March 2016 – Page 10

The King Fell

March 9, 2016 by Belghast

The Ship Boss

Since the launch of Destiny I have had a desire to do the raid content… because that is the sort of thing I would do in any of the MMOs. Unfortunately Destiny never really gained the sort of traction that I would have liked among my circle of friends. Initially Tam and Ash and Kodra all played… but petered out pretty quickly. With the launch of The Taken King there was a bit of a resurgence, but similarly did not last terribly long. Another friend that would have probably happily joined in raid time fun… plays on a completely different console. I had gotten to the point where I kept considering trying to brute force a raid to happen by coaxing various friends who I know that play the game casually into joining me for madness. Then out of the blue my good friend Squirrel almost strong arms me into joining the raid with his clan Axioma, which in truth I jumped at the opportunity. Last night was that raid and I have to say I am hooked. Firstly the group of folks I went in with are amazing, and super chill about newbie failures. I cannot fathom how the first people to do this raid figured out some of the crap that you need to do. I swear it took me a solid thirty minutes to get through the ship encounter, where you have to jump from one ship at the right time as another one is fading from underneath you. All the while Wet was super supportive and coaxing me through the process, and while I felt horrible to taking so long to grasp the jumps… it was kinda awesome that they were willing to let me keep attempting it.

The entire night I was admittedly largely clueless and doing everything I could to listen to the directions and execute them to the best of my ability. When playing with a new group of folks, there is always the strong desire to “not fail miserably”. That said I still managed to cause us to wipe a few times, and regardless of the situation everyone was really relaxed and just kept plugging forward. I have to say this has done more than anything to validate my decision to follow Squirrel and jump clans, because it seems like this really is an amazing group of folks. I am just floored that I have gone from being a pre-raid super casual, to having defeated Oryx in a single night. I fully expected the rookie night raid thing to be a much harder slog, but I am guessing we had more than enough ringers to make the entire process feel more manageable. I would happily sign up for this every week, and while the loot is a huge draw… I really enjoyed the process of doing the fights and want to see them keep going more smoothly. My favorite of the fights was probably Golgoroth just because there is something special about taking down a jump sized Ogre. We managed to do the “challenge” version of Oryx… which suddenly makes me wonder just what the challenge versions of the other bosses are. I somewhat doubt that I will be able to attend the hard mode content, but I have to say normal mode was a freaking blast.

Shining Light

I think the thing that I appreciate the most about the King’s Fall encounter is the way that even though I was a first timer… I was still forced to do “real” mechanics. Sure the fact that everyone else was adept at the fights gave me significant more wiggle room, but I still had to do a job in the encounters. Being “carried” is not nearly the thing that it is in other games. For example when I got my Moose in World of Warcraft… my friends in the Praetorian Guard straight up carried me to victory. You could have completely removed my warm body from the equation and none of the fights would have gone any differently. Last night it felt like I had a purpose and I had a role to play, and when I failed to complete my assigned task… we wiped or at the very list struggled for a bit. I think this is largely because of the small raid size of only having six players. The bigger the raid the more padding, and just like in a ten player raid in WoW everyone has to be on point to succeed at a fight. We apparently took roughly three hours to clear the entire raid, but I have to say that the time flew by because all of it was fresh and new and exciting. I am sure the more you do this the less that will be the case, but for right now I am completely enamored with these encounters.

More amazing than pretty much anything however is the fact that I am finally off high center in this game and now have breached the 300 light barrier. You have to understand that I have been struggling bit by bit to get over the 300 light barrier for roughly six months in this game. Now admittedly that is not six months of constant play, but at very least I am spending a little bit of time on my titan every single week. Honestly after having played this game for as long and as often as I have… I am not sure there really is a viable way to hit 300 light apart from the raid. Above is a gallery of the items that I ended up snagging. The only thing not shown is a 300 ghost shell, which I have subsequently passed on to my hunter since I had a better option already on my Titan. The highlight of the evening however is the two weapon drops from Oryx. I guess because we did the challenge mode we were guaranteed a weapon, and I just happened to roll well and get one from the other chest also. Having both the raid Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle would have honestly been the two weapons I would have chose had I been able to snag any of the ones available. Those tend to be my two favorite weapon types in Destiny, and while I have heard that the Auto rifle is less than amazing…. I want to give it a shot for myself. Basically over the next week I need to spend some time leveling all the new stuff that I managed to pick up. It was one hell of a night, and I greatly thank the Axioma Clan folks for taking me with them.

