April 2019 – Page 6

Outward and Blades

April 8, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I do not have a ton of great screenshots because for some reason over the weekend GeForce Experience decided to stop doing its thing. So the majority of the time when I thought I was taking a good screenshot… I got nothing at all which is insanely maddening given that I rely on these screenshots for this blog. This weekend I tried a couple of new things, firstly Outward which is billed as a survival game published by Deep Silver and developed by Nine Dots Studio. For me personally however it is something completely different. Playing Outward reminds me of how it felt to play Everquest. I don’t necessarily think this game was intending to be one of the many Everquest nostalgia titles out there, but in my hands it ends up being the best one so far. I am not entirely sure what exactly throws it in this category, but a large piece of it is the fact that you have no minimap and the overworld map you do have does not show you where your character actually is at any given time. This means you need to sort your own directions out by following the compass rose or by moving around based on landmarks.

Additionally I have been thrust into a world where I don’t quite understand the rules, and I realize this will fade over time… but for now everything is interesting and dangerous. I have no clue what might be around the next corner and if it will end up killing me. Lastly the game has a system the requires you to venture back into the wild to do a manner of corpse recovery in the form of your backpack that is ultimately left behind when you die. All of these things combine to provide a much truer experience to how Everquest felt as a brand new player than anything to date, and I am pretty certain that was not at all what this title was going for. I think the design goal was to have an RPG rooted in the survival game tradition with extremely challenging stamina based combat that makes you choose your attacks carefully. It succeeds at that, but I honestly don’t think I would have spent nearly as much time playing it this weekend were it not for the fact it was playing upon my memories.

In the above screenshot I remember not noticing that I had a disease for a really long time… because it was the common cold and not the insane life drain disease that I had gotten before. The common cold mean’t that my stamina regeneration was greatly impacted… which also lead to me taking a death in the cave just in front of me. Little things like that sneak up on you in this game and honestly make it feel way more cruel and brutal that any other similar game. The story is pretty bleak so far as well given that you are effected by a blood tax due to the fact that your ancestor turned away some religions pilgrims… that ultimately became the majority power in the setting… things are pretty harsh. After returning from being shipwrecked… the townsfolk demand 150 silver within five in game days or they will repossess your house. So you are set off on a path of either finding a way to earn that money, ignoring it and letting your house get taken… or finding a way to do a favor for one of the locals big enough to get some debt relief. It is a call to action, but sort of a maddening one… that caused me to restart the game a few times until I sorted out how best to play it.

The other new game that I tried out this weekend was Elder Scrolls Blades which promised to be a mobile Elder Scrolls Experience… which admittedly was something I had been throwing a little side eye towards since the original announcement. I’ve played Bethesda mobile games before and was greatly concerned about what monetization methods would be built into this one. Ultimately the choice landed on a timer based system that locks your loot behind a gate of either waiting for it to open or paying to open it immediately. Additionally the first chest you get has a wide array of stuff that is actually useful to you including a significant weapon upgrade. The chests that I found following that initial tutorial chest however largely included unexciting common rarity junk, that admittedly is probably useful for the games in built crafting system… but nothing hear as exciting as getting item drops that you can equip.

The game itself feels like a really weird point and click adventure game… with the addition of real time combat that feels awkward and non-intuitive. My instinct is to click on the mob with my finger to swing my weapon at that body part. Instead you have to press and hold and then release to swing your weapon. You guard by pressing and holding on the shield icon… that isn’t on your screen all of the time and seems to only appear roughly a second after stopping attacking… making the whole experience feel a little stilted. The purpose of all of this appears to be to go on missions and complete objectives… like in this case I was saving some prisoners that you can see caged in the central image of the above triptych. Then you go back to town and use the resources that you just got to rebuild the town. The only negative is… this is fairly time consuming and requires something close to 20-30 minutes per iteration rather than the normal 5-10 minute loop that I expect out of mobile games. This is definitely something you would play on your lunch break… rather than something you might pop open while waiting in line somewhere.

