Innocuous Credit Sequence Screenshot from Horizon Zero Dawn
This morning I have a handful of topics to talk about, and none of them really feel like they are big enough to fill an entire post. As a result you are going to get a number of tidbits about each. Starting up with a screenshot from the credit roll sequence of Horizon Zero Dawn that is in no way a spoiler for the game as a whole. This is the second time I have gotten a credit roll for this game as I had originally played it on the PlayStation. Knowing how the game goes does not stop the fact that the ending was still an emotional sucker punch and I did not have dry eyes at several points during it.
The only advice I would give is that it personally felt better to pause the main story at some point and go knock out the DLC content, and that more or less paid off well. I love it when a game gives you a moment to visit with your friends that you met along the way one last time before the looming end battle. Playing through the DLC ahead of this moment meant that elements of the DLC were included which felt really good. I personally paused the main story shortly after getting to the main city of the game and getting the quest directive “Find <character name> at the Excavation Site” and that seemed to be a good place because it was a lull in what was happening.
Yeah Kamala I feel the same way
I feel like I am getting dangerously close to beating a dead horse at this point with this topic. I tweeted my feelings on Friday and spent a good chunk of Saturday’s podcast talking through it as well. Avengers was not a game that I had been following super closely, but I was hoping it would be enjoyable and had been looking forward to it. On Friday’s I have to take a half day furlough and as a result I had planned on spending my afternoon playing the game. I ultimately lasted about two hours before giving up and asking Steam for a refund. I verified this but in the entire history of using steam since September 22nd of 2004… I have asked for two refunds. The first was for Skater XL, because I was hoping for something like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and when I asked if there was a way to configure the game to behave like that the community was toxic as fuck to me. The second game is Avengers, because I feel like the problems I have with this game will not be fixable within the time frame of a September launch.
The sad thing about this is that I really was enjoying the story beats, but the core gameplay loop felt awful. If you have ever played a truly alpha game, there is a phase that sorta happens early on when all of the pieces that make up the combat system are in the game, but nothing has really been tuned to make it feel enjoyable. The characters are making attacks but they don’t really have a solid flow that they feed into. This is what Avengers felt like to me, as I fought with the overly aggressive camera and screen shake and combat that didn’t feel seem to feel like it was actually connected to what my character was doing. The similarly aggressive Quick Time Event system and the fact that sometimes they just wouldn’t fire when you needed one of them to… like swinging over a chasm… got tiring as well.
We are effectively two and a half weeks away from launch, and at this point… I have no faith that the game is going to change in a significant way. Unless they made the stupid decision of having players play through a year or more old demo… the game is effectively where it is going to be when the game launches. Ultimately it came down to the fact that nothing I was doing was really “fun” because I didn’t feel like I was engaged with the world around me. Maybe it feels particularly bad because I have been playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghosts of Tsushima… both games with phenomenally engaging combat systems. As it stands it is doing a lot of the things that DC Universe Online did in 2011 but instead gives you less freedom of movement and throws in a bunch of Quick Time Event infused cinematics for you to watch. However I believed the combat in DCUO, which I guess makes it the better game.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 Warehouse Demo
Another demo that I got to play with this weekend is the Warehouse level from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. I don’t have a ton to talk about this because I have only played a few sessions, but I know enough now to feel like this is legitimately going to be a good game. I have been playing THPS2 on my RG350 emulator handheld, and I have to say that this essentially checks all of the boxes that the original game did. The only thing that takes a little getting used to is that the game as a whole is considerably faster than the original. The other thing that is a bit weird is that instead of standing up after a wipe, you sorta do this glitchy rewind thing which is stylized… but takes some getting used to. Those things aside… it was after a few minutes that my muscle memory started to come back. I do want to play around a bit with button mappings because as it stands a few of the buttons should be handled better with triggers.
Ghosts of Tsushima on baseline PS4
I spent the majority of Sunday playing Ghosts of Tsushima. I had been wanting to play through HZD before really getting into this game in earnest. I gotta say I am really enjoying myself and the only thing that would have made the experience better is… 1) if it were on a PC and 2) if I was playing with a keyboard and mouse. Essentially controller just isn’t my jam but I suffer through it on occasion for games that I feel are worthy of the frustration. I am still largely in the first area of the game, slowly working my way through the story missions and recruiting help. I am sure I will have more to say in the coming days. I know everyone has been talking about this already for months but it is all new to me.
