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Digital Fragmentation

December 14, 2018 by Belghast

There has been a significant amount of consternation surrounding the recent activities of Epic Games… which I still feel like I need to cram the Mega in there. There are those that herald this as a new era in which Steam actually has proper competition. There are others that signal this as the end times for PC Gaming because players will be fragmented across many platforms. There are others still that are complaining largely because they don’t want to have to install the “Fortnite Client” to play their games. For me however I am somewhat amused as I sit back and watch the events unfold because it all has a sense of deja vu.

Epic is a company that had a game that was a big enough success… that they decided they were able to askew all of the traditional norms and funnel everyone through their own infrastructure. If you removed the word “Epic” and replaced it with Valve the above statement would still be completely true. Steam started out more or less as the digital distribution mechanism for Half-life 2, and a good number of us only got our steam accounts largely because of this. Prior to Steam I had dabbled with a few services like Direct 2 Drive which was at the time a side project by IGN, in fact my original Mass Effect 2 copy was through it. However round about 2008 I standardized on Steam as my platform of choice since it was clearing winning the early digital distribution battles.

Since around 2010 I made the decision to go entirely digital if possible, and that carried forward onto not only PC purchases but also with consoles as well… which has lead me to swap out a few hard drives to upgrade them in the process. The funny thing is… you accumulate a lot of digital games scattered across different platforms. When I purchased a video card a few years back I got a copy of Witcher 3 for example… but it was only redeemable on the GOG Galaxy client. Each month as part of my Amazon Prime subscription, Twitch Prime gives me a slew of games… that are only available through the Twitch client.

I just did some looking this morning and not counting single game clients… I have the following Multi-Game Launchers installed on my system…

Battle.net
Bethesda.net
Epic Games Launcher
Glyph
GOG Galaxy
My.Com Game Center
Origin
Perfect World ARC
Steam
Twitch Client
Ubisoft UPlay
Wargaming.net Game Center
Windows Store

That is thirteen clients, not counting Discord who also seemingly wants to get in on the action but that I don’t have any games through. So to the point of those being concerned about fragmentation… what difference does one more store make giving that eleven of those clients I had installed prior to the launch of the Epic Games store. This isn’t taking into account the three online stores that I also interact with on Microsoft Consoles, Sony Consoles and Nintendo Consoles. The funny thing is… I can think of a couple other clients that I no longer have installed that would have bumped that number up even higher.

What makes it even more disturbing is the number of games that I am accumulating that I will probably never actually play. Originally this was just the realm of Humble Bundle… when I purchased a bundle deal because of one title that I wanted… and got fifteen more that I didn’t. However since then there are Xbox Live Gold and Playstation Plus which I largely just consider to be the upkeep costs of owning a Microsoft or Sony console… but that also give away games each month that I feel obligated to log into their respective store fronts and claim just in the off chance that I might want to play them at some point. On top of that Origin gives away games on the regular… which I am admittedly less connected to regularly grabbing because Origin is hands down the worst client. But now Epic Games is determined to start giving us new games every few weeks, and Twitch Prime offers up a deluge of new titles each month. Ultimately I need some way of keeping track what I have on what platforms and the only real options I have found are completely manual.

Basically what I am saying is… we have been fragmented for a very long time and while I respect the notion that folks don’t want to sully their systems with yet another launcher I am also not that sort of a purist. Disk space is cheap and I like the concept of having a lot of games “on tap” and ready to play when the mood hits me, and as a result I have all of these damned launchers scattered throughout my system doing whatever launchers do. It is an unfortunate reality, but it is a reality I long ago accepted as something that I am going to have to deal with. The only two clients that I really take issue with are Origin and the Windows Store, but one of those I can’t uninstall because it came with the operating system… and the other I am resigned to use because I still care about Bioware games.

