapidly add a few new tricks to your repertoire including apparently the Jedi Mind Trick. The last bit I have admittedly only used once so far, and it was during a speech dialog, but I can influence animals with the force to either calm them or agitate them and get them to attack baddies.

The Tutorial Planet takes place on Coruscant, giving us an amazing romp through the lower levels of the machine city. After completing that mission arc and refreshing yourself on all of the movement, you are set loose on a much more open planet allowing you to explore fairly freely. This gives the game a bit of a Breath of the Wild feeling, though the exploration is not quite THAT free but you do eventually unlock the use of animals as gliders. You also open up a new lightsaber stance which is the ability to break apart your lightsaber into two sabers and fight dual-wielding style. This has absolutely been my jam so far and I am investing heavily in the ability to throw my sabers at enemies.

There are way more friendly folks scattered throughout the world that you can help out. There is also the introduction of Boglings, which serve a similar function to the golden birds from Ghost of Tsushima in that they occasionally lead you to the next objective. You can of course pet the Boglings which is super pure. The detail of the world is so much better than in the previous game. Fallen Order suffered from the problem of several tunnels and areas of work looking pretty similar to other areas. I know this was really bad on Kashyyyk, and caused me to get completely turned round at several points. Navigating here by visual landmark seems to work much better for me at least, but they have also improved the 3D mapping system if you need to lean on that instead.

Over the weekend I played all of the way through the Tutorial planet and unlocked everything that I think I can currently from the second planet. This led me onto the third planet… which frustrated me to the point of shutting down the game and going back to Path of Exile for a while. This third planet is “the floor is lava” the planet, and is comprised of shale piles that you can’t walk up without sliding down… and some sort of sandworm-like creature that can detect your movement and jumps up from the ground to eat you. Which means you have to do a series of annoying wall runs and duck from shelter to shelter while traversing the early areas. I opted to bail out because I did not want to tarnish the great experience of that second planet. I am sure I will return to it at some point this week and deal with the frustrations.

Probably my favorite aspect of the new game is that I can finally have a beard. Look this is important to me. I also can fiddle a bit with different styles of gear and assign some basic color options. My hope is as the game continues there are some really cool-looking options. What I really want is something akin to Obi-Wan’s Jedi Battle Armor from the prequel series. I have a few pieces of tactical armor that I have picked up but nothing quite that grand. As far as the story goes, it isn’t terribly interesting as of yet but does seem like it is going to bridge the gap between the Kenobi Series/Rogue One era of Star Wars and the burgeoning High Republic era. Nothing really has grasped me though story wise other than the desire to “get the band back together”, as all of the characters went their separate ways at the end of the first game.

I think that is probably all I will talk about for now. Expect more attempts at spoiler-free updates on my progress. If you were going to play this on PC… maybe wait for a patch for two until someone like Digital Foundry calls the all-clear.

Blade of Woe

by

First off with some business to attend to that is Blaugust related.  The very awesome Chestnut has been maintaining a twitter list of all of the folks participating in Blaugust 2018 that are on that platform.  Next up I was asked to participate in a couple of blogs, one with recording a promo that they could edit in and another actually sitting down and talking a bit about the event.  Those have both made their way into production as it were, and first off you have my promo that appears near the tail end of Geek to Geek Podcast with Void and Beej.  Next up I recorded a bit with Syp at the tail end of the Massively OP Podcast, but in both of these cases you should totally listen to the entire show because they are excellent.  I always enjoy the conversations that happen between Void and Beej and then  Syp and Bree as well so two shows always worth listening to.

Over the last few days I have not done the whole morning Blaugust updates in part because the sign ups had slowed down a bit.  However with the spots on the two podcasts we seem to have had an influx of new folks.  On the sheet I ask where folks heard about Blaugust, and so far one of my happiest moments is when I get a submission that says something other than the equivalent of “Bel Told Me” because that means we are spreading out and expanding our reach.  At this point we have 48 blogs signed up to participate and we still have some time before the festivities actually start…  I am cheating a bit with that number because technically one has not signed up but I know it is incoming.  If you are wanting a list of all of the participants and mentors I am keeping a google sheet with only the relevant information in it for folks to use on blogrolls and the like.

