February 2019 – Page 3

Anthem Spreadsheet Launch

February 18, 2019 by Belghast

Anthem “Launched” on Friday and I spent my weekend having a blast playing the game for real. However unfortunately the bulk of the people who pre-ordered the game will not be able to experience the game until this coming Friday the 22nd. This is what I would call a spreadsheet launch, and I talked a bit about it on Friday because if you purchased a month of either the $5 or $15 flavor of EA Access then you were able to play this weekend. The $5 price point gave you 10 hours of gameplay… and then I was a sucker and went with the $15 dollar double special secret access that just gave me the game one week early. At this point according to Origin I have spent 17 hours playing, and the majority of why I went with that version over the $5 variant is it allows me to just not care about how much time I happened to be spending.

The challenge this morning is how do I condense the feelings I am having about the game into something resembling a proper blog post. The quick summary is that I like the game an awful lot, so much so that I went to sleep each night dreaming about playing more of the game. I am good and properly hooked and for the moment it is an equivalent experience to how I felt about Destiny when I first got my hands on it. The world is insanely intricate and all of the concerns that I had from the Demo about Freeplay being fragmented with invisible walls… turned out to be misguided. From what I can tell all of those barriers that were thrown up during the Demo were to simply keep us out of the content that they did not want us to visit. Roaming around Freeplay in the final game provides a seamless experience that lets me traverse from one side of the map to the other.

First off lets talk about the map, because I have heard concerns about it seeming like it is very small. I am not able to zoom out far enough to get it all in one screenshot, but I can get a fair amount of it… which makes it seem on the small end. However exploring it…. feels completely different because the map has a lot of verticality to it that is not often there in similar style games. The same area may have a high path, a middle path and an underwater or cave based path all traversing the same ground giving you a lot of fenestration and cramming more detail into a square of map than you would normally have. This is awesome when you are freely roaming the map… and less awesome at times when you need to find an objective and have no clue at all what level of the infrastructure it might be on. At least one of the Tombs that you end up having to track down a ways into the game will frustrate you as you try and find the opening to an underground cave system that contains it.

The next piece that I want to talk a bit about is the Story… which is exceptionally good… but something I cannot really talk about in detail for fear of spoiling the game play experience. I’ve said the game is “very Bioware” which apparently means different things to different people… in response I have gotten Glitch Memes and Romance questions. What I ultimately mean by that is that it presents a really interesting world with a level of depth rivaling the Mass Effect series and is populated with a bunch of characters that I already care about. Through the conversation dialog… I am asked to make a series of decisions similar to the Paragon/Renegade system and I have a feeling that these change what happens in the world. There are definitely story paths that I have seen that seem as though they would not have occurred were it not for the previous choices I made. Additionally the characters are aware of each other… and choices made with Character A end up creating options for Character B… which again creates that “Bioware Feel”.

The gunplay is enjoyable, but I will say that the weapons do not feel as memorable as they do in Destiny for example. What is memorable however is the way that you move through combat and the various options that you have to embellish your play style. You are given a dodge… but why dodge when you can just double jump into the air and engage your thrusters to jet over to a safe distance from whatever attack is just about to land. The demo had significant issues with Mouse and Keyboard movement, but these have all largely been ironed out for the release and the more I play it… the more addictive the freedom of movement has become. If I want to get somewhere the game gives me the means to do it… and it feels completely different than a traditional MMO where you are mostly just flying high above the content and avoiding it entirely. There are lots of things in the air that can ruin your day and force you to deal with them, and instead your flight capabilities seem as a method of augmenting your other means of traversal.

All of these combined make the gameplay experience addictive, and make me want to keep climbing back into that suit and going out on another adventure. There is something about the launch sequence that is just enjoyable… seeing your javelin waiting for you to hop in. The fact that you cannot view your loot or swap gear in the world ends up with a gameplay loop that sees you going back to the Fort every so often, just to fiddle with your equipment before heading back out into the wilds again. I loved playing Patrol mode in Destiny, and as such Freeplay is very much my jam if I just want a solo experience. Thankfully most of the world events seem to be doable solo, which allows me to roam around collecting loot and doing objectives until I decide to get more serious about progression. If I want to play with other people there is the delightful freeplay option which mimics how I play Monster Hunter World with what I call “SOS Roulette”, where it dumps you into a random group that isn’t full and from what I can tell… it could be pretty much any activity.

