mmofps – Page 32 – AggroChat

Deforestation

March 16, 2016 by Belghast

So Much Change

So one of the things you will pick up on if you have read my blog for terribly long, is that I don’t exactly handle change well. I can do pretty well with juggling new information or new ideas… but when it comes to fundamental changes in my home or work lives it stresses me the hell out. Basically I need a place of stability somewhere, and right now that is very much not home. There has been this sequence of changes that are all positive, but all worrisome for me personally. The worst of it was during the renovation work on the house, namely the fact that it drug on as long as it did and that there were constantly other people inhabiting my space. Last night however… it reached a new point when I got home from work. We’ve never done much of anything with our backyard, and this year we are trying to change that. We set up the patio off the new door to our bedroom, changed out the deck boxes, got a bunch of new chairs… and even a wind chime (something I have always wanted) all in the name of making the backyard space more usable. I don’t have a great “before” picture of my back yard, but I will be using one from this winter as a point of reference. You see the trees that we have around our back deck? Those are apparently not trees at all, but are intended to be a hedge. The hedge in the photo is supposed to be about a foot and a half or so tall in front of the other hedge that is now a tree. As a result of this we talked to a friend who does landscaping with the hope that he could sort things out for us and get things back under control.

The problem is I was not exactly prepared for the reality of what that meant. There is what looks like the limbs of an entire forest dotting the backyard, and this panoramic shot was taken before they were actually finished. They have since taken out the bulk of the second tree and cut it back hoping that it will start greening up again in a more manageable fashion. Neither my wife or I were really prepared for the fact that we went from having lots of green blocking the view of the green belt behind our house and the neighborhood across the way… to having almost zero. I have faith that things will grow back and the end result will be much better… but man does it look like shit right now. I guess this is what happens when plants are allowed to grow unchecked for twenty years. At some point I guess I need to learn how to trim things like I probably should have been all this time. I grew up in a house without any real landscaping so I guess I just assume that things needed to be left alone and allowed to do whatever they hell they wanted to. This just adds one more stresser to the pile that seems to be growing. On a positive note that garage is awesome again, and I have been going out each night to work out in our gym… that we have not really had access to for a decade it feels. I even went out quickly for a bit after the raid last night to work out some of the excess post raid energy, which was kinda awesome.

War Priest Challenge

Last night was also my second time attending the Axioma Clan Rookie Raid night. I have to admit I have been looking forward to this since going to the last one on the previous Tuesday. While I have been enjoying The Division, there will always be a special place in my heart for Destiny and I have been logging in and playing for a bit pretty much every day. I have to admit part of this has been easy access on my laptop while downstairs using Twisted’s Remote Play app. The only problem that I have so far is the fact that there is no way to really chat over PSN party chat, which means that while I can do random strikes with strangers… I can’t really group up with friends reliably. Otherwise the connectivity is good enough that I could in theory use it all of the time. Now I doubt I would want to trust it for something like the Kings Fall raid when timing is extremely tight on things like the jumping puzzles. Speaking of that I failed considerably less this week… at least on the ships. On the annoying bit where the giant penis shaped pistons push you off of the wall… I think I actually did worse but I am choking that up to the fact that I am normally in bed by the time we got to that area. The raid itself started an hour and a half later than the previous week, which was a bit of a thing… given that I get up at 5:30 each morning, and my friend Squirrel had to get up at 4.

Regardless I had a great time last night, and I felt like more of a useful member of the team. I still failed quite a bit at various things… like for example on the Daughters fight I ended up getting torn, which meant I had to do the jumping puzzle. The only problem there being that I had never done the jumping puzzle before. I sadly failed and wiped the raid, but I feel like I could probably do better next time. Of all of the dumbass things that I did the cake is the fact that apparently in the two years I have been playing this game… I never realized that a Titan could cancel their jump by pressing x in midair allowing you to pretty much drop straight down at will. All of this time I have been doing jumping puzzles by trying to time just the perfect amount of momentum to carry me over a gap and still be able to land safely on the other side. Once I was told this… and actually Grokked what people were saying… the jumping puzzles seemed way easier. Once again the loot gods were favorable, because I managed to pick up a bunch more items… the highlight of which is probably a 310 raid sniper rifle. I also managed to pick up a 308 fusion rifle, but given that I have Telesto… and I don’t really even like fusion rifles I will probably eat it to power up another sniper rifle. A couple of the other items will likely get fed to my hunter or warlock to help them get their light up. Now that I can hit 304 light, I need to apparently farm all of the strikes in the hopes of getting Exotics that should have a fairly decent chance of dropping at 310, that I can then turn around and use to power up my other gear.

