avengers

Avengers Fixed

by
So yesterday’s blog post was largely invalidated within a few minutes of logging into New World yesterday. I made this careful decision of where I should purchase my home at based on tax rates and such, only to log in and find that the freaking Fire Nation had taken over that territory. Their brand is to crank up the taxes to the maximum amounts like a plague of locusts upon the face of Aeternum. It seems that Devil Inside, the friendly green guild that cranked down tax rates has moved on to other territories and now holds both Weaver’s Fen and Cutlass Keys. So yeah…. instead of 50 gold a week, if my math is correct my housing upkeep is going to be 500 gold per week which is deeply unfortunate. I guess they are doing a pretty solid job of role-playing the oppressive regime that was the Fire Nation.
Okay, I didn’t talk about it all that much but I had some significant issues with the Avengers Beta. The above clip is an attempt at me showing what was going on with the camera. The only way I can really describe it is like having the camera sitting in a little red wagon that is then attached to my character by a Bungie cord. So long as movement is slow and predictable things were more or less fine, but as soon as there was fast movement everything went haywire as the camera was attempting to over correct. It made the game nigh unplayable and I wound up refunding my game purchase as a result. I thought maybe this was just a problem the game had with Mouse and Keyboard support.
One of the things I am known for is doing nonsense with my equipment. One of those bits of nonsense was getting Nvidia RTX Voice up and running to do noise cancellation. Thing is this was designed to run on an RTX card, and I don’t have one of those… I have an GTX 1080 ti. There is however a way to get it up and running on any card, so instead of the Tensor Cores the software is expecting it ends up using my Cuda cores. You know what else uses Cuda cores a lot? Physics calculations in video games, like maybe those trying to adjust the camera behind the player. I talked to a handful of people who played the Beta with Mouse and Keyboard and none of them seemed to have any of the issues that I had. So for Science… I made a rather expensive gamble and purchased Avengers once again. The gamble is expensive because I doubt Steam would have allowed me to refund it a second time.
Sure enough when I have RTX Voice shut down I have zero problems with the camera. When I turn it on… the camera goes wonky. I am guessing the extra strain on the Cuda cores is maybe slowing down the calculations enough to lag behind as experienced in the video above? I have no clue if this is a similar behavior to those running ACTUAL RTX graphics cards and legitimately have RTX voice installed without the hackery required to get it working on other systems. So the problems seem to be gone when playing Avengers now and I spent most of last night working my way through the campaign. There are aspects of the game that still bug me a bit, but with RTX shut down the experience is fairly fluid in 4k.
There is a sizable amount of story that was cut from the beta, and what I thought was a charming narrative even managed to get more charming. I love that the game focuses on Kamala Khan aka Ms Marvel because she so perfectly represents the fans. She is a comic book geek and loves the super heroes in the same way as we do. So watching her interactions with her idols is adorable. There is a whole reluctant dad thing going on with Bruce Banner and the same goes when he is in Hulk form, and it is super cute. I’ve not made it terribly far because there isn’t a ton of hours in a week night, but I am enjoying myself.
Some of the parts that were missing in the Beta were the bits that actually explain how gearing works. Now that I understand it a bit more I am way less flummoxed by it. The whole “insufficient materials” thing is just a warning that you can’t yet upgrade the item, not that you won’t be able to get any benefit from it or that it isn’t equitable. I am still uncertain of exactly how much the gearing actually factors into the game play, but I am making the numbers go up like a good MMO player. Each mission involves a number of heroes, and it seems like you can pilot any one of your choosing from the list of available that you have unlocked. I am mostly focused on Ms Marvel because I like her skill set considerably more than I do Hulk so far. I’m only far enough in to have those two unlocked right now.
I am thankful that the gamble paid off, and that it really was something as simple as RTX Voice running in the background causing these issues. I did have a few crashes to desktop last night, and I have no clue at all what might have caused those. The game seems to be pretty good about letting you start back up close to where the game crashed however. I am not sure if this is true once you leave the tutorial of the game and start getting into specific missions however. Right now it is just a charming story driven game for me and I am not sure how much of the group content I am going to touch right now. The goal is to complete the story now and see where it goes from there. The post Avengers Fixed appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #248 – Apparently Skywalkers

by

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

aggrochat248

Going into the show we had what seemed like a pretty slim set of show notes… but somehow we actually ended up bumping topics.  We start off with a discussion of Grim Dawn since Bel and Grace have been playing it. This leads into a talk about loot generosity spawned by the loot filters in both Grim Dawn and Path of Exile and that ends up going off in its own direction.  We talk a bit about the Star Wars Episode IX trailer which spawns a discussion about the Star Wars Cinematic Universe… which winds its way to the Marvel Comic Universe… which winds its way to a general discussion about Comic books. Finally a brief topic about a Warframe learning from its mistakes and trying a do-over on the Hildryn event.