Another thing that I am deeply thankful for is the fact that the game does not appear to care at all about levels when it comes to grouping. I’ve been paired with level 20s while at level 5… and I still felt viable and that higher level character didn’t feel like a ringer. This is a good thing given that those of us who were willing to spend that extra $15 are going to have a full week of play time on the folks that will be joining us on Friday. Right now among my friends you can see that Naithin is leading the charge with what I can only assume is bordering endgame item level, with Lex not very far behind. My only real complaint right now is I would have liked there to be a clan or guild system at launch, but I am at least happy that it is apparently on the near radar system wise. Grouping seems fairly seamless and there were moments this weekend when I happened to be running a mission and did not realize until after the fact that someone from my friends list had joined. It isn’t like there is much in the way of player to player interaction, and as a result that makes the whole grouping experience feel awesome for folks that end up preferring solo game play.

The only bit of a advice that I will throw out there is that if you played a lot of the demo like many of us did… your first Javelin choice is legitimately that… your first and ONLY Javelin choice for 8 levels. As such this mean’t I incorrectly thought I was picking my first spare Javelin and wound up playing the first 8 levels of the game as a Storm… which is fun but not really my jam. I am a Ranger through and through and once I got to level 8 the game started to feel very much like home again. All in all I am hooked and enjoying the experience greatly. It seems to be a game that splits the difference between many of the different looter shooter titles out there, and as a result has a style of play for pretty much everyone. As a long time Destiny Titan player… the Ranger appeals to me greatly because it feels like a similar game play style. However if you want to survey the battlefield from a distance… the Storm does an awesome job of that. Basically… I heartily recommend this game when the ACTUAL launch happens on Friday.

Some parting links for players… firstly I have a Roster that I have been collecting names on since Origin doesn’t have a way of importing users from other more popular gaming services.

Also Namaslays/Jewel has started up a Discord Community called The Anthem Collective so there is that if you are wanting another way to meet players. I have joined but I am also super bad at keeping track with Discords so I will probably be a super infrequent user, and mostly rely on it if other grouping opportunities peter out in the end game. I am super happy with what I am seeing so far, and am curious what my other friends that are playing think. I am hoping we see a bunch more Monday morning posts about experiences.

AggroChat #240 – The UnHollow Knight

May 21, 2019February 17, 2019 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

This evening we discuss the Anthem “Launch” and the spreadsheet that is required to understand it. We give a quick summary of our experiences and how it is turning out to be really freaking good. From there we dive into Silksong the Hornet DLC that has turned into its own larger than the original Hollow Knight game. We also talk about the first Nintendo Direct of the new year and all of the games that got announced. Bel tortures Kodra with some brief discussion about Keen Dreams showing up on the Switch. Finally we dive into a topic about playing games for what they are actually good at rather than trying to bend them to our will.

Topics Discussed:

Anthem “Launch”
- Spreadsheet Launches
- Improvements over Demo
- Very Much a Bioware Game in a Good Way
Hollow Knight: Silksong Announcement
Nintendo Direct
- Mario Maker 2
- Link’s Awakening
- Various Final Fantasy Releases
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses
- Captain Toad DLC
- Tetris 99
  - Did Tetris Need Battle Royale Mode?
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
- Boxboy + Boxgirl
- Yoshi’s Crafted World
- Astral Chain
- Deltarune
Keen Dreams on Switch
Playing Games for What They Are Good At
- The Struggle with MMOs

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Anthem Friend Exchange

February 15, 2019 by Belghast

Well here we are… it is officially the day that Anthem launches… and by launches I mean if you paid a bunch of money you can get access to the game today. I know several of us did this thing ahead of purchasing the PC version, because in doing so it gives you a discount off the game purchase price in the first place. The only problem is things are way murkier than they have been in the past. There are now two tiers of Origin Access… the $5 a month basic customers and the $15 a month customers. We are now in an era when you need a spreadsheet to explain when exactly you get to play the damned game. EA support of course did this thing… and while I am grousing about it I do not necessarily blame Bioware for this apart from the fact that they allowed themselves to get bought years ago.

So if you are dumb like me and went ahead and ponied up for a month or two of Premier… then you can start playing Anthem legitimately today at 9 am Central Standard Time. I will unfortunately be at work and given that we have freezing rain going on outside I have no clue what my commute is going to look like. As such I will probably get a super late start tonight and am hoping the servers are stable by the time I actually get home. If you have Origin Access basic… aka the $5 a month that used to be the only thing that was available… you get to play a 10 hour head start. Something of note… if you are in this camp Origin loves to not fully close games. I had this happen to me with Andromeda and saw all of my hours tick away while I slept. Make sure the executable for Anthem is good and dead in Task Manager to prevent this from happening to you.