Savior of New York

March 14, 2016 by Belghast

Mostly Done

Yesterday we continued on out in the garage and did a much more prodding and tedious detail pass. This meant sitting down and sorting through old boxes that we had not seen in nearly a decade. Among the treasures I uncovered was my Gameboy SP as well as pretty much all of my Gameboy Advance cartridges. I literally had no clue where that was, and the last time I remembered having it was in a car that we traded off long ago. I had feared that I simply forgot to remove it from under the drivers seat… because for a long while it was my “waiting on my wife to finish at school” from a time when we regularly drove in together. Apparently we did in fact pull it out of the car, and it sat in this trash bag filled with lots of other stuff we hurriedly pulled from that car before we traded it off. This is apparently a tradition of ours because not only did we find a bag for when we traded off the Pontiac Grand Am… but also a bag from when we traded off like two other vehicles as well. I also found entire boxes of stuff that I apparently packed up when leaving previous jobs and never bothered to go through. These boxes were full of countless pay stubs and health plan documents… so a good chunk of my yesterday was sitting down listening to podcasts and shredding all the documents.

One of the gems of the day was the above image… a box of essentially all of our ancient cell phones. These pretty much represented our pre-smartphone era and those Nokia 5160s were our very first phones that we used for ages. We also found a bunch of extra face plates… since you could swap them out so easily. The positive about these ancient phones is the fact that we didn’t even really have texting plans on any of them, so there isn’t really data worth harvesting so we can dispose of them pretty easily. My friend Squirrel suggested that he would love to have them, for target practice. Unfortunately by the time he posted that I had already disposed of the entire box. Probably my favorite of that era was the weird white LG flip phone, largely because it had a clock visible on its face without actually opening it. Another interesting find was my “art box” which is a big wooden box that was crammed with all of my watercolor and pen and ink stuff from college. Another strange thing was the truly insane number of World of Warcraft trading game cards that I found stuffed pretty much everywhere. For awhile it was habit to pick up a pack anytime I needed to go to the store… and apparently they just sat around everywhere. At some point I will sift through them all and gather up all of the leftover in game codes to give away to readers or something. They are mostly the “toy” variety, like Path of Cenarus or Illidan or maybe some Pet Biscuits. Still the sort of thing is fun to have if you don’t otherwise have access to them. The strangest thing about the weekend… is I think because we were so tired anyways from the cleaning, I can’t say that losing an hour has really had much effect on me.

Don’t Panic

I spent essentially the rest of the weekend playing The Division. At this point I have logged about thirty four hours since launch, and am sitting just a little past level fourteen. The game still feels very fresh, and it is funny how much my play style has changed as I have moved into the game. Early on I thought I would be super tanky and focus on things that let me survive in an open firefight, but in truth the longer I play the more sniper I become. Right now I am running around with a Covert SRS for sniping purposes and generally dealing lots of damage quickly to targets that are far away from me, and then when they get into closer range I swap to a Police M4 which can whittle down enemies with focused bursts. This works amazingly well against pretty much every enemy type but snipers. Those guys… are pretty much the bane of my existence because they are trying to play the same game I am, and generally the computer is better at it. So I spend a lot of my time trying to get out of line of sight from the snipers while mopping everything else up… and then play this game of chicken popping in and out of cover and trying to quick scope them before popping back down like a prairie dog. The worst snipers so far are the Rikers because they just seem more brutal in every possible way. That said it might simply be that they are the highest level enemies I can encounter currently.

On the podcast Saturday night we got into this long discussion about the morality of The Division, and how it made the other AggroChat folks feel uneasy. I can’t say that I am experiencing this at all, because like always I am writing my own narrative of my character as I go… and the fact that this is a silent protagonist game really helps that for me. So as i move around the city, I am the big damned hero cleaning up the city and saving people. I am absolutely the good guys in my tale, but then again as they said Saturday so are the Cleaners, who absolutely think they are doing what is right for the city. I guess for me I just love how rich this setting is… all of the little details like the graffiti that I am showcasing in the photos for today’s post is just amazing. I think the key difference is… that I never really fully immerse myself into a game setting. It is always a game that I am playing, and always a story where I am the hero. Even if I am not supposed to be… I am building a narrative compatible with my notion that in spite of whatever actions I am taking, I am doing it for some greater good. In the Division I absolutely rush to save hostages, or citizens being held up by looters, because it makes me feel like the hero I am trying to be. When you do a random encounter on the street you are given bonuses for various things… and when I see that survivor bonus it always makes me happy. I also spend a lot of my time going through abandoned buildings so I can make sure I always have whatever item citizens ask for when I come across one in need. I am the one making the city a better place, and I am comfortable with that stance. I guess that might be why I like the post apocalyptic genre so much, is because the world is in such a screwed up state… that there are so many ways for me to help fix it. Even if fixing means simply hunting down the biggest baddest warlord… and putting a bullet in his skull.