When it comes to making game purchases however that is a completely different situation, and as it stands now… I am not opposed to the concept of buying games on the Epic Games store. The interface currently is way better for finding games than that of Steam… but that is only because it has a handful of games on it at the moment. Steam is a victim of its own success and its generally hands off approach that they have had in attempting to manage their platform. As such potential gems are embedded in among of shovelware asset flips, making it extremely hard to find those things that you maybe have not heard of yet… but probably should give a shot. I guess time will tell how Epic decides to combat that with their own store front. For the moment however I don’t think some sort of a PC Gaming Apocalypse is upon us… nor do I really care about having to install another client. I think things are going to move forward much the way they always have … and by the end of next year I will probably be forced to install a few more vestigial clients in order to keep playing the things I want to play.

Shotguns and Game Awards

December 7, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a night about two things… farming Escalation Protocol in the slim hope of getting a shotgun… and watching The Game Awards. I didn’t even realize that the later was happening until Pete mentioned something about it on Twitter. I am not really a follower of awards shows in general because traditionally speaking they don’t actually reflect my interests in quite literally anything. The academy awards tend to focus on artsy films, and the grammys tend to focus on pop music… neither of which are really my jam. I still remember the Grammys where Metallica Performed and was nominated for the new “Hard Rock” category… against Jethro Tull… and Jethro Tull won. Basically I have always sorta considered the awards scene to be grossly out of touch with anything that interested me. I can’t really say that the Game Awards are all that different given that I don’t really play a lot of the games that they talked about.

It has been however super interesting to watch the show evolve over time. Each year the “realness” has escalated significantly and last night… it legitimately felt like any other big budget awards show in existence. Hell they even have a proper theme now, which was kinda cool and did a good job of showcasing the different flavors of gaming. I also enjoyed how they have this blend of reveals and awards, as well as a meaningful pre-show that instead of watching the “red carpet” used that time to give out the less glitzy stuff like lifetime achievement awards. There was also a reasonable blend of traditional celebrities, e-celebs, and legendary game devs… all treated as peers to create this weird blend of everything that makes the community interesting. For example I don’t care about Ninja necessarily, but I do know he is a big deal in the Fortnite juggernaut, and probably a significantly better ambassador to the “normies” than Pewdie Pie.

The twitch screen had up this “Worlds Will Change” logo prior to the pre-show actually starting, so when we opened the Game Awards with Shawn Layden, Phil Spencer, and Reggie Fils-aime from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo respectively all sharing the stage I momentarily got my hopes up. I wondered would they reveal that finally all games on all three platforms would be cross play by default? Sadly however it was just a gesture of togetherness rather than anything meaningful, but still very cool to see that happen as they all appear on effectively neutral ground. They still need to hammer out those details behind the scenes so that we can all play together without boundary, which is ultimately the thing I think most gamers really want. Truth be told I just want the consoles and PC versions to cross play given that I am almost always going to prefer the PC version the best.

As far as reveals go the one that was the most interesting to me personally was The Outer Worlds by Obsidian, which appeared to be a Fallout style game set in a Wild West Space Opera sort of world on the outskirts of the universe. I am always down with scifi blended with westerns blended with what appeared to be bioshock style advertising branding. It is Obsidian, so we know the story is going to be good… that is the thing they do really really well. It will also probably be very buggy, because that is another thing they do really really well is generate bugs. Regardless I am now really looking forward to this game after only having seen a little bit of trailer.

We got a much longer trailer for Psychonauts 2, which is something we already knew was coming but also something that is going to be excellent. I fully expect to be replaying the previous one prior to this game coming out so I can sorta blend my way into the new story. It has been a really really long time since I last played Psychonauts.

I am also really interested in Far Cry New Dawn which to the best of my knowledge is the first game in the Far Cry series that is a direct sequel to the previous one? It also makes me want to play Far Cry 5 if this is where we are going to end up. There were lots of other reveals and they have posted most of them on the official The Game Awards Youtube, which is super handy.

What games were revealed that you are looking forward to? Drop me a comment and let me know. I will be spending the weekend on a mix of still farming for the shotgun in Destiny 2 and splitting time between two big alphas that are also happening.