New Mentors

New Participants

As always though there is plenty of time to get started.  Pop over and fill out the sign up sheet to get registered, and then pop by the Discord to hang out with other Blaugustans.

eso64-2018-07-19-22-28-55-38

In gaming news, last night I started the Dark Brotherhood series of quests and so far they are pretty freaking cool.  This was always one of my favorite guilds in the Elder Scrolls games because I like the whole Sithis and the Night Mother thing going on as well as the fact that in spite of being a bunch of blood thirsty killers…  there is this interesting family dynamic happening.  This sanctuary is no different and there are some really cool things happening from the sounds of it, and I am interested to see how the events fold out this time.  The Dark Brotherhood quest lines tend to go in a specific direction…  as do the Thieves Guild to be honest.  The Elder Scrolls Online Thieves Guild was in fact a traditional Elder Scrolls Thieves Guild story…  so I have certain expectations of how things are about to go here as well.

I am not very far into the quest line and have only done a few contracts, but I am absolutely and completely down with how Blade of Woe has been implemented in this game.  I like that it just gives me an assassination ability instead of making me wield a freaking dagger.  I am not a stealthy character, but the truth is…  Dark Brotherhood is probably going to make me one because I am not sure how long I can pay the upkeep of constantly having a couple thousand gold in bounties on my head.  Now the first trait in the DB skill line seems to reduce the amount of bounty gained when someone witnesses a murder…  but regardless I need to be at least a little stealthy in my hits.

eso64-2018-07-19-22-18-45-14

I do not really like forced stealth mechanics, and my brand is more about charging into battle in a nonsensical manner and as a tank gathering up all that enemy hate.  This is not conducive to the Thieves Guild, but you can absolutely go in that direction with the Dark Brotherhood.  If you want to complete a mission by making sure there is 100% body count… then by all means that is a thing that can happen.  However it becomes painfully obvious that every one of those kills is going to cost you in the long run, with a very tangible bounty associated with it.  I came out of one mission with roughly 5500 gold in bounty on my head…  and while I could have waited awhile for that to drop I made my way to the nearest outlaws refuge and took care of it rather than be hassled by the guards.

Now that I have gotten slightly better at using Blade of Woe I am doing a better job of getting those kills in unnoticed and as a result reducing that gold footprint.  This game is teaching me to be stealthy and while it is weird for me to say it…  I am actually enjoying it more than I have in pretty much any other game.  I was extremely proud of myself the first time I got into a building unnoticed and back out without having to use one of the magical stealth baskets.  The mission I ran at the beginning of the night involved roaming around a palace and it mostly felt easy to go where I needed to go because I am starting to develop the reflexes needed to sneak about.  There is a certain muscle memory that I am developing that I have never really had in the past.  In other Elder Scrolls Games the only reason why I ever used sneak…  was to land a bow shot with the damage multiplier.  This time it feels like it allows me to move around freely and avoid entanglements I might not want to deal with.  All in all… still having a blast even though I was initially grumpy with the forced stealth.

Snipers and Hellboars

by

desktop-screenshot-2017-11-16-06-38-25-22

One of the core problems with Destiny 2 is that progression is all about luck.  What I mean by that is especially as you wind down towards the end of the power curve, everything lives or dies upon what you happen to pull from your powerful engrams each week.  Once upon a time SquirrelPope told me that he started getting random world 300 blues when he hit 299.5 on his base light level.  I’m at 299.8 at this point and have yet to see one and nor have I actually seen any of the supposed vendor engrams that go as high as 300.  At this point on my Titan I need a chest and a class item to hit 305, which admittedly is way sooner than it happened during the console release.  That said everything is luck of the draw for me and this week my luck was just about as bad as I could possibly get.  In total I got six sniper rifles among the nine powerful gear packages that I have opened on my characters.  Sniper rifle being the only weapon that I consider utterly useless because I have yet to find one that is even close to being worthy of that power slot.  Grenade Launcher is traditionally a stinker as far as slots go, but even there I have Berenger’s  Memory and Play of the Game that I like using.  If I absolutely had to use a sniper… so far the only one that seems even viable is Gentleman Vagabond from crucible packages but even then…  there are so many other good weapons that I could be using in that slot.

