Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off with what has become a regular side topic of us talking about our lives dealing with the pandemic. From there we dive into Cloudpunk a game about a digital dog and delivering packages in a blade runner landscape. Bel dives into a discussion about how Modern Consoles are effectively turning into Gaming PCs and the weirdness of cross generational purchases for Microsoft games. Bel also waxes nostalgic about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and how he is greatly looking forward to the upcoming remaster of 1+2 coming this September. We end up getting off on a side jaunt into Elder Scrolls games, and then transition into a talk about Sodoku. Finally we talk some about the announcement of a brand new Paper Mario game and the new footage available for Ghosts of Tsushima.
Unreal Engine 5 Demo on PlayStation 5
This week we were able to see footage of what this generation of video games will bring us on the new consoles with the release of an Unreal Engine 5 demo running on live PlayStation 5 hardware. Before I dig into this topic I want to throw up a disclaimer that nothing I am about to say is meant to discount the hard work or how revolutionary this may be for game developers. It does in fact sound like it is going to reduce the work load significantly allowing them to directly use assets rather than trying to bake them down to usable assets in a game engine. However from a pure visual standpoint, this seems less like a generational leap and more like cranking the settings from High up to Ultra in a video game.
Unreal Engine 5 Demo on PlayStation 5
I am wondering if we have gotten to the point where graphics are good enough that any improvements just end up feeling marginal? We reached this point with pixel graphics during the jump from the 16 bit era to the 32 bit era with games like Castlevania Symphony of the Night, not really looking that much better than games you could have seen on the Super Nintendo. Sure you had a much wider palette and could therefore display a wider variety of colors on screen at once. However if you jump between playing SoTN and a game like Dracula X that released for the SNES there isn’t much of a noticeable difference.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Nintendo 64
We’ve been on this journey with 3D graphics that started out with something as primitive as this, and evolved rapidly over the course of a few generations. We’ve gotten used to each generation being instantly and noticeably better than the previous generation. I am starting off with the Nintendo 64, because while it technically released after the PlayStation it seems like the floor of 3D graphics that were available during this generation.
Vagrant Story – PlayStation
It may be a matter of preference but for me at least games like Vagrant Story showed the PlayStation 1 era to be cable of a superior experience. The Nintendo 64 games felt childish and block, whereas the PlayStation games were capable of conveying rich emotions. Now these could come entirely down to art direction and decisions made by the studios, but for me at least it felt like I was leaping forward a full generation when I moved from the 64 over to my Dual Shock Playstation.
God of War – PlayStation 2
When I moved up to the PlayStation 2 the leap was even more noticeable. The textures were smooth and gone was the blocky nature of the characters. Other than the 4:3 aspect ration of most PlayStation 2 era games, I still consider many of these to be completely playable. God of War was one of the better looking games on the system, and since I have some direct comparisons to games on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, I figured I would use this as a reference title.
God of War 3 – PlayStation 3
To be honest, looking at these two screenshots, I would argue that this generational leap at least with this title wasn’t as big. Last of Us after all originally released on the PlayStation 3. However just between these two shots you can see higher fidelity of assets and better lighting. It is hard to tell it in a single image, but the main thing that came with the PlayStation 3 was bigger and more open worlds, whereas the PlayStation 2 mostly focused around more static scenes, you had a sense that you were roaming a living environment.
God of War – PlayStation 4
Now I realize this is a completely different type of game to the previous God of War titles, but it no less highlights something important. For me the leap forward that happened between the Xbox 360/PS3 era to the Xbox One/PS4 era was significant. This was the first time we were capable of playing in what felt to be photo realistic worlds, and the games were completely capable of carrying off that illusion. For years PC games had effectively stagnated due being tied to the 360 and PS3, but this is also the generation that 4K became a major player in gaming and with it a higher level of fidelity than we had experienced before. This generation felt like it was the biggest leap to date, for me personally.
Unreal Engine 5 Demo on PlayStation 5
There is no denying that the Unreal Engine Demo footage looks good, but when you compare it directly to an image coming from a game of this generation, I see higher fidelity but not enough to make it clear that we are making a generational jump.
Jedi Fallen Order – Xbox One X
If you compare the above image to a screenshot from Jedi Fallen Order, I am not sure if I could tell they were effectively running on different generations of hardware. I think the challenge there is that we had a half generational jump in the middle of this generation. Notice that this image is from an Xbox One X which is capable of 4K gaming, whereas the base model is still stuck in the 1080p era. I think this generation is going to feel like another incremental bump forward, and not necessarily the radical shift that I was hoping for.
Horizon Zero Dawn – PlayStation 4 Pro
Granted I am cherry picking examples of some of the best looking games from the current generation to use as contrasting evidence, and they are being placed up against a demo reel. However I do feel like it is an important question to ask ourselves as we go into this next generation. If you are already running an Xbox One X or a PlayStation 4 Pro… is this leap worth the $500 to $600 price tag that is going to come with it? For me it likely is because at least on the console front I never took the half leap and am running an original Xbox One and PlayStation 4. So yeah it probably will be a sizeable upgrade, but for those rocking a 4K capable console or PC right now, I am questioning if this is a big enough bump to make it feel worth it?
Unreal Engine 5 Demo on PlayStation 5
All of this said… it could just be that I am getting older and that my eyes are not capable of picking out the same level of visual fidelity that they once were. However if I went into this scenario and you threw screenshots of all of these 4k games in with the Unreal Engine footage, I am not sure if I could immediately tell the difference. Granted all of this is ultimately moot because I am mostly a PC gamer, and maybe it is just that I am used to the fidelity of games that can be produced on that platform already with significantly higher performing hardware than the consoles will likely ever have. Ultimately this has left me with a feeling that the games look great, but that ultimately I expected more in some way that I can’t quite quantify. I feel like we have maybe reached the limits to what is visually possible, and everything moving forward is going to be a battle of margins and not the big leaps forward I experienced throughout my gaming career.
The post Old Man eyes and Game Generations appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 releasing September 4, 2020
With the announcement of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 I have high hopes but also some significant concerns due to the recent track record of the series. Yesterday I had a project piece to write, but this morning I cannot get it out of my head. The details so far are that Vicarious Visions is working on the game and it is targeting the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC via the Epic Games Store. It also is coming out fairly soon, with the trailer announcing that it releases on September 4th, which apparently a demo of the Warehouse level coming out before that for anyone who pre-orders the game.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 Collector’s Edition Contents
There are as far as I can tell three main products available, the standard game is roughly $40 regardless of platform. The digital deluxe edition is roughly $50 and adds some retro stuff for create a skater mode, retro costumes for Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen and Steve Caballero, and The Powell-Peralta Ripper visualized as a skater. All of those things really only matter to those of us who are 40 somethings and grew up in the era when Powell-Peralta and the Bones Brigade were kings. Finally you have the physical collectors edition that is roughly $100 and comes with the game, digital deluxe goodies and a legit Birdhouse Skateboard Deck. This is intriguing because in theory the game is $50 and based on my research Birdhouse decks seem to sell for around $60 so you are seemingly getting your moneys worth with the edition. As much as I loathe physical editions of games, it is a temptation just to have it so I can hang the deck on my wall.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Warehouse Level
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a big series for me, and I owned the original on PlayStation, the first sequel on Dreamcast and when the third game came out for PlayStation 2 it was among one of the first titles I purchased. You have to understand I was a little skater punk during my pre-teen years and I even went to see the Bones Brigade when they did an exposition at the fair grounds. I was a horrible skater, but I loved everything about the scene and even patterned a lot of my early musical tastes based on what I was hearing in the background of skate videos. The soundtrack to Streets of Fire is still freaking amazing even though everything else about it is 110% cringe these days.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Schoolyard Level
I grew up playing games like Skate or Die, 720 and T&C Surf Designs which were generally horrible representations of skateboarding as a whole but the best we had access to. So when I got my hands on the first Tony Hawk game I was completely enthralled. I spent countless hours in Free Skate mode just doing random tricks and figuring out lines to take in the timed modes. The Dreamcast version of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 however elevated everything to a new level, because the graphics at least for the time were completely amazing. I got caught up in create a skater mode as I leveled up and maxed out all of the traits, allowing me to do some silly stuff with the game. The second game even had a create a skate park mode, allowing you to craft levels from a bunch of prefab components. It reminded me of my early years building entire fingerboard skate parks with cardboard and index cards, using bic pen barrels as coping.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Dam Level
I really want the remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 to be amazing. I loved the original games, but I also have to take a moment to express my doubts. Not all of the games have been great, and Activision doesn’t exactly have a great track record with the franchise. In 2012 the released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD which was in theory a remix of the best levels from the first and second game, but fell short on a lot of the mechanic aspects of the game. Everything felt very floaty and the moves seemed to lack the weight that the original console games by Neversoft had. In 2015 they released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 which seemed to take these floaty mechanics and double down on them with moves that felt more like you were ice skating on concrete than actually riding on top of grippy urethane wheels. To make matters worse the game attempted to dip its toes into the games as a service model and required you to connect to lobby servers in order to play.
I hope they do in fact recapture the glory of what made the first few games in the series amazing, and give us a legitimate clean game without the entanglement of always on play and microtransactions. There is already a video that analyzes the game play we have seen so far, and the Youtuber offers concerns that the animations thus far appear to be more akin to what we were seeing in HD than in the first or second game. Ultimately at the end of the day it will come down to how it plays, and we won’t know that until September. I have a lot of hopes though, because I really want this game to be good. The Skateboarding genre evolved after THPS into more simulation games like the Skate series and the indie darling Skater XL. These are absolutely not my jam, because in truth all I really want is the arcade fun that the Tony Hawk series gave me. So here is hoping we can get a return to form for that series.
The post Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Hopes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
On the 9th my friend Wilhelm partook in an interesting thought experiment, in which he pulled the statistics and posted the top five viewed posts for each year of his blog. I would love to be able to replicate this post, however to the best of my ability I seem to be unable to filter my statistics based on posting date. I am guessing this is another one of those times that posting on WordPress.com gives you better access to tools than being out here floating in the black with WordPress.org and Jetpack. There are things that apparently I can do to start capturing this with Google Analytics, but unfortunately it is a little late to go back eleven years and make that happen. The post however was a follow-up to another post where he posted what was the most read posts during a specific year regardless of post date, and that one I think I can replicate.
So going back and looking at my early posts feels like they were written by a stranger. During 2009 I made a grand total of 53 posts on this fledgling blog, and two of those posts got noticed by WoW Insider, namely the Groupcraft series where I attempted to outline the best ways to build a group in the pre-dungeon-finder era. The other was my expose on how keyboard turners are bad and how you should exorcise them from your raid. I mean it doesn’t exactly say that, and attempts to be a help piece, but looking back it absolutely feels like that today. It is one of those popular posts that I am ultimately embarrassed in the modern era.
During the entire calendar year of 2010 I only managed to make seven posts. Most of these were fairly angry screeds about guild leadership, responsibility, and dealing with frustrations. I was not in a happy place mentally either in real life or in the raid. Again reading through these posts, I can remember writing them but they seem like they were written by someone else. Not shockingly all of the posts that were well read during that year were from 2009. I was very much still trying to be a World of Warcraft blog and I was finding myself way less happy with the game and as a result felt like I didn’t have much to write about.
This is the year that I ultimately left World of Warcraft for the first time and decided that apparently I was changing my site over to being a Rift Fan Site. Look we all make some strange choices and last I recall I am still flagged on the Rift forums as a Fansite Creator. During the course of the year I knocked out 70 posts which was more posts than I had written on the blog up to this point. I did love Rift and I poured my year and soul into making posts about the game, including reposting patch notes with some minor commentary. Additionally I started talking about Minecraft for the first time.
2012 – The Secret World and Star Wars the Old Republic
For being the year that spawned my highest read post ever, it is funny that I only managed to write 23 posts during the entire year. This is the year that Secret World launched and then later in the same year Star Wars the Old Republic, both of which were significant games for me. I was getting frustrated while leveling through SWTOR trying to figure out when I should be doing the bonus series that open up on planets. So one day I sat down and worked my way through the various item databases try and sort out a semi-optimal route. I posted this on the guild forums to help everyone else out that I was playing with, and on a whim I decided to also post this on my blog. This is why I often say that it is never the posts you are actually proud of that manage to get traction.
This was the year that I begin the whole “Grand Experiment” and started posting something every day regardless if I actually felt like I had something worth posting. This project lasted about three and a half years and in this first year I managed to rack up 257 posts. The only new post that managed to make the top five however is one that I cobbled together because I couldn’t find a good list of Puzzles and Cairns in Rift and I collated some data I found from other partial sources and combined it. I am rapidly realizing that I probably should go back and edit these posts to update them because they absolutely STILL get hits.
I continued the Grand Experiment and managed to post every single day during 2014, and seemingly had a few spare posts because at the end of the year I racked up 371 unique posts. This was the year when in my infinite wisdom I decided to start Blaugust, the blogging festival that normally occurs in August and originally asked everyone to make a post every single day for a month. You would however barely be able to tell this based on the most read posts. Once again we have the SWTOR Bonus Series post, the Rift Puzzles and Cairns post… but at least there are a few new ones related to ArcheAge which I believe released during this year. Essentially it seems as though the title of a post makes an awful lot of difference in how many readers it gets, and this is a lesson I should have learned over the years but have almost obstinately ignored.
Once again I managed to create 371 unique posts, which is bizarre to have the same number two years in a row for a “daily blog” that is not 365. I should research why the exact same number of extra posts occurred at some point. The second year of Blaugust got significantly more traction than the first year did and as a result we see the introductory post actually charting in the third place. One of the things I have had a bad habit of doing is coming up with a series idea, only to abandon it almost immediately. One of these series was “MMOs Worth Playing”, the idea being to highlight some of the online games that I felt were under appreciated. One of these posts was on Marvel Heroes, god rest its soul, and the Gazillion marketing department picked up on this and advertised the article, causing a massive spike in readership on that one post. The bonus series post continues to refuse to die.
Honestly I am not sure what exactly happened during 2016, as it is a year I have mostly shoved out of my memory. This is apparently the year I decided to stop the daily posting thing because I only racked up 305 posts. I know World of Warcraft Legion launched, and that is has become my favorite expansion and as a result I am certain from August onward I was completely devoted to that. I also know that Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns released, which I am sure I played but I don’t think I really got into it until much later. I know I was dabbling in a few MOBAs, which lead me to write a think piece about how I would really like to see a game that plays like Diablo but has MOBA style character design… something that has ultimately come true now in a few different variants. I was also enamored with Creativerse, which I considered to be an arguably better version of Minecraft… and I think maybe this piece also had some corporate influence in the aggregation department. The Playful Studios account still follows me, but the Creativerse one no longer does.
I made a total of 247 posts during a year that at least for me was largely dominated by Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. The top post of the year was a guide for hitting 400 light in the original Destiny without having to set foot in any of the raids. Largely I outlined the various soft caps and which activities you could use to bypass them, along with a general starter guide on how to address the content. Bumbling Around confused me at first, but in it I talk about using NumLock as a way of tricking Diablo 3 into spamming an auto attack, for those things you want to keep up on cooldown. For awhile I was obsessive about posting what Xur had every Friday, so weirdly one of those posts made it into the list as well as my post about the PC Launch for Destiny 2.
2018 – Blaugust Reborn
Planet and Bonus Series Level Ranges Schmoradric Cube Blaugust Reborn Bumbling Around Leveling DPS is Butts
Once again I settled in with 248 posts, which is only one more than 2017 which I can only assume is just weird calendar math since I fell into the pattern of posting every week day. 2017 was the year with no Blaugust, and 2016 had a very halfassed version of it… so come 2018 I was getting external pressure and support to start the event up again. This represents the start of the modern style of Blaugust being a six week long event with a discord and all of the modern infrastructure. Funny story… the other day I joined a stream and the person kept mistakenly calling me Blaugust instead of Belghast. I thought it was somewhat adorable and didn’t have the heart to correct them. The Bonus Series post will not die and the Diablo 3 numlock post seems to have legs as well. Schmoradric Cube though is the weird post that doesn’t fit given it is largely a throw away topic where I discuss a random item you get from one of Cayde-6’s treasure maps in Destiny 2. The fifth place topic is me complaining about the lack of good leveling options for DPS alts in Final Fantasy XIV.
2019 – A Restless Year
Grim Community Planet and Bonus Series Level Ranges Final Fantasy XIV Minion Guide Blaugust 2019 Steelfeather God Roll
I find it really hard to summarize 2019 with one or two major events that happened. Maybe it is just that it seems too recent for me to look back with clarity on what actually happened. I do know that I cranked out 270 posts, and I think this is in part because I started posting our AggroChat episode on Sundays. The stats are a little weird because a post I made in 2015 came back with a vengeance, and I am assuming it got linked somewhere. Once again… I feel like I really should be going back and periodically updating these “guide posts” because I am certain the “FFXIV Minion” guide is woefully outdated. Destiny 2 had its Shadowkeep release which breathed new life into the game for me, and the “Steelfeather God Roll” got traction due to the title honestly. I also did a deep dive on Grim Dawn and its various community supported resources, which got way more traction than I ever released until looking at the numbers for this post. Once again… the damned Bonus Series post remains.
2020 – Life in Pandemia
Controllers for Big Hands Grim Community Substitute Amiibo Cards A Dose of Blapril Steelfeather God Roll
It is too early to really write the tale of this year, but whatever the case I am certain that it will be dominated by the pandemic and the several month long pause in all of our lives. As far as posts go… the Bonus Series is finally off the map, at least for now. My Controllers for Big Hands post that I am actually somewhat fond of is currently leading the count, with Grim Community holding in strong in second place. My Tutorial on how to create Amiibo Cards is ranking in part because everyone is playing Animal Crossing right now. Blapril just concluded and its announce topic has continued the post-Blaugust-Reborn pattern of making the list, with the Steelfeather God Roll rounding out the top five.
I thought I would close out this little experiment by showing you the list of the top ten most read posts on my blog since its inception in 2009. I think there are two takeaways from this. The first is that you can never really predict what is going to gain traction, and having a clear search engine friendly title means an lot more than I ever realized. This hasn’t changed my stance on giving posts strange titles however. The second takeaway is that it is never the posts you deeply care about that end up becoming your most read. I have come to terms with this and the fact that the Bonus Series will always be up there in numbers. Like I have said a few times, I really should update those posts.