Shotguns and Game Awards

December 7, 2018 by Belghast

Destiny Nostalgia

December 6, 2018 by Belghast

With my general disappointment I have over Black Armory and the direction the game seems to be going now… with focusing only on the end game and not actually giving us anything new that we can do the moment a content update drops. It got me feeling notalgic about Destiny 1 and some of the things I miss that have never quite made it over to Destiny 2. So I am going to take this morning as an opportunity to rifle through my vault and pull out the things I would love to see over here. This is mostly just me posting a bunch of pictures of weapons and talking about them, so if that is not your thing then today’s post is likely highly skippable.

Legendary Weapons

Destiny was largely a game about collecting the exotics, but there were a handful of legendary weapons that stood out and that I coveted. I figured a handful of these definitely needed to be talked about. There were a lot of them that I liked, but these were the weapons that I absolutely loved.

We are going to start things off with the weapon that I bring up so many times… my perfect roll Haakon’s Hatchet, or at least what I considered to be a perfect roll. It came from Year 2 Iron Banner and still has one of the overall best looking Iron Banner weapon visual aesthetics. It had Range Finder, Perfect Balance and Counterbalance so was insanely stable and while relatively short range… it could melt targets especially in the Crucible or Iron Banner. This also doubled as probably one of my favorite PVE weapons for just dealing a bunch of reliable damage to targets.

The Haakon’s Hatchet was eventually replaced with the Genesis Chain which dropped on my first time through Wrath of the Machine when I was super carried hard by my friends in Tequila Mockingbird. I admit a lot of why I used this weapon was because it looked cool and it had an interesting perk called Focused Firefly… which was essentially a much bigger version of the normal firefly that caused targets to explode when you to a precision kill. It also had this super satisfying noise that it made when you triggered one of these explosions… which I think is the real reason why I kept using it. It sounded sorta like the ping of kicking brass out of a Mosin Nagant in all of the WW2 era FPS titles with a bunch of reverb at the end.

I generally hated the look of all of the Year 3 Iron Banner weapons… there is just something about having a bunch of bits crudely cobbled together that didn’t do it for me. This is weird because in general the Fallen weapon aesthetic is very similar… but somehow works with all of its spiky nonsense. The main reason why I loved this weapon was its absolutely crazy high impact, and the fact that enhanced battery took the available shots up to 6… and with performance bonus it had a chance of refunding some ammo. This could just straight up melt any target in front of you, and was a pretty good option to help burn elites.

My heavy weapon of choice has usually always been a machine gun because it always feels like you have a lot more versatility due to the larger magazine size… or in the case of most of them drum size. Once again this gets a strike against it for the horrible asethestic of year 3 Iron Banner weapons, but it has a lot going for it when it comes to stats with Extended Mag, Hand-Laid Stock and Counterblance giving me a fairly high impact and very stable machine gun. Not much else to say about it… it was very much a utilitarian burn option that wasn’t flashy but got the job done.

Exotic Weapons

While we have ended up with a large number of carry over from Destiny 1 in the Exotics department, there are still a handful that I really enjoyed using that it would be nice to see reborn in one form or another.

I have to give an initial shout out to Hawkmoon, which was the very first Exotic that I ever got to drop. Now rumor has it that we are getting this back at some point in the upcoming seasons… but for the time being an equivalent does not exist in game. It was a high damage high capacity hand canon made interesting by the fact that two of the bullets would deal extra damage. Ultimately I replaced this in my line up with the Eyasluna which was essentially the legendary version of Hawkmoon allowing me more leverage in where I chose to use my exotic slot. It still bears mentioning however for introducing me to how cool exotics could be.

Another weapon that was also near and dear to my heart that absolutely no one else liked playing with… was the Fabian Strategy or the Titan exclusive exotic. I have always been a very run and gun player and as such was regularly closing the gap on a pack of mobs, which triggered crowd control and the front lines perk that increased weapon stability and rate of fire. The fact that a portion of the ammo was reloaded into the magazine on kills meant I could storm the castle and maintain a killing screen while taking out minions. This all fits my general play style and made me love this weapon far more than I should have given how many other people kept telling me it was garbage. Proof again that weapon choice is absolutely a personal preference thing.

