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Division PC Impressions

February 20, 2016 by Belghast

The Hard Data

This weekend is another beta test of The Division, and from the sounds of it… this is a much larger pool of testers than the weekend of Pax South. That Sunday and Monday after Pax South I managed to play quite a bit of Division on the PS4, so this time around I decided ahead of time that I would be trying it out on the PC just to get the broad feel of how the game performs on multiple platforms. When it comes to PC gaming… a lot of your experience rides upon your hardware. For the purpose of this test I decided to try playing it on both my gaming desktop upstairs, and my older gaming laptop. I knew pretty much that the laptop would not perform well at all, but I was still curious to see if the game could reach a playable state on it. So as a result I thought it was probably best to start by listing the important stats of my two gaming systems… so you can use that hopefully as a judge of how the game will perform on your own systems. Since this is also an online game… I opted to take a quick speed test this morning just to use that for reference as well.

Gaming Desktop

AMD FX-6300 3.5 ghz 6 cores
16 GB Ram
MSI GTX 960 4G Gaming Edition Video

Gaming Laptop

Intel i7-3630QM 2.4 ghz 8 cores
16 GB Ram
2X Nvidia Geforce GT 650M in SLI Video

Internet Speed

The Gaming Desktop

Division PC Impressions — Gaming Desktop – 1080P Medium Resolution

When I first booted up this game, I have to say I had an inordinate amount of difficulty getting it to run. The problem is the fact that you cannot get to the video and graphics quality settings until you wade through the character creation step. This is unfortunate, since as an MMO gamer primarily… the character creation process is super important to me. Initially the game launched in such a way that I thought it was trying to split the image between my two monitors. I did the Alt+Enter trick to drop it to windowed mode, and then Alt+Enter again to attempt to fix the resolution. However this time I had no mouse input, and could not really touch anything on the screen. After exiting the game and reloading I was finally able to get in and through the character creation process, which is locked down and pretty minimal at the moment. However if you hit randomize enough times you can get a character that you can live with at least for the purpose of this test. Upon entering the video settings…. I realized that for some godawful reason the game was trying to by default run in 4K. I simply do not have a machine capable for 4K gaming, and I think it was just freaking the hell out on my machine and monitors. After dialing back the game to 1080p I started getting a fairly reliable 50-60 fps with dips into the high 40s as you can see in the first screenshot of this post. At least on paper that seems like a really playable framerate, and I give them credit for making the game look gorgeous even on the Medium settings I was running.

The problem being that the game was not really playable even though I was getting roughly 60 fps. It suffered horribly from some bad hitching anytime I moved into a new area, or often times in the middle of combat. I can’t really call it rubber-banding, because there was no time rollback component but it felt quite a bit like rubber banding in MMOs where you hit this hard wall of lag… and things lock up before the world unfreezes and catches up. This is not too horrible when you are simply running around the city and you enter what I can only assume is a new “zone”, but this is deadly when it comes to combat and encountering mobs that are causing your screen to freeze. Now my friend Jabberant said that he played all last test on the PC and did not experience any of this… so it makes me wonder if this is simply a case of network congestion or some sort of bottle-necking happening on the server farm. In any case it does not bode well for the enjoy-ability and stability of this game at launch. Another friend suggested that I turn off VSync and this to some extent lessened the severity of the freezes…. but they were still very much there anytime I moved into a new area, or encountered hostiles on screen.

The Gaming Laptop

Now just a bit of a foreword… I did not expect this game to be playable on my laptop. My laptop is a Lenovo y500 and at this point that model range is over three years old. At the time it was hot shit, featuring one of the only laptops I knew with available SLI. Instead of an optical drive, it features a second hot swappable video card that fits in the multi-bay, and as a result I can still run a lot of games that I should not theoretically be able to run on a GT 650M video card. I have had decent luck by ratcheting games down to 720p instead of the native 1080p resolution, and I can play things like Dragon Age Inquisition that way… that otherwise choke on this machine. As a result I thought this would be a good test of just how well this game might run on an aging system. Firstly I was not shocked that initially I was getting 10-15 fps at 1080p but upon dropping the graphical settings to low and the resolution to 720p I was able to achieve fairly reliable 25-40 fps even in combat. The problem being that at 6:30 am on a Saturday morning… the servers should be under as little load as they will ever be during this weekend test…. and I was still seeing significant stalling and freezing anytime I moved into a new area of town… or entered combat. So this seems to be a general problem with the game, and not necessarily limited to my desktop upstairs. All of which tells me… the PC client needs some serious tuning before it is ready for prime time. Given that “prime time” in this case is Seventeen days away on March 8th… this is a little worrisome.

