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Week In Gaming 11/15/2015

November 15, 2015 by Belghast

Two Times the Monday

I’ve mentioned this before, but this week we got off in the middle of it for Veterans Day. While I completely support this holiday, I question the good of cutting a week down the middle. What it basically created for me at least was a whole lot of time I seemed to be occupying space in a chair but not getting much accomplished… because individuals smarter than me ended up taking either the entire front half of the week off… or the entire back half of the week off. Those people apparently did not coordinate well, which meant there was a skeleton crew on board and few of the people you actually needed to talk about this item or that available and ready to discuss. My hope is this coming week we can make up ground for all of the perceived lost time from this fractured week. On the gaming front though… this was a week entirely about Fallout 4. However while prepping the AggroChat episode I watched another sequence play out on twitter that I am going to get into towards the end of the post.

Irrational Desire

I am admitting here again that I am still struggling with an irrational desire to log in and play World of Warcraft. I think part of it is simply because I know that as much as I loved Gladiator… it will be going away in the coming expansion. Part of me wants to spend some more time playing as a DPS sword and board warrior while it still exists. Then the rational mind kicks and tells me that there is still nothing really there for you. The raid is gone, the guild is mostly gone… there just isn’t an infrastructure to return to. Similarly I realize that other than faffing about and running old content… there is nothing much there that I would really want to do. This reached its peak over the weekend while I was anxiously wanting to play Fallout 4, but not able to do it yet without VPN hackery. The problem is even though I am wallowing fully in the goodness that is post apocalyptic Boston…. there is still a bit of nostalgia tugging at my coat tails telling me that I would really like to log into World of Warcraft still. I have a slew of new content to go experience in Final Fantasy XIV as well, so hopefully between it and Fallout 4… I will slowly quell this desire. I am still really damned interested in seeing how Legion feels, so not giving up hopes on maybe being able to wrangle a beta invite somewhere… but unfortunately I think my past points of access are no longer available. If I had them I would have definitely tried to exercise one for access to Overwatch.

Viva New Vegas

Monday night I got so low that I booted back up Fallout New Vegas and spent a good deal of time wandering around there. I only managed to get as far as the Vikki and Vance casino before finally attempting to get Fallout 4 going. I have to say… it might be nostalgia talking… but I still absolutely love this game. I even popped in for a bit this morning to get this screenshot… and there is absolutely a direct lineage between Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4. The world feels the same… albeit considerably prettier in the newest incarnation. I guess this is why in part folks who hated Fallout… still hate it… and the folks that loved it… are having some of the best times of their life. New Vegas really raised the bar for the way the world felt, and it seems like Bethesda rose to the occasion and answered this narrative call. That said… there is a part of me that kinda hopes that we end up with a DC Metro and New Vegas reboot using the Fallout 4 engine… much the same way as we have one of those under works for Morrowind and Oblivion using the Skyrim engine. I would love to be able to roam around these areas with the fidelity that the new engine provides. Even then… I could still see myself returning to New Vegas time and time again… and loving every moment of it.

Critical Mass

The bulk of my week has been spent wandering around the Massachusetts area in the new Fallout 4 on the PC. Firstly I have to say… I am pleased and amazed at just how good this game looks and how well it runs on my fairly aging hardware. The game auto selected Ultra for me, and I have been playing on that since… with limited hick-ups. The game runs between 50-60 fps at all times and just works flawlessly. Folks are reporting all sorts of bugs… and honestly I haven’t really seen them other than the usual floating objects type issues when you are dealing with a complex open world game. For example… if you remove a table out front under a vase… there is a chance the vase will just hang there indefinitely rather than fall to the ground. This sort of stuff does not bother me at all, and I come to expect it when a game has physics and the ability to place objects. That said there are apparently a number of the traditional day one Bethesda bugs but I am happy to say that I have not encountered any of them… game breaking or not. Maybe I am simply lucky, or maybe I just have not gotten far enough into the game to experience them.

According to steam I am roughly 50 hours into the game… the problem with that is that I accidentally left it running one day while at work… so you can discount about eight hours of that time as that event happening. The rest of the time however is absolutely real… and I have built up at least partially every settlement that I have come across. That is the part of the game that is the real hook for me… especially now that I have trade routes going between the towns. I’ve said this before, but my big take away from why this game is more enjoyable than the previous incarnations is that it feels like I am actively making the world a better place. In other Fallout games… you were the good guy, simply because you were killing off all of the bad guys in the world. There was very little you could do to actually improve the lot of the other denizens of the wastes other than the occasional donation of money or fresh water. In this game… from the very beginning you are actively improving segments of the world and making it a decent place to live in. Sure the world is dangerous… but you are making it far less so for a group of settlers. That right there is the hook, and when I am out in the wastes… every hotplate and desk fan… excites me because I can go back and build something really cool with the parts.