Not First Rodeo

March 8, 2016 by Belghast

The Waiting Game

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country. Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock. My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us. It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle. The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play. I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo. To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy. My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam… which was a process that took over twenty minutes. I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight. The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division. My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around. After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me. It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing. Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit. That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty. This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead… which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp. The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around. This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation. I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay. If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light. Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it. I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley. The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great. At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them. I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions. I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”. While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again… I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game. It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well. Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us. Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two. I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error. As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard. It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile. My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction. In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines… this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option. During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window. It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable. Dear UbiSoft… never do this again… in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu. I mean I get what they are going for… wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game… but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta. So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan. I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue. I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon. The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available. I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land. If the servers stay stable… like will be golden. I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night. However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.

Change is Good I Hate Change

March 7, 2016 by Grace

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you might remember me praising the (still in Steam Early Access) game Subnautica a few times. Well, I’m back again today to praise it some more, and also offer some thoughts on game updates, and game changes more generally.

First let’s get some formalities out of the way. From the beginning I thought that Subnautica was a beautiful and immersive game, and over the past few updates it has only gotten moreso. They recently did a pass on the game that effectively just made everything prettier, from improving some models and animations to updating the lighting effects. I want to spend so much time exploring this world because it is so beautiful.

I did eventually craft an aquarium and grow some critters and plants!

Now it is time to move on to some meatier changes. The most recent update promised the ability to craft planters and large aquaria for growing your own terrestrial and aquatic plants, and for growing sea creatures from eggs. Cool! Unfortunately, this also required starting a new game again. This highlighted some changes since the last time I restarted that, while I think make the game better, made getting up to speed again much slower. There was a tiny bit more of an introduction sequence than I remembered, which was very nice. Once I hopped in the water and started working toward making a new sea base so I could start my new garden I discovered that many of the items I could craft immediately before now required blueprints, and the system for gaining those blueprints was different. Now you need to craft a scanning device to carry with you so you can scan fragments that you find until you scan enough to learn the full blueprint. You can’t add any sort of power supply to your base until you learn the blueprint for one. This really slows the pace of building, since it means you have to constantly run back to your escape pod to use the fabricator for much longer than before.

I think I’m so conflicted on this big change because I’ve been playing so long now and it is quite disruptive to my usual path of progress. It didn’t feel great to have to spend a while searching around for a blueprint for something I had from the outset before, especially when I just wanted to check out some of the cool new additions. Perils of early access I guess, but there’s also parallels to many other games. Leveling for the first time in a MMO I almost always want to take my time and explore. After that, I’m often just looking for the most direct route to get caught up to where I want to be. Having to re-earn something I already worked hard for feels incredibly unfun, whether a cosmetic item, reputation grind, attunement, or other unlocks. It is why big disruptive changes in a game feel bad sometimes, even when they’re adding great new content. The changes to old-world WoW in the Cataclysm expansion come to mind here. They added a bunch of new quests! There was so much to re-explore and see! But it disrupted my known alt leveling path, took away something I was so very familiar with (ah nostalgia!) and replaced it with new stories that I sort of wanted to pay attention to but mostly just wanted to get through quickly on my way to the level cap. To this day I feel like I never gave that content a fair shake because I was always in a hurry to rush through it, even when it was brand new.

