The Farm

The Farm

The PC demo of Destiny 2 so far is following the same basic pattern that the PS4 weekend did, including a brief two hour window for players to explore the new Farm social space.  During the PS4 weekend I didn’t actually get the participate in this because it happened during a Saturday afternoon when I was out running errands with my wife.  As a result I was more than amped to be able to actually see what would ultimately be our new home as Guardians.  Are we even Guardians now without the light?  The space is gorgeous though I have to admit I am constantly feeling like someone is just about to line up a sniper shot on me.  The only times we have been able to be in the EDZ aka the European Dead Zone as player are during a handful of Crucible maps…  one of which has this insane corridor down the center of the map where everyone snipes you.  The farm as a whole though was a fairly dead experience given that there are no NPCs at all…  nor is there even the fabled Chicken.  That said I think the farm is going to work a lot better than the Tower did, as everything we need seems to be greatly compacted.  I liked this about the Temple of Iron, but the only problem there was we didn’t have access to the various faction vendors.  I am however super pumped that Tyra Karn is the Cryptarch we are keeping rather than Master Rahool or the charlatan Master Ives at the Reef that was constantly bugged.  This is the point where the AggroChat crew gives me crap for knowing the names of the Cryptarchs.

The Farm

I think more than anything I am curious to see how this space populates with stuff.  I’ve heard rumor that this is going to be a lot like Meredil was in World of Warcraft, that as you roam around the world you “save” people and bring them back to the farm.  If this is true then I guess it makes sense why there were no NPCs showing up… because there may simply not be a basepop for the zone.  What is available may load based on your progression in the game, with some sort of an instancing tech.  Either that or they may have just stripped everything out for the sake of the demo.  There are folks in my clan that reported that the social space worked their CPU and GPU harder than any other area we have seen, and I can only imagine that is due to all of the models being tracked.  I am not sure what the new social space limits are, but it definitely seemed like a sizable bit larger than tower.  During one of the heated football matches, there were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 players actively on the farm.  This is small by MMO standards but pretty decent sized for something that is functionally a shooter lobby.  The other big takeaway is just how damned gorgeous everything is.  There are docks leading out on the lake… and I am hoping that we maybe get a few boats to explore.  The area surrounding the Farm in game supposedly has lots of signs and directions in German… so in theory that places this area in Germany?  Considering all we have really seen of Earth is the area surrounding the Baikonur Cosmodrome, it is going to be awesome seeing completely new vistas.

The Farm

After some time roaming around the farm, I gathered together with a few clanmates to run the strike since Tony aka DrGoob had not seen it.  The clan is slowly in the process of migrating from Band to Discord…  to some success.  The primary reason is that the PC chat built into Destiny 2 is absolutely horrible.  I mean on some level it is functional chat, but it sounds worse than any audio on a PC should.  In many ways it reminds me of the way that the original implementation of voice chat sounded in World of Warcraft.  Functionally it is tinny and quiet and compressed to living hell to make it take up as little bandwidth as humanly possible.  The other night Grace and I attempted to use it, and ultimately fell back on other voice comms because it was just too bad to stomach.  Apparently Tequila Mockingbird reached the same conclusion and finally latched onto Discord with both hands as providing a reasonable chat experience.  The voice chat on PSN was always horrible… but you sort of put up with it because it was a console.  It is a complete sin to use something this bad on the PC where there is Discord, Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo, Skype and a plethora of other options waiting to be used.  The real interesting thing ahead is to see how the game shakes out… and where everyone ends up.  Thus far pretty much every PS4 player that has access to a machine that can run this game…  is heavily leaning towards the PC version.  The PC running on the lowest preset… looks better than the stock PS4 running the game.  Let that sink in for a moment.  In truth I would say the PC running at Medium…  looks better than what I have seen from the PS4 Pro captured footage.  My three year old gaming laptop runs the game well enough to give my PS4 a run for its money.  Now I plan on playing both platforms because I like the PS4 and I like having multiple copies of Destiny…  but It is almost 100% certain that I will be playing almost exclusively on the PC for awhile when it finally launches in October.

