Dragon Age: Inquisition – Page 4

Distractions

This morning is not going how I expected to go in the least. About 3 am a massive storm blew in, and with it thunder, lightning and torrential rains. This of course woke me up, because rain sometimes means bad things. We have some issues with our wooden siding right now, and it is causing two leaks to happen when the rain is particularly vigorous. We have contracted someone to come out and fix all of this… but that won’t happen until sometime in September when their next available slot is. In the meantime each time it rains I either dread the potential for a leak, or like last night have to listen to the constant dripping from the top of our bedroom window. Needless to say I did not exactly get an amazing nights sleep after that all started. As a result I have been moving around this morning extremely sluggish and easily distracted. I set out with the simple mission earlier of trying to find out what my Wizard 101 account name was… and wound up playing for about fifteen minutes. The distractions are real, and plentiful and I am getting a very late start writing my morning post.

Then to make matters worse when I actually sit down to start writing, I find out that apparently WordPress has released its 4.3 patch, and I now have eleven updates waiting on me. Instead of waiting until AFTER I have advertised a post, I decided to go ahead and update everything right then. It is surprising how long twelve updates take when one of them is a new wordpress version, and a major version at that. It is going to be an interesting day I can already tell it. I have a cat on my desk right now stalking me, because she thinks she is hungry and the kitten playing around behind my monitors which always freaks me out a little bit. Thank god for coffee is pretty much all I can say at this point because otherwise I would surrender to the desire to curl up in a ball like my cats…. and join them in sleep. The cats are absolutely not helping the distracted part however, because they are both being adorable. This may or may not be the worst blog post I have written in years.

Remote Gaming

I guess in the grand scheme of things I should have known this morning would end up like this, because last night was equally spastic. Instead of gaming, I spent a lot of time “trying to game remotely”. I have this dream that someday I will be able to play games on my less than stellar laptop downstairs, from the gaming machine upstairs. I know at this point you are preparing to interrupt me with “but steam in home streaming!” but quell that for the moment. There are a huge number of games that I play that do not run, and ultimately don’t work right through steam in home streaming. I know… I’ve tried. One of them for example is Dragon Age: Inquisition that is locked behind the layer of bullshit that is EA Origin. So instead last night I started trying a different route, namely Splashtop. Some time ago I watched a video from Linus Tech Tips about creating a “Ghetto Shield” to play games from a phone/controller combination. This is all fine and good… but I don’t want to play games from a tablet or mobile interface. I hate touch screen interfaces with a passion, and all I really want is to be able to treat my laptop as a thin client for gaming purposes. The dream is simple, because in theory it would allow me to stop caring about getting a “gaming laptop” and instead just get a decent office type laptop and stream through my gaming machine. The problem has always been that there is enough lag that it ultimately ends up pissing me off.

Last night I managed to get Dragon Age Inquisition largely working, but I ran into two issues. I was running fraps on both my gaming desktop upstairs and my laptop so I could see the FPS of the two systems. My gaming machine was running DA:I around 60 fps just fine… Splashtop on the other hand was running in the 15 to 20 fps range which pretty much wrecked any playability. To make matters worse, for whatever reason whenever I attempted to move “mmo style” while holding down the right mouse button to turn… the mouse input lagged to painful levels making me pretty much abandon the mouse and start keyboard turning. I kept trying this over the course of roughly two hours, and even tried to figure out a way to get it running smoothly through Steam Streaming without much luck either. The reason why I was sent down this path yesterday is the updates to Windows 10 streaming from an Xbox One console. That is cool enough, but for the love of god… will someone make it work between two windows machines without issue. The last attempt was to try and figure out how to install the Splashtop gamepad driver, so I might try that again tonight. Everything I have read online is that the mouse support in Splashtop is just bad. I guess they are emulating the input instead of simply passing it through to the other machine…. which seems insane… until you realize that the software was designed to allow people to connect from tablets to desktops… and not necessarily desktops to desktops. I will say however it already out performs any remote desktop tool that I have played in the past. I booted up World of Warcraft as a litmus test and it ran flawlessly. There was some strangeness with the mouse cursor updating slowly, but the movement was nice and smooth.