The post The Good, the Bad and the Ghost appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends. I still mostly feel horrible, but less horrible enough that I am going to attempt doing work and such. Yesterday late in the day I did in fact make a blog post happen, in part because I wanted to get the review of something new out there as soon as possible. On the gaming front I am still very much living my life in the world of Horizon Zero Dawn. Right now I have paused the main story a bit to catch up on side quests, and figured it was a reasonable time to do the expansion content, or at least the bulk of it.
When I first played HZD on the PlayStation 4, I beat the game at level 39. As of last night I dinged 45 and have so much more content left to go. The game in theory caps out level wise at 60, but supposedly progression keeps on trucking after that if things I have read are to be believed. It will be interesting to see exactly where I wind up upon finishing the story. The key difference is I seem to be killing a lot more random stuff in the world just because I can and it is fun to watch dinobots explode.
I am pretty sure my favorite part of Horizon Zero Dawn though is finding and mounting the Tallneck in a given region. In the frigid north you have an interesting side quest related to saving one, and it might be my new favorite part of the game. These tall friends are the best and I want them to live happy lives. Also the north is absolutely visually stunning… which causes me to stop and take photos of this sweet sweet friend lumbering around happily. I am probably weird to be personifying the robots so hard but whatever… this one has never tried to kill me.
Another weird thing that I apparently like doing… is dressing appropriately for whatever climate I am in? I mean the armor has no impact on your surroundings, but I find myself wearing Banuk armor when I am in the north and Carja armor when I am in the south because apparently I don’t want Aloy to get hot/cold. It legitimately makes next to no difference what type of armor I am wearing, because I can move the mods around at will, but for some reason it makes a significant difference to me as the player. The weird part is that I have never worried about dressing appropriate to the climate before in a game, but for whatever reason I just do so instinctively here.
The only problem with playing a single player game is that more or less I don’t have a lot that is terribly interesting to talk about, that is also not deeply spoilerific. Yes this game is now three years old at this point, but for the PC crew it is brand new and I don’t want to do anything that would heavily damage the impact of the story beats. So instead you are probably going to get a continued sequence of content with me posting pretty pictures and talking about largely unimportant things until I get Horizon Zero Dawn out of my system again. I think I might be entering another sequence of single player titles, because I believe more than likely I will be playing Ghosts of Tsushima after this.
The post Saving TallFrens appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning folks! I spent the entirety of my weekend in Horizon Zero Dawn (minus a bit of time playing World of Warcraft while podcasting of course). I’ve played the game before, in fact it was my game of the year from 2017. However like always, my preferred method of playing games is on the PC and with Mouse and Keyboard and there was a lot of the game that I found trying because if the imprecise nature of controller gaming. Additionally there was a Frozen Wilds DLC that was released after our initial play through, and I never quite returned to pick that up and play it. So with the release of Horizon Zero Dawn on my preferred platform, with my preferred play style, and with new content I had never seen… It prompted me to sit down and play the game with fresh eyes some three years after my first visit to this world.
There is a bit of controversy surrounding this game, and I am not sure if it is coming from legitimate issues or hyperbole. So some things that you need to know before heading down this road. The game install is about 70 gb and there will be a 35 gb patch immediately after installing. I am not sure if the binaries have been updated in steam to allay this issue or not, but I pre-loaded and was greeted with a significant day one patch. The game also really wants you to be on the latest revision of your video drivers, so I highly suggest doing that before attempting to play. Those things out of the way immediately following launching the game it is going to do this step that takes a significant amount of time as the shaders are pre-compiled on your hardware to make sure the game runs as smoothly as possible.
For me this was about a 15 minute process, but for some folks I am hearing it can take upwards of an hour as they wait for their game to reach a playable state. From what I understand if you are running the game on the “Original” preset, you are effectively playing the game with the same graphical fidelity that would have been present on a PlayStation 4 Pro. For me, the game detected High preset and is running at 4k resolution, and I have largely left that alone and run with it. Unfortunately I scale down the screenshots to 1080p and compress them before uploading to the blog so it doesn’t exactly do the game justice. It is hard to state just how pretty the game is and how good the experience of running around in this world feels on a PC.
