Hey friends! Sorry for the quiet over the last few days but I have been dealing with some significant technical difficulties on the web host side. That however in theory should be resolved… so here is hoping that I can resume my regular schedule. Last night I got a box that I had been anxiously waiting for for awhile and I am super glad that it has finally arrived. Preordering through Sams Club was way more stressful than I would have wanted, and in truth it seems like Sams doesn’t exactly know what to do with the whole preorder experience. I managed to snag mine on September 17th… and then got zero updates at all about it until 11/9 when I was told that it would not be arriving until the 27th.
Not getting a PlayStation 5 on release day when I had managed to snag a pre-order was a bit of a bummer, but a late PS5 was better than NO PS5. On the 13th however I got an email telling me that my PlayStation 5 was on its way and would be there on the 17th. That eventually turned into the 16th which was even better. However even though FedEx claimed that the package was out for delivery by 6 pm it had not shown up. Around that time the status updated to “Pending” and “No Delivery Date Set” which caused more than a small amount of anxiety. We were dealing with the fact that the battery in my wife’s car had died and stranded her, so I didn’t have the spoons to freak out about it. By the time I got up yesterday morning it had been rescheduled and was once again flagged as “Out For Delivery”.
Given the on and off nature of this… I spent more than a small amount of the day watching the front door camera. Around 3:45 someone from FedEx and deposited this package on my doorstep, and within a few minutes I was whisking it away because it was absolutely NOT something I wanted a porch pirate to find. Around 4:30 I was unpacking and working on setting it up. This picture is it beside my Xbox One original model, PlayStation 4 original model, PlayStation 3 original model and now the PlayStation 5 disc model. Eventually I will probably move the PS4 elsewhere in the house since I can use it as a remote play unit for the PS5. I had seen comparisons before but I was not at all prepared for just how big this is. It legitimately looks like it is an Alienware Tower and not a gaming console.
I have to say this is probably the easiest console set up experience I have ever been through. Prior to receiving my console I went through the process of copying all of my saved game data off to a USB thumb drive. When setting up the console I was given the opportunity to set up through the PlayStation app. Inside the app there is an option for “Sign In PS5” and you essentially scan a QR Code that is presented on screen and then magic happens and your console authenticates and pulls in all of your information. I expected to have to go back through and set up my picture twitter account again, but nope all of that transferred across without issue. Within about ten minutes I was just left wit the eternal chore of downloading games.
As far as the controller goes, I think the Dual Sense is considerably more comfortable than the Dual Shock 4. Things feel a bit more spread out, which is good from the standpoint that my large hands feel considerably more comfortable using it. The negative however is that when your thumbs are on the sticks, reaching over to hit the DPad is a bit of a thing because I don’t quite have that muscle memory built yet. Not being an aficionado of rumble, I was not sure what I would think of this new fangled experience. The jury is honestly still out. It is better than standard rumble but it isn’t the earth shattering experience that I have been lead to believe.
Astro’s Playroom is built into the console and is essentially a test pad that shows off everything that the controller can do. The thing is that I legitimately think that this game could be a Mario quality experience if it spent more time trying to be a real game and less time just being a demo reel. There are moments that are genuinely phenomenal while playing the built in game. The rumble does add something to the experience but I am just wondering if my fingers are simply not sensitive enough or something because the way it had been described to me is not what I am experiencing. One of the early reviews indicated that the rumble felt differently depending upon which surface the character was walking on… and sure it does a little bit but it is a super subtle difference. I guess I just expected more.
I picked up Demon’s Soul because while I have never really gotten into the Soulsian experience, I keep hearing that this is one of the most next gen experiences on the console. The game is freaking gorgeous and honestly… I think I like it better than the other souls games I have played apart from Jedi Fallen Order. I’ve not made a ton of progress in this, but I do think I want to keep trying. Maybe this will be the time that it finally clicks for me.
I played a little bit of Bugsnax, but I have to admit that it did not grab me. It mostly felt like Muppet Skyrim for some reason, which wasn’t the most amazing experience. Maybe I would like it with a mouse and keyboard better? I will probably return to it at some point, but since it is the free game for the month through PlayStation Plus I wanted to at least give it a shot.
The game that I spent most of my evening playing was Ghost of Tsushima. I had paused my play through in part because I knew I would be getting a PlayStation 5 at some point. I am very happy to report that I was able to load my saved game from the PS4 without much issue. It did seem to have to go through some sort of a patch or conversion process. As soon as I booted the game up and attempted to load my saved game, a 30 minute download started. Once that finished however the game is working as expected. The load times are considerably more than everything else I have played with, so I am hoping that we get some sort of an optimization patch for the PS5.
All told, I am very happy to have my PS5. More than anything I am think I am happiest to not have to keep checking stock and following links in an attempt to snag one. I went through that with the Switch and I think in part why I was so adamant on trying to get a preorder is so that I wouldn’t have to go through it again with the PS5. Unfortunately I am still checking for those links in an attempt to help the friends that were not so lucky.