The other big problem that I encountered is that while I have a fairly modern phone that has feature parity with all of the current flagship models… I apparently was ineligible for app install. If you are curious here is a supposed complete list of devices the game is available for… which seems to be missing a ton of devices it can technically run fine on. So when you encounter a situation like this… you don’t really have to sit and take it or at least not if you are an android user. Sure Google Play is the most common app store and the one in general you want to use for most purposes. However there are a bunch out there that will let you install literally anything you want on any device you want… whether or not it will run is a completely different challenge. Personally I tend to favor APKPure as I have had a lot of luck with that app in the past and it has some built in patcher support similar to Google Play. Functionally this is going to be a two part step… firstly you need to enable installing apps from unknown sources and secondly you need to download the APKPure app to your device. After that you can install Elder Scrolls Blades on your device and log in with your Bethesda.net launcher account. If everything worked as expected you should be able to try out Blades on any device not listed on the official list. For me it ran perfectly fine on my ZTE Axon 7… though admittedly it is a significant battery drain taking me from 100% to 79% before completing the first tutorial quest… which admittedly was like 20-30 minutes worth of game play.

I will probably poke my head into the game a bit more, but I am not entirely certain if it is really for me. I was expecting Mobile Skyrim… and what I got was a traditional mobile device game. Once I reset those expectations I am sure I will probably enjoy the experience and add it to my before bed roster of mobile games.

AggroChat #247 – Limited Ability to Focus

May 21, 2019April 7, 2019 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we delve into the esoteric talking more about concepts than concrete things. Bel leads off with a discussion of a game he has been playing lately Outward, and how it feels like we remember Everquest feeling even though it is not entirely certain if that was the purpose. From there we delve into a topic that has been sitting on our list for awhile but kept getting bumped due to time… namely Focus-Consuming Games as in the games that as a lot out of the player. This starts a discussion about the constraints on our time and how occasionally a game is just expecting you to be playing it as a hobby. From there we delve into a topic spawned from a YouTube video linked below… discussing how a lot of Games as a Service titles are manufacturing discontent among the players to spur them into making purchases. We discuss that there are a lot of lessons to be learned in how to do this well from the Mobile Gaming space and how in many cases Genres don’t matter the way they used to.

Topics Discussed

Outward
- Feeling like we remember Everquest
Focus-Consuming Games
- Games that want more attention than we are able to give at a time
- Looking for that neutral state in games
- Limited attention span or ability to focus
Manufactured Discontent
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
- Games as a Service and the psychology that goes into putting us in a position to buy things.
- Lessons that need learned from Mobile Gaming
- Genre’s matter less than they used to

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Epic Games Through Steam Launcher

April 5, 2019 by Belghast

I’ve spent more time this morning talking on twitter than actually working on a blog post. I’m still very much in that state where I am fighting something… be it a cold or something worse. The hammer has not quite slammed down on me, but I feel like I am on the cusp of really getting sick. My wife has continued to cough like mad pretty much every night to which I often say “Please don’t die” and she will angrily respond between coughs “I’m Not Dying!”. She also won’t really go seek assistance either… which admittedly were the roles reverse I probably wouldn’t either. Still it is painful to hear her cough like that, and with my own fucked up immune system… I know that it is just a matter of time until I will be doing the same. As a precaution I have been trying to push fluids hard and get extra sleep… but the second point doesn’t exactly make for interesting topics to talk about in the morning when you barely played any games the night before.

One of the things about yesterdays luke warm take on not really caring about Epic Games exclusives that I did not fully estimate… was just how much hatred folks in general seem to have about a game like Borderlands 3 going exclusive on that platform. The latest is a rumor that Epic Games is now doing something to block launching under steam as a “non-steam game”. One of the arguments by supporters of Epic Games has been that you can still launch the games under Steam if you really just wanted to put them all in one location. Were this rumor true it would seem that someone on one side or the other was actively taking moves to ward against this. As someone who has three titles installed through the launcher I figured I would do some detective work. For reference those titles are Fortnite which I picked up prior to the Battle Royale version because it was a game that I had been following in development. The next is Ashen which is a platform exclusive and a game I very much wanted to try out. The last is Hades which was ultimately the game that made me have that “whelp I guess I am installing this launcher” moment because I absolutely love Super Giant Games.

The game that this rumor is circulating around however is Metro Exodus, that I did not purchase on any platform because quite frankly I don’t have the bandwidth to play it. I am maybe finally learning my lesson to put of purchases until I am actually going to do something with the damned game. So this is not necessarily going to be a fair test of the complaint that is circulating, but this should be a test if the launcher itself is blocking access to the games in some manner. For the uninitiated you can effectively add any game to steam by going up to the “Games” menu at the top and choosing “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library”. This ends up bringing up the dialog above and sure enough… none of the three Epic Games Launcher games were showing up in the menu in spite of it seemingly bringing up every other executable on my system. Curiouser and Curiouser.