Revisiting Tristram

I am not entirely certain if it was my recent foray into Hellgate London, or my recent railing on click to move as a control scheme… but for whatever reason I have had an undeniable craving to play some Diablo 3. Last night ultimately turned into a night of updating drivers and things, and in the process I installed a new Nvidia driver. One of the things I do periodically is flip through what it is suggesting as my “optimized setting”. Some of the suggestions are pure crap, because out of laziness they really have not tested any of the settings. However every now and then you get one that is really well optimized, and that seemed to be the case with the configuration it was suggesting for Diablo 3. My newest video card is capable of doing the spiffy trick where it renders the game at 4k and then down-samples it back to 1080p. Nvidia Experience ultimately suggested this mode for Diablo 3 and I have to say playing like that is absolutely gorgeous. I am not sure if you can actually see the difference in the screenshot but in game it just feels smoother than traditional anti-aliasing usually does. On a whim I decided to create a Season 3 character, even though Season 4 is only a couple of weeks away. Not sure what I am hoping to accomplish because I doubt there is any way in hell I will get a character to 70 before the season ends.

I made it to level six and the blacksmith apprentice quest before ultimately deciding I needed to log for the night. I could have likely stayed up for a few more hours playing, but I was hoping to prevent the level of groggy that is already well underway this morning. Either I am getting better at click to move, or I am getting lazy… because in truth I didn’t really do that much clicking last night. I mostly ran around with my left button held down allowing the game to auto attack most of the mobs, occasionally throwing in a shield slam. I am still not a huge fan of the control scheme, and the announcement yesterday of Marvel Heroes 2016 introducing game pad control was welcome news. That said I am maybe okay with playing it every now and then. I have been feeling terribly disconnected and Diablo is the perfect kind of soloing but still having people to talk to type gaming experience. I booted up Wildstar and attempted to play for an hour or so last night, but ultimately felt horribly lost in the expanse that is Whitevale. Diablo 3 provided me tight and constrained corridors without much thinking, and that seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Tonight however I will have to put on my productive adult cap, as it is raid night and we are likely going to be doing more tries on Ravana.

Endless Faffing

It is funny how a conversation can set someone down a path. During the Saturday night recording of AggroChat 70, we got onto the topic of Ashgar playing Mass Effect again, which not surprisingly lead to some discussions of Dragon Age as well. For whatever reason I have struggled to play Dragon Age Inquisition, and in truth I had the same issue getting started in Dragon Age 2. It was a good year and a half after the release of that game before I finally managed to play my way through it, and I was beginning to wonder if the same would be true for Inquisition. At face value the game seems like the perfect mix of Dragon Age storytelling with Skyrim-esc open world exploration. The problem is the mixture together seems to be a confusing mess for me personally. Even though every single person I have talked to says to leave the Hinterlands… I struggle bringing myself to do this. The Elder Scrolls player in me wants to wander about seeing what all I can find in this nook or that cranny. Which means I have spent twelve hours so far playing the game and have not really accomplished much. Yesterday however I started trying to force myself to knock things off my quest list rather than wandering around and seemingly gathering up an endless number of them.

Not surprisingly as you can see above I am playing a Dwarven Two-Handed Warrior. That pretty much means I will always be grouped with Cassandra, because of the two tanky options I have encountered she is preferable to Blackwall. I don’t mind the character of Blackwall at all, in fact I kinda like it… but compared to Cassandra… well there just is no comparison. For most of last night I ended up playing with Vivienne as my mage, and quite frankly… I think I am switching back to Solas. Vivi apparently disapproves of my whole wanting to help the Mages thing, which is something that happens while I am playing Dragon Age. Normally I am more than happy to see Mages slaughtered by the dozens… but this game mythos actually makes them into characters I can sympathize with. It feels like they have simply drawn an unlucky lot in life, and are oppressed for it. Those Tevinter however… I am still more than happy to slaughter them by the handfuls. I guess ultimately last night I turned some sort of a corner and managed to get into the game just enough to make me want to keep playing it. Previously it was a pretty if not slightly awkwardly controlling Skyrim clone… but last night it finally became a Dragon Age game for me.

