So yesterday’s blog post was largely invalidated within a few minutes of logging into New World yesterday. I made this careful decision of where I should purchase my home at based on tax rates and such, only to log in and find that the freaking Fire Nation had taken over that territory. Their brand is to crank up the taxes to the maximum amounts like a plague of locusts upon the face of Aeternum. It seems that Devil Inside, the friendly green guild that cranked down tax rates has moved on to other territories and now holds both Weaver’s Fen and Cutlass Keys. So yeah…. instead of 50 gold a week, if my math is correct my housing upkeep is going to be 500 gold per week which is deeply unfortunate. I guess they are doing a pretty solid job of role-playing the oppressive regime that was the Fire Nation.
Okay, I didn’t talk about it all that much but I had some significant issues with the Avengers Beta. The above clip is an attempt at me showing what was going on with the camera. The only way I can really describe it is like having the camera sitting in a little red wagon that is then attached to my character by a Bungie cord. So long as movement is slow and predictable things were more or less fine, but as soon as there was fast movement everything went haywire as the camera was attempting to over correct. It made the game nigh unplayable and I wound up refunding my game purchase as a result. I thought maybe this was just a problem the game had with Mouse and Keyboard support.
One of the things I am known for is doing nonsense with my equipment. One of those bits of nonsense was getting Nvidia RTX Voice up and running to do noise cancellation. Thing is this was designed to run on an RTX card, and I don’t have one of those… I have an GTX 1080 ti. There is however a way to get it up and running on any card, so instead of the Tensor Cores the software is expecting it ends up using my Cuda cores. You know what else uses Cuda cores a lot? Physics calculations in video games, like maybe those trying to adjust the camera behind the player. I talked to a handful of people who played the Beta with Mouse and Keyboard and none of them seemed to have any of the issues that I had. So for Science… I made a rather expensive gamble and purchased Avengers once again. The gamble is expensive because I doubt Steam would have allowed me to refund it a second time.
Sure enough when I have RTX Voice shut down I have zero problems with the camera. When I turn it on… the camera goes wonky. I am guessing the extra strain on the Cuda cores is maybe slowing down the calculations enough to lag behind as experienced in the video above? I have no clue if this is a similar behavior to those running ACTUAL RTX graphics cards and legitimately have RTX voice installed without the hackery required to get it working on other systems. So the problems seem to be gone when playing Avengers now and I spent most of last night working my way through the campaign. There are aspects of the game that still bug me a bit, but with RTX shut down the experience is fairly fluid in 4k.
There is a sizable amount of story that was cut from the beta, and what I thought was a charming narrative even managed to get more charming. I love that the game focuses on Kamala Khan aka Ms Marvel because she so perfectly represents the fans. She is a comic book geek and loves the super heroes in the same way as we do. So watching her interactions with her idols is adorable. There is a whole reluctant dad thing going on with Bruce Banner and the same goes when he is in Hulk form, and it is super cute. I’ve not made it terribly far because there isn’t a ton of hours in a week night, but I am enjoying myself.
Some of the parts that were missing in the Beta were the bits that actually explain how gearing works. Now that I understand it a bit more I am way less flummoxed by it. The whole “insufficient materials” thing is just a warning that you can’t yet upgrade the item, not that you won’t be able to get any benefit from it or that it isn’t equitable. I am still uncertain of exactly how much the gearing actually factors into the game play, but I am making the numbers go up like a good MMO player. Each mission involves a number of heroes, and it seems like you can pilot any one of your choosing from the list of available that you have unlocked. I am mostly focused on Ms Marvel because I like her skill set considerably more than I do Hulk so far. I’m only far enough in to have those two unlocked right now.
I am thankful that the gamble paid off, and that it really was something as simple as RTX Voice running in the background causing these issues. I did have a few crashes to desktop last night, and I have no clue at all what might have caused those. The game seems to be pretty good about letting you start back up close to where the game crashed however. I am not sure if this is true once you leave the tutorial of the game and start getting into specific missions however. Right now it is just a charming story driven game for me and I am not sure how much of the group content I am going to touch right now. The goal is to complete the story now and see where it goes from there.
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I’ve written a few different posts about New World already, but last night I finally decided which town to buy a house in and ultimately made the purchase of one of the 2000 gold offerings. I have been splitting most of my time between Monarch’s Bluffs the zone that I started in and Everfall a zone nearby. Monarch’s Bluffs has this whole pirate shanty town vibe which I dig heavily, and Everfall largely reminds me of Westfall from World of Warcraft. The key deciding point however between the two is the fact that the company that owns Everfall has cranked up the tax rates to the maximums and the company that owns Monarch’s Bluffs has lowered them to the minimums. This means that my weekly housing tax is only going to be around 50 gold, which seems like a really good incentive to get players to use your town as their primary hub.