Sleeper Awakens

March 11, 2016 by Belghast

Real World Rifts

Yesterday I took the day off to manage getting a dumpster delivered. This was one of those odd situations where they would not really give us a time of day for it to be delivered, but instead wanted to call on their way. As a result I felt like I was pretty much in a holding pattern until that event happened, largely because we wanted it dropped off in the yard… not in the drive way. So I treated yesterday like a normal work day, except instead of shuffling off to work after posting a blog post… I booted up and played The Division for a bit. I had been months since I attempted to stream anything, and I was also kicking the tires of the new OBS Studio… which seems to obfuscate a bunch of the settings. So the first few minutes of the stream were apparently a slide show narrated by my voice. After that I fiddled with some settings until I finally landed on a combination of levers that seemed to produce a nice watchable streaming experience. The thing about The Division is that I feel like I am constantly doing something… even if it is not the thing I intended. One of the aspects of Rift that I loved was the fact that the world was constantly spawning rifts and invasions that I had to deal with. It felt new and fresh… up until the point that it didn’t anymore. The happenings in The Division are varied enough that I hope they remain fresh, but I worry that there will be a time where I start avoiding the little things going on around me… just so I can complete the thing I am actually trying to focus on.

The other potential issue due to the dynamic interactions is that most of the time I feel like I am not actually making any progress. I might set off in search of this or that… and get distracted by six things that happen along the way. For example last night I was trying to do one of those missing agent location quests, where you pick up on their trail and follow them to what unfortunately usually ends up being a log book. While on the final step of one of those chains… I also got the shout over the radio that looters were attacking a supply drop. Instead of going over and defending I tried so hard to keep following the trail of clues. All the while I was actually feeling like a horrible person for not helping those NPCs. The game makes me feel the weight of my decisions in a way that most games don’t, and I think it is because this game bridges the uncanny valley gap so damned well. The world I am wandering around feels so real to me… that I could step out of the screen and into the real Manhattan and not really notice the difference. It also makes me wonder how amazing a game like City of Heroes would have been… if it were rendered with this level of detail. Right now I am feeling so completely behind in everything I am doing, but I am currently knocking on the door of level 10, whereas lots of other folks are hitting the level cap. I am not really going to worry about grinding my way up, because really… I don’t want to burn out on this title.

Completing Quests

The strange thing about yesterday was that I had the entire day to play The Division, but instead I largely focused on working on stuff in Destiny. I have been a slacker when it comes to completing any of the end game content, especially if it requires tedium. For example one of the big goals is collecting Calcified Fragments, and they are hidden damned near everywhere on the Dreadnaught. Most of them can be obtained “in the open” while doing patrol missions, but a handful of them are only exposed during strikes or story missions. Even others involve doing events like Skyburners Deployment Code or Wormsinger Rune. The other night while doing the Kings Fall raid, the nice folks made sure that I got all of my fragments from there, which took a big obstacle out of the way. There is a long drawn out quest called “Hunger Pangs” that involves doing a bunch of silly stuff for Eris Morn. Several of the steps are gated by the number of Calcified Fragments you happen to have collected at that point. To do the final part of the quest you have to have found 45 of the 50 total fragments that currently exist in the game. So yesterday during the day I managed to solo most of the quest line, including a rather tough version of the Undying Mind strike. I was however stuck on the final quest, which is a pretty insane version of the Phobos quest that starts the Taken King. Thankfully Squirrel and Jex helped me out last night, and I now have a shiny new Touch of Malice which will come in handy during the raid.

Since they were looking for something else to do… I coerced them into also helping me out with my Sleeper Stimulant quest. I had been on the final stage of this quest since I believe last October, but didn’t have a ready group of people to talk into helping me with it… and had zero luck pugging it. The quest requires you to run a Nightfall level version of the Saber strike, which is somewhat insane to survive given that you get bombarded by Fallen ships at the start. I had always heard that if you could simply manage to make it through the first sequence… that the rest of the strike was really not that bad. I agree at least in part, that is until you reach the final boss. That encounter was absolutely insane… but we managed to take it down pretty easily. Then feeling our Wheaties turned around and attempted the exact same strike as the weekly Nightfall. The combination of Match Game and Fresh Troops made it so much worse. Towards the end we were ping ponging around the room trying to stay alive long enough to resurrect the next fire team member, usually only ending up getting wrecked ourselves in the process. Through a bit of dumb luck and perseverance we managed to pull out the victory on our third attempt at the final encounter. After that I was needing to log, because in truth I only really intended to do the Malice event but ended up staying upstairs on the PlayStation for like three hours. Was a pretty great night and I feel better having knocked a couple of big goals off of my list in the game.