Herald of Andraste

I did not mention my favorite party member yet I guess. You can see in the background Sera, the awesome elvish archer you pick up in Orlais. She is sassy, irreverent… randomly shakes her ass at Vivi… and is having absolutely none of my shit. Grouping with her reminds me of the many nights Tarantella has hung out with us on voice chat, and I mean that in the best possible way. I’ve reached the point finally where I just want to play more of the game, and I had to pull myself away from the screen last night in the middle of a big action sequence because otherwise I would be non-functional this morning. The only negative is that the next few nights are largely spoken for. Tonight I have my original Final Fantasy XIV raid team, and Wednesday I have a second Static… with Tuesday sandwiched in between which I have been attempting to devote to some Wildstar play. My fear is that if I wait too long I will lose the momentum that I have going right now. I am not sure why this game in particular has been such a struggle for me to get into. I think part of it honestly has been that generally speaking I play single player games on my laptop downstairs. Dragon Age Inquisition will functionally run on said laptop, but it looks like shit and suffers from the shiny hair syndrome that occurs when you attempt to play the game on crappy hardware.

Instead I need the firepower of my full gaming machine upstairs to do the game justice. I am just not used to playing 50 to 100 hour games on my desktop. I guess in the grand scheme of things I am going to have to get used to it, because Witcher 3 suffers from pretty much the same issue. My laptop while more gaming oriented than a lot of them, is just dated at this point. It will run most of the MMOs I want to play decently, but the GTX 660m card in it just cannot handle the PS4/Xbox One era of gaming. At some point I will upgrade it and everything will be fine, but for as little as I have actually used my laptop of late… I just can’t see that as a sensible expense. I have a fairly checkered past when it comes to laptops. I’ve owned several “gaming” laptops over the years and each one dies a fairly spectacular death after a year or two of use. As such I pretty much have resigned myself to picking up cheap second hand laptops, because each time we have spent full price on one… it has lasted just long enough to get out of warranty before suffering some catastrophic and largely un-repairable error. The laptop I have now has been a trooper and in spite of it having a dated video card runs most everything that I want to play. It will run FFXIV in DX11 at around 40 fps which has made up the bulk of my recent game time.

Blame Origin

I am honestly not really sure why it has taken me this long to boot up Dragon Age Inquisition, and why it required the AggroChat show to remind me of its existence. I think part of it is the fact that it is on Origin, a client that unlike Steam I never actually have running. When I have a game on steam, I see it sitting there in the list mocking me… so I end up booting it up periodically. Origin however is in a completely different client that only really has Bioware games for me. I have been going through this down cycle lately where I am largely keeping to myself. Inquisition would have been the perfect game for this sort of activity, but out of sight out of mind. Honestly Origin works perfectly fine from what I can see, but as a testament to how little I use it… I had not actually added a single person to my friends list until last night when I imported my PSN network. I only did this because at some point we are going to try both some Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and some Dragon Age Inquisition Multiplayer. In spite of Origin doing a fair job, it still annoys me that I have to use it at all. Steam for me is a value add, because it gives me quick access to all of the games I want to play and represents a generally cheap and ubiquitous portal for purchasing them. Origin however falls in the same category as UPlay… as that piece of software that I am required to use but constantly frustrated by.

Last night I actually took some time and poked around the Origin store, and I came to the stark realization that honestly… the only EA games that I care about are the Bioware games. For the most part everything else is either a franchise I have grown out of like Battlefield, or one I have never quite gotten into like Sims… or a string of sports games that I have never had any interest in. EA largely produces games that I don’t care about, and I guess that is why having my beloved Bioware games blockaded behind the service feels so wrong. The funny thing about it is that the supposed core reason behind EA pulling out of Steam, was that they did not like having to discount their games on a regular basis. It seems that EA is having to discount their games even further than Steam generally did to get people to nibble. I noticed last night that Titanfall, the game that was supposed to herald in a new era of Xbox One supremacy… is down to $10 for the Deluxe digital collectors edition that once sold for $100. The only real positive however is that Origin also has cloud sync, so when I installed Mass Effect 3 it synchronized all of my save game data from the Bioware servers and it remembered everything that I had unlocked. All of this Origin ranting aside… I expect my solo gaming to continue on for a bit longer as I get some more Dragon Age Inquistion gameplay in. In truth I have reached a good pausing point in Final Fantasy XIV as I have essentially finished getting gear on my Warrior from Alex normal (minus the chest piece) and have upgraded every slot on my Dragoon to 180, giving me two viable characters for endgame shenanigans.