I crafted some very basic items and now have a bed and end-table and a pantry sort of thing. I’ve always picked up various random items out in the world including the two windchimes that I have out on the porch area. That is ultimately why I chose the house that I did, because it had a really large deck area that seems to be a place where you can build on. Additionally it was beside the trading hall, near the walkway up to the town project board and my faction vendor, and near the crafting machines. Seems fairly ideally placed. The housing controls are fairly rudimentary, but I would take basic housing over no housing.
Fast travel does exist in the game, and you can travel to your house I believe once per day, though having just purchased this I am uncertain of what exactly the cooldown is. You can bind an an inn and travel to the inn once per hour. So right now my theory is I can have a house in Monarch’s Bluffs and get to it quickly and bind in the inn at Everfall so I can move between those two areas rapidly. That said it isn’t really a long run between them anyway which is ultimately what I have been doing thusfar. There is also fast travel to any hub, but that consumes Azoth which is currently a relatively limited resource.
Another thing that I did this weekend was roll an alt on another server instance. Largely since my friends lean heavily towards team purple, I wanted to be able to see what the gear and such for that faction looked like. So I created a new character and leveled it up to the point of being able to make a faction choice. I decided to go with Two Handed Hammer this time and went for the more defensive of the two paths. It is really fun and actually makes the game feel a little bit like playing a great sword in Monster Hunter.
The furthest I have made it into the game is Weaver’s Fen, which is a swamp area also held by the same company that holds Monarch’s Bluffs. This is in theory the place you need to go for oil, which seems to be the resource in the game right now that is in the highest contention. I am hoping that they add oil to other areas, because right now every single node I have found is effectively camped. It seems to have a 15 minute respawn and I have managed to get to one of these spawns before anyone else did. Unfortunately this negatively gates the crafting system, because you cannot craft steel without oil. So I am hoping as they move further into the production cycle they fix this slight problem and make it a little more prevalent.
I also spent a little bit of time trying to do some of the corrupted content. This seems to be where the group content lives in the game, because I absolutely should have come in with a group. As far as I can tell you have a corruption resistance that ticks down while you are in the rift. When it ticks to zero you take a chunk of damage and get another 60 resistance. So if you want to stay in for long you are going to need some form of reasonable healing, or maybe you can buff your resistance with items. I am not entirely certain how this works, but it would be interesting to go there with an actual group and figure it out.
For now however I am mostly just poking around and enjoying myself. I am however going to be a bit sad when the event ends later this week. I’ve been playing pretty much nothing but New World and according to steam have played 54 hours with 40 of those taking place in the current test. I wish I had more permanent access to the game, like being part of the testing group. Alas however that is not a thing that ever happened and I will have to wait for the next more public test. Maybe we will get lucky and closed beta will start immediately following this preview. Regardless… I am absolutely hooked and looking forward to whenever this launches.
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Well Folks, for better or worse we have finished the running of another Blaugust. This year things were mixed up significantly given that we technically ran the traditional Blaugust event back in April as “Blapril”. Instead of repeating things I made an attempt to create something different, and I think the jury is still out on how well it worked. The idea was simple in my mind, but the closer we got to actually starting it I realized just how complicated it actually was. I think the original intent was that we would be providing prompts for the community to write about, but instead it largely just turned into a thing were someone wrote about a prompt each day and we attempted to shine the light on that effort.
The dates were staggered so that for example on 8/30 I would technically be giving the prompt for 8/31. However that just confused everyone involved, and instead we shifted to something that carried off without a hitch. I am super proud of everyone who offered their support in this madness, and how reasonably well it worked. In the spirit of this adventure I figure it is a good time to do a final rundown of the prompts that were shared.
08/31/2020 – Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut – aka this post you are reading now
That is of course just a fraction of the posts that were created during this event, and you can see a large number of them using the Blaugust2020 Hashtag. The biggest complaint that I saw from anyone was that the prompts didn’t fit them that well. The challenge there however was that I tried to create 31 prompts that were fairly generic. Blaugust being what it is, it is a community that spans anyone one game… or even gaming in general and the hope was to try and make it as malleable as possible. The ultimate hope was that the writers would take that generic seed of a prompt and turn it into something that fit them personally. There were an awful lot that managed to do that which makes me exceptionally proud, and when I look at the list above it seems like a success to me.
