Good Morning Folks! For anyone who has tuned in more recently during the “Genshin Boom” as I am calling it, there is this thing that I like to do semi-monthly where I review the games I have been playing and talk about them a bit. This also serves as a reminder for me to update the regularly playing widget in the sidebar of this blog. Even more than this it is also a time for me to finally admit that a romance with a game is over and send it off on its way, while also talking about the new things that excite me. I actually legitimately did one of these in September so maybe this is the beginning of it actually returning to being something I do each month.
Essentially I like to divide the games up into a few categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
To Those Remaining
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
I am a sucker for this game. I am not playing an awful lot of it right now because we are in the doldrums between finishing one season and starting a new one. However the next season is right around the corner and it should be a very interesting one. During the season the Kanai’s Cube is expanding to four slots with the fourth being completely open to what you want to stick in it. I am assuming that most builds are going to go with some sort of double weapon buffs, but it should be super interesting. Given how packed that November is going to likely be gaming wise, it probably means I will be Demon Huntering it up given that tends to be the fastest route forward.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4 / PS5
I am one of the lucky few that managed to snag a PlayStation 5 preorder, or at least hope that I was successful. I am not playing this game a lot, largely because I am waiting for the improved visuals of playing it through a PS5… but I am occasionally popping it open and wandering feudal japan from time to time. Glorious game and I look forward to focusing on some more at the tail end of this year.
Hades – PC and Switch
This game is now officially out and you should probably be playing it. I’ve shifted things up a bit and I am now playing a lot more of this on the Switch from bed than I am on the PC. I am looking forward to cross save being implemented because while I am not super progress on either platform I would love to just have one that I am focused on period. This is a really great game and I am constantly in awe of how well Supergiant makes games.
New World – PC
I am not actively playing this game but lord I wish I was. I keep hearing rumors about new phases of testing starting up soon, and I am down for this. I had a blast in August and September playing the last extended phase of testing, and the phase prior to that one. I am super on board with this game whenever it actually launches and I would love for if the next phase included a friend code… or if they just rolled into Open Beta soon. I cannot fully conceptualize why I enjoyed this game so much, but I am wanting to get in and share it with some friends. I have this sneaking suspicion that the AggroChat group will be drawn towards Team purple, even though I myself tend to gravitate towards Green. I will make the sacrifice of course for them however, but it is definitely an experience where you want everyone on the same team.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch
I started this last time as a general catch all category for poking around with emulation and my Retro Freak console. I’m not really dug in deeply into any games other than maybe the current play through of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest that I have going on the switch. I also picked up a mega pack of Sega Genesis games recently when it was on sale for the Switch and I’ve been playing quite a bit of classic Streets of Rage 2. I’ve yet to really go spelunking into the closet, but given that I am going to have to rearrange my set up to make room for the PlayStation 5… I have a feeling that I might be doing this sooner rather than later. I need to devote a weekend to organizing and hooking up my office for playing this sort of nonsense. I still want to dig out the NeoGeo CD and see if I can get it running on HDMI.
World of Warcraft – Retail / Beta
Shadowlands has been delayed, but we should have the pre-patch event starting next Tuesday. I am hoping to spend some time this weekend maybe finishing leveling my rogue, but other projects have stolen my attention. Additionally we should have the beginning of the Halloween event soon, and you can damned well bet I am going to be spending each day running it on each of my available characters because I really want that damned mount finally. I mean it is highly likely that I won’t get it… but I am going to at least make a good effort this year given that I actually am enjoying the game still. November is likely going to be heavy shadowlands time for me so this absolutely retains its spot.