Topics Discussed

  • Grim Dawn
  • Loot Filters
    • General Loot Generosity
    • Loot Management in Games
  • Star Wars Episode XI Trailer
    • Star Wars Cinematic Universe
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe
    • Marvel Comics
  • Comic Books in General
  • Warframe Hildryn Event Redo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

AggroChat #202 – Sequential Things

by

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

aggrochat202_720

Tonight we are extremely happy that Tam is still with us.  Find out how exactly he has managed to be hit five different times by motor vehicles.  With his ability to take a fall he is still with us and healing… but still very sore. We talk a bit about the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general terms and attempt to be as spoiler free as possible.  Largely we discuss what a feat it is to have 19 movies and 11 television series that all more or less interact with each other in the same shared universe. From there Kodra and Belghast talks a bit about Magic the Gathering Arena and the new quick draft mode.  Finally Tam talks a bit about his experiences with Yakuza Zero and what a weird game that ultimately is.

Topics Discussed:

  • Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • Magic the Gathering Arena Drafting
  • Yakuza 0

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Santa and Grumplings

by

Santa Lives

I’ve been going through this strange set of emotions since getting out of the movies on Thursday night.  One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am in fact deeply susceptible to nostalgia.  Growing up I honestly thought I was not nostalgic at all, because the things I cared about never seemed to align with the things I was supposed to care about.  Photos for example are just not one of the things I care about that much, and the only time I take a photo of something is when I want to show it to someone else.  I have a pretty good memory when it comes to visual images, and I can always summon up images from the past when I want them… and as such I never placed much value in having a physical representation.  My mother on the other hand…  that is the thing she finds most important in the world and has taken volumes of photos that the world will likely never see… because she never does anything with them.  My nostalgia… seems to be firmly rooted in the things and places that gave me the most joy in the world.  The king of all of this will always be Star Wars, because it truly was my first love.  For so many years I doubted my memories, or at least doubted that I had as much fun with Star Wars as I seemed to remember.

Then Thursday night I watched Force Awakens and remembered just what it was like to experience that level of joy again.  Now I am just riding the giddy contact high of the experience, and looking forward to talking about it with anyone that has already been indoctrinated into the club.  Yesterday there was a sequence of tweets trying to decide when it was time to talk about the movie, and I guess personally… I am going to wait until January 18th.  I am going to give the world a full month to watch it before I start openly talking about spoilers and spreading the world with my theory crafting.  Spoilers are such a weird thing…. because for me personally they do not adversely effect my enjoyment of the movie.  I personally guessed at four or five of the plot points from the movie, and it was in no way tarnished for me when I saw them coming.  In fact there was a bit of strange excitement coursing through me when I realized that things were playing out in one of the ways I had imagined them.  For others though… once something is spoiled it ruins the experience, and as a result I am going to try my best not to ruin anyone else’s.

The “A” Team

Santa and Grumplings

I love the Star Wars universe, and while I was greatly disappointed for years…  shows like the Clone Wars and the current Rebels made me remember just how awesome the setting COULD be.  I think they were essentially the gateway to allowing myself to indulge in the hype leading up to Force Awakens.  The problem with Rebels is that as good as it is…  it isn’t the team of characters that I wanted to be engaged with.  Shows like it or Agents of Shield… no matter how amazing they might be… will always be stuck in the rut of being the “B” Team.  These are the characters that are ALSO in the universe…. but aren’t really the characters that you really want to be watching.  While shows like that might raise the excitement level a bit every now and then with a “special guest appearance” you know at the end of the day… you are never really going to get back the characters you care the most about.  While to some extent the new movie is setting up a brand new cast of heroes to take over the throne… in the form of Finn, Rey, Poe and Ren, it still very much feels that we are going on another adventure with the characters we grew up loving: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2, and C-3PO.

There is a continuity that other derivative products lack, and in a way I am more okay knowing the cast of the original trilogy will always play a secondary role in this new trilogy of movies.  The Avengers are still an active team… and while they exist… Agents of Shield will always be the lesser product.  Similarly no matter how cool Rebels is… and how awesome it is for filling in the gap between the prequels and rebellion era movies…  it will always be the story of people we didn’t know existed until Disney told us they did.  So in the meantime I am going to embrace the joy I am feeling, because there were points yesterday where I wanted to take my hot-wheels Millennium Falcon and go running around the office making “space” noises.  There is a kid inside me that has woken up, that has not been awake since the 80s… and I am perfectly okay with hanging out with him again.  Part of my whole mission to limit the negativity in my life, and to be less cynical…  was to be able to truly feel unbridled joy again… and this movie has paid off in spades.  Sure I am almost forty years old… and sure I probably shouldn’t be enraptured by Star Wars.  To that I say “fuck it” I get to decide what sort of Adult I am going to be, and I choose to be the one that never really grew up inside.

Grumplings

Santa and Grumplings

The most annoying part of any in game holiday event… are the things you have to fight other players for to get spawns.  In the new Winter Veil garrison event, you have to fight players for patches of snow on the ground, in the hopes that instead of getting a snowball of various kids…  you get a Grumpling pet.  Last night after looting many piles of snow I managed to get one… and now I am done touching those piles of snow.  I am not going to be one of these players that tries to profit off this event, because it is my hope that by removing myself from the picture others will have an easier time getting their own Grumplings.  Now however I am still going to be completing the daily event… until I get the damned mount.  I’ve decided to send all of my packages to Belgrace my MooCowAdin, because he seems to be the closest to getting all of the appropriate factions for the flying mount.  So among the four characters I have that can do the daily, I am hoping ONE of them gets the stupid mount.