September 2017 – Page 7

The Shader Situation

September 8, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I briefly mentioned the issue happening right now with Shaders, but I had a few people ask me directly what exactly was going on. So I thought I would take a moment this morning to explain the issue from my perspective. In the original Destiny Shaders were an item that dropped that when applied effected the color scheme and sometimes physical properties of your armor. It was a purely cosmetic system, but one that the players latched onto with both hands. The Shaders themselves dropped from all manner of activities and occasionally were attached to achievements. This happened with enough relative rarity that when you got one… you noticed and immediately started playing with it. Each Guardian could carry a total of nine shaders with them at any given time… and I personally found myself swapping back and forth between shaders on a regular basis to fit my current mood or to coordinate which whatever weapon loadout I happened to be rocking that night. To say I was engaged in the system is probably a bit of an understatement given that I had 103 of them according to the achievement that tracks such progress. I was by no means the most prolific however because there were folks in game who had literally every single one… and you can see in the above photo… the ones that are greyed out are ones I had not found yet. The system itself was pretty limited and some shaders looked good on some armor sets… but absolutely horrible on others. However it was something that gave us some license to stand out in the tower from the other Guardians also wearing Iron Banner gear.

With the lead up to Destiny 2 there was so much talk about how improved the Shader system was going to be. It was announced that we would be able to apply shaders individually to armor pieces and even our weapons. As a long time supporter of cosmetic systems this seemed amazing, because it would finally give us some level of granular control over our appearance. In Destiny 1 it was annoying when your chest-piece looked amazing with a specific shader applied, but your boots or arms looked completely horrible. This was especially true when rocking the various combinations of black and white like I regularly did… and it would have allowed us to swap around until we found a specific shader that worked for each individual item. While playing the “Demo” I found it curiously lacking that they didn’t show off the new shader system, but given this was a build of game originally shown at E3 I thought maybe it was simply left out because the system had not been finished at that point. It was not until launch that we actually saw the system at work… and realized that shaders were not a single use consumable item. The above image is of my shader “collection” in Destiny 2, and all of these so far have come through the starter packages that you keep getting handed by the Eververse vendor at the Farm each time you reach a specific level plateau. Why the community is going to war over this minor point is the fact that Bungie took what used to be a very good but limited system… and turned it into a potential cash grab.

Yesterday Luke Smith released a sequence of statements on his Twitter account talking about the issue… and the answer feels less than satisfactory. Luke is literally the only person who thinks that doing “shader farming” is a good idea. That sounds miserable especially when it means that you now somehow need to rope five of your friends to follow you down a rabbit hole just so you can have pretty armor for the week. It is hard enough to convince people to run old school World of Warcraft raids when only transmog items are on the line… let alone run a 2-3 hour long Destiny raid that never really trivializes… for armor paint. Now up until this statement I was taking a wait and see approach and in part I still am. I noticed that all of the planet faction NPCs had shaders on their loot table that you can get from engrams. Maybe as he says as we start to grind faction we will be swimming in armor spray paint, but more than likely there is still going to be a sizable number of shaders that are only available through bright engrams. Bright engrams for reference are the new RNG loot box that the Eververse sells for Silver. Right now the equivalent conversion rate is $5 to 3 Bright Engrams… and while these drop organically each time you fill up your xp bar again post level 20… that is going to be a less than enjoyable grind to get them. While I have not actually opened an actual Bright Engram, I have been opening the assorted packages that Eververse gives you in the farm and through those I have received a bunch of shaders enough to make me think that this is going to be the easier way to get them.

As of last night I hit 15 and probably will push through to 20 tonight, so I should start to see this supposed increased shader drop rate shortly. What is frustrating to me is that everything else about the game is really amazing. However that amazing is slightly tarnished by the fact that I know one of my favorite systems has turned into something I looked forward to using… to something I will probably hoard and never actually use. You change out gear in Destiny constantly… and even on my maximum light cap 400 characters in the original game… I was regularly tweaking and fiddling with my build out each time I got some new interesting piece of loot. There is never going to be a point where you can set your armor selection in stone, knowing that you will likely never get something that works better for you. Each patch Bungie tweaks this or that making it likely that you are going to be swapping gear our to optimize whatever you happen to be going for this week. There is never going to be a point where you have enough of your favorite shaders… nor will you have the freedom to swap them around at will just to do silly things like have everyone raiding in Glowhoo or that hideous McDonald’s looking shader. Shaders were fun and one of those few non-gear rewards that you loved seeing at the end of a Crucible match or after a strike. Gone are the days when you cannot wait to try on the new shader you just got to see what it looks like. Now instead it is going to be a stack in your inventory that keeps going up in number… but you still feel like you maybe shouldn’t use yet because there is a really awesome item waiting around the corner that you might want it for. So that in a nutshell is the situation with shaders and why the Destiny 1 player base is frustrated by it.

