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No Man’s Sky Thoughts

August 13, 2016 by Belghast

This morning was an absolutely glorious morning, in part because of a massive cold front that blew through over night. It is suddenly 70 degrees outside with a lovely breeze, rather than the usual over 100 degree madness that has been happening for weeks. As a result we decided to get up and walk over to daylight donuts for breakfast and then take it into the backyard and eat it on the patio. After the generally shit week that I had, I needed this little bit of respite to maybe start to recover. It is not that anything really went wrong… just the stress of entirely too much maximum level adulting. The week was one with several adulting raid bosses, and the progress made on them were mixed. However I am now happy to chill out on the sofa with a cat precariously balanced between my arms trying to find a way to snuggle while I type. So far it is working but I have a feeling at some point she will wander off because my hands are engaged in something other than serious petting action. Other than all of this… yesterday a game was released that I had been waiting anxiously for since it was first announced at E3 during the Sony PS4 reveal show, or at least I think that was when I first saw it. No Man’s Sky promised to be the space exploration game for me. Elite Dangerous looks awesome, but it is entirely too fiddly for my tastes. I don’t want to have to care about learning to pilot a ship through the vast expanses of space, or learning how to dogfight when there is no “up”. I just want a Star Trek away mission simulator that lets me wander around the cosmos and land on interesting new planets to explore. No Man’s Sky seems to be exactly that, but before I get into the good parts I need to talk about the bad.

Lots of folks are having trouble playing this game on the PC now that it has been released. I am not sure what happened during the process of the launch but the “minimum” listed specs seem to have been thrown completely out the window. I know Tamrielo has already returned his copy through steam because on his pretty hoss machine it simply would not give him more than 10 fps. First lets go over the minimum specs that were released for the game.

OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel Core i3
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 480, AMD Radeon 7870
Storage: 10 GB available space

I’ve played it on two of my machines… first on my Laptop

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: 4th Gen Intel Core i7
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 960m

On this machine I had to bump it down to 720p/medium to get stable framerates in the range of 30 fps, with the occasional dip into 15 territory. However nVidia experience claims that this machine does not meet the minimum requirements to play the game, whereas instead every single category above technically outstrips what the suggested minimums are.

My upstairs gaming machine has the following specs…

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: AMD fx-6300 3.5 ghz
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 980

As one would expect the beefier graphics card means that I am getting significantly better performance, but not massively so. I am running the game at 1080p/medium and I get severe dips from the 60fps to 30fps and it is extremely erratic. What this feels like to me… is a game that was rushed to make last minute changes and is extremely poorly optimized for the PC. From the sound of it… everyone that chose to get the PS4 copy seems to be just happily playing away. Those of us on the PC are trying to find that precarious line where the performance to pretty balance is reasonable. The biggest confusion point that I am seeing thought is having a big badass system doesn’t necessarily make a difference. It is almost totally random who can and cannot run this game. As a result I highly suggest you purchase the game through steam, that way if for whatever reason it does not work for you… you can return it to get a full refund. I believe GOG does the same thing, but I have never actually returned a game there so I am not sure how fast or easy that process is. Essentially this is definitely a “buyer beware” title… and if you simply want to play it without much fussing then I suggest you check out the PlayStation 4 copy.

Now that all of that is out of the way…. the game is really pretty and feels like you are exploring alien worlds. It has this feeling of minecraft, starbound and elite all throw together in the a mixer and some weird hybrid came out of the process. The key thing that stood in the way of me playing Elite or Star Citizen… is that my player fantasy has nothing to do with flying a ship. I could give a shit about actually flying anything… and would be perfectly happy just taking “taxis” between planets. What I want is the exploration of new and interesting places, and that is the fantasy that NMS hones in on. There are going to be folks that complain that this title is entirely too “walking sim” for them, but the couple of planets have all been filled with rich and interesting environments for me to explore. Right now my biggest problem is the lack of inventory, and lack of understanding how to increase said inventory. There is just so much I don’t know how to do, and so many items I pick up that I don’t have a clue what they are even for. What is the most interesting to me is the fact that when you encounter an alien race, you don’t know how to communicate. You learn language through finding these knowledge stones, and each of them teaches you a single word in another language. Now I have yet to see what actually happens when you know some words… because I absolutely lost faction with a race by patting them on the head.