New Spaceships

Yesterday was a very full gaming day for me, and many others in my (admittedly tiny) social sphere. Not only was it the start of the Destiny 2 PC beta, but it was also a major patch day for WoW. They didn’t let us peasants that haven’t preordered yet download the beta until mid-day yesterday, so I had to queue up the download after I got home from work. Then I had to pause that download long enough to let WoW get patched up. I let D2 download in the background while I checked out my new WoW spaceship and headed off to another planet.

I only played enough WoW to unlock the new set of world quests on one character, but it’s been a pretty great experience so far. Argus feels huge and dangerous. The opening sequence feels suitably epic, although it still manages to have Blizzard’s trademark “lore character swoops in for the kill steal” moments. Here on the first day of the patch it feels more like a mini-expansion than a mid-expansion update. We shall see how well all of the content on offer holds up in the coming weeks. At least we are promised a bit of meaningful questing as the Argus story unlocks. Anything is better than Broken Shore favorites like “hand Dadghar some currency so he can make a joke at your expense,” and “I don’t know, just go away and kill some stuff I guess.”

Thinking about those quests makes me mad both because they felt like a waste of time and because I had to do them to unlock flying, which is now useless in the new zones. I don’t want to get in an epic rant about flying in WoW but the back and forth of having and losing flying is getting very old. I appreciate the idea that going without flying at the start of the expansion lets them design the zones and questing experience in a more immersive way. I don’t even mind that earning flying requires a bit of effort now. What feels terrible is spending all that effort to get flying for one patch, and then having it taken away again. My $0.02: If you’re going to take it away, don’t make us work so hard for it, or if you’re going to make us work hard for it don’t take it away.

Flying rants aside, I greatly enjoyed my time in Argus up until exactly the moment when the D2 download finished. Then I commenced an epic battle with error codes, graphics drivers, and windows updates until I finally was victorious and could launch the beta. It looks and feels very slick on my machine, and it played nicely with my controller. The small amount of PvE questing available was fun enough, and felt perfectly Destiny-y. I’m not sure how much the story will make sense to someone who’s never played the first game, but I expect that they’ll be too busy struggling with the controls to worry about it since there’s no tutorial of any kind. I hope the full version of the game does a better job of easing people in.

I did get the chance to try out the strike with a couple friends, and I’m glad I did. It felt fairly similar in difficulty and length to the few strikes I’d tried in Destiny before, although the last boss was more complicated than I’m used to. I’m very glad I got to do it with friends so I could enjoy the sights and not feel super rushed. I haven’t tried any of the crucible offerings yet, and I’m not sure if I will during the beta. Most likely I will make a few new characters and play through the quest sequence again until I decide between keyboard/mouse and controller, and figure out the settings that work best for me.

If you’re curious or on the fence about Destiny 2 I’d suggest checking out the beta while you can. It’s definitely not full access to all the game’s content yet, but it is a reasonable sampling that should give you an idea of whether you’d enjoy it or not. I’m definitely looking forward to being able to play the full game!


New Spaceships

When A Beta Isn’t

When A Beta Isn’t

Last night I managed to run the Inverted Spire strike with a few friends…  Grace and Ammo.  For Grace it was her first time running the strike and while she was not as rabid…  was also a veteran of Destiny 1.  Ammo on the other hand…  the closest she had ever been to Destiny was drawing my Sunbreaker themed avatar.  If you know me very well… or are in that core group of people that I hang out regularly with…  you have had to listen to countless hours of me retelling things that happened in Destiny.  All of that apparently made her curious enough to try it out now that it was coming to the PC and available for download through the already very familiar Battle.net client.  Ammo while completely new to Destiny was by no means an FPS rookie because over the last year or so she has played a significant amount of Overwatch and is way the hell better than I am at it.  One of the things that I like about Destiny on the PC is how largely ubiquitous basic controls are if you have ever played a modern shooter.  Sure there are all manner of extraneous “super power” keys but the core gameplay of shoot shoot reload fall into the standard control scheme we are all used to.  The only real adjustment period of me was figuring out which key binds near WASD did which “power moves”.  Grace took to the game rather quickly and got to play big kid at several moments as she was able to get over and rez the rookie well before I could.  All in all it was a really fun experience and I am super glad that I wound up running the strike in this manner, since during the PS4 beta I largely just random queued for it.