I tweeted this comment out last night and I thought I would post it on my blog as well this morning.  I promise I meant this to be helpful and not ragey, but it does frustrate me when I see players effectively wasting the scorch cannon rounds spamming the crap out of them.  I admit that I did not know this was even possible until I got to run the Wrath of the Machine raid in Destiny year three, so I went that long effectively using them wrong myself.  The scorch cannon at face value looks like a rocket launcher with a lot of ammo, but it is way more than that even though the bosses that use it never actually use them to their full power either.  With Titan being the weekly flashpoint planet, you are going to encounter a lot of scorch cannons considering 2 of the 3 available events on that planet involve Fallen Walkers.  The weapon has a somewhat hidden alternate fire that involves holding down the trigger after you have fired the round and letting the munition grow in size before releasing and letting it explode.  You are going to have an auditory and visual queue to this and while you can continue to let this go and keep gaining strength as Squirrel pointed out last night, my personal experience is that the 4 second rule seems to be the most efficient for killing those walker tanks.  What I do is fire a round and then duck behind cover while holding the trigger allowing the munition to grow in size and about 4 seconds into holding it visually doubles in size.  At this point I let it go and let the damage get dealt while lining up a shot for another round.  Basically doing this will burn your target faster and easier I might add than spamming rounds and also give you more than enough ammo to take out both tanks with a single Scorch Cannon.  The AOE explosion is also fun for dealing with waves of yellow bar captains and such, but unfortunately this is a tidbit of ancestral knowledge that has not yet circulated through most of the population given that I see most players wasting these weapons.  As a result I just wanted to toss this thought out there and hopefully it sticks.

world-of-warcraft-screenshot-2017-11-16-06-34-55-57

As far as last night goes however…  after my crushing disappointment of being in sniper rifle hell…  I decided to chill out on the sofa with my new favorite orc.  At this point I am just shy of level 64 and am still in the Hellfire area cleaning up the quests.  In theory I should be able to completely skip Zangarmarsh and go to Terrokar, doing the every other zone leapfrog across Outland much like I have done with Legion content.  There is something extremely relaxing about Warrioring it up and all the while chatting occasionally with the Facepull crew horde side.  Mostly World of Warcraft is serving as this super relaxing comfort gaming time for me, and with work being as stressful as it has been lately I guess I am finding I need it.  Right now it is looking like I won’t really get to take much time off for the holidays other than the default days they give us off.  I have too many deadlines crashing in together at the same time, and this is also throwing a massive monkey wrench in my traditional Pax South plans.  Right now unless something massively changes I will not be attending this year which is a bit of a bummer considering I’ve gone every year since its inception so far.  It also means I will miss out on meeting up with friends and hanging out… and the biggest bummer of all is that I just found out my friend Cuppy is on a panel this year.  I would have loved to have seen that, but then again I am absolutely horrible at actually attending panels at Pax.  I tend to miss them while wandering around doing other things.  Even if not for Pax I am hoping to make it back to Austin as some point in the future.

Megafauna Rider

by

HorizonZeroDawn_20171006125209

I spent most of my weekend playing Horizon Zero Dawn instead of Destiny 2 for a change.  On Saturday night we recorded our September game club show and as a result I pushed myself to beat the main story quest in HZD.  Firstly…  this is really a foreign mode of play for me and in many ways it takes a lot of fun for me out of the game to focus fire on the main story.  I remember bowing out of the FFXV show in part because I didn’t want to ruin the game by forcing myself to ignore all of the side stuff.  With Horizon Zero Dawn I am sorta glad that I forced myself past this hump and buckled down on finishing.  This might be some of the best science fiction that I have experienced regardless of form factor be it book, movie or game.  The problem is it takes a really long time into the game before the hooks are set and you get enough of an inkling of what might be happening just beneath the surface.  There is this place that a lot of people seem to stall out, where you exit the sacred lands of the Nora and before you are handed the reins to the real story of the game.  I personally stalled out here as did Void and I have a sneaking suspicion SquirrelPope did as well based on some comments last night.  Once you get past this hump however it is an amazing roller coaster of a ride all the way to the finish.

HorizonZeroDawn_20171006202442

Since I was forced to play in a manner that is really not my style, I spent some time Sunday going back and meandering my way through the world.  The game does the whole hand wavy “the final events have yet to happen” thing after you finish the credit roll.  I feel this obligation to sit through the credits as a sort of homage to all of the people and work that went into making the game.  This one however tested my resolve because it is quite possibly the longest credit roll I have seen, but it just shows how much effort goes into making a modern AAA blockbuster.  I do however highly suggest you wade through because there is a massive payoff at the end that explains one of the weird little things that happens in the world as you explore it.  I think more than anything that is what I love the most about this game… it is constantly planting seeds that do in fact grow into something cool by the end of the game.  There seems to be nothing placed in this world that does not at least eventually lend its way to a larger purpose.  The secrets of the game are revealed to you at the same time as they are to your character Aloy, and as a result the experience is really interesting.  There were several times I thought I had guessed how this was all going to play out in the end, but the game kept throwing me curve balls.  The end result is a mythos as rich as any of the big tenets of geekdom, and I am absolutely rabidly looking forward to the expansion that is coming in November.