The coolest moment so far has to be when I finally repaired my ship, and decided to lift off of the planet and out into space. I watched as the horizon got darker and darker until all of the sudden I broke through the atmosphere and could see the stars around me. Similarly awesome was the moment when I realized that landing on this planet… I had to be super careful about my angle of entry. If you come in too straight you absolutely start to burn up in the atmosphere damaging your shields in the process. So that mean’t I had to skim along carefully descending slowly enough to avoid taking damage, but that also meant that this was no means a quick process. There are consequences of pushing off planet, and I burned through all of my fuel on the first planet using my ship to explore. Each time you thrust off the surface it takes resources, ones that you cannot easily replenish without significant time spent exploring… which in itself costs resources because the environments are usually hostile and stress your life support systems to where they need recharging as well. There however is a central loop that I find enjoyable of exploring and gathering and exploring and gathering. In fact last night I absolutely lost two hours of time playing this game. Not that I was aware that I spent time… but I thought I had maybe spent fifteen minutes playing, until I looked up and realized that two hours had passed. So if the issues of the launch can get ironed out, I have a feeling that this is going to go down as one of those Minecraft like experiences that just keeps building upon itself.

So final advice is… pick it up definitely. However if you have a Playstation 4, you might lean towards that for your purchase. Otherwise definitely purchase it through a provider that is going to allow you to return the game on PC if for whatever reason it does not like your machine.

How to Survive 2 Impressions

March 25, 2016 by Belghast

Sandbox/Mission Hybrid

Roughly a month ago a friend of mine hooked me up with a copy of How to Survive 2, because she knew I was a fan of the whole zombie apocalypse genre and it was a game she was enjoying. I had all of these plans to write up a proper impressions piece, but got sidetracked by all things The Division. This game was a whole lot of the reason why I survived the lead up to the launch of that title, because it gave me something fresh to piddle around with. The basics of the game are that you are a survivor in a world long after everything went to shit thanks to the zombie outbreak. Since I did not play the first title, I feel like there is probably some background story there that I am missing. What I do know however is that this title is set in the coastal region of Louisiana. There are no real recognizable landmarks however, but instead the world simply borrows a swampy feeling Tileset. The game has both single player and multiplayer game modes, but I have largely spent my time playing single player.

Within moments of starting a new game you are introduced to the character of Kovac, a man that at first you only know as a voice coming through some sort of a speaker system. He serves as your guide as he attempts to teach you the basics of surviving in this world. The game itself is divided into two basic chunks, the large open world area that allows you to freely roam and explore, and very tight and controlled missions with specific objectives. The missions themselves are repeatable and you can crank up the difficulty to give you better rewards and experience. One thing of note, and why I am doing an impressions piece is that the game is in early access, and there are a lot of things that are simply not in the game yet. Much of the tutorial that walks the players through how the world works is simply missing, so I had to rely on my friend and what I could google to figure out a few things.

Level Your Camp

One of the big things that I was missing was how one actually levels up. The game has two parallel systems that are designed to level up together, that is your “camp” that you are building in the open world and your character itself. Both of these have levels associated with them that are purchased through the spending of experience gained through doing activities. The fastest way to gain this experience for me at least, seemed to be to repeat one of the early missions with the difficulty slider cranked up as far as I was allowed to. The reason the whole camp leveling thing was a bit confusing at first, was that the character level is locked to the camp level. So in order to level up your character you have to first level the camp, and you will continue to stair step the two progressions from that point on. In addition to raw level however there are numerous perks that you can unlock… some of which are absolutely must haves like the ability to open lock picks. Others are improve the efficiency of using weapons or items, and I assume are also really important once you get a good idea for how you want to build out your character.

The thing I have noticed is that the difficulty of encounters ramps up pretty quickly, especially in the open world. For quite a while all I encountered were the generic slow zombies, however once I got to around level three or four the game started to throw in those “track star” zombies that have become popular in the more modern and edgy zombie films. Around level five I encountered this games version of the boomer… the fat bloated corpse that explodes when you get it low on health. I am sure as the levels continue to ramp up I will keep encountering other mixes of bad guys each one with their own way of dealing with it. The only real problem is that in the bit I have been playing my only ranged option so far is a crafted bow. I am wondering when exactly I will encounter guns, because while I have found a small bit of ammunition.. I have yet to find anything to use it with.

Fallout-Esc

There is a certain nostalgic feeling to playing this game that I have a hard time really putting into words. In many ways the game reminds me of the original Fallout games, in that much of your interaction is happening in smaller closed maps that are tightly designed around a single mission. There is a big of fog of war going on as well as you explore because you can only actually see a small section of the screen at a time. This is magnified as you go into buildings because there is a forced zoom that happens allowing you to see finer detail inside. This also makes it much easier for a zombie to sneak up on you and there have been a few moments especially on the night missions where I genuinely jumped when something lumbered out of a corner that I had not been looking yet. Wandering a cityscape with only your flashlight to see with… is unexpectedly tense given that this is a top down isometric game. I definitely had moments of trying really hard to bait everything out of buildings before actually going in to explore them for the fear of getting overrun especially on higher difficulties.

The game is very much not finished, but what is there was really enjoyable to play and helped to get me through those Division withdrawals. I would really like to play this game with friends because I think it would be extremely awesome to explore larger cities together. The game is targeting PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and I could absolutely see this being an enjoyable console co-op experience because the movement feels like it would translate well to a twin-stick controller setup. The big thing to remember about this game is that it comes with the same early access concerns as always. The game is not finished, but they seem to be updating pretty regularly. They have a beta branch that has more frequent updates, but also likely is in a less polished state… and then the normal branch is largely stable. I had quite a bit of fun playing the game, and I intend to pick it back up again. It is the perfect thing to pop into do a mission, and then exit feeling like you accomplished something or at least moved the experience bar forward. While going through all of my recent home renovations there were many occasions where I simply did not have the time to get into something terribly detailed. Instead I booted up How To Survive 2, and poked around for a bit and got my quick gaming fix before returning to the fray. I liked it and look forward to seeing how this evolves. At some point I feel like I really need to poke my head into the original game since this one doesn’t really provide much backstory.

AggroChat #86 – High Fidelity Story

May 21, 2019December 6, 2015 by AggroChat

This week we return to the whole topic driven focus, because honestly they seem to work better. We had several topics we wanted to discuss but for the sake of time we pushed a few of them off to another episode. Once again we have the full cast of Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen.

The topics we delve into…

Rocket League – how we are apparently late to the party, and any time a game is getting played at the same time by wildly different groups of gamers… it should be checked out.
Space Chem – how Kodra falls into a deep hole of trying to create the most perfect engine in this video game that plays more like a really good board game… and also at times a programming simulator.
Otome Games – we talk about how our podcast got mentioned recently by Pizza Maid and Suishi Geisha… and how it would be awesome if the games we liked to play had the same level of story fidelity that Otome games do. This spawned an entire side discussion about story drive games in general.
Co-Opetitive Games – the games where you are playing co-operatively but also at the same time competing with your friends…. also fertile ground for losing said friendships.
Sandbox Games – We talk about the wall that happens in most sandbox experiences where we as players are just “done” with the game long before we have technically completed all of it.

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Week In Gaming 9/27/2015

September 27, 2015 by Belghast

Week of Playstation

This week was very much a week of me waiting on something to happen on my PC while pivoted to the side and playing the PlayStation 4 instead. The strangest thing has happened and I am not sure exactly when it did. For years I was a diehard Keyboard and Mouse gamer… and if you suggested that I play a shooter with a controller I would give you a dirty look at best… and at worst give you a thirty minute rant about why that is a sloppy control mechanism. The thing is… shooters now have a significant amount of aim assist regardless of what platform you happen to be playing them on. Sure you can get closer to pixel perfect aiming with a keyboard and mouse… but I am finding for extended gaming sessions a controller just feels more comfortable. Destiny was essentially the game that forced me to learn how to play with a controller, and now… I am finding myself replaying some games that I played exclusively on the PC on my PS4. Over the week I picked up the Borderlands “Handsome Collection” because it was silly cheap on PSN, and I have to say… I am finding the game more enjoyable over there. While I won’t necessarily say I have abandoned the keyboard and mouse… I am finding myself equally comfortable with a controller and it seems so strange to be typing those words.

Destiny

Week In Gaming 9/27/2015 — Exotic Weapon FTW!

This week the game that I spent the most hours playing was without a doubt Destiny. I am not sure why but the game feels fresh and new, and all of the frustrations I had over gearing for light are just gone. Instead light has become this number based on the average attack power and or defense of your items, and seeing it climb is awesome… but at the same time not something oppressively holding me back from doing interesting things. I now think of light much more like a traditional gear score system in MMOs. There is some content gated on that number, but it doesn’t feel like something that is extremely grindy to get. I happened to luck out this week and Hawkmoon this seasons exotic hand cannon was available on Xur. I had enough coins to buy it and bam I am now rocking a really awesome weapon, which only serves to improve my experience. I’ve heard that you can send blue engrams to low level characters as a more efficient way of farming Strange Coins, and I might end up doing that as I pretty much depleted my entire stash on this one item.

Other than that I am slowly working my way through all of the story content that I have not played since launch. It feels strange to be progressing in three different storylines at essentially the same time, doing whichever happens to suit me at the moment. The big thing I am trying to work towards right now is I really need the dreadnought patrol zone opened up because I keep getting those as daily quests. I am not sure how far into the story that happens but I keep working on creeping that storyline forward in the hopes that the next one will unlock the patrol zone. Other than that I unlocked Sunbreaker and am completing most of my content as that, in the hopes of leveling it quickly. There is something satisfying Fist of Havoc, but I have to say super fire hammer brothers is also pretty awesome as well. You can whittle down objectives super quickly while throwing those hammers. I’ve taken Taken bosses down to half health during my “hammer time” but the only problem is it essentially leaves you out in the open and vulnerable. So I end up having to run for cover as soon as I’ve spent all of my energy. Needless to say I am having a lot of fun with Destiny and probably going to continue playing it over the coming weeks.

Creativerse

I’ve blogged about this game already at length this week, but I have to say I am still really liking it. I am also digging that the company is from McKinney Texas which isn’t terribly far from me. Not sure if I can rig this but it would be kinda awesome to go down and meet that team at some point. I am hoping that they end up doing Pax South this year, because the game has so much potential. I called it “Pretty Minecraft” but really that is selling the game short by a large amount. I will say that it has pretty much killed my desire to play Minecraft at all from this point out. I get what people say about the mods, but in reality I never modded Minecraft that much other than adding in quality of life things like a mini-map. Regardless of how I modified the game it just felt like I was playing the same thing over and over with varrying differences. This game however feels fresh and interesting because the world itself is something that I don’t know the formula behind. I talked about this a bit the other day, but I think part of it is the fact that I have no real resources to rely on yet. I can’t go on a wiki and find out that obsidian spawns between these two coordinates or if I need an item for a recipe I have to find it the old fashioned brute force way of exploration. If you are in the mood for a building and exploration fix I highly suggest you check it out.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Last night during and after the podcast I finished up Alderaan on my Smuggler. In the time it has taken me to get this far on my Smuggler, I found out that Tam has leveled like three characters from 1 to 50. How is he doing it? Well he is doing ONLY the class storyline, and I think maybe he has made a convert out of me. I shot through Alderaan last night only working on my class storyline and gained three levels in the process. Mostly at this point I just want to see the class storyline on several new classes before Fallen Empire comes along and changes a good deal of it. I think the rest of the day I am going to likely work on my Smuggler and see just how close to the end I can manage to get. My hope is that even after Fallen Empire they come up with a way to speed characters to the post 50 content. I need to circle back around and do the Shadows of Revan content on my Jedi Knight, but honestly I am having so much fun with my Sawbones. This is still such a great game, if you just treat it like a subscription. The free to play options are complete and total bullshit, and feel like the most punitive way to play a game I have seen period. If you can stomach the fact that you have to pay a subscription to really enjoy this game… then it seems like a really enjoyable experience still.