the division Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Not First Rodeo

March 8, 2016 by Belghast

The Waiting Game

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country. Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock. My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us. It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle. The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play. I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo. To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy. My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam… which was a process that took over twenty minutes. I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight. The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division. My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around. After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me. It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing. Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit. That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty. This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead… which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp. The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around. This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation. I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay. If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light. Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it. I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley. The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great. At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them. I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions. I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”. While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again… I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game. It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well. Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us. Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two. I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error. As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard. It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile. My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction. In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines… this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option. During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window. It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable. Dear UbiSoft… never do this again… in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu. I mean I get what they are going for… wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game… but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta. So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan. I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue. I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon. The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available. I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land. If the servers stay stable… like will be golden. I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night. However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Last night was another night that was all over the place. Firstly I decided to reinstall Forge.gg and give it another chance. I have so many mixed emotions about this service, I like the concept that I can grab short clips at the end of my gaming session. I dislike the fact that I can ONLY grab short clips, which are generally too short to show a boss fight for example. I like the always on nature, and that it can just run in the background without me feeling like I need to be entertaining. However I ran into some issues last night where apparently even though I had push to talk set… it was still actively picking up my microphone the entire time as you can see in the above clip. So you get a snippet of a conversation between my wife and I about something I don’t even remember. I like the idea of streaming but I don’t always want to be actively interacting, and forge is this great middle ground. Ultimately I wound up muting my microphone at a system level just to make sure that it was not picking up. I am hoping this is just a bug in the current client, and I will crawl the site to see if I can find out why this was happening.

The other gotcha it seems is that it did not pick up and start recording Elder Scrolls Online. I spent the first part of the evening doing garrison dailies and doing at least one Tanaan objective in World of Warcraft and it recorded all of that perfectly. However as soon as I swapped into ESO, it never came up with the forge icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen letting me know it is recording. I will say that the really really nice thing about the client is sometime in between my last attempt at using the service and this one… it seems to work nicer with Fraps because there is no way I am giving up that just to use the service. I am too used to having a common and centralized screenshot tool for all of the games I play. It is an absolute necessity that I have a fresh source of new screenshots for this blog, and I hate having to try and find the screenshot directory for each individual game. So instead I tend to unbind the screenshot key if it is allowed and just use Fraps for everything. It was awesome last night that I was able to use fraps just fine while still recording on forge…. at least when it came to World of Warcraft. I am going to be a sad panda if that ends up being the issue with it recording Elder Scrolls Online.

Return to Greenshade

eso 2016-02-29 20-13-11-90

The bulk of my time last night was spent wandering around Greenshade in the Elder Scrolls Online. Generally speaking I tend to play this game by wandering aimlessly from objective to objective, but last night I actually seemed to move through the zone with a purpose. That purpose being ingratiating myself to the Court of the Wilderking, a forest spirit that controls the Valenwood and that the local Bosmer worship as a God King. As part of trying to quell the rebellion and steal forces away from the Veiled Heritance, my mission was simple… get the support of the Wilderking to get the support of the local forces…. thus ending the rebellion. I of course did a bunch of other stuff along the way, and I am not entirely complete with the main story sequence… but I am having a blast. I got sidetracked in helping a friend level in World of Warcraft, and then again by the Love is in the Air event…. and finally I am settling back into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. Granted currently I will probably continue to hop games like mad because there is just so damned much stuff that I want to be playing. In Elder Scrolls I have yet to see any of the Imperial City content, or Orsinium… and they are just about to release the Thieves Guild as well. So much catching up to do… but at the same time I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it because I am not playing the game at a serious end game focused level.

eso 2016-02-29 22-47-26-19

The other big happening of the night is that I finally dinged Veteran Rank 4, allowing me access to the next tier of crafted gear. I was doing awesome…. until I screwed up and rushed to get my shield made and forgot to go to the set crafting area. Originally I was planning on having 5 piece Alessia’s Bulwark, and 4 piece Ashen Grip… except I am now sitting at 3 pieces in that set because I got sidetracked and ended up making a non-set shield. Unfortunately I am completely out of the right kind of wood so I will need to do some more adventuring before I can finish things out. For the time being I have opted to abandon my costume and go with the actual armor look because I dig the Imperial armor look. I will probably always favor the Dunmer sword type, though recently I did enjoy using an axe for a bit. The game looks amazing on the laptop, and I am so damned happy with how well everything is performing to be honest. It does get a little hot but then again what gaming laptop doesn’t. My previous one had a SLI graphics card configuration so had insanely hot air venting out of both sides of the laptop. At least this setup isn’t continuously baking my mouse hand. I just need to sort out why exactly Forge was not recording the game.

