fps – Page 14 – AggroChat

When A Beta Isn’t

August 30, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I managed to run the Inverted Spire strike with a few friends… Grace and Ammo. For Grace it was her first time running the strike and while she was not as rabid… was also a veteran of Destiny 1. Ammo on the other hand… the closest she had ever been to Destiny was drawing my Sunbreaker themed avatar. If you know me very well… or are in that core group of people that I hang out regularly with… you have had to listen to countless hours of me retelling things that happened in Destiny. All of that apparently made her curious enough to try it out now that it was coming to the PC and available for download through the already very familiar Battle.net client. Ammo while completely new to Destiny was by no means an FPS rookie because over the last year or so she has played a significant amount of Overwatch and is way the hell better than I am at it. One of the things that I like about Destiny on the PC is how largely ubiquitous basic controls are if you have ever played a modern shooter. Sure there are all manner of extraneous “super power” keys but the core gameplay of shoot shoot reload fall into the standard control scheme we are all used to. The only real adjustment period of me was figuring out which key binds near WASD did which “power moves”. Grace took to the game rather quickly and got to play big kid at several moments as she was able to get over and rez the rookie well before I could. All in all it was a really fun experience and I am super glad that I wound up running the strike in this manner, since during the PS4 beta I largely just random queued for it.

Last nights experience got me thinking that maybe just maybe releasing through the Battle.net client was more than just a way of having to skip the infrastructure development costs of going to a brand new platform. Overwatch is a weird game because while it is at its core a competitive shooter… it is also one wrapped in so much story that it is impossible to not at least know some of it even if you are not actively playing the game. This is a game that I saw be adopted at frightening rates by gamers who were well versed in the Blizzard ecosystem but never really considered themselves fans of the first person shooter genre. As a result many have had their horizons broadened to realize that yes they could do this shooter thing and with practice get rather damned good at it. Now we have this Destiny thing coming along and poking its head into their already familiar gaming environment… so why not take a peek. I’ve already seen a lot of posts on my twitter feed talking about how individuals are enjoying the Destiny experience but only ever downloaded it because it was available for free through the Battle.net client. Cross pollination is really beautiful thing… and I have found myself in this same boat several times in the past. I am not the biggest fan of League of Legends… but I immediately tried Heroes of the Storm because I wanted to see the Blizzard take on it. I am not really a huge fan of RTS games anymore… but I occasionally play Starcraft II because it has amazing storytelling. I think the Battle.net coup for Destiny… will be bringing a whole bunch of new eyes into the franchise.

Here is where we get to the problem. The “Beta” that we are getting to experience isn’t actually Destiny. It is a bit of a hollow shell that should have been clearly labelled as a demo, because it lacks so many of the reasons why I spent so many hours playing the first game. If you look at my time played on the tracker sites… something like 77% of my time was spent doing random stuff on Patrol missions. I liked roaming around, doing events… unlocking secrets on the dreadnaught… all the while enjoying the really amazing gunplay. Where are the events like Archon’s Forge or Court of Oryx… that I could literally spend hours running over and over. Don’t get me wrong… the Inverted Spire strike is a hell of a lot of fun, and even the 4 player Crucible is starting to grow on me. The problem being however is that we really are not putting the best foot forward for a bunch of players that may or may not have ever experienced the franchise. The other problem is that we are not exactly doing a great job of giving players that bounced hard off of Destiny 1 a great reason to feel positive about coming back. Sure the Homecoming mission has more story elements in it than the entire vanilla game… but I am questioning if that is enough. I am bought in for the long haul because I have loved Destiny as a concept and an experience since the moment I got into the original Alpha of the game on the PS4. Taken King proved to me that the game was worth my devotion and I have been back and at least peripherally active ever since. I am a member of their core demographic… but had they maybe given us something other than a demo… it might be enough to gain new followers rather than just galvanize their existing player base. I hope people can see through the cracks and see the game that is ultimately going to be there behind the walled gardens. I feel like I can and since I am also rabidly gobbling up all of the news that is leaking out about the content that is waiting on the console players September 6th… I am so sold that I am planning on playing once again on two different platforms. I am just not sure that we sold Ammo on the experience other than giving her a fun night of running a space shooter dungeon.