The post PlayStation 5 Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Due to some technical difficulties, we are getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning. Things appear to be functioning as normal right now so we are going to hope it holds together long enough to make a post. For the uninitiated the above image comes from Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it is an amazing show. However after this weekend the lore drops in Destiny 2… I have decided that this is legitimately what I seem like to my non-Destiny friends that I keep trying to engage in conversations. I am convinced that Destiny is one of the greatest science fiction stories to ever be told… but it is thoroughly inaccessible to all but the most diehard of fanatics.
Imaging writing an epic piece of fiction and instead of publishing it in books… you instead tore each page in half and then shoved the halves into bottles. You then threw those bottles out into the ocean hoping that someday people from all around the world would start to piece together your magnum opus. This is ultimately what being in the Destiny Lore Community feels like. We are given scraps of digital text and then expected to fit the pieces together to make sense of the greater cosmology of the setting. There are times you wonder if you are really going mad… and then something gets released that causes all of these assorted scraps of paper to align in just the right way as to present the clear path through it all. It is when these moments happen that you start to question if this is all part of some greater plan that started over a decade ago… or if this is just convenient use of dangling plot threads in order to make something that was spur of the moment feel destined.
That however is NOT what we are going to talk about, because quite frankly even the paraphrased version seems like nonsense. We are going to talk about Beyond Light as a whole and more importantly the experiment Bungie has foisted in front of us of “archiving” content in a vault and removing the first few years of the game the players. With Beyond Light came the sunsetting of weapons, because I admit that it has to be hard to find a way to balance hundreds of weapons at the same time and make sure the “sandbox” is performing as expected. I was largely in support of the notion of this needing to happen, and I did some prep-work during the Season of Arrivals to best figure out some of my favorite weapons that would be with me for the long run.
This sunset however has caused some significant issues like the fact that right now there is one singular Legendary Machine Gun that was spared… and to the best of my knowledge it is no longer dropping. Currently if you can get far enough into the content, we also have access to Thermal Erosion, which thankfully I managed to get over the weekend. I have no clue about the validity of the roll I received, but for now I am using it because it gives me a functional machine gun when I had none. The answer that most folks have leaned on is to use an exotic machine gun, but right now I only have thunderlord as I never got access to xenophage or heir apparent.
The challenge with removing multiple hundreds of weapons in a single pass… is that you also need to introduce a lot of fresh weapons to prime the pump. The dropping of these new weapons seems to be few and far between and most of what I am getting are what I considered vault trash back in year one. So the end result is that I am mostly still using things that I picked up during the Season of Arrivals because nothing terribly compelling has come along to replace any of it. It just feels bad because there have been so many times I thought “I need to do X element kills, I will just grab my trusty… ” and then realize that the thing I was about to reach for is now permanently stuck in the past.
The biggest challenge that Beyond Light has is that we are sitting here whether we want to or not… and making a valuation. Is what I just got worth the four planets, multiple raids and hundreds of weapons that I lost? The short answer is no… not yet. The Season of the Hunt has yet to officially start and I am hoping that the activities associated with it will add the lubrication needed to make it feel like the new drops are flowing once again. Right now we are in this awkward space at the beginning of something new and not entirely certain how it is going to shake out, but we also lost our own familiar stomping grounds in the process. I was probably one of the few players that legitimately loved Titan. I’ve likely spent more time on that destination than any others in Destiny 2.
Admittedly this was also the problem with the launch of Destiny 2 initially. It felt like we had just lost so much well tuned and polished content that we were familiar with in Destiny 1, as well as the vast arsenal of options we had stockpiled. Essentially Beyond Light is the launch of Destiny 3, without really intending to be. It has put us back in a position where we are having to deal with the loss of the familiar and comfortable with the promise of something great on the horizon. I am still enjoying myself but I am throwing out some significant questions on if this sacrifice was worth it yet.
Don’t get me wrong. Were I to judge Beyond Light simply on the merits of that expansion alone, it clearly goes down as one of the best designed expansions to date. There are a lot of really cool systems and we also managed to get an entirely new type of character class. While I am not in love with Behemoth for Titans, the concepts are really cool. I think the equivalent might be an expansion like The Burning Crusade where not only did you get new races and new starter zones, but the two factions also got access to the class they were missing so it felt like there were so many possibilities. Unfortunately no matter how good the new content is, it will always be judged against the content that is no longer available. I will never play another round of escalation protocol for example, which was legitimately something I greatly enjoyed.
I am not grinding hard in the manner that I used to with Destiny. Ultimately I don’t want to reach a point where I have burned myself out again. I am trying to figure out a way to play Destiny as one of many games that I am interested in rather than as a second vocation. I’m also trying to learn to live with the fact that there are just things that I will likely never get to see in the game. I don’t have the hours or the dedication to be able to get all of the things available in a single season before the next season rolls out. That is a really bitter fucking pill to swallow, because I hate the concept of disappearing content. I firmly believe that games as a service offerings should continue to grow over time rather than constantly keep shrinking back as more content is released.
