November 2018 – Page 5

Mobile Core

November 15, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve been on this journey of discovery, that largely started with the negative reaction the Diablo Immortal reaction had in the community as a whole. Sure there was the pent up disappointment that we had waiting for Diablo 4, but it seemed to go way further than that. There was a reaction that most of the Diablo fans had, myself included… that mobile gaming was somehow “not for them”. Right or wrong there has been an impression among PC and Console gamers that mobile gaming was something “casuals” did, and that serious gamers were playing games on other platforms. I am not even sure if this was ever the case, but it feels like things are changing drastically on this front, largely because mobile devices have improved greatly over when I was trying to play a Diablo clone on my Palm Pilot back in 2003. Like I have said before when I fail to understand something, I tend to pour myself into trying to figure it out, and as such I have been playing a lot more mobile games lately.

One of them is The Walking Dead Our World, which at face value appears to be a Pokemon Go clone for The Walking Dead. Sure I knew Pokemon Go fans were hardcore and established raids and such on a regular basis… but that more or less is in spite of the fact that Nintendo still refuses to accept that the internet is a thing that exists. Our World seems to be a game that takes the idea of PoGo but extends all of the things we have learned about clan/guild play and internet connectivity. As a solo player it is largely a game about clearing infestations, picking up supply caches and rescuing survivors. As a team however it changes drastically, and in truth were I not now part of an active clan I probably would have faded away from this game long before.

The game more or less suggests you join a group, and then suggests the ones that are active in your vicinity. The biggest problem I had was finding one that was not outwardly racist, trumpian, sexist or anti-LGBT. It was shocking to me to see just how many groups had something like that in their message, thankfully I found this one that seemed to be reasonable and largely focused on getting objectives done. Now I don’t know any of these people in real life, but they apparently live in the near vicinity of me… and a lot of the locations that get called out over chat are places in the surrounding communities. There is a Weekly Challenge system that involves performing a bunch of objectives and then unlocking rewards as a result. Last week I believe we made it through four maybe five of these challenge boards, each time earning really good loot and the in game “upgrade” currency. What I find the most interesting is that everything I see in the social chat that I largely just lurk in… mirrors the exact same behavior I have seen in MMO Guilds. They are all working together on a shared objective and focusing on specific things that they can bring to the table.

The game has this interesting system that allows players to drop a flare at a specific location, and then other players in your clan can teleport to that location and be able to farm the objectives there. I’ve seen this a few times when someone happened across an area with a cluster of epic missions for example. The game tends to follow the television shows, and if a character has a major role that week… then immediately following there will be a number of seasonal missions that show up awarding the cards related to that player. I’ve also seen my clan drop flares when they find a cluster of a specific type of walker needed for an objective… like over the last couple of days we have been working on killing armored walkers with Darryl, which as such lead to my load out in the above screenshot. It of course has a cash shop, and while it is pretty pushy about advertising what is for sale… it doesn’t appear like you actually need anything from it pending you are willing to wait things out. Similarly being in a clan tends to help make sure you are rolling in resources.

Mostly I found it shocking to see the exact same MMORPG behavior on a mobile platform. I will admit I largely thought that Pokemon Go and the dedication of those players… was more attributed to the source material and less something that you find on mobile devices in general. However as I have dug into Dragalia Lost I have run across some seemingly super hardcore players there as well. I think the tides are shifting, and maybe those of us who proclaim to be PC or Console gamers need to update our mindsets. Sure mobile gaming might be “not for you” but the low barrier of entry… and how well all of these games run on my $300 unlocked android phone… makes it accessible to a market that may not be able to purchase a Console or a Gaming PC… but is damned likely to have a mobile phone that they use as their primary source of internet access. As a developer I have watched the numbers skew over the last few years on the large site that I maintain professionally… and previously we used to see 10-15% of our users coming in off mobile devices. Now that has reached a point where 49% of our users are either on phones or tablets, which has created a massive shift in how we approach content. It is not shocking that game developers have started to do exactly the same thing. I may not be super happy with this trend, but I am now at least starting to understand it a bit more.