When A Beta Isn’t

Last nights experience got me thinking that maybe just maybe releasing through the Battle.net client was more than just a way of having to skip the infrastructure development costs of going to a brand new platform.  Overwatch is a weird game because while it is at its core a competitive shooter… it is also one wrapped in so much story that it is impossible to not at least know some of it even if you are not actively playing the game.  This is a game that I saw be adopted at frightening rates by gamers who were well versed in the Blizzard ecosystem but never really considered themselves fans of the first person shooter genre.  As a result many have had their horizons broadened to realize that yes they could do this shooter thing and with practice get rather damned good at it.  Now we have this Destiny thing coming along and poking its head into their already familiar gaming environment…  so why not take a peek.  I’ve already seen a lot of posts on my twitter feed talking about how individuals are enjoying the Destiny experience but only ever downloaded it because it was available for free through the Battle.net client.  Cross pollination is really beautiful thing… and I have found myself in this same boat several times in the past.  I am not the biggest fan of League of Legends…  but I immediately tried Heroes of the Storm because I wanted to see the Blizzard take on it.  I am not really a huge fan of RTS games anymore…  but I occasionally play Starcraft II because it has amazing storytelling.  I think the Battle.net coup for Destiny… will be bringing a whole bunch of new eyes into the franchise.

When A Beta Isn’t

Here is where we get to the problem.  The “Beta” that we are getting to experience isn’t actually Destiny.  It is a bit of a hollow shell that should have been clearly labelled as a demo, because it lacks so many of the reasons why I spent so many hours playing the first game.  If you look at my time played on the tracker sites… something like 77% of my time was spent doing random stuff on Patrol missions.  I liked roaming around, doing events… unlocking secrets on the dreadnaught…  all the while enjoying the really amazing gunplay.  Where are the events like Archon’s Forge or Court of Oryx…  that I could literally spend hours running over and over.  Don’t get me wrong… the Inverted Spire strike is a hell of a lot of fun, and even the 4 player Crucible is starting to grow on me.  The problem being however is that we really are not putting the best foot forward for a bunch of players that may or may not have ever experienced the franchise.  The other problem is that we are not exactly doing a great job of giving players that bounced hard off of Destiny 1 a great reason to feel positive about coming back.  Sure the Homecoming mission has more story elements in it than the entire vanilla game…  but I am questioning if that is enough.  I am bought in for the long haul because I have loved Destiny as a concept and an experience since the moment I got into the original Alpha of the game on the PS4.  Taken King proved to me that the game was worth my devotion and I have been back and at least peripherally active ever since.  I am a member of their core demographic… but had they maybe given us something other than a demo…  it might be enough to gain new followers rather than just galvanize their existing player base.  I hope people can see through the cracks and see the game that is ultimately going to be there behind the walled gardens.  I feel like I can and since I am also rabidly gobbling up all of the news that is leaking out about the content that is waiting on the console players September 6th…  I am so sold that I am planning on playing once again on two different platforms.  I am just not sure that we sold Ammo on the experience other than giving her a fun night of running a space shooter dungeon.