This is a very different feeling from a simple addition of new content that picks up where you left off. New DLC for the most part, or new patch or expansion content in MMOs that adds max-level activities or increases the level cap doesn’t invoke so much resentment in me. Hopping into an existing game file or on to an endgame-ready character and working toward newly-added goals is satisfying because it feels like progress, not retreading old ground in a slightly different way.

I’m not sure exactly what all this means for me and Subnautica going forward. I absolutely love the game and will continue to highly recommend it. They are still adding monthly updates though, so maybe I need to space out my play time a bit and let a few pile up before returning and starting over from scratch again. Hopefully that will allow more cool new additions to outweigh my grumpy resistance to change.

Bloodborne (Or: Reminding Myself That I’m Bad At Video Games)

March 7, 2016 by Tamrielo

Thanks to a gift card, I picked up a copy of Bloodborne and loaded it up with Kodra this weekend. We put in about two hours and got to the first save point. Long story short, the game wrecked us solidly and unremittingly.

We did eventually admit defeat before reaching the next save point, but even so, the game was a lot of fun, just draining. Kodra and I traded off at every death, so roughly once every sixty seconds to ten minutes or so. We died a lot, maybe I mentioned. What keeps it fun, though, is that the game, while unrelentingly difficult, is entirely fair. The rules don’t change on you, and when new rules are introduced, it’s very clear. When I saw a random huge monster guy wandering through a place that I had to break a bunch of boxes to even access, it wasn’t precisely a surprise when it ignored my heavy attack and just grabbed me and squished me.

I think what makes the series of From Software’s games (Souls games, Bloodborne) really compelling is that it changes the philosophy on you. In a lot of games, especially narrative games, the story is the reward– get through this segment to get another bit of story, and keep on going to get more story. You beat a boss because you want to see what happens next, and as a result the game has a vested interest in keeping you on a forward trajectory, seeing more story so you don’t get bored. Victory is the default, and the narrative of the game is predicated on you winning and continuing on. It can safely be assumed that you’re going to win a given encounter.

Not so in Bloodborne. Story is incidental; it’s something you piece together, if at all. The reward is power, and the game makes you want power immediately by making sure you know how much it sucks not to have any. It’s a trope that you die more or less immediately in Souls games, to one of the first enemies you fight, but as above– the game is very fair. You CAN beat that first enemy, if you’re exceptionally skilled, and in general the game rewards you very well for doing so. You want to beat bosses because you shouldn’t be able to; success in the game is an act of defiance, one that the game respects.

It’s that respect that really seals the deal. If you find a cheap, easy way to bypass a nasty fight or exploit some terrain to beat a boss, the game won’t punish you for it. You owe the game nothing, and in return, it owes you nothing. If you swing at an enemy and miss, there’s no aim correction; you forgot to lock on (or didn’t lock onto the right enemy) and the consequences are on you. Play better next time. You found a ledge that the boss can’t reach and can shoot at it, and have enough ammo to take it down without reprisal? Good on you, you beat the boss, you were cleverer than it was. Grind an area until you’re stupidly overpowered before moving on? That’s your choice, do what you need to in order to win.

I really appreciate that in Bloodborne, especially given that there are generally multiple ways to approach each encounter. It took Kodra and I a solid hour to realize that we were playing the game like Bel, methodically fighting and defeating every single enemy in an area before moving on. It was taxing on our resources and took up a lot of time for little return. We quickly discovered abject cowardice and used it to flee further than we’d gotten with overt aggression.

The amount of game space we played in over the course of the day was about half of a Warframe level, or less. Maybe half of one of the smaller starting levels. However, that tiny amount of space was incredibly rich and nuanced, with lots of approaches and lots of things to see and learn. I never felt like we were punished unduly for experimenting, and resources were plentiful enough that we could use them regularly without feeling like they were being wasted. Sure, we died a lot, but we made a lot of progress as far as developing our actual skill at the game.

By the end, we’d graduated from getting murdered by a guy with a rake to dying to some kind of massive tree beast. Progression!