The Division

TheDivision 2016-02-21 10-00-02-54

Also looming on the near horizon is the launch of The Division. At this point it is absolutely certain that I will be playing it on the PC, at least at first. When the price comes down a little I will probably also pick it up for the PS4 so that I have access to it for any of the friends that happen to be playing there. For the last few days since the end of the beta I have trying to sort out how best to organize folks for the upcoming launch. The game itself does not really have guilds or clans or any structure like that…. at least that I saw in the two betas I have been part of. So as a result this is going to make getting stuff going a little more difficult than in other games. However my friend Sigtric, the man who coined the hashtag #BelEffect is firing up a Discord group and attempting to get it to be the official/unofficial chat server for the game. If you are going to be playing I highly suggest you pop by and join the “Gone Rogue” community. There is a shared general chat and breakout channels for PC, PS4, and Xbox One to make organizing things a little easier. I honestly wish I had something like this for Destiny. Discord is one of those things that is growing on me, and while I still find Slack easier to use… there is a point in the near future where I could see abandoning traditional voice servers and moving to Discord entirely.

Unexpected Change

February 22, 2016 by Belghast

Strange Transition

I entered this weekend very much favoring the Playstation 4 version of The Division, because quite simply “it just worked”. Friday and Saturday both I had all manner of problems with the PC version of the game, but it seems like most of those issues were server side. Sometime during the day on Saturday they either ramped up new servers, or did sometime to improve the processing… because when booted up the game Sunday morning, everything seemed to magically “just work”. It is funny just how much network and loading lag can destroy your game experience, because a lot of the problems I had associated with the game client itself… simply went away. Before I thought the console interface felt more smooth, but in truth the PC one works just as well once you are no longer fighting with input processing delays. Additionally I was shocked and amazed at just how well I managed to get this working on my elder laptop. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t nearly as pretty as it looks on my upstairs desktop…. but it works, and enough for me to get in and run missions or explore the world while watching some television. Last night I even managed to do more than that, as I took down several bosses that I apparently forgot to pick up from the Hudson river camp. I had no problem whittling down significantly higher level mobs, and it feels like the longer I play this game… the more I get used to the third person tactical style.

The other big takeaway I have is how much I am now seeming to not only enjoy the PC client… but lean towards it. One of the big reasons for me is Teamspeak and to a lesser extent Discord. Both of which are simple voice solutions that sound so much better than Playstation party chat. Also it allows me to hang out with people who are not necessarily playing the same game I happen to be playing. Since I am part of a very social gaming community, this was a huge problem I had when it came to Destiny, because the entire time I was playing that game I felt walled off from my friends. Another problem I am finding starting to disappear was the whole lack of “space guns” issue I talked about. This game seems to have a really wide variety of weapon options, that cover more than just the AR/AK realm of assault rifles. I’ve picked up no less than four different flavors of shogtun, each of which felt completely different in the way it handled. I also managed to find what seems to be my “Ideal” weapon which is the Enfield L86 LSW rifle that you can see me firing in the above image. It has pretty great single round accuracy and also fires some really tight bursts that while they travel up… seem to do so in a more predictable manner. I guess this isn’t super shocking because in World War II games back in the day I used to love firing the Enfield MK1.

Remaining Challenge

Now the challenge that remains is where exactly to pre-order the game from. Everyone seems to be offering pretty much the exact same stuff for digital copies of the game… with Gamestop being the only retail difference offering the Hazmat Suit seemingly in addition to the National Guard outfit that comes with the gold version. For years I was absolutely opposed to darkening the door of a Gamestop, however at Pax South I met someone that made me start to re-evaluate that line of thinking. Any company smart enough to make @JetPackHattie a manager… and give her free reign to create awesome events for her store seems like a place that cannot be all bad. I also went int the other day when I was tracking down a Hori Fight Commander 4 controller, and no one tried to up sell me on anything…. which was always the problem I had with going in the first place. Problem being at this point… I am not sure if I can pre-order in enough time to guarantee that I get the special bonus stuff. I also hate physical copies of games, but it seems like GameStop now has a download only option for UbiSoft games at least. The problem being… part of me kinda wants this game tracking through Steam even though I still have to launch a horrible horrible secondary UPlay client. So I begin to ask myself…. will I ever actually wear the Hazmat suit? The answer is probably not… whereas I can absolutely see myself wearing the National Guard uniform… or at least parts of it.

In any case I will need to decide something since the game launches in roughly two weeks. Of note… just for the sake of anyone wondering how this game will look on their own aging hardware. Every screenshot I posted this morning is pulled from my laptop which is essentially running 720p and the lowest possible graphical settings. The game still looks really decent, or at least better than a lot of the previous generation of shooters. As far as frames per second… at the high end I could hit 50 and at the low end I was hitting around 35… both of which I consider very playable especially given that I was playing the game on a three year old laptop. Focusing in on targets that are a significant distance away is not the easiest thing in the world. However with the Enfield I was able to headshot enemies that were on a rooftop from the safety of my hidey hole behind a planter box. Sure I was targeting a blurry mess, but it was easy enough to determine where the “head” was in said blurry mess. Essentially at least until the official PS4 Remote Play app releases…. the PC version seems to give me the most options given that I can play upstairs on my desktop, where my PS4 is sitting… or I can play downstairs on my laptop… and in both cases I can play with or without a controller. The PC version also makes it significantly easier to take screenshots given that with the PS4 I have to constantly be swapping a thumb drive back and forth to copy the files off. So yeah… over the course of the weekend I shifted allegiance and am now leaning heavily towards picking it up the PC.

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.