Destiny 2 PS4 Launch Impressions

September 7, 2017 by Belghast

At this point I’ve played Destiny for somewhere in the range of five hours. I’m not sure if an actual way to tell and the third party sites like Destiny Tracker don’t seem to be keeping this information. Regardless I have played a bit more than I had when I sat down to talk about it yesterday morning. At this point I am level 10, have some reasonable gear, and am a few missions into the second planet. During the course of this mornings post I am going to try and keep spoiler information out of it… but what classifies as a spoiler is very personal. For me the things that I generally consider spoilers are story beats or surprising revelations. However I do not consider any mechanical and nuts and bolt sort of stuff spoilery, so be warned there might be something here you don’t want to read if you are wanting to go into the game completely blind and are waiting for the PC release. Disclaimer out of the way… I am really enjoying myself. Yesterday my friend and fellow blogger Isey made a post talking about how disappointed in general they were in the game. It is weird how one experience can be translated in very different ways based on a given players perspective. For me the fact that Destiny 2 is very much Destiny 1 done better… is a good thing. Now we are going to get into the details that I largely left out yesterday as to why I was brought to tears playing this game.

This is a little spoilery but for players returning to the game it presents you with a series of “memories” of big accomplishments you completed. This is the point where I just lost my shit yesterday and started crying. I remember each of these firsts in game and who I was with when I did them… like this raid I remember being completely in awe of the feeling of going through the raid. I remember the frustration of trying to learn the ship jumping puzzle for the first time. Basically King’s Fall was a package of emotional baggage waiting to be unwrapped and to know that the game remembered me… was just more than I could handle in whatever state of mind I happened to be in. Then when I got through the sequence of memories and was confronted with my guardians sitting there waiting for me.. I really lost it. I was prepared to lose everything going into Destiny 2 and more or less I did… and the game really grinds this point home… which is in part why I think Isey had problems with it. However for me… the fact that I had “my” guardian sitting there waiting on me… in a game that remembers what I did… was enough to bond me to the experience instantly. In the games I play… the characters I play matter to me. It matters that I am playing “my shepard”… and when I game tries to make me play someone else that is very much NOT me… I bounce pretty hard from it. All I have ever wanted in a sequel is to be able to dust off the team that I had in the previous game… and go out on one more grand adventure and Destiny was sitting there waiting for me to start.

It feels lame to say… Destiny 2 is Destiny the way it should have been. However that is the best possible description I seem to be able to muster after playing it. This is everything I had hoped Destiny was when we first started playing it, and seems to support all the ways I really wanted to play it. I’ve talked before about how deeply connected to the Patrol zone experience I am… and how I have spent something like 77% of my game time running Patrol missions. This game takes that notion and expands it in every meaningful way by giving us large planetary zones to explore. I found my first Lost Sector last night before I even knew what a Lost Sector was… I did what I always did in Destiny 1… I went exploring. There were areas of the Cosmodrome that I knew like the back of my hand, and places that I went exploring in that I had no real business exploring… each time being slightly frustrated when I encountered a closed door indicating that the area behind is for a strike or raid… and otherwise not accessible right now in patrol zones. I set those same instincts to work… and as I wandered through a building I happened to find a path that took me down into a sub basement… and then continued following that around until I found a room full of Fallen… and ultimately a mini boss that I killed. Sitting there in the room was a shiny chest full of loot… marked with what I ultimately came to learn is the symbol that marks a Lost Sector. Even more than that… the chests you find randomly in the zone are actually useful now. Previously you had a shot at a little glimmer, some resources from that planet and maybe just maybe if you are insanely lucky a ship schematic. Now the random spawned chests in an area drop actual usable gear as well as a currency used in a given zone making them super useful to gather up.