Destiny 2 PC Beta Thoughts

August 29, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was the beginning of the Destiny 2 PC beta for those of us who have already preordered the game. I am one of those weirdos that loves Destiny so much that I plan on playing it on multiple platforms. With Destiny year 2 and beyond I played it actively on both the PS4 and Xbox One… and going forward I am planning on doing the same and splitting time between PC and PS4. One of the things you need to realize is that I have some strange habits when it comes to gaming. I split my time between my gaming desktop upstairs and my gaming laptop in the living room. I’ve found the secret to marital happiness as a gamer is to be able to be flexible in my gaming habits and there are nights when I just need to be more available than cloistered in my office with my ear cans on. As a result I have two systems to worry about being able to play Destiny on. The positive is however as someone who potentially might be interested in Destiny 2, you are going to get functionally two different sets of reviews for the game… one on a system that is heftier than the recommended specifications and one that is closer to the minimums.

Gaming Desktop

Machine Specifications

Intel Core i7 5820k 3.3ghz 6 Core Processor
Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 ATX Motherboard
32 gb G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4-2400 Memory
MSI Geforce GTX 980 4GB Twin Frozr Video Card
System SSD but Game Running on Mechanical Hard Drive

For starters I spent absolutely zero time fiddling with the sliders and I just went with the defaults that it handed to me. The end result was a gorgeous 1080p 60 fps experience. I don’t have fancy monitors or anything even vaguely close to outputting a 4k or even 1440p signal so I went with it. With time I plan on ratcheting up the detail level to see what I can do, but I am hearing from folks with 1080s that they are having issues sustaining frame rate on Ultra so more or less I am pretty damned happy with the results. In truth the hardest thing I had to figure out was some third party screenshot tool that would actually record the screen. Bungie has done a bunch of stuff to disable overlays and I had to fall back on the Nvidia Experience tools to be able to capture anything. I am presently running the game in Windowed Fullscreen which is my preferred method and it just works great. The difference in quality between the PS4 and PC is noticeable even just running the game in 1080p. All of the textures just look crisper and less muddled, but that said the console experience with Destiny 2 on even a stock PS4 like mine…. looks noticeably better than the original Destiny. Last night I tried out everything but the strike, and saw zero frame drop at any point during my experiences. I have been keeping an eye on the lower left corner of the screen where I have the Nvidia framerate tools running… and the only time I saw drop was upon going into a pre-rendered cutscene. All of those are still at 30 fps, which I would assume is to be able to support all of the different configurations of the game.

Gaming Laptop

Machine Specifications

Asus ROG GL551JW
Intel Core i7 4720HQ 2.6 ghz
16 gb DDR3 Memory
Geforce GTX 960M 2GB GDDR5
Mechanical Hard Drive
3rd Quarter 2014 Release Date

While the Desktop was a picture of simplicity… literally everything about the Laptop experience was a hassle. I included the street date of the laptop just for reference and to show that I am attempting to get this running in functionally a three year old machine. I knew that 1080p was largely out of the question so I started trying to dial in specs for a 720p setup. Since my laptop has a 15 inch screen that seemed completely reasonable and generally the only reason why I run MMOs in 1080p is because of the UI element resolution. The biggest issue that I kept running into is that for some reason it felt like my mouse was dying on me. I would have these issues where I could not swing my viewpoint to the right of my model, and then other times I couldn’t scope in my weapon at all. After trying a bunch of configuration options I noticed that it was ultimately happening at the same place each time in the mission, which made me start doubting it was just the mouse. After a bunch of searching I found a thread on Bungie PC Support forum talking about this same issue. What I ultimately had to do was go find the executable for Destiny 2 and choose properties off the right click menu… then change the compatibility settings to disable Scaling on High DPI settings. Note this is called something different depending on the version of windows you are running, but in all cases it will be some Option referencing DPI.