The other complaint that I am hearing is that the game crashes, and that is not entirely untrue. I don’t have significant issues with crashes but I have experienced a handful while playing. Normally it happens after a two to three hours of gameplay and the game will just lock up… before crashing out and asking me if I want to send a bug report. I am hoping that later patches will remedy this, since hopefully they are getting an influx of bug reports about this issue. However it really hasn’t caused that much of an issue while playing. The game is pretty prolific bout creating auto saves while you run around the world, and I am also extremely used to hitting every campfire I happen to pass. The combination of these has meant that I have never really lost any significant progress from a crash.
I realize it is a bit unusual for me to address things in this order, but in the case of this game and its current mixed reviews on Steam, I felt like I wanted to get the negative bits out of the way first. The positives of the game greatly overwhelm these and for me who has not played the game in three years… it felt like visiting an old friend. The biggest take away I have upon returning to the game is that I am just significantly more powerful than I was the first time. That isn’t a change in a game, but more a change in the way that I approach it. I understand how combat works now, and I understand how important it is to target the weak points on enemies. For example there is a latch on the back of a shell walker, that if you disable with your bow will cause a treasure trove to pop off of its back. I didn’t do a good job of this the first time around and as a result I missed out on a lot of powerful loot as a result.
There is a moment early in the game where you are set up against what is supposed to be a very intimidating encounter. However that same encounter with time becomes something that you see pretty often out in the world, and as a result I went into it knowing exactly how to disable it and take it down efficiently. Essentially as I titled the podcast this weekend “Precision is Power”, I know how the world works now and as a result I can do a much better job of navigating its hurdles. Coming back to the game, I find myself remembering so many things that just keep flooding back in waves as I arrive at areas. It only took a few minutes before the Keyboard and Mouse controls felt like an extension of my arm, rather than something that I was having to account for.
If you want my gaming impressions, you are probably significantly better off reading my original post from 2017. Those are the thoughts of someone experiencing the game for the first time, and probably a better experience for those who have never played the game. To be honest… Horizon Zero Dawn might be on my Games of the Year list for 2020 because playing it on PC and with my chosen input method is such a more enjoyable experience that it elevates everything to a new level. That said… playing the game with the expansion content adds a new dimension to the game. I wasn’t exactly sure how the new content would weave its way into the story, but it does so in a manner that feels seamless.
You can branch out into the new content as soon as I arrive at the city of Meridian, which depending on your play style could be pretty quick… or could be several hours into the game. What is unique however and the thing that I noticed almost immediately is once you have exited the “tutorial” content, the world seems significantly more alive than it used to. The only frame of reference I can really give you is that the game now has Skyrim-esc random encounters as you are roaming the world. You might come across a pack of enemy bandits trying to take down a machine, and you have to choose to either avoid the entire mess or take advantage of both sides and get some easy kills. Additionally there are encounters were you happen across some Nora braves, and you can help them out and get experience for doing so.
It is a little thing, and subtle… but it adds so much life to the world. In the original game, once you left any of the settlements it was more or less just you and the zoids out there. Now there are other human beings along the way that make the world feel more inhabited and vibrant. I love this game so much, and coming back has felt amazing. If you have never had the chance to play the game I highly suggest checking it out on your PC storefront of choice. I picked up the game on Steam and have been happy with that decision, thought it is also available on Epic Game Store. However it seems like the EGS didn’t offer preloading which was a bit odd. Bow combat feels so much better with the precise nature of the mouse and keyboard, and I am legitimately wishing this had been an option from day one. I am hoping as we go through the next generation of consoles, that more games will natively support KBM.
The post Horizon is Better on PC appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Due to improper planning and the fact that last week was Belghast’s wedding anniversary so we called it for the evening. Tonight we are back and with a proper show chock full of goodness. Actually just prior to the show Tam carpet bombed the trello with like two dozen topics, so we will probably be in business for several weeks. Kodra participated in the very first GenCon Online and has lots of things to talk about regarding it. During the middle of this discussion we break into a side tangent about how we feel like Shadowrun would work well using the World of Darkness Storyteller system. Grace and Bel revisit Horizon Zero Dawn on the PC and talk about how much better the game feels with a mouse and keyboard. Ash talks about playing Gundam EX vs Maxiboost ON and this leads to a side discussion about Gundam Breaker. Bel talks about finishing Death Stranding and how emotionally connected he was to the characters in the game. Finally we dive into a discussion about games and companion apps and how a lot of tabletop gaming and the company fear of the internet shoots them in the foot.
