The Division 2 – Page 2

Vacation Gaming

March 25, 2019 by Belghast

Today is going to be the first day back after a lengthy break, and as such I am struggling a little bit to get up and around this morning. Last week was the universal spring break week for Oklahoma schools and with that I opted to take Wednesday through Friday off to spend time with my wife. We went back and forth about taking some sort of a trip, but instead just dealt with a lot of things around the house that needed dealing with. I cleaned and organized my office, she tackled the closet, we got a new rug for the living room, made two trips to my mechanic to fix my drivers side window that was having trouble rolling up, finally dealt with our taxes and didn’t have to pay… and a slew of other small things that filled most of the time I took off. In between all of the running around I got in a fair amount of gaming, with the largest single target being The Division 2.

I am completely in the swing of this game and am slowly pushing my way across the map clearing control points and side missions along the way. At this point I have largely cleared the White House surrounding area, Downtown East, Federal Triangle, East Mall and have been focusing my time on clearing out content in the Southwest area. I am spending 99.9% of my time soloing the content and it is going more or less fairly well. My jam is still some sort of a fast firing single shot rifle and a shotgun to back it up when things get too close. What I am actually using for either of those varies based on what I happen to have seen drop… which is the weird thing about this game is the large number of drops I seem to get that are in no way upgrades to the weapon I was using from 3 levels earlier. However as with any Division game… the really important drops are the ones with a teal border like the one shown above.

Another major accomplishment of the weekend is that I finished the Final Fantasy XIV 4.5 content. I was ONE dungeon away from doing so but Anthem launched and then Division 2… and I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to log in and take care of it. Huge kudos to the awesome player who guided three of us newbies through Ghimlyt Dark and did an excellent job explaining the mechanics. I have to say though… it was a WAY easier dungeon than the Burn… which I think Thalen still needs? I need to check into that and help him out this week if that is the case. All in all I am ready for the next content drop to finally explain how we get from this point… to the point shown in the Full Trailer released at Fanfest Tokyo over the weekend. One of my employees is a super serious raider type… so I will be quizzing him this morning as to his thoughts about what was shown.

Another thing that has been stealing my time… namely the hanging out in bed before going to sleep time… is Baba is You. This is a weird puzzle game where you essentially hack reality and rewrite the rules of the universe to get a win condition. It reminds me of this mix between the old shareware title Paganitsu and Basic Programming logic. Paga was a significant title for me growing up because it fit neatly onto a floppy and we could play it clandestine like from the computer lab at school. Baba Is You is great because so often in puzzle games you get introduced to the mechanics and then they simply start dialing up the precision and speed that you need to react in order to complete puzzles. Baba on the other hand keeps challenging your conceptions and does not care at all about the fine motor skills or speed of execution… and as such gives you unlimited rollbacks as you sorta figure out how the pieces move on each map. Well worth checking out if you are interested in such things.

Lastly I started messing around with Breath of the Wild again… but if that were the end of that statement it would not be as nonsense as it ultimately is. I own this game on Wii U and Switch… but last night I started dinking around with Cemu the Wii U Emulator to see just how well it runs and what sort of resolution I could get it working at. The game looks gorgeous running in 4K but requires a bunch of fiddling to get it there. Not to mention just the act of getting it up in running was a pain in the butt which involved a whole slew of hoops to jump through to get the game patched and the emulator running. Then there was the added step of getting it working through Parsec so I could have the same experience while hanging out on the laptop downstairs… which involved installing controller emulators.

Basically I have NO CLUE why I did this thing, but I had a lot of fun and made it as far as Kakariko Village last night. I never made it terribly far into Breath of the Wild in part because of the restart. When the game first came out I did not have a Switch, and then at some point along the line I managed to find one in stock and re-bought the game on that platform. That meant having to redo everything over, which sorta killed my forward momentum. I seemed to log in more to summon treasure chests with Amiibos than I did to actually do anything else. My save game is littered with chests around the Dueling Peaks stable. It is truly shocking how well it runs, but there are a lot of frustrations… because the first time you encounter anything new there is a massive game freeze as it builds shader cache, however from that point on things are fluid again.

Basically chock this up to a long line of stupid things I have done like created a Chinese account so I could try Monster Hunter Online and setting up a Sega of Japan account to play Phantasy Star Online 2. I will likely wander away from it boredly at some point in the near future, but last night I had an awful lot of fun doing things that I should be able to do. I will however due to the potentially shady nature of this not be assembling a guide. I own two copies of Breath of the Wild so I figured it was completely legit for me to do shenanigans, but the real more stable answer to playing Breath of the Wild is to get a Switch.

Incentive Not To Play

March 21, 2019 by Belghast

I am still very much in vacation mode this week and as a result the posts are happening way later than normal. Yesterday Bioware hosted a developer stream and you can check out the VODs on Twitch or Mixer or if you are like me and prefer a bullet point list there is one up on the official Anthem Reddit and a slightly different one up on the Low Sodium Anthem Reddit. Unfortunately both of them seem to have missed at least one detail, but if you are interested in the Reddit at all… I highly suggest the Low Sodium version for overall better reading experiences. Ultimately they went over a bunch of changes to the game for both performance and quality of life as well as adding a few new systems in. First up there are the Elysian Caches that will spawn at the end of Stronghold missions and upon opening will reward either crafting embers or vanity items. I with it was BOTH and not either… and there will honestly be hell to pay if one of these chests starts pooping out lower tier crafting embers instead of Masterworks. The example they gave was 25 Masterwork Embers… which honestly is nowhere near as relevant to me as a Vanity item… so I am hoping that isn’t the majority we get out of these chests. Ultimately each player can get a key through a daily quest and if you have four players with four keys you end up with four times the loot at the end. Opening a chest grants items to everyone in the mission, so I have a feeling we will probably start saving these keys to run with our friends rather than with random people.

On the ever important loot front they stated that they are greatly improving the loot from chests and from the bosses at the end of strongholds, meaning that while you will still get one guaranteed drop you will have a higher likelihood of seeing additional Masterworks and Legendaries instead of the seemingly fixed 2 purples and an orange allotment that we seem to get now. I am hoping this actually maps out into something that feels like progress because for me at least the 1.0.3 loot changes have not actually worked out to being more Legendaries. Again I am at the end of the curve where I shard everything I get from pretty much every bit of content I run. Another big change is that they have removed the loading screen for the forge and put in what appears to be the start of a stat screen where it now shows on a single screen everything in your load out. Legendary Missions are going in which will be retreads of story missions but at harder difficulty and with what they are calling an Apex monster at the end of each, which is going to be like an Ancient Titan or a Luminary or something that is big and that already has its own higher baked in chance of dropping good loot. However the biggest improvement that I am looking forward to is that supposedly World Events will now show up on the damned World Map… so you can navigate your way to them instead of wandering around blindly hoping one will spawn.

I am in this weird place with Anthem where I am super excited to see the changes continue to happen, but it also disincentives me from actually playing the game right now. Why would I spend hours grinding in frustration when all of the activities are in theory improving their loot chances with the next patch? Right now it is targeted at Tuesday, so I will be looking forward to them and hopeful that they actually provide what feels like a benefit rather than just something that maths out over a high number of iterations.

In other news I joined LeavingSafeArea as it appeared to be the Clan with the highest density of folks that I know. Not that I am actually providing any sort of tangible benefit to the clan yet, but I did roam around a bit last night in the area of the White House dedicated to that sort of thing. Apparently in the post apocalyptic future we have randomly floating screens that seem to be projected from nowhere in a very specific location? Whoever this Enforzer person is has a MASSIVE lead on the rest of us. I am still very much in wander around aimlessly mode and explore the city. I knocked out a handful of side missions last night and then struggled to queue for the next main mission. I am not sure if I have missed the boat when it comes to running those missions with other players, or if I just need to bump up the difficulty to catch back up with the train. Right now I am still digging the Marksman Rifle and Shotgun Combo… and have upgraded what represents that combo more than a few times at this point. I miss my preorder shotgun, because none of the options I have found in the wild where anywhere near that good… however I had to walk away when I started getting options that were 2000 more damage. Still enjoying myself but I have to say… the most excited I get is when I see a new cosmetic item drop.

Incentive Not To Play

March 21, 2019 by Belghast

A Time Long Gone

March 20, 2019 by Belghast

Last night was largely spent roaming around the ruins of Washington and unlocking things. Seeing as I apparently did things out of the natural flow of the game… I have just now unlocked clans and will have to sort out which one I should join as it appears like there isn’t really a coalescence of my friends in one place other than the clan that Scopique and Traellan are in. Normally speaking I would be joining whatever extension of the AggroChat/Greysky Armada/House Stalwart community that would be erected in a brand new game. The challenge here however is that I know there won’t be one. That group of individuals bounced faster off the first one than I did, and as such I know there is no glorious renewal of interest in the game and with it a flourishing of guild activity. Division 2 is a game that I largely go into knowing that I won’t have the social structures I am used to with the familiar comfortable integrations with other players that I tend to take for granted. I will be blazing a new trail and carving out a new home for myself… and the challenge there is of course which group of friends do I choose.

I already have an invite waiting on me from TBC or The Bloody Clans… a group that dates back to EGA Battletech but I spent most of my time with during Everquest and City of Heroes and have not really spent much time with since. I know TQMB has a presence or Tequila Mockingbird, which was my original Destiny clan and one that I still associate with when I actually play the game on a serious level. There are lots of other pools of friends that vary in level of seriousness about the game, all of which gives me a maze of choices to navigate. This reminds me of a statement that my friend Neph said the other day and while I don’t remember the exact phrasing it was something to the effect of the following. “I can’t wait until everyone is playing the same game again.” While I agree with that desire… especially in a scenario like Division where those of us who are playing the same game are not even under the same banner.

The problem is my statement back to her was that it is likely never going to happen again. I think the era of everyone playing one game is past us… at least for the age bracket most of us are in and for the type of demographic gaming wise that we represent. The era of the big budget AAA MMORPG is long gone, and there just isn’t something exciting enough on the horizon to unite the tribes of gamers together underneath one mutually agreeable digital habitat. If I am being honest with myself the last game that did this was World of Warcraft… and I am not talking modern WoW but instead the series run from Vanilla through the end of Wrath of the Lich King. In my experience that was the heyday of the “It” game that everyone was at the very least dabbling in. It was the era where you could walk up to pretty much any gamer of any stripe and they would be able to tell you what server and faction they were playing. My friend tells a story about an awkward interaction at a birthday party when he goes through a sequence of emotions… first of excitement to find out another one of the dads plays Warcraft… and then disappointment when he finds out they are playing on the opposite faction.

The “It” game for this generation is Fortnite… and before that it was League of Legends… and before that it was Minecraft… all of which more or less left the demographic that most of us are members behind. Even during the heyday of MMORPGs we struggled to ever get everyone to commit to playing a new game. I remember the first big foray was into Warhammer Online, and even then we only managed to muster about fifteen players to try it out of a roster of almost a hundred. The inertia of World of Warcraft was too strong to break most players out of its field of influence. We tried similar jaunts for Champions Online and the one that finally took me away from the game completely for awhile was Rift. The last big successful departure was Star Wars the Old Republic, and even then that only lasted for a few months. With the release of Elder Scrolls Online I drew heavily on social media attempting to pull everyone into the same guild… only to watch it fizzle out after another three months.

Essentially I feel like there will probably never be another game that unites the banners, and that is in part because we as gamers have fragmented and quite honestly are no longer willing to deal with the things we once were. I remember with the launch of World of Warcraft being stuck looting a Kobold in Elwynn Forest for a good 15-20 minutes and simply hard crashing the client and going on with my life. Which is in part why I found it so funny to hear people call the launch of Anthem disastrous, because compared to that it was smooth sailing. We just aren’t willing to deal with the inconveniences that we once were in order to play with gamers online, because that is no longer a novel and unique experience. Everquest was in part popular because it gave us the ability to have lots of our friends together in the same world, whereas before we were limited to somewhere between 4 and 16 players connected to a dedicated server that someone had to run in order to play games together. Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online before that gave us massive persistent worlds for us to explore… and at some point along the line we stopped caring so much about that novelty.

Now almost every game you play has some sort of massively online functionality that pushes other players into your game time. In Assassin’s Creed when another player dies in game it spawns a quest for you to go avenge their death by killing whatever NPCs took them out. This is a functionally single player experience, but it still has hooks into the larger game world to make you feel like you are experiencing things together with your friends… with friends being the loosest definition of that term in this case. The novelty of being online with other people just isn’t the draw that it once was, and as a result we instead are focused on the story or the gameplay or other elements that instead mean we are effectively looking for different things in our gaming experiences.

I’m a grinder… and while I enjoy the story… I am ultimately in a game for the loot and a sense of progression. So I can play games with the scantest of story so long as the moment to moment game-play feels good. Tam on the other hand cannot get behind a game that does not have a story or a game world that he cares about. This ultimately was the line in the sand that kept us both from enjoying Destiny 1/2 because he could not get behind that world or the digging required to find out any of the story. Ash on the other hand is deeply into systems and tends to love games with lots of customization and ability to tweak builds… so something like a Warframe with its systems within systems within systems really resonates with him. Every so often there will be a single game that caters to all of these core desires… but it happens very rarely. While I just outlines motivations for three members of our group… you can imagine what that matrix begins to look like when you expand that to ten people or a hundred people.

Ultimately we want a higher level of fidelity in our games now. We were willing to give something up for the novelty of hanging out online with our friends, but seeing as we are almost constantly connected through Slack, Discord, Twitter, Facebook and countless other little ways… that connectivity no longer is as valuable as it once was. Shit I remember a time when my friend and I used to dial into each others computers and talk over a terminal app just because it was interesting and novel, and now I can message tens of thousands of people in my larger orbit within seconds… and we just consider that the bare minimum for internet connectivity these days. No one builds massive worlds these days where lots and lots of players are connected at the same time… instead everything seems to have shifted away to smaller match based systems with cities serving as lobbies. I personally like the Destiny/Division/Anthem/Monster Hunter style of game play that lets me drop in and out without feeling bad about letting my friends down.

I know this summer we will once again coalesce upon Final Fantasy XIV for the release of the Shadow Bringers expansion. However I know that by the three month mark it too will have dwindled down to only the most die-hard and dedicated of player still playing it. I’ve largely made my peace with the fact that there will likely never again be another World of Warcraft, at least not in that genre. That same magnetism however keeps happening in other genres, so maybe someday down the time fifteen years from now… there will be a re-invigoration of the MMORPG genre. However I think more than anything… we mourn a moment in time where the stars aligned more than we actually mourn a specific game during its period of greatness. Games at the end of the day come down to the people you play them with… and as such I am still stymied by picking who to play Division with.