Streaming and Games

While prepping this post today I watched a little exchange on twitter. Essentially one of my friends challenged streamers to do more with the games they are streaming. That it would be nice to have streamers take a mostly educational stance on either showing other gamers how to do something… or working through problems. While I think that might be pretty cool, the truth is that is not at all why game companies seek out streamers. I am going to give an analogy that is going to be a bit long winded, but stay with me. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, and in this part of the land there are few things more important than High School sports. I have my own damage thanks to this fact, and having no interest in sports at all… but that is a tale for another day. In a small town the team is the center of pride for the community… and while high school athletics has the possibility of making money for a district… in a small town it is mostly a giant hole that you pour money down. So when it came to maintaining facilities, it was always a struggle… and knowing this soft drink companies would often times ride in on a white horse to save the day.

There was not a small town anywhere near me that did not have either a big Pepsi logo or a big Coca-Cola logo on their score board. Of note I have no clue who’s scoreboard this one actually is, but I am just using it to illustrate my point. They would offer to sponsor the scoreboard, make sure the school district had a free supply of cups, lids and straws… brand new pop machines… and a discounted rate on the soda itself just so long as they would sign an exclusive contract with the brand and only allow their products to be sold at school events. The schools needed the goods they were offering… and could make money selling the product which then would end up supporting the school. Pepsi got advertising out of the deal and more than likely converted a good segment of the townsfolk into loyal Pepsi or Coke drinkers for life. My small town had Pepsi and it is probably no small coincidence that I grew up in a household that drank Pepsi and still drink predominately Pepsi products. The indoctrination works, and goes back for generations… so much so that when a school changes affiliation there is often times an uproar in the community.

But What about Streaming?

So you are asking yourself… Bel… you just told us an elaborate story… but you said it was about streaming? This is precisely what is happening with game companies and streamers. There is a natural symbiosis at work. The gamers need a fresh supply of whatever happens to be the hotly contested games to stream, in order to keep the eyeballs on their channel, and the companies need to have their games placed strategically on as many channels with as many eyeballs as possible. So even if there is no payola happening under the table… the streamers are actively promoting the products of these games companies. In fact there is a not so subtle desire on the part of the streamers to keep from burning any bridges with a company… because that could very well mean that they would lose their privileged access to new releases. On the part of the company… all they really want out of the deal is for this streamer to look like they are having a really good time playing their product, that way someone leaves the channel and gets convinced to subscribe or pre-order because it looked so appealing.

Sure it would make sense for them to serve a greater educational purpose… but honestly… the big popular streams aren’t doing this. The popular streamers are entertainers first and foremost. They are selling themselves playing this game more than the game itself. They build up loyal followings because the people are interested in the person, not so much what they are doing. The advertising still works however because it is subtle. They might have their back wall decorated in products of the company they are streaming for, or be wearing branded merchandise that the company provided… or even giving away items for the game on their streams. While all of these seems fairly natural and filters into our subconscious as benign… it is absolutely planned branding and ultimately we are the dollars that the companies and the streamers are trying to get. Once upon a time… game companies cared deeply about what the blogosphere was saying about their game. That time unfortunately is over, and over the last few months I have come to realize something. Blogging is not dead by any means… and nor is Podcasting really… but in the gaming sphere neither are they growing. Once you leave the land of MMO gaming… you are hard pressed to find ANY blogs devoted to games.

For example I have crawled the internet trying to find a source of news and information about Destiny other than Reddit. There is simply no one out there blogging on a regular basis and producing content explaining how the finer points of the game work. There are however hundreds of YouTube channels and streamers devoted to this niche. There are almost no blogs devoted to Call of Duty, but similarly there are thousands of channels devoted to it. While blogging was the comfort zone of my generation that grew up reading game forums… and podcasting is the natural extension of that… the next generation no longer really cares about it. They are completely connected to YouTube and Twitch as their game information sources, and as a result… I feel like the bloggers really don’t have much sway. I am not trying to do this as a living, so in the grand scheme of thing it doesn’t matter too much other than the fact that I don’t have much of a shot in hell of getting into this exclusive alpha or that limited beta. The companies know exactly what they are doing… and quite simply they are playing the numbers. They are putting their product in front of as many eyeballs as they can, and doing so in the medium that has the largest majority of those eyeballs… Twitch and YouTube.

Drag Experience

August 27, 2015 by Belghast

Youtube Gaming

The big buzz worthy thing that is happening right now is that Google is rolling out its Youtube Gaming platform. It proudly announces that finally there is a youtube for gamers! Which causes me to pause and ask… wasn’t YouTube already for gamers? At least 90% of the content that I watch on YouTube tends to be video game related so… I think it was doing a fine job before. What gets slightly lost in the marketing spin however is that they are now offering twitch like streaming services. Which in itself is a big confusing because I have had the ability to stream to YouTube for roughly a year now. There was even a page in my channel settings that explained how to connect OBS to the YouTube RTMP servers. I guess the big difference is that people are starting to actually use it. I played around a bit watching various folks streaming and there were a few issues. The biggest thing I kept running into was the stream was hitching periodically. It also seemed that people were confused and simply unprepared to field YouTube chat. Also it feels strange that when I interact with other people I show up as “Tales of the Aggronaut” which is my YouTube channel and not “Belghast”. I am wondering if this is a setting somewhere I can configure, but thusfar I have not found it. In fact there seems to be really limited configuration options for channels in the first place, which means… I sure hope you had your YouTube channel set up how you wanted it before the gaming site imports it!

On some level I find this all interesting, but mostly in passing. I’ve recently switched from attempting to make Hitbox a thing, to giving up and just using Twitch because I simply got more random viewers. I felt like Hitbox was the superior service in every way, because the most crucial thing for me is minimal delay between your stream and the channel chat. It becomes so awkward to try and hold a conversation with someone who happens to be watching your stream where there is a lengthy delay. Twitch recently put in functionality to help alleviate some of this, and it works… sometimes. In order for me to even consider switching to YouTube, there would have to be a set up similar to Hitbox where there was little to no delay. The problem being that what I am hearing in practice is that the chat delay is often longer than that of Twitch currently. I guess at some point I will swap the configuration in OBS and give it a test to see how precisely it works. The other thing that concerns me is that from what I understand your stream gets backed up to your YouTube channel regardless. I liked being able to pick and choose what I exported from Twitch, keeping my YouTube channel as a cleaner version of whatever I happened to stream. What are your thoughts so far if you have tried it or watched someone else streaming on it?

Drag Experience

When Diablo 3 2.0 was released the AggroChat folks played it quite a bit. For the most part all of us had characters in the level 60ish range… that is except for Kodra. Kodra had not really played much Diablo 3, but we knew that the game granted some extreme experience to folks being drug along with you. Over the course of a few play sessions we managed to catch him up, but it was an exceptionally fraught experience for him. Last night after our Final Fantasy XIV raid, my good friend Grace asked if I wanted to tag along as she farmed in Diablo. She would get bonus loot and I would be able to soak in the lions share of experience. During the course of an hour and a half I went from level 40 on my Crusader to level 70 gaining about 5 paragon levels after that. I got to experience first hand the sort of game play Kodra did, and I have to say I understand why it frustrated him. I would have leveled so much faster… if I could stay alive. Grace was farming Torment V which meant if anything even glanced in my direction I exploded in a violent eruption of giblets. I was simply playing a different game than what she was… which was more akin to dodgeball. Carefully trying to stay in the part of the screen where the mobs were not spawning, and dodging projectiles as they came in.

The resulting experience however was just silly. There was no point in ever repairing my completely broken body, because I was leveling out of my gear too fast for it to matter. Finally when I hit 70 I was able to piece together enough gear to be “passable”. The biggest problem is just how behind the curve you end up being when you finally hit the level cap. While I could survive damage for a bit, I lacked any semblance of gear to be able to actually do Torment V style damage. We did manage to encounter a few bugs that kept us from getting loot. The saddest of these occasions was when some treasure goblins died just out of bounds and I was able to watch a dozen legendary patterns rotting in a place I could not loot from. However we also completed a number of bounties, and from those I got plenty of patterns as well. This allowed me at the end of the night to craft a few legendaries and a green chest piece and get my gear at least to a point where I could function. I am super thankful for the speed run, because this gives me something to dink around with until the new season starts Friday. Right now the game plan is to start a Female Warrior, since I love Sonya so much in Heroes of the Storm. The crusader is awesome, but I am not sure if I want to duplicate that experience again so quickly.

Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015

May 1, 2015 by Belghast

It’s That Time Again!