For everyone else… you get to start playing next Friday, which is kinda screwed up that the folks who are paying the $15 premium are going to get one full weeks worth of game before the folks who simply ordered the game. This is a frustrating situation and I am weak as fuck for playing into the “buying early access” game model. The real question is… I have no clue what this is going to do to the grouping dynamic and how far of a gap between characters is completely reasonable. We didn’t really pay attention to levels during the demo but wound up largely within a level or two of each other given the very limited range that was possible. We all mostly capped out at 15 by the end, and while I think we pulled in someone who was around 10… it wasn’t really a noticeable issue.

I am hoping it will be simple to help pull players up and do group content together regardless of the level gap. This gets into the other major problem with Anthem… there is no guild/clan system going in at launch. This combined with how dodgy the Origin client is in general has made me contemplate some sort of alternate way of collecting people who are going to be playing and also occasionally available for grouping. As such I set up a google sheet this morning to start collecting Origin account information. Because I didn’t think of a better way to handle this… there are two parts to the system… the Sign Up Form and The Roster sheet. I will be manually copying entries from the Form over to the Sheet… which is honestly the only way I could think to do this without either manually sharing out the Roster or giving everyone Edit access which would go horribly wrong.

Why would I do this thing you ask? Well it is simple… Origin is this walled garden disconnected from the other various gaming networks. It for whatever reason does not seem to understand that we want to group up with people we might know from other platforms and as such has no way of importing users or getting suggestions from other platforms. There is no twitter or facebook integration, and most certainly nothing like the Steam integration that Epic Games Store has. So you are stuck trading ids with people on a one by one basis and I figured something like this… would allow a large number of us to catch up in one pass and turn the friends list in Origin into something that is actually useful. Right now at the time of posting the sheet only has my information but I will be updating it throughout the day and keep posting new names at least once daily after that.

So to summarize:

Hopefully this smooths out the bumps given that this is a bit of a new venture into MMO territory for the Origin client given there was no integration between Origin and SWTOR. If you think this is a really dumb idea, then I am more than willing to accept those comments. If you think it is a good idea however… fill out your info and lets get ready to fly some mech suits!

Assorted Blizzard Topic

February 14, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I am going to apologize to anyone who actively reads either my Twitter feed or my Fediverse feed. Those tend to be the platform where I make extemporaneous commentary and in the moment reactions to whatever happens to be on my mind. Often time those statements end up getting distilled down into a blog post once more time and distance has passed. Yesterday I spouted off in thread form on Twitter about the Activision/Blizzard layoffs and this morning I still feel the need to talk about it so I am cobbling together something in blog post form. For those who have not been following this story it has been something looming on the horizon for awhile as Blizzard had gone into cost cutting measures and offered a number of employees buyout packages to voluntarily leave the company. So these actions are something we had all been fearing would be happening, especially after the massive stock hit that came with the announcement of Bungie’s departure from the agreement with the publisher.

For those who have not been following this… it was not a great year for Activision Blizzard as a whole in the public opinion area, however this did not stop them from making record profits this past year. In 2017 they had a net profit of $273 million and in 2018 they realized a record $1.8 billion dollars in profit. This is what makes the 800 layoffs feel all the more like “Snidely Whiplash tying Nell to the railroad tracks” evil. I’ve not been able to verify as of yet who is and is not effected from the folks that I knew who were still working for Blizzard. However among my circle of friends a good number of those friends of friends got the axe. This whole sequence has been extremely frustrating and depressing to see play out on social media as so many people are scrambling to find a home in another studio. Based on a few examples told to me in confidence, it appears that a good chunk will be trying to make their exit from games development in general for sake of stability.

There is a medium article that came out yesterday from Patrick Beja that is worth reading that goes over his thoughts about the whole situation and summarizes some statements that he had made earlier in the lead up. There are a couple of specific sections that struck a chord with me, but I call one out in particular.

The other thing I often hear is “they’re only developing F2P mobile games that SUCK”. First, we don’t know they’ll suck. And second, I don’t know why they’d stop developing PC games that make money. Did you not enjoy Overwatch or Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm? If you didn’t, you haven’t liked Blizzard for a long time… But if you did, maybe you’ll think the next PC games they release will be good too.