To The New and Returning
Genshin Impact – PC / Android
If you have been reading this blog at all this month and the tail end of the last month you will know that I am completely obsessed with Genshin Impact. This is being called “Breath of the Waifu” by many a person online, but I am not even sure if that covers it. I am absolutely not playing it for the Waifu or Husbando, but instead because it is this insanely good action RPG that sort of came from out of nowhere. It is this expert blending of Breath of the Wild, Trials of Mana, Modern Dragon Quest games, Open World Exploration and the addictive as hell Gacha mechanics of Dragalia Lost. I am still shocked at just how damned good this game is for as free as it legitimately is. Sure I have spent money on the game but I also didn’t feel like I had to. If you are not playing this you should be, and probably on the PC/Mobile since they cross save and the PS4 is locked to only that platform. That said there is cross play between all of the platforms regardless, I just like the freedom of being able to farm materials from bed on my phone or tablet and also play primarily on my PC.
To Those Departing
Avengers – PC
Oh Avengers… its not me… its you. I feel like this game probably needed another year to mature and develop enough interesting combat to really be the sort of game that it was trying to be. This is the Anthem of 2020, a game with a lot of promise but also a game that felt pointless after awhile as I chased rewards that didn’t really matter. The difference being that the moment to moment gameplay was so much more enjoyable in Anthem. Avengers needs significant tweaks in its combat system to make it feel more enjoyable in the moment to moment gameplay. I leveled and farmed up a full set of yellow gear for Captain America, leveled up Thor, and then realized while I was leveling Ms Marvel that I didn’t exactly know why I was doing it and logged out never to log in again.
I rarely do two pictures for a single game, but here we are breaking that rule. This is a snipping from Steam DB for the Avengers game, and notice that its peak concurrency was at launch… and only ever hit just over 31,000 players. The few times I attempted to match up with other players, the queues were too long and I eventually gave up and went back to soloing content. The storyline for this game was great and I made me fall in love with the character of Ms Marvel, and since then I have been pouring through her comics through Marvel Unlimited and having a grand ole time. The game however just becomes repetitive when you realize there are six maps in the entire game and everything is carved out as chunks of those as they send you on the same handful of mission types with semi-randomized objectives. Maybe I will revisit in a year or so and see if the game has improved.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I still don’t know why this game and I struggle to get along. There is so much about it that I adore, but at the same time I feel absolutely no desire to actually log in and play it. I left it on the list last time, but to be honest I don’t think I logged in at all during September. With everything on the horizon game wise with the launch of the PS5 and World of Warcraft Shadowlands… I don’t expect to probably play it for the rest of this calendar year. At some point I will return and gobble up a few patches worth of story content, but I am already behind in that department. I love Lalabel, and I will come back to visit him at some point in the future but for now we are admitting to ourselves that the game just isn’t going to be played in the near future.
Ships Passing in the Night
The Division 2 – PC
I gotta admit I teetered back and forth between putting this on the new and returning list. I had a really fun week/weekend hanging out and playing this game and I could see myself returning to it on a more permanent basis. That said… there is just so damned much stuff on my radar right now so I am going to put it in this category for the moment. If it becomes more… then it can trickle upwards on the list. The game has either massively improved since its launch, or I never really gave it enough of a chance because I became enthralled with Anthem. Either case… I am compelled to spend some more time here at some point.
Swords ‘n Magic and Stuff – PC
This charming game is an Early Access title that Tam stumbled onto and I have poked my head into a few times. Not really actively playing it, but it is something I am definitely going to be watching. They are doing active development on it and I am hoping some rounds of combat balance are in the works. if you want more detail you can check out my write up from a few weeks back.
Summary
There really wasn’t a ton of movement, but that is usually the case when I actually manage to do these on a monthly basis. Looming on the horizon is the launch of the PlayStation 5, World of Warcraft Shadowlands, and Cyberpunk 2077 which are all going to steal some of my time. Past hat I am really not sure what the tail end of this year is going to lead to. Time is moving so damned fast in part because every day is effectively the same as I rarely leave the house. I can’t believe we area already knee deep in October when mentally it still feels like it is maybe April. 2020 is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” I think for me, and while I have stayed busy… it all just sorta flows together.
What are you “regularly playing”? Drop me a line below.