All of this said… the game was shockingly playable on this old hardware. It felt pretty much like playing Destiny on an XBox 360. Sure the world looks like a blurry mess, but the core gameplay itself was pretty solid… apart from the whole freezing thing. I could in theory see myself playing this on the laptop without much issue, and even games like Warframe cause me to make resolution concessions to be able to run them downstairs from the comfort of my couch. I also have to say that as far as controlling the game… I am MUCH better at playing it with a mouse and keyboard, largely because even after all the time spent with Destiny… I am MUCH more accurate with a mouse than I will probably ever be with a controller. So given that Laptop graphics cards generally run an entire generation behind as far as performance goes… that would mean my laptop is the equivalent of an SLI GTX 550 setup…. so a 660/670/680 range video card in a desktop should be able to give equivalent performance. Basically meaning that if you have an old machine, it won’t look pretty but the game should at least still be playable.

PC versus PS4

There are positives and negatives about both systems. You can read my original thoughts about last beta test, where I talk more about the game-play than the nuts and bolts. A lot of those statements still apply for either version. Largely where I stand at the moment is… the concept of being able to play from my laptop is really nice… but even then I was consistently plagued by problems. The Division on PC will be a viable game at some point, but my fear is it will be months after release and a couple of patches later, which is honestly what I have come to expect from the MMO gaming launch cycle. These sort of games are rarely if ever 100% on the PC at day one, and I fear that The Division is going to be another case of that. The Playstation client however just worked flawlessly. I didn’t need to get in and fiddle with resolutions or slowly and painstakingly ratchet things down until they reached a level of performance I was happy with. Instead I just booted up the client and played the damn game. As someone who has always favored PC as the platform of choice… I have to say it sounds really damned odd to hear myself saying that. Sure there are problems with PSN and such, and I fully expect it to be flaky a bit around launch day to. However once you get into the game it just works, and works well. Sure there are issues with some muddy textures on the PS4, but the game runs without hitching in combat or movement or anything of the sort. So right now I am still very much up in the air about purchasing this game, however if I do… I will more than likely be picking it up on the Playstation 4. The ability to simply turn it on and play without having to worry about framerates and resolutions… is extremely appealing. Additionally there is the problem of this being a heavily PVP game… and at least on a console I know all of us players are on even footing. With the PC… this is absolutely going to be a game where your system will control how well you can play. On low settings…. aiming on encounters is really difficult because the further away from you the mob is… the more it just sort of blends into the background. Running on high resolution and sharp textures is going to give an advantage to anyone who can afford the system to run it. So largely for my impressions… I am a bit disappointed in The Division as PC gaming experience…. but I know that I can always fall back on the PS4 and still be happy as a clam.

Raiding and Judgment

February 19, 2016 by Belghast

Raiding Modes

I have a strange topic inside me, that I am going to try and let out this morning. It has been growing there for some time, but wasn’t exactly sure how it would take shape… that is until yesterday and a small conversation with some awesome folks on twitter. For years now I have seen a tendency to discount raid experience that is not in the hardest possible mode of a game. Now granted this is more of a World of Warcraft thing than any other game… because even in say Final Fantasy XIV folks unanimously agree that “Savage” anything is pure madness. Over the years I have seen so many statements to the equivalent of “but I am only raiding normal” and hell I have found myself doing the same, to underpin that my experiences might not be as intense or serious as those of others. When it starts to get under my skin however is when folks treat it in a way that individuals not raiding in the deepest end of the pool, or not raiding at all… are somehow poor players or otherwise flawed. I realize this is really strange timing considering I spent last night getting drug through Heroic Hellfire by some friends… who are genuinely awesome and very skilled players.

Where I would love to take the conversation when it comes to raiding is not towards a direction of player skill, but instead about one of personal preference and prioritization. It always feels like players expect to be either immediately and magically good at raiding… or to be forever relegated to the back burner of LFR. I would wager a bet that very few active raiders right now are in that “prodigy” territory, in that they were simply born awesome at video games… and never have to put in any work. Instead I would continue to wager that most active Mythic raiders got through through an extended sequence of learning their class and cutting their teeth on less difficult content until they developed the skill package necessary to reach their goal of raiding the highest difficulty. So when I see a server first or god forbid a world first…. I don’t immediately think “my god these are a bunch of naturally talented people”, I instead think “these are a bunch of folks that really put in a bunch of training and effort, and devoted a significant chunk of their life to completing this goal”. It becomes a matter of personal preference, and prioritization of their activities to meet those goals.

