I remember when Uplay+ was first announced… I threw it some serious sideeye. Why would anyone pay for a subscription service to play games that regularly go on seriously deep discount sales? Now I stand on the precipice of partaking of it myself and have a slightly different perspective. At that point there really wasn’t much that I wanted to play from UbiSoft that I did not already own, or could not purchase easily. Now we are in a time of gold and ultimate edition games that double the price of entry if you so choose to partake, and also on the cusp of a banner sequence of game releases from the studio.
Over the coming months I want to play the following:
Watch Dogs Legion – Available Today – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Asssassin’s Creed Valhalla – November 10th – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Immortals Fenyx Rising – December 3rd – $100 for the Gold Edition
Farcry 6 – February 18th – $120 for the ultimate edition
My natural instinct tends to be to go for that ultimate edition so that I don’t have buyers remorse later when there is some shiny doodad or thingamabob that I don’t have access to. I know it is a bad habit and a first world problem but it is a thing for me at least. Were I to stack up all of those games in the highest version I would be dropping $460 over the course of the next several months… or to put that into perspective almost the cost of a RTX 3070 graphics card.
This morning I stared down the barrel of the Uplay page trying to decide what I wanted to do. I want to play Watch Dog Legions, but did I want to go ahead and just purchase it outright or pay $15 to start a Uplay+ subscription. Even if I went for the Vanilla versions of all four games I listed that adds up to $240 and an entire year of Uplay+ is $180. Yes I realize in the second scenario I don’t own any of the games but my current running theory is that I subscribe for a few months, get my enjoyment out of the titles and then if for some reason I actually care enough about one of the games to own it… I pick it up later when Ubisoft has their deep discount sales like they often do aligned with Steam sales.
What I have realized is that I don’t return to single player games that often. Sure I have played copious amounts of Fallout and Elder Scrolls games… but I think they might be the exception rather than the rule. I played Assassin’s Creed Origins hard and heavy for a good while and then walked away from it seemingly never to return. While I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Witcher 3, that game was intensive enough that I can’t see myself actually returning to it again. The modern open world game requires so much of you, that once the story is played out… I think it just becomes a challenge to really revisit it. Sure I loved my revisit of Horizon Zero Dawn recently, but that was a case of me experiencing the game through fresh eyes of playing with my chosen platform of Keyboard and Mouse.
I’ve been on the digital download bandwagon for a decade now, and I am starting to wonder if games are shifting around for me much like Movies and Music did. I no longer care about owning any music. What I care about is having access to music when I choose play it and as a result I pay for a streaming subscription. Similarly I don’t care about owning movies, because it is so rare that I will ever sit down and re-watch one. What I care instead is having access to them on the rare occasion that I want to… and for that I also have streaming services. Maybe I have evolved to a point of caring deeply about a small number of games, but wanting access to others just for the purpose of playing them and then dropping them by the wayside.
There we have it… Uplay+ got me and I am now downloading Watch Dog Legions off the subscription plan. I need to set myself a reminder to cancel the service in March, because I can’t really see this being something I want to keep going permanently. It isn’t so much that I cannot afford to buy these games piecemeal over the next several months… but more a case that I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to shell out that much money in one lump sum. We will see how well this goes and what hidden pitfalls there might be, and I will of course report back how it is going. Anyone else suddenly find the subscription option for UbiSoft significantly more tantalizing with the sequence of releases on the horizon? Maybe I will actually sit down and play through some of the Anno games that I have never touched now that I have access to them all.
The post Uplay+ Finally Makes Sense appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Originally I had no plans of talking about this, but I woke up this morning with some thoughts. Also I have to go into the office today and I had hoped this would be a relatively fast discussion. There are a lot of different opinions about the slipping of the Cyberpunk 2077 release date. First let me state that after having devoured the Witcher 2 and 3 along with all of the DLC content… I was absolutely looking forward to this game. The folks that are pissed about the game date slipping once again have a right to be, especially considering the track record of this title. Here is a brief run down of the announced release dates so far.
April 16th
September 17th
November 19th
December 10th
So I can absolutely see getting pissed about the constantly siding date range. Truthfully I would not be terribly shocked if we see another delay that pushes the game into the first quarter of 2021. There is obviously something going on behind the scenes that we are not entirely privy to that is making the release strained. My pocket theory is that this game originally targeted the 8th Generation consoles, but as time went on the scope of the game outgrew them and it is now something more proper for the 9th Generation of consoles and beyond. However preorders have been taken and commitments have been made to make this thing work on the original Xbox One and the original PlayStation 4… which are significant downgrades to where we are currently in console gaming.
This isn’t even the only high profile delay in the release of a game that is impacting me. I should have been playing the Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft right now as I was happily grinding my way to the next level cap and hunting for gear. I am not however doing that thing and in the case of both games I am more or less fine with that. How many games have been released over the last several years that we have commented could have used another six months to a year of time baking? How many times are games salvaged by a Hail Mary patch or expansion after months of a frustrated fan base? For me at least it is far better to launch later with a game that represents the best ability of that studio than to push something out the door that the fans are going to hate at worst and at best be disillusioned by. You can only do that so many times before you lose the benefit of the doubt.
Let us think back to what should be known as “The Parable of Anthem”, a game that was frankly brilliant in the type of gameplay that it was delivering but released in such an incomplete state that I legitimately don’t know anyone still playing it. Even the most hardcore of Anthem Zealots have long since set the game aside and moved on to greener pastures. I for one loved a lot of what was there from the moment to moment gameplay and the story being told… but the game as it released felt like the opening chapter of something larger and not a finished product. No one has really nailed the games as a service model if I am going to be completely honest about it. You need to hit the ground running with four or five rapid releases waiting in the wings in order to keep the player base engaged.
Anthem struggled from a lack of content on all levels. There weren’t enough activities to complete and there wasn’t enough different ways to obtain gear. The end result was that they just made it damned near impossible to get the highest rewards or that when you did get them they were mostly useless. I am deeply concerned by the level of redesign that is happening as they work on Anthem 2.0, because for me… the fundamentals were fairly strong. Significant work was needed on the itemization system and other than that… they just needed about five times the content that they launched with and a pipeline of future updates to keep the players going. If they had another year or two of development time I think Anthem would have launched as a highly successful product, and instead it is a game that becomes the horror story that we apply to every single launch since.
Another game that launched in a completely incomplete state was Fallout 76. Effectively this game was a tech demo that legitimately was built for fun within Bethesda… that got “productized” and felt just about as polished as that sounds. While subsequent content releases and patches have turned this into an extremely enjoyable experience, the damage is done. Bethesda burned players early and many will not be likely to ever return to the experience, even though they have already spent the cost of entry. The old adage of only getting one chance to make a first impression is true. You will forever be judged by the first moments of gameplay that you give your players and if that is a buggy mess then your game will always be broken and horrible in their eyes.
No Man’s Sky for example should be heralded as the comeback story that all games deserve. The amount of love and care that has gone into the later phases of this game is significant. The game that exists today resembles almost nothing of the game that launched back in 2016. To the credit of Hello Games, every single one of these broad content updates has been delivered to the players completely free. All one has to do is patch the game up and they can be playing this revolutionary experience, but for many players that is still a bridge too far. There are folks that hold a grudge about this game and the fact that it did not deliver on the promises on day one and nothing that this studio can do will ever fix that core problem. Do I think that stance is unrealistic? Absolutely, but it doesn’t change the fact that bridges were burned that can never be mended.
Basically I am always going to be fine with a video game delay because the alternative is so much worse. I often wonder what my beloved Destiny would have been like had they the time to really have built the franchise into what it could have been from day one. It took until The Taken King expansion to turn Destiny 1 into the game that we have come to cherish, and the same story played out with Destiny 2 and The Forsaken turning a mess of a launch into an exceptionally enjoyable experience. While I don’t love the direction that the game has gone in recently with season fatigue and expiring content, the game that came out of the two rough starts has been something I have fallen in love with. Yet there will always be a group of players that were burnt by the releases not being finished at launch and will likely never give Destiny another chance.
Essentially I am fine with these game delays pending it actually improves the product that is being released. If you delay a game and still release a buggy and unfinished mess, then I guess there is nothing I can say to stop the avalanche of anger that will be dropped upon that studio. I am hoping that Cyberpunk 2077 will truly be game of the year material and I am hoping that the Shadowlands expansion ranks high on my list of favorites. I have to say that in both cases I am a little concerned, and I hope the delays give both studios the time to apply that layer of polish so we can just boot that game up and lose ourselves in the experience. This is a year when escapism is a critical survival mechanism, so please stick that landing.
The post Regarding Game Delays appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Unboxing culture is the actual worst. We’ve arrived at this point where watching someone open something is high dollar entertainment. I say that and as you can tell YouTube is giving away my secret that I did in fact watch the iJustine video because I personally found it entertaining and I worry about myself greatly because of that fact. Yesterday was the embargo date for the PS5… but not in any meaningful way. It was the day that those deemed worthy of receiving a press unit in the mail were able to actually open the box and show the contents to the world. Prior to this they were simply able to show off the box that they received and many did just that in reference to other Sony PlayStation boxes.
There is another embargo date on November 6th that actually allows them to talk about the unit, how it plays, the user interface and all of the other things that folks actually care about. What is making this so insufferable is the fact that we just went through something similar with the Microsoft Xbox Series X. When folks got their hands on units initially they were limited in what they could actually show… namely they could really only talk about application start up time improvements. I don’t believe we have actually seen third party footage of anything other than current generation games running on the Xbox hardware.
What multiplies the infuriation of this whole drawn out process is the fact that it is highly unlikely that the majority of folks wanting one will be able to purchase either an Xbox Series X or a Sony PlayStation 5. Unless they are just about to open the floodgates… the units are going to be in very high demand and as a result very short supply. In both cases there was discussion about multiple waves of preorders that as far as I am aware never actually materialized. I would expect there to be some sort of a restock around Thanksgiving/Black Friday and another possibly closer to Christmas but the stock is going to be tight more than likely until well into the new year.
The end result is simply that the TechTubers are being orchestrated by these massive corporations to whip folks into a frenzy… over something that realistically they can’t actually buy. Now please note… I don’t blame the reviewers because they have been given a golden ticket with an expiration date that allows them to draw a whole lot of eyeballs to their channel with something that the masses are interested in. Same is true for all of the Streamers that suddenly switched to Genshin Impact as they were trying to draw in the eyeballs as that game was booming. Who I blame is the console manufacturers because this entire generational rollout has been a mess of playing cat and mouse around releasing details.
All of the information that has been drip fed over the course of the last two quarters… should have come out in a single push around June pending there was actually an E3 this year. I think the last minute nature of everything has doomed this to be a rough launch. I say all that feeling relatively certain that I have a pre-order unit locked in. Even then however I am not 100% certain that I will be getting my shiny new toy in any semblance of the release date. Truth be told there is part of me expecting a refund any day now and a sorrowful message from the retailer telling me that they oversold the available quantity.
We are living in a time of great uncertainty because the world is just burning down around us. I know it is silly to be frustrated over a game console, but that is precisely where we are because for many of us the only thing holding us together are the distractions. I am not sure I would have made it through this year were it not for gaming and my ability to focus on it instead of the asshole in the oval office or the fact that no one seems to take the fact that we are living in the time of a pandemic seriously. If you have made it down this far, I thank you for indulging this rant piece. I am sure I will return to proper content tomorrow.
The post The Console Embargo Sucks appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This mornings post is going to be a bit of a descent into my madness. One of the things you will have no doubt noticed by now on my blog is that I post a lot of screenshots. It has become a bit of an obsession to have a decent workflow for taking a screenshot from a moment in a game to a properly sized image ready for posting. One of the problems I have encountered over the years is that every single game seems to want to store its screenshots in a different arcane location. While there are websites like the PC Gaming Wiki that can help you decode this nonsense, there are even more games that have no built in screenshot functionality.
My desire is to ultimately have every screenshot that I take land in a single incoming directory, where I can then process and eventually (often times months and months later) sort it into my long network storage. I need to reorganize but I have some rough break downs by game type and then store my images in a directory loosely named off of the game title. The benefit of this is that I can rapidly pull back a screenshot for a game that I have not been playing in ages if I end up needing/wanting to talk about it again. I play an excessive number of games so having some sort of a system helps greatly in trying to decipher this mess.
For years… and I do mean like a decade or so… I used FRAPS. It was the swiss army knife of PC screenshotting tools, and was relatively lightweight in a sort of set it and forget it manner. I configured it to dump into my “gameshots” directory and the rest was history. I could reclaim the fruits of my labor from that location and then convert them as needed for the purpose of the blog. The core problem with this is that FRAPS and Beepa the company behind it… are effectively defunct. Sure you can still purchase licenses for it, but it has not been updated since 2013 and has had a slew of issues starting with Windows 8.1 and continuing with Windows 10.
This lead me down a path that ultimately lead to DXtory at the suggestion of a friend. This application works fairly well… except when it doesn’t and for whatever reason keeps your game from even launching. Anthem for example… will not launch while DXtory is running and I am guessing this has something to do with the way that it is hooking into Direct X as an overlay and it being detected by Anti-Cheat software as somewhat of an aberration. The other issue that I would occasionally run into with DXTory is that it would just stop working out of the blue, and would not start working again until I rebooted. The final nail in the coffin unfortunately is once again DXtory seems to be a bit of an abandonware project given that the last update was in 2017 and the game has numerous unresolved issues.
Another tool that I have used quite a bit is GeForce Experience and its in-game overlay which provides access to taking screenshots and video. This works when it works… and stops working seemingly randomly. There are games that this will capture like a champ, and it has the added benefit of dumping them into a directory named after the information in the games executable. However it was unreliable enough that there were many nights where I thought I was capturing all of this content for the blog… and then get out of the game only to realize I got nothing. Additionally this does not play nicely with Parsec all of the time, which lead to some weirdness that could occasionally cause me to lose mouse input controls while remoted into my upstairs machine.
Greenshot is an open source screenshotting tool that seemed promising. However it has a massive flaw that ultimately drove me away from it. There were many a night when I would be humming along taking screenshots, only to realize later that for whatever reason it was not capturing the game but instead just picture after picture of my desktop. This caused a rapid uninstall and a retreat back into other tools.
Steam has a perfectly cromulent Screenshot functionality, that seems to work flawlessly. It has two fatal flaws as far as I am concerned. The first being that you cannot change where the screenshots are stored and they are stored in a truly arcane path that I die inside a little bit each time I remember that I have memorized it. “Steam\userdata\8795056\760\remote\1085660\screenshots” for example is the directory for Destiny 2, which is a game that is notoriously hard to nab screenshots from with a third party tool. The only bit that is unique to Destiny is the “1085660” which I believe is some kind of Steam Catalog Identifier. I’ve had to rely on this for Destiny for awhile given that neither Fraps nor DXTory were capable of pulling a screenshot. The final flaw however is the fact that this only works for games running under Steam… which is not a case for every game I play.
When I shared this lament with folks online… the almost universal refrain was “What about OBS?”. The thing is… I don’t want to capture video. OBS is my go to for any time I want to capture footage or that I might want to stream, and I use it at work for manipulating my web cam before piping it through video conference software. The problem for me at least is that while OBS does support screenshot functionality, it feels like a lot of overhead to be running this window of OBS that is constantly mirroring my screen just to be recording a still. Then there is the problem with Medal or any of the other “record clips” apps, that they are really focused on live video. Pulling a still from video is messy and often times ends up with anything that was in action being blurred as a result because video doesn’t record full single frames but instead a mishmash that visually works in motion.
Where we have ended up is another piece of software that a friend suggested. ShareX, like Greenshot is also an OpenSource project but it seems to be designed around capturing anything you might want to capture. It has a whole workflow system, which I have only barely scratched and was seemingly designed for the purpose of taking an image and then uploading image to some external host. I am not doing that second part, but I am wondering if I can eventually script it so that it does my entire workflow. Right now I have everything dumping into a single directory, but it seems like I could pretty easily recreate the functionality that GeForce Experience did and name things based on the executable information. So far it “just works” and it has even managed to flawlessly capture Destiny 2, with the caveat being that you have to be running it as Administrator or some games seem to block it.
I’ve been using it for about a week now and everything that I have attempted to capture has been great without any weirdness that I have encountered thusfar. I am hoping that I might have a winner here, and pending that I do I will happily start contributing to the Patreon as a way of funding this thing that is seemingly really hard to find. I have zero qualms supporting the things I used and had licenses to FRAPS, DXTory and even the thing I am going to talk about next… IrfanView. Ultimately I need to dig into the workflow scripting because once I get an image in the incoming directory, that isn’t the end of the process.
I’ve used IrfanView since college for batch image processing, and before that I used something called Graphics Workshop. IrfanView is this awesome one size fits all image viewer software that has plugins to support all sorts of esoteric other formats. The final step before an image ends up on my blog is to run it through a batch conversion where it makes sure the size constrains to at least 1920×1080 (it ignores anything smaller) and then converts it to a JPG to reduce the size. My native resolution is 3840×2160 aka “4k” and I have no interest in posting something that large on my blog. However I do like storing the original image capture for any future needs down the line. As a result I everything gets run through IrfanView which also moves the screenshot to its final resting place signifying that it is ready to post on the blog.
I am hoping that ShareX stays with me for awhile. So far I have yet to encounter a game that it would not capture. I need to spend some time learning about its functionality because I am using it for only a fraction of what it seems to be able to do. If it could replace my entire workflow it would be phenomenal, so that it could save a copy in Full Resolution and then send a scaled down copy to my working directory as well. I know this is probably madness but I feel like it is useful every so often to peel back the curtain and talk about how I approach things.
The post In Search of Screenshots appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