The post Regularly Playing: October 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Well friends… it has been twelve days since Genshin Impact released for the North American audience and I feel like I have just now arrived at the “real game”. Last night I hit level 30 and with that opens the last of the story content currently available in the game. They are in theory working on a patch right now for a whole new area to open up roughly the size of Liyue. The reason why I say I am just now arriving at the “real game” is because up until this point I always seemed to have whatever resource I needed at any time I needed it. I could pretty comfortably keep a squad and a half worth of characters fully equipped and leveled without much issue.
At level 30 the World Level increases once again and with it comes the 3rd stage of ascensions for Characters, Weapons and a whole slew of talent levels that you can now train into. All of which require materials that I don’t quite have consistent access to as of yet, and are only really obtainable through the Alchemy table and crafting them. This is a VERY lossy method of obtaining these items and I am very rapidly whittling through whatever reserves that I had stockpiled for this point. I mean the answer to all of these woes is just to “play more of the game”. Thankfully that moment to moment gameplay is so damned good that I am not going to have a problem with this fact. However the relatively rapid ascent is going to grind to a halt for awhile as I slowly upgrade my core team.
I feel like I am probably lucky that I had enough resources banked to pour everything into a single character and kit Razor out completely. The theory being that this one character should be able to carry the rest of the team forward as I ultimately farm all of the resources and mora needed to drag up the rest. I can absolutely foresee that I will probably hit AR35 and the next break WELL before I have managed pulling up those characters, which probably begins a viscous cycle of always being out of resources and money.
I did make a call and ended up switching weapons. I had been using the Sacrificial Greatsword, which had the feature of ending the cooldown of one of my abilities. However since my Razor is built mostly for melee damage output, this wasn’t the best synergy in the world. I’ve now switched to the crafted Greatsword Prototype Aminus which has a 50% chance every 15 seconds of proccing an attack that deals an additional 300% attack damage and causes a small AOE. When this procs it is absolutely glorious and I have crafted two of them… and now am desperately on the hunt for additional Northlander Claymore Prototypes. If anyone has tips for farming these to drop given that they just state as coming from “Bosses”, I would be greatly appreciative.
As for artifacts I am rocking a full set of four stars and using the 2 piece Berserker and 2 piece Gladiator bonus. Once I get a few more pieces of Gladiator I will likely switch over to that set for 4 piece bonus. I think my lowest artifacts are +12 and my highest are +16… but this really comes down to a lack of mora to push them up much higher. That has rapidly become an issue for progression is that I just need so much raw money to pay for the upgrades needed. I guess I could start farming Gold Clouds but up until this point they have seemed like a poor use of Resin.
The most costly thing to level both in Mora costs and resources is absolutely the talents. Each one of these required a significant number of higher tier mob drops, which I had to create through crafting and a copious number of talent books. thankfully I was able to get most of the later through the Battle Pass, which continues to be a phenomenal boon. The positive is that the talent increases make a massive difference in damage throughput each time they are available. So in theory these should also allow me to push a little further into the Spiral Abyss.
Yesterday I lucked out on pulls and managed to get both Ningguang and Fischl, but unfortunately given the drought in resources they are both likely going to be relegated to running missions at the Adventurers guild for the time being. I know given that the content is essentially paused for the moment while additional releases are being worked on by Mihoyo, I should in theory have enough time to dig myself out of this hole. Largely I just wanted to prepare my readers for when the elevator stops going up quite so fast as you hit Adventure Rank 30.
Thankfully however my favorite part of the game is still as valid today as it was on the first day. I love wandering around and exploring. I can get lost in just roaming the map looking for monsters to kill and treasure to open. I still have a copious number of doodads to find out there in the world to finish unlocking the towers, and I have likely not even scratched the surface on all of the possible treasures available. I imagine I will continue finding areas that I have been near but never actually explored fully for a good while. Genshin Impact has an immensely dense world full of lots of tiny details that can be easily missed on the first viewing. I guess in some way I am happy that the ride is slowing down a bit so I can take more time to savor it.