Division Thoughts

March 10, 2016 by Belghast

Busy Week

The last few days have been unexpectedly busy, which is at least a little unfortunate since The Division launched late Monday night/early Tuesday. Work as always gets in the way of my fun, but even more than that there have been various activities that I needed to be coherent for. On Tuesday I had a blast doing the Kings Fall raid in Destiny, but that also meant a night that I could not really devote much time to Division. Last night I had the World of Warcraft raid, and we managed to duplicate our progress from the previous week… this time with fewer ringers. Granted we still had ringers… just about half as many as we did the previous week so the progression felt more “real”. Today I took off work because I am having to coordinate the delivery of a dumpster. Then tonight, Friday night… and Saturday afternoon we will be cleaning out the garage which is our spring break project. It is going to be awesome to reclaim that space because for the last decade it has been a space where we just threw anything that we wanted out of sight. So there is an old dresser out there, a couple of benches… countless insanely large boxes that we didn’t want to haul to the recycling dumpster at that moment. So in theory I think most of it will go really quickly. The only major concern I have is that I also know there are various chemicals out there as well, and have no real clue what to do with those.

All of this said I have still been trying to squeeze in as much Division as I possibly can during the week and have managed to hit level eight so far. I’ve been loving the insane amount of clothing that I have managed to pick up while wandering around. With all of the options I have cobbled together an outfit that feels uniquely me… in a way I have not experienced in a game since The Secret World. The only problem is… the character models themselves are pretty limited. See the glorious beard that I am wearing? That beard is only available for a single face… which seems insane considering that I might want to have a beard like that on any model. A similar situation is the state of glasses in this game… I ended up going with the round Lennon lenses because they were the only ones that I felt actually fit my face. There were however zero options for actual glasses… like corrective style which I would have happily put on my character instead of permanent sunglasses… even in the middle of the night like the above picture. These frustrations however are relatively minor, and after not being able to get into the game on opening night… I’ve played pretty reliably ever since.

Rewarding Exploration

One of my favorite things in video games is to wander around unfettered by obligations and just explore the world. This is my Bethesda games are such crack for me, because I can absolutely jump off the beaten path at any moment… and am generally rewarded for doing so. One of my subtle frustrations of the beta was the fact that so many areas like the sewers and subway system seemed to have no real purpose. In the live game however… these locations are chock full of interesting encounters. On Tuesday night I was playing for a bit ahead of the Destiny raid, and popped into a sewer… largely because in beta these served as ways to get over to the next city block pretty easily. However while down there I encountered a chest that notified me that I had discovered a gun runners cache or something of the sort. When I opened it up, it had a very nice level 4 blue SMG that I have yet to be able to replace at level 8. I feel similarly awesome when I wander through abandoned buildings and explore them looking for treasure, and this time around it is great that I am not constantly hitting walls that I cannot cross into other areas of town. Sure there are absolutely some places where I really should not be yet due to my level… but I like that the game lets me go there anyway.

The problem with being so exploration based… is that I feel like I am getting absolutely nothing accomplished. I can happily wander around the streets doing random encounters that I happen across for hours… and then realize… oh shit I really meant to be doing this or that objective. I am slowly whittling down the objectives that I have open to me… and I think today I will work on some of the missions that involve rescuing this person or taking out that baddie. I remember there being a whole slew of things around the Hudson camp that I did during beta that I probably want to go back and explore. Granted I might be over level for them… but it should be fun in any case. The big thing that I have to talk about this game is that while I kinda wish you had random encounters with other players… after getting some grouping going I finally understand why that isn’t a thing. When we were running around as a group the other night it was a VASTLY different experience to me wandering the streets solo. With Ashgar and Tam, we were constantly running up against huge groups of mobs, and I have to say…. huge groups of cleaners are the absolute worst. Those damned fire bombs that they throw out… I guess I had gotten used to the looter smoke bombs not being that bad. In any case I hope to do some more grouping over the next few nights, but at this point everyone is going to be massively out of my level range I fear. I wonder how the game handles staggered level ranges… I think a lot of the difficulty we had the other night was due to the fact that Ash and I were level 4, and Tam was level 8. So I cannot imagine what it would be like with a larger disparity. All in all however I am still enjoying myself and having a good time.