A Team Sport

The truth about raiding is that personal skill in itself doesn’t get you terribly far, especially as you escalate your way through the difficulty curve. Competing in difficult raid content, means you need to be effective as a group… not just effective as individuals. It becomes less about making sure you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing… and instead about making sure that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing and also at the same time supporting the goals of the team as a whole. Over the years I’ve personally raided at several different levels in this game… with everything from cutting edge progression, to casual Sunday afternoon romps in raid zones. In all cases… I was the same person playing behind the keyboard with the same skills and the same abilities. What changed between the various modes was the amount of focus I was forced to give the game experience, and at the same time the amount of time I had to spend outside of game doing research and planning. In my more serious forays into raiding, I would spend several hours a week pouring over logs… reading various theory-craft forums… all to see if I could squeeze a little bit more out of my game play to lower the margins on the next fight and make it that much closer to a victory.

Basically where I want to go with this is that I feel like as players we need to change how we talk about raiding. Each tier of raiding requires more commitment from the player, and quite honestly… you have to assess where your happy place is. Having experienced lots of different raiding difficulties over the years, I have come to realize that “serious” and “focused” raiding is not my thing. That does not mean I am some how defective, and that I lack the ability to do serious or focused raiding. It simply means that the risk versus reward equation of the amount of “stuff” that I have to do, and the amount of schedule prioritization that is required to make that serious commitment… is not worth the amount of “enjoyment” that I receive from it. I absolutely respect anyone who is raiding serious content, and I tip my hat to the awesome folks that drug me along last night, and I tried my best to stay focused and avoid doing bad things that would hurt the raid. Even though last night was very much a “roflstomp” occasion, since that group has long since moved on to Mythic raiding… it still required enough focus for me to simply not want to do it on a nightly basis.

The Commitment

Honestly I think the group I was raiding with last night is the perfect illustration that raiding simply takes a lot of hard work. While they have technically progressed past Heroic Hellfire Citadel, they are showing up and putting in time to help gear folks that are new to the team, knowing that the gear will be necessary to reach the performance levels needed to succeed in the later Mythic fights. It is not that they somehow magically transformed into Super Saiyans or somehow unlocked their “final raider form” between defeating Heroic Archimonde and starting Mythic. Instead they put in a lot of hard work, and time working through the content… time that they continue to put in trying to pull up the gear level of players to increase the performance. I would never want to somehow discount how important that hard work is, or how awesome the accomplishment of reaching that point as a raid is. What I do what to change is to somehow remove the judgement from the way WoW players in general talk about raid modes. It is a double edged sword, because for bad seed that is calling anyone not raiding what happens to be raiding a “Scrub” or “Trash”… there are dozens of people that well tell themselves that they are simply not “good enough” to do that content.

I would love us to reach a point where we can be okay with the choices of other players. Looking for Raid is awesome for example, because it allows you to see raid like content without putting in any effort. Normal mode is also awesome because it lets you see legitimate raid content without having to focus quite so hard on optimization, and is this great sweet spot when it comes to raiding with your friends. Heroic is also great because it ratchets up the difficulty significantly and requires both team coordination and personal focus to defeat it. Finally Mythic is that place where it requires you to take everything that you have learned and removes the margin of error to a point where you have to execute flawlessly as a team to really get through it. All of those modes have their places, and I don’t begrudge anyone for choosing to stop at a specific step on the ladder. I know personally the highest mode I would ever be willing to raid for example is Heroic, and I am perfectly comfortable with that decision. I am also perfectly comfortable with anyone deciding that the raid game simply isn’t for them… and that they would rather be crafting, or PVPing, or farming Transmog bits… because we all know the real end game is looking amazing. The best feature that World of Warcraft has going for it, is the simple fact that it has so many different things for players to be doing with their time. However it is you choose the spend your time is awesome, because ultimately it is you that needs to decide what makes you happy.

Like a Bandit

Lastly I wanted to thank once again Pugnodeum and the whole Praetorian Guard crew for letting me ride along last night. I had a blast, and made out like a bandit picking up the scraps that no one needed. These are folks who have worked hard to be able to make this content look so easy, and at the same time they are pretty chill about the whole experience or at least have been on the few runs I have now been on with them. This mornings post was not in any way a reference to my experiences last night, but instead something that had kinda been percolating for awhile in my brain… then was dislodged by some discussion on twitter yesterday. I have nothing but respect for the amount of devotion it takes to get where they are in the game, and last Saturday after getting my moose I stayed on the stream to quietly cheer them on in their Mythic Kilrogg attempts. I will continue to be excited for them as they move through the Mythic progression and am amped to know that several of my friends are there with them. As far as me last night… I made out extremely well…. which should help out our significantly more casual raid that we are in the process of pulling together. One that will once again see me return to tanking on the warrior instead of being the goofy gladiator dps thing that I have been doing up until this point.