I am one of those weirdos that allows every game to drop an icon on my desktop, so I decided to check out what exactly Hades was launching. When you look into the shortcut you see something that is complete gibberish and that potentially only the Epic Games Launcher has any idea what to do with it. “com.epicgames.launcher://apps/Min?action=launch&silent=true” is not something that steam can launch seeing as it is looking for some sort of executable. I remember installing Hades to my bulk storage drive and the “Games” directory and sure enough I quickly found its directory. Underneath was an X64 and a X86 directory and inside of each was an executable called “Hades.exe”. So with path in hand I used the browse option to manually add this to steam and sure enough it launched the game as expected.

Now you can do this with games that are purchased through platforms like UbiSoft’s UPlay, but there is almost always the caveat that you need to have the Games Launcher running in the system tray in order for the game to successfully launch. In the case of UPlay even games you purchased THROUGH Steam itself… have to have the Uplay client running to access. To test this theory further I decided to hard kill the Epic Games Launcher and make sure nothing remained of it in memory. Unexpectedly… Hades still launched fine and even managed to get the Steam Overlay successfully over the top of the game play. The above screenshot is originally 4K resolution scaled down to 1080p so I could actually upload it to my blog, but you will see the tiny overlay window from steam in the lower right hand corner happily over top of Hades.

Maybe this was a fluke specific to the way Hades was developed, so I decided to try it again and go for a Ashen this time which is another platform exclusive title. Same process as above, I had to go find the actual game executable but once I knew its location I was able to browse to it through the “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library” dialog. Again the game launched fine and again the steam overlay showed up in the lower right hand corner. So the 25 year plus of experience technologist in me says… that this isn’t a behavior baked into the launcher itself. I am not saying that something shady isn’t happening, just not necessarily the behavior that folks seem to be indicating. I do find it weird that Steam seemingly refuses to find the executables for any of the games that I have installed through the Epic Games launcher, but has picked up like all of my Adobe Products… all of the Asus apps that came with my Motherboard drivers… Skype… every single MMO and all of the games that installed through Origin. Steam literally ONLY excluded the Epic Games titles which was bonkers.

The funny thing is about today’s post… I have already written more words about the Epic Games store than I ever intended to. I am not going to defend it because really I don’t care. I used to have extreme loyalty to Steam as a platform, but originally it was a pretty great place to find new games. I valued its discovery system to help me find titles that I might be interested in. Lately however all of the really poor and asset flip titles clogging the platform… has made it extremely hard to find anything. So often its discovery system now gives me games “because it is popular” and not actually based on any past purchase or play history that I have had. Steam isn’t exactly doing a great job… but the problem is… nobody else is either. I admit I like the more curated experience of Epic Games because it has so many orders of magnitude fewer titles than Steam. Ultimately at the end of the day I will buy the game in whatever digital platform it is available on… and for Ubisoft titles for example I have stopped buying them through steam entirely and just go through the Native launcher since I will have to have it running in the background regardless to play the games.

I didn’t have anything better to talk about this morning, and I spent most of my writing time researching this nonsense… so you are getting it as the daily post. Please note… I am not trying to dissuade you from hating Epic Games or video game exclusivity. You can hate anything you want and there is plenty of ammo on either one of those stances. However the rumor floating around that Epic Games is actively blocking launching games through steam… does not appear to have any validity. I launched two exclusive titles through steam this morning both with and without the Epic Games launcher running in the background. In both cases it just worked without problems. Since Metro Exodus is the game in question and I do not own it… I cannot diagnose what is going on there. It could be that 4A Games or Deep Silver is doing something to block the Steam process from launching their executable, but again I can’t test this. I can say that in my opinion it isn’t actually the launcher at fault.

Borderlands Still Fun

April 4, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I did the thing I have been doing every night and spent enough time in Anthem to unlock another key, and then ran a stronghold in which I managed to expend two of the three keys I had banked. I actually got a purple quality emote, which is a major step up from the various dross I had gotten prior to that. After that I was somewhat listless and ended up landing upon installing the newly released Borderlands Game of the Year Remastered edition that should be showing up on whatever service you happen to own the original Borderlands through. I remember reinstalling the original Borderlands shortly after the launch of Borderlands 2 and thinking to myself that the game in general felt really dated. However this version allows me to push it up to glorious 4k resolutions with graphical clarity… which is awesome and helps to distract me from the fact that it largely has a monotone color palette.