Leaving Flatwoods

November 14, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday it turns out that I was not crazy, and that Fallout 76 was in fact active and fully launched for most of the day. When I popped in to get a screenshot for the blog post, I noticed that it was allowing me to hit play… and sure enough I got in with a half dozen people roaming around the map. The funny thing about this is I remember doing something similar during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and getting into that game several hours early. I guess it pays to be patched up and ready to go when Bethesda launches a new game. The funny thing is though, since I knew the game was available it caused me to approach launch day with a lot more chill than I normally have. This is also helped out by the fact that I had a character with progress that carried over from the beta, and I didn’t exactly feel a rush to get to a point of sustainability quickly. Now that said I am always seeming to need a source of food and a source of water and weirdly enough a source of wood… to keep boiling said water.

For most of the beta I spent my time around the Flatwoods area, which is one of the first towns you encounter… if you actually follow the quest directions. However it is an area rich in resources and quests so in theory it is a pretty good idea to go there first. We did a jaunt to the far south at one point and captured the Poseidon power plant as a Trio, but I never managed to make it to Morgantown which was where the next major quest objective was directing me towards. So I set forth on a journey that would take me up Interstate 59 to Route 64 and on into the basic vicinity of Morgantown. I largely followed the highway system in part because I figured if I were doing this for real… I would wind up doing that as a way of keeping track of where I was going. Sure I could have set a waypoint off in the distance and made my way across the open terrain, but I was curious what attractions I might be able to find from the highway.

Roughly halfway down Interstate 59 I encountered a Slocum’s Joe which for the uninitiated is the Fallout Universe version of a coffee/donut shop. On the road beside it however was something magical… I am guessing this player spent every last minute of the beta hoarding resources to build this really awesome base, giving him one hell of a start for when the game launched proper. What was creepy however is that the mutated hounds were flopping stuck in the side of his fortifications. They were one of the random encounters I ran into along the road so I am guessing they attacked the base… and then got gunned down but the two turrets up above. My previous camp location had the problem of constantly being attacked by feral ghouls, and in one case they managed to damage the turrets and make their way into the base… and I logged in just as they were taking out my generator. So as such I started thinking more defensible fortifications… and this guy here seems to have a great design… minus the fact that the steps are wide open. Maybe the NPCs can’t walk up steps so good?

When I got to Morgantown I found this bridge with an eyebot moving back and forth across it playing its patriotic theme… and behind it was leading a trail of rat pups pied piper style. I watched the bridge for quite a bit and nothing else seemed to be pathing across it due to the fact that this neutral/peaceful event was programmed to take place there. This gave me a bit of an idea…

As such I opted to move my camp and reconstruct it underneath the bridge… thinking that this map feature might make for a slightly more defensible outpost. This was well and good until I realized that the ground was just uneven enough to make erecting a barrier of fences nigh impossible. I’ve built as much as I realistically can at this moment because I have run out of resources. However the area surrounding my camp is full of logs, so my hope is they will have re-spawned each time I visit the camp and can keep harvesting a decent amount of lumber that way. Additionally I am on the outskirts of Morgantown, which should serve as fertile scavenging grounds for parts to make more stuff. The camp being nearby will let me shuffle loads of things over to it and dump them in the machinery there to free up my inventory. I need to learn to pair down my weapons and carry only the things that I know I will be immediately using. The truth is I have largely settled on my serrated machette and my trusty 10 mm pistol… but in both cases I need to build the level 10 version of each I think. Unfortunately my building spree has run me out of other resources as well.

The biggest takeaway from last night is that this is in fact a Fallout game. My wife got home super late and as a result I largely played things other than fallout until around 7:30. By 8 pm however I was deeply engaged in the game and did not really look up or pay attention to the time until a little before 11 pm when I hurriedly scrambled off to bed. Another friend managed to play until 4 am without realizing it. When you are focused on this objecting or that while exploring this deceptively large and densely populated map… all other things in the world sort of fade away. I still have not really encountered any players in a negative fashion, and while they are out there… once I left the Fallout 76 proper area and Flatwoods especially… I stopped encountering them. That is not to say that there are not players out there… the above screenshot I took to show off where my camp is located and you can see a number of dots sprinkled around the map representing other players. That seems like a large number for the roughly 6 am when I took it. More than that however I learned a few key pieces of information about why the world is the way it is… and what happened to most of the people that were remaining. That however is a tale that I am going to save for another time, given that it factors on some serious spoilers.

Shock to the System

November 13, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I had the day off and I am sorta thankful for that. It means that I missed driving in the first snow of the season. It isn’t that the roads would have been slick or anything… it is just more a case of folks acting crazy in inclement weather. As a result I stayed home and dealt with the air conditioning folks doing our winter maintenance checkup on the system. I also spent a good deal of time playing various video games and also making a batch of Chicken Tikka Masala. My wife unfortunately did not get the day off and as such I wanted something to warm up her belly when she got home.

While waiting on the folks to get here, and while they were doing their thing… I played a lot of Diablo 3 on the Switch and have moved on into Act 2. I like this port of the game quite a bit, but as I have talked about… mobile gaming just doesn’t fit that cleanly into my life. If I have access to my other machines I would probably rather play them… and the switch is just heavy enough to be awkward to play while laying in bed. However I heard last night that apparently the Switch version is what Tamrielo needed to really get into the game as he now has a Necromancer in its 60s… which is significantly higher than I think he has ever gotten a character before? The controls feel good, but for someone who is super used to how things work on the PC… it is taking a lot of adjustment. I equate it to someone reciting a poem you know in a foreign language… you understand what they are saying but there is a lot of translation happening.

As far as most of the day… I spent a good deal of time playing Path of Exile… and I really need to figure out how to leave public channels. I also decided to spend a little money with the game and bought one of the supporter packs that they are just about to phase out when the new expansion releases. I figure at this point I have gotten enough joy out of the game that I really should pay something for it. This gave me a bit of cash shop currency which I then used to get a better looking weapon and shield… though I am wishing I had gone with something else for the shield because it does not match the outfit at all. Basically my gameplay tends to revolve around Molten Strike, Blade Vortex and Leap… everything else is largely superfluous and as such I am completely cool losing W as a keybind to give me back the move forward functionality I am used to in Diablo 3. I flirted briefly with binding leap to spacebar, but ran into issues with the game needing a close all windows keybind to replace the spacebar I took. Once I figure out a decent option for that I might go back to spacebar for leap since I prefer having a movement key bound there.

As far as Monster Hunter World goes… I am in an odd place where I need some Kirin+ items… but for whatever reason do not have access to High Rank Kirin. I spent a good chunk of the night trying various quests to try and whittle down whatever it takes to unlock the High Rank version of the fight, but failing miserably. Essentially I need a couple materials to get the last of my layered armor pieces from the Kulve Taroth event… and I am not sure if I will still be able to do the turn-ins after the event or not. I know that I can craft Kulve Armor without issue, and have gathered up more than enough mats to make a full set of that once I farm up the Elder Dragon gems. I’ve been sitting at Hunter Rank 49 for awhile now, which means that I have to take down a Tempered Kirin. Last night I made several attempts and while one came super close… there is always the problem of someone fainting. In this particular run it was me that failed… but in others I managed to stay alive 100% of the time and someone else got the carts. Ultimately I will get through this… but in reality I just want the parts from it and could care less about moving my Hunter Rank higher at this very moment. Time to research what exactly I need to have already completed to unlock the needed High Rank hunt.

There are so many games right now out that I’ve not had a chance to really devote much time to. On the 16th another one gets added to that stack in the form of Let’s Go Eevee… because Eevee is way cooler than Pikachu. I need to figure out a better way to spend time with the switch because I have quite the backlog right now… because I have not devoted anywhere near enough time to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate or Starlink Battle for Atlas. The only problem with Switch games is that they look like crap on my 4K setup upstairs, and they are not quite comfortable to play in bed. So I need to figure out a happy middle ground where I feel comfortable playing the games and will also be willing to give up playing something on the PC. Yes I realize these are the first worldiest of problems.

Also in the extreme stack of games that need attention… Fallout 76 launches I believe tonight? Look when someone says Midnight I never quite know if they mean which specific night/morning. I believe it launches tonight at Midnight EST, but when I popped in a moment ago to take screenshots the servers were up. I am wondering if this was by accident, or if they are just going to let people trickle in that happen to try it. Sadly I have work, but I can in fact verify that everything from my B.E.T.A. character is there and functional… minus one turret that I placed on my base. I am not sure if it got blown up, or if something glitched and it fell below the world or something. Regardless Fallout 76 is either launching tonight… or has already launched and it will be tonight before I get to give it any attention. I had a lot of fun with Kodra and Tam running amok, and now I am left with the decision of… do I play my already level 10 character from beta or do I roll something fresh.

Captain K

November 12, 2018 by Belghast

I am all over the map right now when it comes to video games. I am in this weird holding pattern where I am playing a ton of different games, but none of them for terribly long in a single sitting. I also managed to garbage out my left pinky this weekend which is making typing surprisingly painful. Right now my average night involves at least one Kulve Taroth match in Monster Hunter World, and then flipping over Destiny 2 to try and score another powerful/prime engram for the evening. From there I bounce all over the place… lately that has included some time spent in The Division which actually lead me to hit the level cap of 30 and start unlocking end game activities. One of the things that I loved about this game was just how detailed its world was, in that it felt like a real place that I was going to visit. Yes I realize it was patterned off of New York… but I have supposedly visited New York in a bunch of different games and this was the first time it really felt like an actual place. The game looks gorgeous at 4k… but then again so far MOST games look gorgeous at 4k.

I poked my head into Neverwinter as well this weekend and finally claimed my Purple Owlbear mount from Twitch. This game has a lot of positive things going on, but it is an inventory management nightmare… which ultimately prompted my little burst of posts on twitter. Inventory Management is just not something that is fun… and out of the tons of favorites I only got one person who chimed in stating that they actually like cleaning their inventory. There are games where having a nonsense inventory is enough to make me log right back out, and many times… I feel this way about Neverwinter. Side note another game that I often feel this way about is Everquest II because so much of what ends up dropping is not terribly useful, and when you can have bags that are getting close to 100 slots each… you can carry around a lot of junk. I think the theory is that people get excited when they see loot… but that excitement quickly passes when you realize that 99.9% of the stuff that drops is useless crap.

Which leads me to Path of Exile… a game where the common practice is to install a loot filter so you just don’t see the useless shit you shouldn’t be looting in the first place. I am using the NeverSink filter, largely because it seemed to be the one that was most widely recommended. I will say however… it does greatly improve the experience… even though that I still feel like inventory space is a nightmare in this game. I spent way more time this weekend playing POE than I expected, and I will say that the game has gotten significantly more enjoyable once I crossed the line into Act II. Unfortunately I didn’t take many screenshots this weekend… especially now that I apparently unleashed an ancient evil and blotted out the sun. POE comes in both Grim and Dark flavors… but apparently I shifted into Grim Dark mode. The other issue that I have with POE is that my character looks stupid… which I realize is fixable if I drop a bunch of money on the cosmetic shop. Right now I am wearing a leather diaper, plate booties, a metal old-timey football helmet… while wielding a camp axe and a cabinet door for a shield. This is not a good look on anyone… and no matter how much gear I swap out I seemingly cannot get rid of the diaper.

Lastly I am still spending quite a bit of time before falling asleep each night playing various mobile games and one of the ones that I am finding myself enjoying in spite of it not making any sense… is Lineage II Revolution. During the podcast I talked a bit about this and apparently I completely missed the whole cookie clicker like games thing. Games that play themselves are apparently a genre… and this one is weirdly enjoyable. What I found odd though is once I hooked up ADB to play the game mirrored on PC from my phone… it had built in support for WASD so in theory… this game was designed for a PC interface? I am legitimately wondering about trying this through an emulator like Memu and mapping it in a fashion to allow for keyboard and mouse play. At the moment you can do that… but it means you are clicking buttons on the screen instead of having things bound to mouse buttons/keys. It is weirdly entertaining… but it isn’t like I can actually suggest it as a “good” game. It is pretty and some stuff is happening on screen but I am largely just letting it play itself since mobile controls are garbage. Maybe that is the way these games are getting around that fact… letting the game navigate for you and then just hit attacks periodically in a sort of on rails shooter type experience.