The post Insufficient Mora appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! One of my favorite things about Genshin Impact are the boss fights. The game is full of these raid boss style encounters that reward a significant amount of good loot. Two of them are on weekly timers Andrius the Wolf god and Stormterror which in theory I hope you have already fought by this point as part of the story. Fair warning if you have NOT finished that step in the main story then this might give you some spoilers. The big wolf is awesome because you can bring your friends and quite honestly he is a cakewalk with multiple ranged characters. However Stormterror is a pain in the butt and something that both myself and Grace barely limped through.
As a result this has been something I have dreaded stepping foot in, and last night apparently I had some clarity. So far every boss fight in Genshin Impact has been challenging but at the same time very fair and if you understood the mechanics you were going to get through the fight regardless of your gear levels. This made me realize that we were likely doing the fight entirely wrong. The problem with Genshin Impact guides is that they are almost all YouTube videos, and the vast majority seem to be streams of people opening Gacha pulls. After some digging I found an excellent resource from one of the beta tests and if watching a video is your jam then I highly suggest checking it out.
For those who prefer a written guide, I am going to take stills from that video and talk through the process. One of the problems with the Stormterror fight is that you won’t have full control of your camera because it effectively puts you in a 2.5D encounter as you traverse a series of platforms left to right in front of the boss. Because of this ranged classes have a hard time doing normal damage or “white hitting” the boss, and since the guide suggested it I made a party of nothing but melee characters along with Barbara as a healer. This helped immensely, and now I will walk you through the basic mechanics of the fight.
At the beginning of the fight you are going to spend most of your time just avoiding getting hit. Stormterror will strafe the platform and you need to be preserving your stamina so you can dodge out of the way. I took another tip from the video and decided to use Kaeya as a “soak” or a character that I didn’t care that much about to use doing the dodge phases so I didn’t risk killing my highest damage characters which were Razor and Xiangling. There are going to be some wind sprites on the edges of the platform and you want to go ahead and activate those to start the wind currents going which will come into play in a later phase.
After a few minutes Storm Terror will slam his claws down onto the platform giving you an opportunity to dps them down. If you look at the health bar for the encounter you will see a smaller white bar below it which indicates the health of the claws. Your goal is to burn through these claws as fast as possible to trigger a phase shift. Like the video I started dpsing the right claw and very shortly after doing so Stormterror will start a breath attack that ultimately sweeps the platform. As this is beginning you want to dodge your way over to the left claw and begin burning as hard as you can to shift the phase. If you are of reasonable gear and you burn various DPS “E” attacks you can do this. I would hold your limit breaks or “Q” attacks for the next phase.
When you have burned through the claws, it will cause Stormterror to slump down onto the platform at which point you need to climb up on top of his neck and unleash everything you have on the glowing pink “scab”. This is the point where you want to hit your limit breaks if you have them saved up and cycle through any attacks that you might have available as well. This is the REAL burn phase of the encounter because it is the first time you have been able to do anything to the red bar indicating the health of Stormterror. In theory you should be able to get this down to about half before the next phase change.
Now here is the key to the fight, that I apparently originally missed in the times I have done it before. Stormterror is surrounded by a ring of platforms and he is going to do an attack that causes them to start cracking. If you stand on the ground during this phase you will take signficant damage over time. However the goal is now to find a clean platform and use the wind currents to safely make your way across the chasms between. In the video the guy just keeps going left until he finds a clean one and that is precisely what I did as well and it seemed to work. This will cause a reset of the phases and you are back to dodge the strafes, attack the claws and dodge the beam and then hop up on the back and in theory you should be able to finish it off in the next phase.
Once I knew what the hell I was doing I was able to finish off the fight last night without taking significant damage on any of my characters. This went from a fight that I dread to something that I can probably cakewalk my way through with way lower geared characters. Essentially here is the TL;DR of the keys to success as outlined in the excellent video.