Prompt 31
Horizon Zero Dawn – PC
So, I would say the event went off without a hitch minus one slight problem. Given that the prompts were offset by a day… I was originally supposed to be making this post on the 30th and not the 31st. That felt odd however and I made the executive decision to just sorta bump this one post a bit so it lines up better with the end of August. The prompts were legitimately assigned at random and the final prompt that landed on me is as follows.
What is your favorite thing to do in order to relax?Blaugust 2020 – Prompt 31
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you are probably going to realize that my answer is going to be gaming. There are a myriad of reasons why people play games. There are folks who really have a competitive spirit and love to play games for the challenge. There are folks who really enjoy the social aspect of gaming and do so as a way of hanging out with their friends. For me… when I am playing games at the purest I am playing them as an escape from the woes of the day to day grind. I love coming home and effectively melding into a game, shutting my brain off and just relying on pure muscle memory as I pilot the character like an extension of myself.
The Many Faces of Bel in various games
I think this is in part why Open World games and Massively Multiplayer Online Games have always been my kryptonite. They present to me this entire world for me to inhabit while I am playing it. I get to set my troubles aside on the shelf and be someone else for awhile, even if that someone else is just sorta the idealized version of me. The above image is something I commissioned from my friend AmmosArt for the 7th anniversary of this blog, and it shows some of my characters in various games… and there is a similarity between them. The character of “Belghast” has a certain appearance and I seek to create it as closely to that mold as the game will allow me. I think ultimately it is the me I sorta wish I was?
The Actual Bel with Josie
I am not this person however, and while I am largely okay with the bumbling oaf that I am in real life… there are times when it is really enjoyable to stop being me and become someone else for awhile. It is fun to become a person of action rather than to be forever locked in this overly cerebral state of indecision and self doubt. The most disturbing self realization that I had years ago… is that effectively “Belghast” is just Adrian Paul from the Highlander… with a beard. It is really weird the baggage that you carry along with you in your psyche, but I remember being super into that show as a teen.
My Blood Elf Paladin in World of Warcraft – PC
I think why I like games where you can grind your way in skill and level, is that they ultimately allow you to feel powerful. There is so much of my own life where I largely feel powerless over the actions swirling around me. I know this sounds weird given that I manage a fairly large team and have moved up in my career considerably since starting it in 1998. However no matter what my station in the working world is, there are just so many things that always feel out of my own control. I am always relying on the whims of someone else and never really feel like I have complete control of my own destiny. Instead I am just reacting to the things as they come and making the best possible decision I can at any given time.
Ghosts of Tsushima – Base PS4
In a game however, I am the ultimate arbiter of my fate. As I level up, gain new equipment I eventually reach a state near the end of the game where I am powerful and a force to be reckoned with. The thing is… it also has the side benefit of happening within a safe closed box that doesn’t impact others. So much of power is wielded in the real world by the selfish and the cruel in fulfillment of their twisted fantasies. Games allow me to safely act out upon those power fantasies while saving the day and being the big damned hero, rather than doing so in a more harmful manner. When it becomes too much, I can just log out or power down the console and move on with my very real life, all without any negative impact on others in the process.
Mass Effect Andromeda – PC
Games act as a sort of wish fulfillment. I wish I was a better person, and at times I wish I was off on grand adventures. I wish I was saving the galaxy or at least a village full of people from a rampaging horde of monsters. Games allow me to live all of these lives within the span of a couple dozen hours, and still log right back out and keep my normal life as well. There are times I think that games have been what have kept me sane, as I have dealt with all sorts of issues over the years. The truth is it is really my friends that I have made through gaming that have become the large extended family and support structure that I needed. I love my gaming family that puts up with me even when I am being a little boorish. Ultimately gaming is an escape for me, and I am very thankful that it gives me a relatively safe vehicle for relaxation.
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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we are back after having a week off due to scheduling. Bel is super excited to talk about Amazon’s New World, which finally leaves NDA. He goes into a deep dive of his experiences so far with the assorted systems of the game. From there we have a reasonable segue into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 and getting used to the WvW pvp system. We also talk a bit about other games like Final Fantasy XIV and how it handles PVP. We have a random aside where Bel talks about how he tends to avoid using mounts in Open World games, and finally Ash talks about how he has come to peace with the Blue Mage in FFXIV.