This was something that was hard to hear because since the release of Starcraft Blizzard has been a company that I held up on a pedestal as being quite possibly the ultimate end goal of what working in the games industry could be like. I have obsessed over so many over their games and loved the artistry and craftsmanship that went into them. However seeing that statement in print made a point ring true. I love the Blizzard of the past and not necessarily the Blizzard of the here and now. Now we are not talking about expansion content here… but the last new game that they released that I have really enjoyed on a large level was Diablo 3 from 2012. That means that for the last seven years they have not produced something that really interested me. While I have rabidly eaten up every bit of expansion content for Diablo 3… World of Warcraft and I have a much spottier record with liking some expansions like Legion and largely loathing some expansions like Cataclysm. Effectively though… I didn’t so much love Blizzard but instead loved those two games.

To preface some of what I have said in thread form… Overwatch is a universe that I really like but with a game attached to it that I have no real interest in playing. Hearthstone was a game I was interested in and dabbled with occasionally… but all of that interest died the moment I got my hands on MTG Arena and got what I had wanted all along. Heroes of the Storm academically is a better game for me than League of Legends… but I don’t really like either enough to play them on a regular basis and I have no interest at all in solo queuing. Battle for Azeroth was probably the thing that caused Blizzard the most damage in my eyes because it went in the opposite direction that I wanted the franchise to go. Legion gave me hope of us moving towards a class based narrative and away from the big dumb red versus blue crap we have had forced upon us for years. However the narrative felt hollow and the gameplay was not really interesting enough to keep me attached to it as everything felt like rehashed versions of things we had already seen in one form or another before.

Diablo is the franchise that Blizzard created that I probably care the most about, and the handling of the Immortal announcement stung. I am actually looking forward to that game, because I think it will be something fun to play from bed while I drift off much like I do currently with Dragalia Lost. However we are hungry for more core Diablo gameplay and every year I have waited with so much built up hope for the eventual announcement of Diablo 4 that never quite comes. Now I am more or less tired of waiting and have redoubled my efforts to explore the various alternatives like Torchlight Frontiers, Pagan Online and games I already have access to like Grim Dawn. I fully support the Diablo team because they caught a bullet that was not necessarily intended for them. However that does not mean my personal goodwill and hopefulness did not take a hit.

The layoffs have really driven home how disconnected I have become from Blizzard games in general. Right now the only thing in the Blizzard launcher that sees much in the way of playtime is Destiny 2, and it is one of those games in limbo since Bungie left the fold. I made an attempt to start this season of Diablo 3 but for various reason I never really latched onto it and didn’t even make it a quarter of the way to the level cap. I’ve not really played World of Warcraft since October, in spite of logging in one or twice in November… and effectively logging right back out again. Blizzard currently is not producing anything that is really exciting me, and I am finding that excitement in other places which is nothing terribly new to be honest. I have always been a WoW Tourist over the years… where I would disappear for a few months but return eventually to keep playing. That said however the longest that I have gone without playing the game since 2012 is a couple of four month long breaks.

Unless there is a drastic change in direction that makes significant effort to bury the hatchet of the dumb faction conflict storyline… I am not sure if I will be back. Battle for Azeroth is the first World of Warcraft expansion not to make the AggroChat Games of the Year show, and quite honestly it is the first expansion I regret pre-0ordering and playing. The future of me and Blizzard largely hinges upon if they make good on giving me a Diablo game that I want, which is a sorta depressing thing to say. One thing that I want to talk about at the end however is that I don’t blame anyone other than myself for this. I think the workers at Blizzard need our support desperately right now, because it has to be a very scary time for those who survived this round of cuts. For those who didn’t… we need to do whatever we can to help them out during this transition.

That is a point that I have always made throughout the years is that even if I am struggling to like a company… it has nothing to do with how I feel about its employees. Everyone works their asses off to make the best damned game they can. When we talk badly about their work, it often feels like a kick in the gut after they probably gave up so much of their own life to crunch through the release of that product. I see you all out there and appreciate what you try your level best to provide me a fun entertainment experience. I am always reluctant when I start criticizing something because I don’t want it to feel like I am kicking the poor folks who helped to build it. Lets be honest… many of us had daydreams of working in the games industry. However I saw early on that it was not exactly a path of stability and I went down a path that would give me that security blanket that I craved. That does not however mean that I don’t respect the fuck out of everyone that is making these games for me… and for people who are not my specific arrangement of tastes.

The take away from this post is not that Blizzard is bad because we have grown apart. I just find it weird that I can say something like that and actually mean it. I am however frustrated with the hell that is being unleashed upon the good people that make up the company. If you ever need someone to talk to my DMs are open.