Another huge boon to the overworld experience is the addition of what I believe they call High Value Targets. Basically as you are fighting around the world you will occasionally come across what looks to be a miniboss in the open world. Upon taking one of these down they drop a special loot chest that contains glimmer, the zone currency and most of the time in my experience a couple of pieces of gear. Similarly the zone events have improved and feel both more challenging and more rewarding. I feel like Destiny was the game that has lead to my enjoyment of Guild Wars 2… in being willing to just go with whatever events happening to be occurring in a given area. I did this while out on patrol and often helped defend the warsat or take out a specific target… and in Destiny 2 I’ve found it extremely enjoyable to play in the same sort of way. The best part about events…. is you can now see what is up and available on the director map making it no longer a thing to keep zoning back and forth between two areas to see if something has kicked off yet. So far I am a little sad that the actual patrol beacons no longer be a thing… I used to always have one ticking away while doing other activities. However the system that it feels like has replaced them is Adventures, and if I had to give up patrols to get that I am thinking it is a reasonable trade. It’s hard to describe what these are… but think of them as missions that happen while you are out in the open world. Once you kick them off you will be directed through a series of events by one of the actors in a given zone. In the EDZ these largely involved retaking certain parts of the zone or attempting to make them more habitable by setting up fortifications or radio towers. I am hoping that these respawn over time, because right now I only have access to a very limited number of them.

The most important part of Destiny though are the guns and how they feel to use. In the “beta” experience I was not a huge fan of all of the weapons. There were a few I really liked and then much like Destiny 1… others that I couldn’t really stand. A large chunk of the original game while leveling, you spent time using what felt like pretty lousy weapons. This time around… it feels like you hit the ground running with a bunch of interesting options. In the original game I was not the biggest fan of the Omolon weapon foundry other than the infamous Hung Jury scout rifle. Who would have known that I apparently love their Auto Rifles… or at the very least whatever archetype the Jiangshi happens to belong to. I am really hoping there is a legendary version of this gun, because I pretty much love everything about the way it feels. Right now I have largely been surviving in game on the large number of Pulse Rifles available from various vendors… because the game keeps handing me Scout Rifles via loot drop. I am really not a huge fan of Scout Rifles… and while I like having them for ranged attacks… I need either a Pulse or an Auto to make me happy. That said I have tried out a whole slew of weapons… and adjusting for personal taste they all seem to be pretty good versions of the weapons I knew before. The whole auto sidearm thing is pretty great, and I am in fact finding a lot more in the field. Similarly I have come to really like the Sub Machinegun archetypes, but those are largely an up close and personal weapon for me… and not great for the distance I am trying to keep mobs at while playing through the story missions.

Which leads me to the Story Missions as a whole. So far I am enjoying them quite a lot but I don’t want to get into a lot of details for spoiler reasons. They feel better than Destiny 1, and so far they are a lot more involved than they were previously. Homecoming… the mission that we got to experience during the Beta legitimately is a good representation for how the story missions as a whole are going to feel in this game. It is not some weird one off mission that is hyper focused on story elements. The later missions don’t have the cute in mission cutscenes with major story characters showing off how awesome they are… or at least I have not encountered any yet. That said there is a lot of comms traffic interaction with multiple characters from a given planetary area, and you have interesting things to go out into the world and be doing to move the overarching story along. Still I feel like I need to drill home the point that… if you did not like Destiny you are probably still not going to like Destiny 2. This is very much a Destiny game and feels like the continuation of the first game… where they roll out and fix everything that was broken with it. This is not a completely different game experience and while there is a ton more story interaction… and they are making it clear that they want to help explain concepts to the player… it is not a vastly different experience. For me… it was exactly what I wanted in Destiny 2. For others it will still fall short of whatever measuring stick they keep trying to hold it up to. Right now the only frustrating part of the game is that they seem to have fucked up the shader system… and replaced it with a single use consumable. There is quite a bit of backlash from the community and I can only hope that maybe they revert this change by the time the PC game comes out. Chroma was a dumb system… and they got Chroma in my Shaders and made it a dumb system too. Other than that however live seems to be peachy in Destiny land. Now I am going to hit publish on this and play some more before I have to run off to work.

Daythoughts

September 6, 2017 by Tamrielo

A big thing that stopped me blogging last year was a sense that I didn’t have anything interesting to say, not on a daily basis. Realistically, I don’t have something interesting or thought-provoking to say every day, and trying to come up with one is kind of unsustainable when I have other things to do (which I do, now!)

So, instead, when I feel like writing but don’t have a clear topic, I’m just going to label it “daythoughts” and run down some of what I’m thinking. It’s my equivalent of chatting about my day when I get home, except in my case my dog is not the most receptive. This might be interesting for me to look back on later, too.

So. Daythoughts, 9/6/17.

–I am deeply concerned by the weather, locally and elsewhere. Smoke and ashfall where I live is distressing. Monsoons in south Asia are devastating, the hurricane(s!) slamming the Caribbean and Gulf Coast are doing serious damage, and basically the predictions of increasingly dangerous weather that went ignored for so long are proving to be as accurate as the data used to predict them. I’ve checked in with my family as much as possible, but I don’t have contact info for some of my more extended family, who are going to get hit by the weather.