Bring a Melee Team
Avoid taking damage until he slams claws down
Burn claws while avoiding the breath attack
Hop up on Back and Burn the “Scab”
Glide left until you find a clean platform
Start the process over by avoiding taking damage until claws phase
The reset of the Wolf and Dragon encounters is essentially in the wee hours of Monday morning each week. It is well worth doing and hopefully between the video that I keep linking and my text/screenshot break down this will give you the confidence to tackle the fight. Doing so this week managed to net me a second piece of Gladiator’s gear giving my Razor the excellent 2 piece bonus. At some point I will also do a write up on how I have approached the wolf encounter, but that one is considerably easier given that you can co-op it. For friends I am more than happy to ride along for wolf kills even though I have probably already gotten my rewards for the week.
That is one thing above all else that I really enjoy about this game is the way that they handle lockouts for encounters. You can always attempt something for free and bash your head against it as many times as you like until you figure it out without risk of spending currency on attempts. You don’t spend any of your resin until you actually receive loot, and similarly you can keep helping friends out with encounters as many times as you like without getting loot. So for Wolf boy I could do it over and over all night long even though I already got my loot for the week. So if you are a mutual and are struggling with some of these fights, hit me up and I am more than happen to help you through them.
The post Taming Stormterror appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This mornings post is going to be a bit of a descent into my madness. One of the things you will have no doubt noticed by now on my blog is that I post a lot of screenshots. It has become a bit of an obsession to have a decent workflow for taking a screenshot from a moment in a game to a properly sized image ready for posting. One of the problems I have encountered over the years is that every single game seems to want to store its screenshots in a different arcane location. While there are websites like the PC Gaming Wiki that can help you decode this nonsense, there are even more games that have no built in screenshot functionality.
My desire is to ultimately have every screenshot that I take land in a single incoming directory, where I can then process and eventually (often times months and months later) sort it into my long network storage. I need to reorganize but I have some rough break downs by game type and then store my images in a directory loosely named off of the game title. The benefit of this is that I can rapidly pull back a screenshot for a game that I have not been playing in ages if I end up needing/wanting to talk about it again. I play an excessive number of games so having some sort of a system helps greatly in trying to decipher this mess.
For years… and I do mean like a decade or so… I used FRAPS. It was the swiss army knife of PC screenshotting tools, and was relatively lightweight in a sort of set it and forget it manner. I configured it to dump into my “gameshots” directory and the rest was history. I could reclaim the fruits of my labor from that location and then convert them as needed for the purpose of the blog. The core problem with this is that FRAPS and Beepa the company behind it… are effectively defunct. Sure you can still purchase licenses for it, but it has not been updated since 2013 and has had a slew of issues starting with Windows 8.1 and continuing with Windows 10.
This lead me down a path that ultimately lead to DXtory at the suggestion of a friend. This application works fairly well… except when it doesn’t and for whatever reason keeps your game from even launching. Anthem for example… will not launch while DXtory is running and I am guessing this has something to do with the way that it is hooking into Direct X as an overlay and it being detected by Anti-Cheat software as somewhat of an aberration. The other issue that I would occasionally run into with DXTory is that it would just stop working out of the blue, and would not start working again until I rebooted. The final nail in the coffin unfortunately is once again DXtory seems to be a bit of an abandonware project given that the last update was in 2017 and the game has numerous unresolved issues.
Another tool that I have used quite a bit is GeForce Experience and its in-game overlay which provides access to taking screenshots and video. This works when it works… and stops working seemingly randomly. There are games that this will capture like a champ, and it has the added benefit of dumping them into a directory named after the information in the games executable. However it was unreliable enough that there were many nights where I thought I was capturing all of this content for the blog… and then get out of the game only to realize I got nothing. Additionally this does not play nicely with Parsec all of the time, which lead to some weirdness that could occasionally cause me to lose mouse input controls while remoted into my upstairs machine.