Once this change was made my mouse suddenly started working as it should. One more round of tweaks saw me setting the display mode to Windowed Fullscreen and I was finally playing the game in pretty good shape. While its not amazing… it is playable at a generally 30 fps… however as you can see in the upper right hand corner of the above screenshot… I am dipping down into the high 20s occasionally. The biggest challenge is that Destiny requires a ton of VRAM. When I was playing on the Medium preset I was consuming every last bit of VRAM available and borrowing from the system memory. I really appreciate Bungie including a gauge under the video settings to show just how much you are consuming and how much is left available. The high preset functionally takes a little bit over 2 gb, and I would assume each time you ratchet it up those requirements go up again. The other thing you can take away from the fact I was running it on a laptop… is that effectively everything on a laptop performs like it is a generation older than the equivalent Desktop component. So my 4th gen i7 in truth performs about like a 3rd gen i5… and my gtx 960m… effectively performs the same as a gtx 760 in a desktop card. Between the two setups you should be able to extrapolate how this game should be able to run on whatever your current gaming PC setup seems to be.

Gameplay Discussion

For a complete write up about my feelings of the Destiny 2 beta… I highly suggest you check out my PS4 impressions post from July. I am not going to spend a lot of time this morning talking about general topics. Instead I am going to focus in on the tweaks that were made between the two betas. The first noticeable thing is that the recharge rate that I complain so much about on the PS4 seems to be greatly improved. During the tower courtyard fight on PS4 it felt like I was lucky getting a single super charge and a single grenade charge while fighting the three waves of red legion cabal. During the PC beta… I could easily get 3 super charges and 2 grenade charges during the same time. Grenade still lags a bit from what I would have liked it to be… but part of that might simply be that I am used to running around with the Armamentarium and as a result always have two grenade charges available, so even when I use one… there is almost always one sitting there waiting in reserve. Things just feel “better” as a result of the recharge rates being cranked up, and it feels more like the Destiny experience I am used to. My guess is that they have increased the rate of recharge you get from killing things, because the effect was a bit less noticeable in the Crucible. Previously in the PS4 beta everyone got their supers at exactly the same time… which was just a few minutes from the end of the match. During the PC beta I managed to get off two supers and was getting close to a third by the time the match ended, so in theory had I been playing better I probably would have easily gotten three supers.

The other big takeaway is that everything just feels more polished. This one isn’t easy to quantify, but everything about this build felt production ready. The other big takeaway is that once I got used to the hotkeys… the PC experience is just flawless and before long I reached a point where it was just as instinctive for me to hit F to activate my super as it is to mash my two shoulder buttons. So far I have only modified one hotkey, and that was to change ~ from toggling between weapons since I use that as my push to talk key. Instead I use the alternate key which is mouse wheel to shift between weapons. For those going into the game I thought it might be useful really quick to run down the basic hotkeys.

Movement – WASD + Mouselook
Primary Fire/Light Attack – Left Mouse
Scope/Heavy Attack – Right Mouse
Melee/Block – C
Reload – R
Jump – Space
Toggle Sprint – Shift
Toggle Crouch – Ctl
Class Ability – V
Super Move – F
Air Super Move – X
Interact With Objects – E
Kinetic Weapon – 1
Secondary Weapon – 2
Heavy Weapon – 3
Rotation Through Weapons – Mouse Wheel
Toggle Chat – T
Deploy Ghost – Tab
Return to Orbit – O
Character Loadout Screen – F1

It is a lot of hotkeys to remember, but in truth it largely matches the pattern I was used to with PC shooters already. All in all I thought the PC Beta played amazingly well and it is going to be a really hard call as to which game gets the majority of my attention. I think ultimately it is going to be determined by how many people that I know are chosing which platforms. The only other thing that really concerns me are the general limitations of Battle.net already. I feel like I am already bumping up against the maximum friend number there because of the various other Blizzard games that I play… and for the most part everyone in my Destiny clan is not already in that list. So it is going to be a bit frustrating to try and find space to add everyone new in. I am also really curious to find out how each of you felt that the PC Beta was when it goes “open beta” today.