 

Destiny 2 PC Beta Thoughts

Destiny 2 PC Beta Thoughts

Last night was the beginning of the Destiny 2 PC beta for those of us who have already preordered the game.  I am one of those weirdos that loves Destiny so much that I plan on playing it on multiple platforms.  With Destiny year 2 and beyond I played it actively on both the PS4 and Xbox One… and going forward I am planning on doing the same and splitting time between PC and PS4.  One of the things you need to realize is that I have some strange habits when it comes to gaming.  I split my time between my gaming desktop upstairs and my gaming laptop in the living room.  I’ve found the secret to marital happiness as a gamer is to be able to be flexible in my gaming habits and there are nights when I just need to be more available than cloistered in my office with my ear cans on.  As a result I have two systems to worry about being able to play Destiny on.  The positive is however as someone who potentially might be interested in Destiny 2, you are going to get functionally two different sets of reviews for the game…  one on a system that is heftier than the recommended specifications and one that is closer to the minimums.

Gaming Desktop

Destiny 2 PC Beta Thoughts

Machine Specifications

  • Intel Core i7 5820k 3.3ghz 6 Core Processor
  • Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 ATX Motherboard
  • 32 gb G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4-2400 Memory
  • MSI Geforce GTX 980 4GB Twin Frozr Video Card
  • System SSD but Game Running on Mechanical Hard Drive

For starters I spent absolutely zero time fiddling with the sliders and I just went with the defaults that it handed to me.  The end result was a gorgeous 1080p 60 fps experience.  I don’t have fancy monitors or anything even vaguely close to outputting a 4k or even 1440p signal so I went with it.  With time I plan on ratcheting up the detail level to see what I can do, but I am hearing from folks with 1080s that they are having issues sustaining frame rate on Ultra so more or less I am pretty damned happy with the results.  In truth the hardest thing I had to figure out was some third party screenshot tool that would actually record the screen.  Bungie has done a bunch of stuff to disable overlays and I had to fall back on the Nvidia Experience tools to be able to capture anything.  I am presently running the game in Windowed Fullscreen which is my preferred method and it just works great.  The difference in quality between the PS4 and PC is noticeable even just running the game in 1080p.    All of the textures just look crisper and less muddled, but that said the console experience with Destiny 2 on even a stock PS4 like mine….  looks noticeably better than the original Destiny.  Last night I tried out everything but the strike, and saw zero frame drop at any point during my experiences.  I have been keeping an eye on the lower left corner of the screen where I have the Nvidia framerate tools running… and the only time I saw drop was upon going into a pre-rendered cutscene.  All of those are still at 30 fps, which I would assume is to be able to support all of the different configurations of the game.

Gaming Laptop

Destiny 2 PC Beta Thoughts

Machine Specifications

  • Asus ROG GL551JW
  • Intel Core i7 4720HQ 2.6 ghz
  • 16 gb DDR3 Memory
  • Geforce GTX 960M 2GB GDDR5
  • Mechanical Hard Drive
  • 3rd Quarter 2014 Release Date

While the Desktop was a picture of simplicity… literally everything about the Laptop experience was a hassle.  I included the street date of the laptop just for reference and to show that I am attempting to get this running in functionally a three year old machine.  I knew that 1080p was largely out of the question so I started trying to dial in specs for a 720p setup.  Since my laptop has a 15 inch screen that seemed completely reasonable and generally the only reason why I run MMOs in 1080p is because of the UI element resolution.  The biggest issue that I kept running into is that for some reason it felt like my mouse was dying on me.  I would have these issues where I could not swing my viewpoint to the right of my model, and then other times I couldn’t scope in my weapon at all.  After trying a bunch of configuration options I noticed that it was ultimately happening at the same place each time in the mission, which made me start doubting it was just the mouse.  After a bunch of searching I found a thread on Bungie PC Support forum talking about this same issue.  What I ultimately had to do was go find the executable for Destiny 2 and choose properties off the right click menu…  then change the compatibility settings to disable Scaling on High DPI settings.  Note this is called something different depending on the version of windows you are running, but in all cases it will be some Option referencing DPI.