I have to say that I am happy that games are now pushing us beyond the “everything is brown and grey” era of shooters that we were stuck in for so long. Hot pinks and purples absolutely belong in the wasteland, so I feel like it would have been great if they could have maybe splashed a little color here and there for this re-release. That said they did a dutiful job of up-sampling all of the textures so that they pop… the only negative is… it makes me realize how limited the geometry of this game is at times. All of that said does not detract from my hot take of the night: Borderlands is Still Really Fun to Play.

I did not make it terribly far into the game, but I have already noticed a handful of quality of life improvements. For example I did not remember the original borderlands having a mini-map, which was one of my complaints about questing through the game and feeling like I always had to keep popping up my large map. Borderlands is a game without a lot of freedom of movement, and more or less you are travelling down fixed paths… which means in order to get form point A to point B there is pretty much one correct path that you needed to take to get there. Having the minimap makes me significantly less frustrated as I snake my way through a series of winding tunnels to a plateau… that does not have an obvious visual path to help direct you there.

I am playing Roland… because I always play Roland or Axton or whoever the third game will have that fills the roles of the basic soldier plus gadgets. There is little wonder to why in Division 2 running around with a Turret feels so natural. The other take away from the night is that the gunplay in Borderlands 1 is nowhere near as good as I thought I remembered it being. In the meantime I have played Destiny… a game which takes obsessive gun feel to a whole new level. Compared to that… and quite frankly even compared to Anthem… Borderlands weapon design feels like an inaccurate mess. That said I am adjusting and learning to over compensate for the fact that none of the non-scope sights seem to actually bear down on the target correctly.

The other hot take of the night is that I really don’t care about Borderlands 3 being an Epic Game store exclusive title. Basically this is a financial decision and should not be looked at as anything else, regardless of whatever lame commentary the parties involved come up with. The harsh truth is Borderlands 3 will make way more money for the studio on Epic Games regardless of how many sales they make. Borderlands has always been a title developed in Unreal Engine, which means that on top of the 30% Steam cut… there is a 5% Unreal Engine cut. So the studio takes home 65% of every dollar made on Steam. On the Epic store they are completely waving this Unreal Engine fee and then also only taking a 12% cut, meaning the studio takes home 88%.

So in the simplest of possible math… if a game makes 100 million dollars… on Steam they would be taking home 65 million, and on Epic Games store they would be taking home 88 million. That is a difference that you just cannot ignore in the climate of studios trying to figure out how they are going to fund their next title. Especially given that Gearbox has had a number of pretty high profile flops since their last massive success in Borderlands 2. I mean do we need to summon up imagery of Battleborn, Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever? The difference in money a studio can get on Epic Games is just not something that can be ignore especially given that titles like Metro Exodus have proven that in spite of all of the grousing… the majority of fans will not care at all about the platform change. That title sold better than any of the previous titles regardless of the PC storefront exclusivity.

Where I take issue with the jump to Epic Games is in scenarios where pre-order packages have already started being sold on a specific platform. I feel like if you ever start taking pre-orders you are obligated to support that platform indefinitely. I think where this will backfire strategy wise is the fact that high profile titles have jumped ship long after pre-orders had started… will start making the customers question if putting in ANY pre-orders from now on is a good idea at least until things have stabilized a bit more. Personally the only games that I pre-order in the first place are ones that are giving me some sort of a perk for doing so… mostly a cosmetic outfit or a special gun… even though I know that these items will be long forgotten within the first few hours of gameplay.

Ultimately at the end of the day Steam has to come to the table with a better proposition to keep titles from leaving. As it stands if you are releasing a game built in Unreal Engine… you would be dumb not to go with the Epic Games store platform for your release. I think where I come from is maybe a different place than a lot of gamers given that I have traditionally mostly been an MMO gamer. Almost every MMO has its own launcher and does not originally release on Steam… in spite of the fact that many eventually do come to that platform. As a result my system is already strewn with single user launchers so an additional store front here or there does not really phase me in the least. Steam is already not the only platform I bought games through… if it is a UbiSoft title I tend to just buy directly on UPlay since I have to have that client regardless of where the purchase was made. Then there is Origin my least favorite storefront that I continue to begrudgingly use… because Bioware. I more happily use GOG, but largely because I have a bunch of older titles there… and my freebie copy of Witcher 3 had to be redeemed there.

Essentially while I favored Steam… I was not exactly a loyalist. If a company can make more money on Epic Games store… then who am I to halt them. I’ve seen a lot of “whelp I guess I won’t play the next Borderlands game” in my feeds, and that is fine if you truly feel that strongly. Me I will be playing it and enjoying myself because as I found out last night… Borderlands is still fun.