–I think about data a lot lately. We have more tools to know more things about more things than ever before, and we live in the Data Age. Information is one thing; we can communicate what we know. Data is a different thing– it’s empirical evidence that can be used to predict what we don’t know. If we get good enough at it, and in many places we have, we can act on things we don’t know as well as if we did know it. I can imagine a person from today with some basic modern data collection tools flashing back even a hundred years and putting them to use. That person would look like a prophet, just acting on simple behavioral data.

–Despite all of this data, we’re really, really bad at actually listening to it. I think there’s a deep-seated (learned?) distaste we have for the idea that we’re predictable to a high degree of accuracy. It’s weird for me personally, because it’s something I take comfort in, it suggests that we don’t act randomly, that we act in patterns that can be seen and understood and modeled. It’s not just a chaotic weave that we all contribute to, it just looks that way if you aren’t looking at it with the right tools.

–I wonder, often, how much of this aversion we have to being predicted is cultural. I think about trying to spend some time living in another country, just to get a feel for how differently people think.

–This is the worst time of year for me. I am reminded of the things I haven’t yet accomplished this year, the things I meant to do but didn’t, or couldn’t. It’s some combination of convention season, my birthday, and the end of summer, which is my favorite season. Cons remind me that I am not the person I’d like to be, my birthday reminds me that time continually ticks away from me, and the end of summer is a start of the cold/sunless/quiet season. It’s not quite loneliness, but the expectation of impending loneliness.

–I’m trying to engage on Twitter a bit more. It’s a platform that I really don’t like for a variety of reasons, but it’s also one of the few that I’m a part of that have expanding circles rather than contracting ones. I’d really like to meet and get to know some new people, and Twitter seems like the best avenue for that.

–It makes me really happy to play games that feel like they have something to prove. I’ve spoken before about my love of the “second place” MMOs, because they really try harder than whoever’s on top at the time, and it’s true for other games in other genres as well. Currently am very impressed by the storytelling in GW2, which is something I didn’t expect I’d say, and the anniversary event in FFXIV was really touching. I look forward to more from both.

–I’m looking forward to the GW2 expansion more than I expected. I’m (finally) caught up in the story and while I’m sometimes frustrated by certain parts of the game, I have fun pretty much every time I play. Unlocking our guild hall and working towards that is really fun.

–My FFXIV playtime has dipped, as it often does, as I’m left in a place where any progression I do either requires a full raid group or requires me grinding daily roulettes. I really don’t love daily things, and (frustratingly, predictably for this expansion) long queue times as a DPS haven’t done much to inspire me to play more.

Thoughts for today. Not sure if they spark anything in anyone, but let me know if they do.

–Tam

Happy Tears

September 6, 2017 by Belghast

One of the problems with getting older is that you can’t seem to snap back quite as quickly from those late nights. There used to be a time where I could stay up until 1 am and then still get up for work at 5:30… those days are long gone. I had every intent last night of staying up until the 11 pm my time start of Destiny 2, but around 9:45 I decided there was no way I was actually going to make that and went on to bed. Instead I got up this morning and poked around a little bit. I was shocked to see my Guardian staring back at me… so instead of playing with the character generator I just went with it. This is not the first time that I was brought to tears this morning, and it wouldn’t be the last. I am weirdly emotional about the launch of Destiny 2, because on so many levels the original was a very important game for me. I can’t quite put it into words why, but it really was. The first time however was through a sequence of memories… that I don’t want to go into too much detail on for fear of ruining the experience for others. Basically I went into the game expecting to have to start from scratch… and while we have… the game remembers us. It feels like Bungie really does care about the actions we took defending the city over the last three years… and while they didn’t want too much of that to factor in they gave us a nice stoic nod.

As far as the game itself… most of that is going to have to wait until this evening when I have some time to actually sit down and play it properly. I already feel connected to this world… because its the world I left behind forever changed by the actions of the Cabal Dominus Ghaul. From here this is where we forge our new path… our brand new adventures. I am in no real rush to raid… so I want to take my time to savor these moments as they happen. In part I am experiencing everything knowing that in another month… I will be doing it all over again on with the PC launch. I am largely just hoping that I understand the world by then and can tackle it far more efficiently. I have to say… having crappy weapons never felt so good because you are starting in very meager circumstances… and you appreciate every bullet. Its time to rebuild our legacy. I will see you in game tonight, and hopefully I will have gotten the tears out of my system by then.