Well folks it is once again May the First and as such time for us to begin the Newbie Blogger Initiative. For those that are unfamiliar with this program, I thought I would take a few minutes this morning and talk about what exactly it is and what you can expect from it over the coming month. May is essentially the month that bloggers set aside to helping create more bloggers. In order to do what we do we need a thriving community to live in, and this is our version of a neighborhood block party. I once referred to NBI as the BlizzCon of the gaming blogosphere, because really this is the event I look forward to each year. It is exciting seeing all of the new faces filtered into our world, and seeing others rededicate themselves to creating more frequent content. Others of us just enjoy helping folks out to get their start with whatever projects they are wanting to do.

For New Bloggers

If you have ever thought about creating a blog, a podcast, or a youtube channel this event is solely centered around you. For years we have heard that “blogging” is dead but the fact that I have over five hundred active blogs in my feedly account would disagree. Each time I go to read through my gaming blogs it is like drinking from a firehose. I love this and I love the fact that there is so much creativity packed into this community. However in order to keep this a vibrant and fresh community we keep needing to infuse it with some new blood and new ideas. One of the most difficult parts about starting any new venture is getting an audience. It can be frustrating to feel like you are writing into the void, and in part the Newbie Blogger Initiative is here to give you what you need most… exposure.

During this month the gaming blogosphere turns its eyes to the Newbie Blogger Initiative and by choosing to start a blog during this month we are essentially hand delivering you readers. Now of course starting the blog is the easy part, creating regular and creative content is the challenge. Throughout the month veteran bloggers will be giving you tips and tricks that we have to help ease your transition. This has always been a very blogging centric event, but we want to embrace all gaming content. There have been quite the number of new podcasts spawned out of this event and the connections with other bloggers, as well as a few folks dipping their toes into video creation. Essentially the sky is the limit on what you can do, but you have to start someplace and we are here to help.

For Veteran Bloggers

While all of this love is getting thrown around on the new bloggers, it is really the Veteran bloggers that make up the backbone of this initiative. We need you, your ideas and your wisdom. Blogging is rough, and getting up and doing this on a daily basis means we need some tools to be able to lean on. Each of you started out as a fledgling blogger at one point or another, and many of you got a massive boost by the Newbie Blogger Initiative in the past. Now is the time for us to step up and help the next generation to become the awesome bloggers of tomorrow. Many times these new bloggers just need someone to talk to and bounce their ideas off. I personally am always open to new blogger queries and during the course of this event I will end up trying to make a personal connection with as many of the new folks as I can.

What we need more than anything however is for you to keep making awesome content. Let the bloggers know what works for you, what you have figured out doesn’t work, and general ideas about how to make a blog successful. I’ve talked about a lot of topics in the past, and there are a few of them I end up dusting off almost every year. More than anything we need you showing that this is an achievable goal, and that given dedication you can succeed. Each of us has tricks that we use to keep us going, and at the end of the day someone starting this is going to need a big bag of tricks to lean on. Channel your gifts in whatever direction you feel best be it with writing prompts, tutorials or lessons learned, but whatever they might be we need you to make this work. There are already folks signed up on the forums waiting for us to find them, so I suggest you sign up as mentor today.

For Wayward Bloggers

Now especially I want to address a special kind of blogger this year that I might not have in the past. Have you lost your way blogging, and somehow lost the will to put pen to paper and create new content? While I am generally thought of as this prolific daily blogger, there are some pretty massive lapses in my blogging history. I recently celebrated my second anniversary of making posts every single day… but prior to starting that there was a seven month lag in my blog. It is easy to “fall off the wagon” for lack of a better term. Life gets in the way and your font of inspiration dries up… then the longer you wait to make a post the more pressure you put yourself under about making said post. We are our own worst enemies, and as the months tick you suddenly realize you are no longer really a blogger.

Newbie Blogger Initiative is also the perfect time of the year for you to get active once again. Sometimes we start down a path that doesn’t end up as sustainable for our interests, and other times life just simply throws us a curve ball. In any case I urge you to take this month to get back into blogging. We are here and waiting to help you with whatever you might need to tweak on your blog to make it sustainable. We are also waiting with a ready audience to consume your brand new and shiny content. Each year we lose a number of bloggers to life, and I am hoping to help resurrect some of them and get them making content once more. The Newbie Blogger Initiative is so much more than just a launch pad for new blogs. It can be the vitalization of our community every single year, giving us a new perspective to carry us through the next year. If you want to come back to blogging regularly, we are waiting for you.