Minuet 42

July 25, 2017 by Belghast

A few days ago I said I had more or less “beat” the Destiny 2 beta in part because there is so little to actually do in it. That said for whatever reason I keep returning and playing. Since writing my initial post I have done the strike several times and spend a bit more time in the Crucible. Some of my initial comments about not really liking the 4 vs 4 format and the small map sizes, is in part me likely just getting adjusted to changes and not really having a weapon load-out that I would have preferred. Traditionally my crucible build has been an Auto Rifle in the primary slot… usually my extreme stability Haakon’s Hatchet or if I am feeling squirrely… my Genesis Chain. From there I generally have either a Shotgun in the secondary slot Invective or Party Crasher +1 or I go for one of my Fusion Rifles… traditionally Saladin’s Vigil. The heavy slot varies greatly because in truth… I am not really expecting to get heavy ammo in Crucible matches so I am not super concerned. If I have an exotic slot available I go with Gjallarhorn and if not probably my Silvered Dread machine gun. The problem with the Destiny 2 weapon loadouts is that on my preferred class… the Titan there was nothing that I could really replicate this feel with so I in part had to feel out what worked for me in the new scheme.

What finally ended up feeling good and seeming usable is to run a Submachine Gun in my primary slot, namely The Showrunner seen above. However in truth I was using this weapon much in the same way as I would have used a secondary in Destiny 1 only swapping to it at certain times. For my main weapon I relied heavily on the Minuet Hand Cannon sitting in my energy weapon slot, because it had some significant stopping power and actually allowed me to win non-teamshot firefight engagements. Where the sub machinegun was handy is any time that someone ran up on me, I could hang out just outside of melee range and grind them down with a rapid fire hail of bullets. In theory I think this is more or less what folks who loved the sidearm used to do… but I never could make sidearms work for me in this fashion. As far as the heavy/power weapon slot… once again I didn’t care too terribly much about this given that I was similarly not expecting to ever get ammunition for it… so instead just relied on the grenade launcher in case I ever did. I am by no means “good” at the new Crucible, but I managed to find a setup and style that worked for me and I managed to keep climbing higher in my efficiency number as the night went on.

The thing that I find the most impressive about the Destiny 2 demo experience… is the fact that it is so damned short yet I kept returning day after day to keep experiencing it in any way that I could. In part it has made me want to actually dig in and try and finish some of the book achievements that are sitting there unfinished, and bask in the glory of the Destiny 1 experience before it is gone. All in all I am anxiously awaiting the release of this game and even more so the upcoming PC beta that we are getting at some point in August. I have a lot of concerns relating to the PC version, namely how it is going to feel and how well it plays in my various systems. I am really hoping that I can figure out a set of tweaks to get it to play with passable performance on my i7 Geforce 960m laptop. I am not expecting the world and would be completely fine with running 720p on it… pending that the performance is at a minimum 30 fps. One moment of sadness last night however is that the left thumb stick on beloved Hori FPS Plus controller started tearing. I am seemingly particularly hard on left thumb sticks, and as Squirrel pointed out last night… since it is not our aiming stick we are way less gentle with it. I ordered a set of cheapo aftermarket thumb stick caps, hoping that maybe just maybe it will fit. I tried one of the Kontrol Freaks PS4 caps that I had laying around and it kept popping off because the slightly smaller than normal size. All in all though I am going to be really sad to see Destiny 2 beta ending tonight, but will be looking forward to actually getting to play the game at launch.

AggroChat #159 – Alt Madness

May 21, 2019June 4, 2017 by AggroChat

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

This week we once again have Grace as a medical issue has kept her away a few weeks. Tonight we have a relatively short show, at least as far as AggroChat shows go. Thalen has reached the point where he is doing The Taken King and talks about the shock that happened when suddenly Cayde-6 developed a personality… and is in fact Robot Mal. We get on a tagent talking about the changings coming soon in Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood, and our thoughts about what might be tweaked during the expansion. Grace and Bel talk a bit about their recent alt madness in World of Warcraft, and specifically how Bel has leveled and geared a character in a single week. Kodra talks a bit about Elder Scrolls Legends and why he likes it much better than Hearthstone. Finally we talk a little bit about the recent phone game craze that is Magikarp Jump.

Topics Discussed: