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Boltgun Initial Thoughts

May 24, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! It was in June of 2022 that I first saw the teaser trailer for a new Warhammer game called Boltgun, and I could already tell that I was probably on board with its particular brand of nonsense. Very rarely is a video game so directly targeted at my soul. In the mid-90s when I was obsessing over making levels for Doom 2, I was also obsessed with assembling plastic “beakie” Space Marines with my friend Jason and waging epic battles on his ping pong table semi-permanently converted into a battleground full of scratch-built terrain. That Proto-Bel would have been all over this game… in fact I kept trying to pretend that the EA-released Space Hulk PC game was actually a Doom clone at the time.

About a week ago the Boltgun trailers started to make their way into my feed and I remembered how much I wanted to play this game. Yesterday it officially released and I picked it up over on Steam, but it appears to pretty much be available for all platforms. Having spent part of my evening playing through the first half dozen levels or so… it very much feels like more of an actual spiritual successor to Doom and Doom 2 than the extremely excellent 2016 Doom release. As someone who cut my teeth on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, and of course Duke Nukem 3D… this FEELS like you remember those games feeling. Modern audiences probably won’t really appreciate this fact, but even the sprite work in this game FEELS like it is 2.5D in the way that the transition of the model animations is ever so slightly abrupt.

You start off with just your chain sword and a little way into the first level you pick up your holy Bolter seated on top of an altar… with the reverence one would expect a holy instrument of imperial might. The chain sword takes some getting used to because effectively it throws you into a sort of bullet time as you line up your attack. You charge your sword, which pauses the game and then your character leaps forward and attacks with the blade. Essentially low-level minions will be finished off in a single hit… for higher-level minions, you will need to wait until they only have a sliver of life before it becomes a really effective attack. Essentially it can also be used as a movement ability of a sort where you charge forward and can sort of do a mid-air charge if you time it just right.

While the game lovingly replicates the feel of “random doodads all over the place for you to pick up” that was common for this era of shooter, it also has a lot of modern messaging. For example, the Chaos Cultists have lovingly painted platforms with yellow paint so you can know where you should be leaping to in order to kill them more efficiently. The game also features a “ledge pull-up” parkour system so if you leap across a gap, you can catch on the lip and pull yourself over onto the next platform. This isn’t over the top but feels pretty natural even within the framework of a “retro-inspired” shooter. There will be no blinking arrow telling you where to go… but I feel like a game like this doesn’t really need it. In some of the larger maps, there will be a bit of fumbling around and looking for the exit, but that also comes with this era of the genre.

What is so pure about this game is the fact that you get an endgame summary screen just like you did in Doom. The only thing that I feel a little iffy about is what it seems to count as secrets are not what I would have called secrets back in the day. Generally speaking, so far it is finding your way to a hidden powerup or something that is just off the beaten path… and less opening up new chambers and finding new areas of the map. I guess gone are the days of “humping” the wall while spamming your open key looking for a hidden door… and instead, it is just efficiently clearing every corner of every level. I admittedly missed several secrets on each level so maybe there were hidden doors that I just didn’t find.

The story is a bit on the light side, but really… did we care about the story in Doom? The story was largely an excuse for us to kill more demons, and the story in Boltgun is the story of EVERY Space Marine game… PURGE! There is a lovingly crafted number of chaos mobs that you will end up fighting along the way from mere cultists to Chaos Marines… to Chaos Terminators… to even Chaos Daemons like the Great Unclean One. Basically don’t expect high art here… this is a game with just enough story to keep it from falling on its face… as it should be for any 90s-era shooter. If you are also of this era then you will probably love it. If you were NOT from this era… I have no clue what you will think about this game. It’s a relatively fast-paced retro shooter with weapons that feel powerful and combat that feels visceral. For me personally… it really hit the spot. The post Boltgun Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Anthem Demo Weekend Two

February 4, 2019 by Belghast

Outdoor cat has officially been fed so I can now sit down and start trying to compose my feelings about Anthem Demo weekend number two. The first “VIP Demo” weekend was for folks who had pre-ordered the game and I will assume a certain batch of influencers that were brought to that special EA event to record footage. You can scroll through my thoughts about that weekend in a post I made last week, but for me and most of the AggroChat crew it was a buggy and often times unplayable mess. However there was enough good there laying just underneath the covers to make me interested and quite honestly miss playing the game. So while I was not on nearly as much as I could have been… I played a significant amount of Anthem this weekend. I managed to get in a Stronghold… this games version of a Strike and spent a significant amount of time just roaming around and doing World Events and the little mini-dungeons that are available off the segment of the map we had open to us. It galvanized my desire to play this game… and largely reinforced my decision to keep playing the “shootymans” class the Ranger… who appears to be a really amazing single target dps class.

What I want to talk about the most however is what a difference there was between the first and second weekends. During the first weekend it was a constant struggle to be able to play this game… and in the second…. everything just sorta worked flawlessly. Sure there were some minor glitches like for some reason our javelins would not load on the “reward” screen. Additionally I have never actually seen the full suit prep sequence because the game kicks me over to a loading screen when I assume that sequence is designed to make us ignore how generally long loading into an area takes. However what was gone was the need to keep closing the game with task manager and loading back in to successful get into a mission. I could just play the game as it was intended to play and this made me way more open to grouping up with friends given that it was a predictable sequence rather than a struggle to get all four players into the same instance.

I’m very impressed with how communicative Bioware has been during this whole sequence… and more than that I feel heard. We all for the most part universally complained about how bad Mouse and Keyboard Flight/Swimming felt…. and they acknowledged that yeah… it feels less than optimal. These changes are apparently already in the “live” build of the game, but what is even better is that they have started giving us a run down of things that will be fixed before the initial EA Premier launch on the 15th and what will be in place by the 22nd.

UI Clicking on visible options in menus fixed for 15th Feb (except social which is 22nd Feb)
Navigating Menu tabs with Q and E instead of old keybindings fixed for 15th Feb
Forge rotation speed with mouse improved – 15th Feb
Scrolling with mouse wheel wont zoom your javelin AND scroll the menu (will be contextual based on where your mouse is) – 15th Feb
D-Pad will show as keyboard bindings – 15th Feb
Turning off Motion Blur in settings now works (decoupled from post processing) – 22nd Feb
HDR toggle available – 22nd Feb
Camera Shake slider added – 22nd Feb

I’ve said it before but I believe that Bioware feels the pressure that this launch has to go fairly flawlessly, given the perceived failing that Andromeda was. The whole multiple launch dates thing does not do it any favors, especially considering that a lot of the issues that plagued Andromeda were fixed by the end of that first week. EA has a bad habit of shredding game studios, and the whole teasing a Dragon Age game… I think is more insurance than anything else to try and keep delaying that decision. If launch goes like last weekend however I think we are going to be just fine, and what I really want is the same level of communication that they are giving the community to continue into the first year of the game.

I really do think that Anthem might be the game that can finally blended the different looty shooty genre players together. There is enough here to intrigue the Destiny players with a rich and interesting lore and the Ranger class being essentially a “Destiny” class where it is mostly gun play with a few abilities. There is also something here for the Warframe players that want move movement and ability spam… and the Storm and the Interceptor fill those roles nicely. Then there is a class for the player who just wants to be a big freaking mech in the form of the Colossus. What is better is that gameplay feels more enjoyable when you are running with a pretty decent mix of the four classes. Ranger as far as we can tell is going to be the class that has the highest single target damage… so great for boss killing. Storm is the battle tactician that takes an overwatch position over the battlefield and can effect large swaths of it with its abilities. Interceptor is the fact melee shredder that is probably going to be excellent at grabbing objectives and avoiding taking damage. Then you have the colossus which is the king of staying alive… as was seen this weekend when Ashgar absolutely saved the day by surviving long enough to start bringing us all back up during a stronghold. They all have their key niche and all feel great when played together.

Ultimately I progressed my character as far as it probably could have been during the Demo. I managed to upgrade every slot to a level 19 rare item and my final build was an Light Machine Gun for my main weapon… a Marksman Rifle for my secondary to melt anything at a distance like snipers. Then I would run poison darts to act as my primer… that also doubles as a debuff that causes me to just deal extra damage to that target. Frag Grenades after trying a bunch of different options seems to be my detonator of choice, and also a decent crowd sweeper. Then muster point is what I was running as a damage boost for helping to burn down those big mobs. As far as components I was running one to increase Frag damage and another to increase LMG Ammunition, and it was a build I was pretty damned happy with. I could in theory go for a max damage build by picking up the devastator sniper rifle, but I never got one of those to drop for me and did not see it in the crafting tables. I also settled in on the above paint scheme which is pretty much the colors I tend to choose in any game that gives me the options.

Towards the end of the weekend they started an event that caused Primals to spawn in large numbers and frequency… so I managed to get in and take down a few of the bigger ones. In fact I was fighting one of the big primals when the servers went down, so no clue what loot might have dropped. Weirdly the game let me keep fighting, so I am guessing part of the world is cached on the client itself? This gives me concerns when it comes to what hackers are going to be able to do to the game… but without a PVP element I am not entirely certain how much it will effect me. I am a little saddened that it sounds like while my weekend was smooth and flawless… others that had a flawless previous weekend… started encountering disconnect problems during this test. I’ve now played 16 hours worth of the Anthem demo and can say that I am looking forward to starting on the 15th. If you have not already picked up the game… you can pony up for a month of Premier… which gives you a discount that you can then apply to your preorder… and will also give you access to the full game on the 15th instead of the 22nd.

So my awesome readers… are you picking up the game? Will you be joining me on the 15th or are you waiting on the 22nd… or are you just going to take a hard pass?

Embracing Chaos

February 1, 2017 by Belghast

There are games from my childhood that I will always have an odd amount of nostalgia about. There are the obvious ones like Zelda and Mario… but then there are the ones where I latched onto with both hands and never quite understood why. Chaos Engine is one of those games in the second column because by all rights… it was not really a popular game in the United States. We never really had the massive Amiga Culture here that the UK did… and while I owned one… I didn’t get it until my college years for use with Digital Video production. However I did own a Sega Genesis and we did get Chaos Engine released under the confusing re-branding of Soldiers of Fortune. I played the hell out of the game but didn’t realize what I had been missing… because while a completely functional port it is in no way as good as the original. I bought my Amiga 3000 second hand… and it came with a box of crudely labelled Amiga floppies. One of which was called Chaos Engine, and when I fired it up… I felt immediately at home. The original Amiga game was so much better in every way than the port I was familiar with, and most importantly was the music. I’ve included a video I found of the game intro running on an A500. The game was essentially an isometric shooter but a much more interesting one than say Commando or Ikari Warriors. It allowed you to pick from a cast of characters… the Brigand, the Gentleman, the Mercenary, the Navvie, the Preacher and The Thug. Each with their own strengths and unique weapons, and also added a small bit of RPG style progression as you could use the money found in each level to purchase buffs to further customize the way the character played. Even today I have purchased every copy of this game that has come out… from a Windows 95 CD version that no longer functions to the more recent release on Steam.

While roaming around the floor at Pax South I came across what I could only describe as the logical successor. Tower 57 is a game that I didn’t even know existed before this convention. It apparently was on Kickstarter during August of 2015 and managed to raise roughly 55k dollars. Had I known about the game then I would have likely backed it, even though my track record with video game kickstarters is not that amazing. The game website describes it as:

In a dystopian, dieselpunk world, where Megatowers are the only enclaves of civilization, a group of extraordinary individuals is sent to infiltrate the reclusive Tower 57. Their skills, clips’ capacity & the ability to cooperate will decide on their fate.

Tower 57 is a top-down twin stick shooter with 16-bit inspired pixel art, destructible environments and heavy focus on co-op. It is also a modern take on what made AMIGA games so great back in the days.

What it felt like was a sort of Shadowrun meets Chaos engine, with a similarly interesting cast of characters. Unfortunately I didn’t actually get to start fresh when I gave the game I try… but it seems like I could largely pick between a female detective wearing a trechcoat and using a shotgun, and the diplomat which is a guy that looks like Abraham Lincoln with a flame thrower. The game has all the right quirky notes that Chaos Engine did, and a similarly Victorian Era meets Steampunk meets 1920s speakeasy feel to it. The artwork is absolutely gorgeous and the movement of the characters felt fluid, with interesting and challenging monsters that you encountered. In the Pax South demo it seemed to largely be locked to the sewer level, and I was amped to see the gameplay unfold very similarly to what I expected with Chaos Engine. Essentially doing something in one area of the map might unlock a secret area in another corner of the map, but also spawned multiple waves of mobs that you then needed to clear.

The game is functionally a twinstick shooter, and the demo was played with xbox one controllers. After a short period of time though I adjusted and managed to play my way through the level and get up to the mini boss at the end of it. Ashgar managed to beat it… I however managed to take out the main encounter… then got super careless and died to something stupid on my way out of the room. There was a line of folks waiting to take the controllers, so I stopped playing… but I would have loved to have had another shot at the game and tried playing some of the other characters. Reportedly on both the game website and the steam profile the final version will include seven different playable characters, each with their own weapons and traits. Another thing that I thought was really fun was the fact that the majority of the world appeared to be destructible. Sure this serves a purpose with explosive barrels, but even when it serves no real purpose it is glorious to see the entire screen erupt in a hail of debris without actually slowing down the frame rate. Reportedly the game will support local and online multiplayer co-op gameplay, which is admittedly something I am looking forward to. I am probably going to convince Ashgar to play through the game with me some weekend… which usually means he carries me super hard as I fail miserably somewhere in the background while looking for loot.

If anything I have said sounds interesting, I highly suggest you check out the game. I have a huge amount of nostalgia for Chaos Engine and this game is riding heavily on that fact. However Ashgar seemed to enjoy it just as much as I did, and he had never even heard of that game. Right now the game has an ambiguous “Spring 2017” release date… which to me means “any time before May” but to Square Enix apparently meant June when they were talking about Heavensward. Whatever the case… the game felt really polished and hopefully that means the game will be available shortly. You can pre-order now on Humble for $9.99 but to be honest I am more than likely going to wait for the steam release since I believe right now… humble disqualifies you from giving proper feedback on steam because it is not an “official purchase”. To be honest the whole “steam purchase” versus “key redemption” thing is a mess when it comes to reviews. Whatever the case it is definitely a game I enjoyed and I am ready to get my Chaos Engine game play back on.

Unintended Stealth

November 23, 2016 by Belghast

I had every intent last night of going home and working on my Deathknight. This week the world boss is The Soultakers, which finally allows folks to unlock the hidden frost appearance. I had been enjoying my newly humanized Deathknight after years being a Worgen, but had largely been taking my time in pushing through the levels. However with the promise of an artifact appearance waiting on me, the goal was to get home and push as hard as I could to get to 110 before the week was finished. Recently they patched the game to make all artifact appearance drops from world bosses a 100% drop chance. Apparently however there is a giant asterisk looming behind that statement. What I am hearing now is that in order to get the appearance you have to be artifact knowledge rank four, which is completely impossible for me to actually obtain during this week, at least without the impending catch up mechanics. So instead I went upstairs to try and solve another issue. According to my friend Squirrel, apparently I have not been online on PSN in over thirty days… so after some back and forth we determined that I had apparently inadvertently set myself to appear offline. For awhile now I had seen a red X beside my portrait in the PS4 menu, but I always just assumed that meant I had a flaky connection. However apparently on my profile page I hit the wrong thing and flipped myself into some sort of stealth mode. After fixing that… I also started getting updates as to what my friends were doing, so when Squirrel joined a party I decided to hook my headset up and join as well.

The plan for the evening was supposedly a Hard Mode Wrath of the Machine, but due to the holiday messing with everyone’s raiding plans… it was just Squirrel, myself, Jex and Havel that were available. The original thought was that if we could somehow muster the folks that we would end up running a normal to show me the ropes. Instead we just ended up completing various crap that I had sitting undone. I am the worst at actually grinding through quests, and the Gjallarhorn was something I tried when I was sitting at 340ish and found maddening. There are wave and waves of exploding shanks that have this nasty way of sneaking up on you when you are least expecting. I would ultimately end up getting blown up and failing out… and unfortunately this is one of those quests where you have to complete a bunch of stuff if you die at any point. The goal originally was to pester someone to come help me, but I never got around to doing it. Last night they were willing to help and I was more than happy to knock a quest out of my inventory.

Similarly I had been sitting on the Thorn quest for at least a week now, having completed the last of the crucible kills during the recent Iron Banner. In order to do this one I needed a key, and had never actually finished the Sepiks Perfected strike quest… which rewarded a key. So next up my friends set about to helping me complete this quest. Unfortunately I have not actually spent any time with the gun, but seeing as I never got the year one variety I have always been curious just how it feels. There was a time where I used hand cannons above pretty much any gun, but the short range and ammo capacity nerfs have ended up with me favoring other things. If nothing else I might throw this up on my hunter and be the stereotype, even though this version of thorn is significantly defanged from the original.

Lastly when I opened the chest to pick up the Thorn, I managed to pull a pretty sweet new sniper with significantly higher light than the one I was using. I like the super high damage archetype of snipers, so this has already seen some use given that it is solar burn week. We attempted a random heroic after completing the Thorn quest but for whatever reason I failed to get credit from my Future War Cult quest. I am super thankful to all of the help that Squirrel and Jex were willing to dish out last night, and I really want to figure out a time when I can hang out properly and do more Destiny stuff. I knew I missed them, but I didn’t realize how much until the middle of last night hanging out killing baddies.