#NBI2015

Hitbox is Beta

July 18, 2014 by Belghast

Changing Religion

I honestly do not remember when I first signed up for Hitbox.tv but it has been some time ago. I have this habit of signing up for everything that comes out if for not other reason than to reserve the name “Belghast” on any given network. I have belghast at outlook.com for example but will likely never use that email for anything considering I am joined to the hip with google products. In all honesty it was not until this week that I even considered using Hitbox for anything… until oftentimes tastemaker Scopique mentioned in a post that he was planning on using it for his website Levelcapped.com in part because he was actually able to get the name Levelcapped.

So being a sometimes devoted member of the internet Zeitgeist I gave it another look. It turns out that Hitbox has the single “killer feature” that I had been longing for from Twitch. As part of the default interface you are able to organize into “teams”, which is a functionality locked away on twitch until you become a partner. There is no way in hell I will ever have enough viewers to reach partner status on any network, let alone twitch. That said I still wanted to be able to create a shared channel for all of the Alliance of Awesome streamers so that we could give that out as sort of a television channel to anyone who was curious what all was going on in a given evening.

The other “killer feature” is the ability to have a configurable delay. By default everything on twitch is delayed by at least 30 seconds. In practice if you are doing HD streaming… this delay tends to be considerably more. Ultimately this delay was factored in for the purpose of competitive match play, but since I don’t really compete doing anything… it just becomes a pain in the ass to deal with when trying to respond to folks in chat. I’m a carebear and so rarely doing anything where prior knowledge of what I am doing… would actually matter at all. So while the stream is not actually instant either it is far more manageable, and probably something similar to the conditions that our oceanic gamer friends have to deal with on US servers.

Hitbox is Beta

The problem with the switch to Hitbox is that Twitch has become so damned ubiquitous that it works with almost everything simply by default. So while the livestreaming and video playback functionality work amazingly well, little things that I have come to just expect don’t function at all. For example after playing with it, I can seem to find no way that actually embeds a video from hitbox into my blog, nor does the documented embed a stream seem to work either. This would not be a huge deal since I try not to embed twitch either… but for the time being both their download your stream and export to youtube functionality also seems to be broken. They mentioned a few days ago on the @hitboxliveHelp twitter account that they should have a fix tomorrow… but at this point that tomorrow was two days ago.

In a day and age when “Beta” has come to mean a highly polished public preview… it is both refreshing and frustrating at the same time to see that Hitbox in fact really uses beta in the appropriate sense of the word. However none of us is really enough to scare me away from the service. For starters it seems like there might be a better integration point between my favorite little social network that could Anook and Hitbox in the near future. Also there are just so many things that are nicer for the streamer. Built in polls, and contests and the whole popout dashboard is extremely all nice. There are so many times that you have a few technical hurdles when you start up your stream, and having twitch spam your friends each time you start and stop OBS gets old. Having a panel that automates the message for you when you are good and ready is awesome. Additionally it seems to actually remember my channel title and the game I am playing, unlike with twitch when I seem to have to rename things half a dozen times each time I switch games.

The Results

All of this doesn’t really matter unless the results are nice. I’ve streamed for roughly five hours now and a combination of three different games. So far I think the end product has been excellent. There was a little bit of tweaking in my OBS settings, but I think all of that is working nicely. If you are curious check out some of the broadcasts below… since you know I can’t export them to youtube or embed them directly yet.

I think overall the stream looks really good, or at least good enough to keep me using the service given all the other advantages. The biggest thing for me is the ability to have the Alliance of Awesome team. So if you are using Hitbox or want to use Hitbox and already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… let me know and I will throw you an invite to the team.

Blaugust Update

I am still very much working on a mega prompts post, that I will likely make a little closer to the event. So far I have had a bit of interest in the proceedings and this makes me happy. My goal is to have sixty or more prompts that folks can pick from when in need of a topic. In part this is going to give me something to fall back on as well when I am having one of those blah mornings where I can’t think of anything to write. One thing that I wanted to make sure folks knew about is the Blaugust Anook community. If you are going to participate please pop out there and join the nook, as I am going to give folks elevated access to advertise their new posts out there.

The truth behind this initiative is a simple one. Newbie Blogger Initiative is like this shot of adrenaline in the arm of the blogging community. While it is going on everything is active and vibrant and regularly updated. That said a few months after the proceedings… folks start to wane a bit. My idea was to have Blaugust a few months after the initiative as a way of maybe kicking up the volume again. For some of the folks who have responded thusfar, this seems to be doing exactly that. At this point however I have no clue just how many people will be participating, but I am hopeful.

#HitBox #Blaugust