So I find myself in this position where I am enjoying the present I am in, but I am still a little flummoxed about the past that we lost. I tend to be a packrat in MMORPGs and if nothing else this has given me reason to destroy a ton of gear because it is effectively useless now. I’ve held on to a lot of armor because I am not entirely certain how this supposed transmog system is going to work and I don’t want to lose out on some of my favorite appearances. If you are playing Destiny drop me a line with some of your thoughts. How are you faring after the sunset?
The post Destiny’s Cataclysm appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off the show with a brief discussion of the console releases this week and how none of us actually managed to get one yet. Bel has one that is still shipping and Tam has had zero luck even getting to that point in the process. Bel talks a bit about Destiny 2 Beyond Light and how it is a solid expansion but cannot make up for three years of content that was removed from the game. The “sunset” has had some pretty negative impact on the game and even Bungie agrees that they maybe went too far. We talk a bit about the first major Genshin Impact patch and how it added way more content than we were expecting. Finally we dive into a discussion about games and hobbies and seeking out a place for creative expression. We also talk about the differences between creating something that is physical and tangible that you can hold in your hand versus something that takes place solely online.
I am not sure how to fully explain how happy I am to be in this location again. For those who did not play Destiny 1, this was the location where we spent our first moments in the game. If you do the New Light experience you go through a somewhat condensed version of that intro as well. This is where our ghost first found us among the wreckage of rusted out cars, and now some six years later we are able to once again roam freely around the outskirts of the Cosmodrome. In Destiny each location has a story that you have to dig hard to find… and while this turns off most players there is something magical about uncovering the past that has kept me at connected to this setting.
Last night I finished the main storyline of Beyond Light and as a result got my hands on No Time to Explain once again. This also is a reference back to Destiny 1, as it was the legendary rifle you were given then by the Exo Stranger for completing the Black Garden mission. It came back later in the life cycle of the first game as an Exotic, and it is a variant of this that we are now able to wield once more in Destiny 2. The weapon is pretty nice, though I have to admit I do miss the full auto variant that we first took away from the Black Garden. This one summoning a little echo of a sort that fires bullets at your enemies though is rather tasty… and it seems to be a way better shot than I am.
While the main story is relatively short, it does provide a lot of answers… specifically about the relationship between the Eliksni and the Traveler or as they refer to it the Great Machine. Much like Humanity, they were once the chosen of the Traveler and for them the Traveler fled the darkness leading to the downfall of their civilization. This is well trodden canon, but the final moments of this expansion give us a very brief glimpse into what Eliksni life and their planet might have been like. I am now working my way through the follow up sequence of quests now that I have mastered Stasis for my own. I think the jury is out right now on what I actually think of Behemoth spec and the Stasis powers. It seems terribly useful for the Crucible but significantly less so for PVE encounters.
Another game that I spent some time with yesterday was Godfall. Unfortunately I do not have my PS5 as of yet, but at 2 am I did get a shipping notice telling me it was on the way. However Godfall was a game I had always intended to play on the PC so that I could use my control scheme of choice the keyboard and mouse. That said everything about this game seems to have been designed for a controller, so if you have been considering getting it… you might want to hook one up and save yourself some control scheme frustrations. I am not entirely certain what I think of the game yet. I enjoy some aspects of it, but avoiding attacks seems to be a fiddly and weak aspect of the moment to moment gameplay. I don’t feel terribly effective dodging out of the way of incoming blows. Maybe this changes with time and the way you spec your warframes.
Lets be honest… this game is Warframe with melee weapons and more MMORPG loot. From what I can tell your brother is Evil and he is attempting to ascend to godhood and you are trying to stop him from doing this. This means you have to traverse the various realms of the Monolith… which appears to be an equivalent to the World Tree. The intro mission is just getting through this large temple to enter the Monolith, but after that you begin traversing various realms… the first of which being the Earth realm. I believe it means Earth in the elemental sense and not literally Terra. This area is more open and allows you to freely roam around completing objectives, which admittedly already places this higher up on my scale than Warframe since it doesn’t really have an equivalent of a Destiny Patrol zone.
Your mission into the temple is to recruit this creepy machine face lady thing, which allows you to unlock the various systems of the game. Your first action is to forge a new Warframe or as they call them Valorplates. You can equip them with different build outs and then swap things up to change the way you are playing. Unfortunately they are all melee which is going to rule out a lot of my friends who are not melee friendly. What it is doing is not really tricksy enough to entice Tam, and the lack of proper magic is going to rule out a lot of the AggroChat folks. So I am not really sure this is the sort of thing that would take off very much within my immediate friend group. I am enjoying myself, but not enough that after a few hours of playing it I didn’t immediately return right back to Destiny 2.
Are you exploring Beyond Light in Destiny 2? Did you try out Godfall? Drop me your thoughts in the comments. I am curious especially if Godfall is clicking for anyone else, or if it is destined to be yet another game in this lobby game/looter genre. I fear that much like Avengers… this one is not going to gain traction as we have reached maximum saturation in yet another gaming trend.
The post NTTE and Godfall appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