This is all the cool shit I ended up with…

Where’ve you been, Tam?

February 18, 2016 by Tamrielo

It’s been a crazy few weeks. I started a new job (part-time, but I’m trying to ramp up quickly) while juggling full-time classwork and wrapping up some side projects. Then, the site goes belly-up and locks me out. A bunch of backend corruption caused me to have to reinstall and restore pretty much everything; we’ve been working from a cache for the last week.

The short version is, for the first time in a very long time, I haven’t had the spare energy to write, so the site worked through my post buffer and then, this week, ran out of material. At any rate, things should hopefully be calming down somewhat soon and we can return to regularly scheduled posts.

As for what I’ve been doing lately, game-wise, I’ve been playing a LOT of Warframe. The game really appeals to me once I found my niche in it, and I’ve been playing it more or less to the exclusion of all else recently. I have some thoughts percolating on it and also on MMOs, kind of the present and future of persistent online gaming (is there any other kind anymore?), but it’s all half-baked. I want to get a bit deeper into the game and see how various things hold up before I go blathering about one system or design philosophy or another.

On the business/management side, I’m doing a lot with finance and operations management lately, which doesn’t necessarily make for terribly compelling blog posts (it’s interesting for me, but I don’t know that I need to inflict it on other people).

At any rate, hopefully things will be calming down here soon and I can get back to regular posting. I don’t have Bel’s relentless devotion to posting even when he’s so sick he’s basically dying; I try to post only when I have something to say, and recently I’ve been listening a lot more than talking.

See you next week!

–tam

Hellfire and Gronnlings

February 18, 2016 by Belghast

Enter the Ramparts

Some things changed between yesterdays post and last nights festivities. Firstly I largely abandoned the notion of playing a Monk tank, because I got to thinking about what my actual “goal” was. That goal being helping Grace get a foothold on my server of choice, and prepping her for eventual raid shenanigans. My general theory was that still the fastest way to do that… would be to push hard on running the outland instances as a duo… with me largely just wrecking thinks with thunderclap. We however lacked the finesse to realize that it seems like the absolute best choice here is to hang out at Hellfire Ramparts until the person you are pulling is around level 65 and thus qualified to run all of the various Outland dungeon quests. Without a doubt, after having done all of the lower level Outland dungeons…. Hellfire is the fastest and in theory you could run it fast enough to push up another character extremely quickly. Sure it slowed down significantly after she reached sixty one, but I think the completion bonus would have been enough to keep pushing forward. Granted we probably would have hit the instance lockout of I believe 10 instances per hour… and had to take a brief break here or there. Still I firmly believe that had we actually stuck to this plan… Grace would have been in Wrath of the Lich King already instead of just on the cusp of it.

All told for the evening we managed to push her from 57 to 67 before I simply lost steam. With the recent illness, I have also largely weaned myself off of caffeine other than my morning coffee. This also seems to mean that my ability to stay awake and keep doing the same thing without getting drowsy… has also been adversely effected. I want to say we started up the dungeon train around 6pm and finished up around 8:30 so I guess 10 levels in that time is not that shabby. Essentially we ran normal and heroic versions of Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbogs, Mana Tombs, Auchenai Crypts, Sethek Halls, and finally Shadow Labyrinth. There was a period of time where we had to chain run Slave Pens for a bit… which is pretty much the point we realize that we should have been doing that with Hellfire Ramparts instead. Now we simply need to push a little harder to get out of Outland and into Northrend… though if WoWHead is correct we might not be able to do Utgarde Keep until 69. That is the big thing we are realizing through doing this is the strange quirks as to when you can zone into a specific dungeon. They don’t seem to make much sense, and it feels like at some point they just decided to pick random numbers that don’t actually relate to the quests you are receiving. Basically I am realizing that the older content has suffered greatly for all of the redistribution of crap that happened in Pandaria and Warlords.

Gronnback Riding

In other news I finally managed to get the Garrison mission that rewards the Coalfist Gronnling mount. I am honestly just not sure what I think about it… I mean ANY mount is a positive because it increases the total number of mounts I have and moves me closer to all of those achievements… but riding this thing…. it is ridiculously big. Warlords of Draenor has been the expansion of humongous mounts… from the Corehound mount from the 40 man Molten Core, to the Grinch Yeti… this is very much an expansion of irrational land yacht style mounts. As cool as I might think this mount is… I just cannot foresee myself ever riding it. When you ride around on it, the animation is in such a way as it feels like you are just about to fall off of the back… which strangely causes all sorts of anxiety in me. Regardless I am happy to knock another mount off the long list of mounts that I do not have. At some point I would love to get a group together and camp the various world mounts from Draenor, because as of right now I have ZERO of them.