Once this change was made my mouse suddenly started working as it should.  One more round of tweaks saw me setting the display mode to Windowed Fullscreen and I was finally playing the game in pretty good shape.  While its not amazing… it is playable at a generally 30 fps…  however as you can see in the upper right hand corner of the above screenshot…  I am dipping down into the high 20s occasionally.  The biggest challenge is that Destiny requires a ton of VRAM.  When I was playing on the Medium preset I was consuming every last bit of VRAM available and borrowing from the system memory.  I really appreciate Bungie including a gauge under the video settings to show just how much you are consuming and how much is left available.  The high preset functionally takes a little bit over 2 gb, and I would assume each time you ratchet it up those requirements go up again.  The other thing you can take away from the fact I was running it on a laptop… is that effectively everything on a laptop performs like it is a generation older than the equivalent Desktop component.  So my 4th gen i7 in truth performs about like a 3rd gen i5…  and my gtx 960m…  effectively performs the same as a gtx 760 in a desktop card.  Between the two setups you should be able to extrapolate how this game should be able to run on whatever your current gaming PC setup seems to be.

Gameplay Discussion

Destiny 2 PC Beta Thoughts

For a complete write up about my feelings of the Destiny 2 beta… I highly suggest you check out my PS4 impressions post from July.  I am not going to spend a lot of time this morning talking about general topics.  Instead I am going to focus in on the tweaks that were made between the two betas.  The first noticeable thing is that the recharge rate that I complain so much about on the PS4 seems to be greatly improved.  During the tower courtyard fight on PS4 it felt like I was lucky getting a single super charge and a single grenade charge while fighting the three waves of red legion cabal.  During the PC beta… I could easily get 3 super charges and 2 grenade charges during the same time.  Grenade still lags a bit from what I would have liked it to be… but part of that might simply be that I am used to running around with the Armamentarium and as a result always have two grenade charges available, so even when I use one… there is almost always one sitting there waiting in reserve.  Things just feel “better” as a result of the recharge rates being cranked up, and it feels more like the Destiny experience I am used to.  My guess is that they have increased the rate of recharge you get from killing things, because the effect was a bit less noticeable in the Crucible.  Previously in the PS4 beta everyone got their supers at exactly the same time… which was just a few minutes from the end of the match.  During the PC beta I managed to get off two supers and was getting close to a third by the time the match ended, so in theory had I been playing better I probably would have easily gotten three supers.

The other big takeaway is that everything just feels more polished.  This one isn’t easy to quantify, but everything about this build felt production ready.  The other big takeaway is that once I got used to the hotkeys… the PC experience is just flawless and before long I reached a point where it was just as instinctive for me to hit F to activate my super as it is to mash my two shoulder buttons.  So far I have only modified one hotkey, and that was to change ~ from toggling between weapons since I use that as my push to talk key.  Instead I use the alternate key which is mouse wheel to shift between weapons.  For those going into the game I thought it might be useful really quick to run down the basic hotkeys.

  • Movement – WASD + Mouselook
  • Primary Fire/Light Attack – Left Mouse
  • Scope/Heavy Attack – Right Mouse
  • Melee/Block – C
  • Reload – R
  • Jump – Space
  • Toggle Sprint – Shift
  • Toggle Crouch – Ctl
  • Class Ability – V
  • Super Move – F
  • Air Super Move – X
  • Interact With Objects – E
  • Kinetic Weapon – 1
  • Secondary Weapon – 2
  • Heavy Weapon – 3
  • Rotation Through Weapons – Mouse Wheel
  • Toggle Chat – T
  • Deploy Ghost – Tab
  • Return to Orbit – O
  • Character Loadout Screen – F1

It is a lot of hotkeys to remember, but in truth it largely matches the pattern I was used to with PC shooters already.  All in all I thought the PC Beta played amazingly well and it is going to be a really hard call as to which game gets the majority of my attention.  I think ultimately it is going to be determined by how many people that I know are chosing which platforms.  The only other thing that really concerns me are the general limitations of Battle.net already.  I feel like I am already bumping up against the maximum friend number there because of the various other Blizzard games that I play… and for the most part everyone in my Destiny clan is not already in that list.  So it is going to be a bit frustrating to try and find space to add everyone new in.  I am also really curious to find out how each of you felt that the PC Beta was when it goes “open beta” today.