Red Death was my go to for whenever I needed to sustain my life in a situation where I knew I would be taking a significant amount of damage. This made it the ideal weapon for those affixes that would cause your shields not to regenerate normally, or anything where there was a aura effect that would be slowly damaging you over time. Sure we got Crimson which is effectively a Hand Canon version of this weapon, but it feels lousy to play with in my opinion and as such doesn’t really count for me. I would love to see the original Red Death back. Given the storied past of this weapon it feels like the perfect option for a lengthy chain to unlock it.

Now for the weapon that inspired this post… Thunderlord is awesome and does a great job of melting a bunch of minions because of its arc damage proc… but the best version of that was on the Zhalo Supercell. Not only was it a really stable auto rifle, but the chain lightning proc made it perfect for clearing waves of mobs. It also held a special place as one of the few elemental primaries that survived the year one cull, which made it amazing for arc burn weeks. I would love to see a version of this gun back with a similar proc, especially given how many horde mode encounters we are getting in the game now.

While I never got to experience the grandeur of year one Gjallarhorn because I stopped playing shortly after launch… I fell in love with this weapon during Year 3 and it is impossible to make a nostalgic post without mentioning it. There was just nothing cooler than watching an entire pack of mobs melt to wolfpack rounds. During much of Year 3 this was pretty much the dedicated exotic that I used for everything because even if it was not solar burn week… it still was the best option for killing all of the things at once. Sure one might say that made it too powerful, but it was insanely fun to play with so it deserves on this list.

Another weapon that I would love to have back that we will probably never get back… is Invective or the shotgun that regenerates ammunition over time. Sure this and the Icebreaker the sniper equivalent were a little broken… but I loved this weapon so much in The Crucible because I didn’t have to care about the meta of trying to camp the special ammo. It looks amazing as well which as we all know goes a lot way to making a weapon feel good to use. Party Crasher+1 was the only shotgun I used regularly other than this one, but for most of my iron banner nonsense it was this in the special, Haakon’s in the primary and some machine gun in the heavy slot.

Sure we got a version of this with the Curse of Osiris DLC called Machina Dei 4 but it is nowhere near as good as this classic exotic version. It also looks nowhere near as cool. I would love to see a version of the original return, because again… this was an epic quest in the original Destiny and would give ample opportunity to make it a seasonal quest to recover the weapon. Everyone loved the Stranger’s Rifle and this was just an updated version of that, so would love to see it back.

These next two are largely situational, but I felt like they were unique enough that I wanted to include them as well. Touch of Malice was a must have raid weapon for the Taken King expansion, given that there were many burn phases where you were given an invulnerability effect allowing you to effectively pour rounds into the target without reloading with this weapon. It’s special effect allowed you to drain your own life and convert it into a bullet to keep firing after you have essentially emptied your magazine. This mean’t that it was super useful in a few clutch situations, but also was a great way to kill yourself if you were not paying much attention. In either case it was fun for the entire family.

Lastly we have Bad Juju that had two situations where it worked amazingly well. String of Curses did two things… firstly kills caused your ammo to reload and give you a damage buff. Secondly this effect when procced caused you to gain additional super energy, allowing you to charge your super significantly faster if you could be put in a situation where you had to kill waves of mobs. This made this the go to weapon in situations where you needed to have your super up regularly, which came in super handy in Prison of Elders and similar activities where you were both fighting a bunch of stuff and also getting additional credit for using your super. Other than that I was not a huge fan of the weapon, but I liked it because it filled a specific niche in my armory.

What were some of the weapons that you miss from Destiny 1? I largely excluded the elemental swords because I would have had to have included all three of them… because they were all great in their own way. Drop me a line in the comments below about your favorite Destiny 1 weapon that we have not seen yet in Destiny 2.