Greenshot is an open source screenshotting tool that seemed promising. However it has a massive flaw that ultimately drove me away from it. There were many a night when I would be humming along taking screenshots, only to realize later that for whatever reason it was not capturing the game but instead just picture after picture of my desktop. This caused a rapid uninstall and a retreat back into other tools.
Steam has a perfectly cromulent Screenshot functionality, that seems to work flawlessly. It has two fatal flaws as far as I am concerned. The first being that you cannot change where the screenshots are stored and they are stored in a truly arcane path that I die inside a little bit each time I remember that I have memorized it. “Steam\userdata\8795056\760\remote\1085660\screenshots” for example is the directory for Destiny 2, which is a game that is notoriously hard to nab screenshots from with a third party tool. The only bit that is unique to Destiny is the “1085660” which I believe is some kind of Steam Catalog Identifier. I’ve had to rely on this for Destiny for awhile given that neither Fraps nor DXTory were capable of pulling a screenshot. The final flaw however is the fact that this only works for games running under Steam… which is not a case for every game I play.
When I shared this lament with folks online… the almost universal refrain was “What about OBS?”. The thing is… I don’t want to capture video. OBS is my go to for any time I want to capture footage or that I might want to stream, and I use it at work for manipulating my web cam before piping it through video conference software. The problem for me at least is that while OBS does support screenshot functionality, it feels like a lot of overhead to be running this window of OBS that is constantly mirroring my screen just to be recording a still. Then there is the problem with Medal or any of the other “record clips” apps, that they are really focused on live video. Pulling a still from video is messy and often times ends up with anything that was in action being blurred as a result because video doesn’t record full single frames but instead a mishmash that visually works in motion.
Where we have ended up is another piece of software that a friend suggested. ShareX, like Greenshot is also an OpenSource project but it seems to be designed around capturing anything you might want to capture. It has a whole workflow system, which I have only barely scratched and was seemingly designed for the purpose of taking an image and then uploading image to some external host. I am not doing that second part, but I am wondering if I can eventually script it so that it does my entire workflow. Right now I have everything dumping into a single directory, but it seems like I could pretty easily recreate the functionality that GeForce Experience did and name things based on the executable information. So far it “just works” and it has even managed to flawlessly capture Destiny 2, with the caveat being that you have to be running it as Administrator or some games seem to block it.
I’ve been using it for about a week now and everything that I have attempted to capture has been great without any weirdness that I have encountered thusfar. I am hoping that I might have a winner here, and pending that I do I will happily start contributing to the Patreon as a way of funding this thing that is seemingly really hard to find. I have zero qualms supporting the things I used and had licenses to FRAPS, DXTory and even the thing I am going to talk about next… IrfanView. Ultimately I need to dig into the workflow scripting because once I get an image in the incoming directory, that isn’t the end of the process.
I’ve used IrfanView since college for batch image processing, and before that I used something called Graphics Workshop. IrfanView is this awesome one size fits all image viewer software that has plugins to support all sorts of esoteric other formats. The final step before an image ends up on my blog is to run it through a batch conversion where it makes sure the size constrains to at least 1920×1080 (it ignores anything smaller) and then converts it to a JPG to reduce the size. My native resolution is 3840×2160 aka “4k” and I have no interest in posting something that large on my blog. However I do like storing the original image capture for any future needs down the line. As a result I everything gets run through IrfanView which also moves the screenshot to its final resting place signifying that it is ready to post on the blog.
I am hoping that ShareX stays with me for awhile. So far I have yet to encounter a game that it would not capture. I need to spend some time learning about its functionality because I am using it for only a fraction of what it seems to be able to do. If it could replace my entire workflow it would be phenomenal, so that it could save a copy in Full Resolution and then send a scaled down copy to my working directory as well. I know this is probably madness but I feel like it is useful every so often to peel back the curtain and talk about how I approach things.
The post In Search of Screenshots appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
