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Xur Week Three: 9/29/17

September 29, 2017 by Belghast

Since this is becoming a regular thing I am doing… Happy Xursday! This time around he is located on Io given that it is the flashpoint planet this week. You can find him in the Giant’s Scar area of the planet in a cave off the lefthand side of the path coming from the fast travel location. Once again the mobs seem not to be willing to follow you into that cave so you can duck inside to relative safety. This is going to be the week where we see if Xur really does stick around until the reset, or if that was just a bug since we have had a patch since last week. There was no specific mention of Xur but as is always the case with MMOs… patches often times have a bunch of unannounced changes. Lets get into the item rundown.

Starting off we have the weapon Riskrunner, and for those who played the beta this was the exotic that Warlocks got from Lord Shaxx during the homecoming mission. It is a really unique feeling weapon given that it fires what looks like an eruption of lightning. As far as overall usefulness… it is extremely situational. The special ability Arc Conductor causes you to deal more damage and gain increased arc resistance… upon taking any arc damage. While in this overcharged state, getting kills with the weapon add additional time to the buff. Without this buff the weapon is largely just another legendary tier sub-machine gun and is quite honestly outclassed by weapons like the MIDA Mini-Tool. However if you can somehow be regularly taking arc damage… then you can churn through encounters with this gun and it becomes a formidable beast. Now if you just like the player fantasy of firing a lightning gun… then screw all of this and use it because it just looks badass.

Last weekend I leveled my hunter at least in part to be able to take proper Xursday shots rather than swiping them off the interwebs. As a result I am leading off with the Hunter item this week, the Mechaneer’s Tricksleeves. These are mobility/resistance arms that have the perk Spring-Loaded Mounting which increases the ready time and reload speed of sidearms. These are one of the choices you can make during the main story quest, and I thought they were really limited in their utility. You have to love sidearms an awful lot to spend your exotic slot on an item that improves that one weapon. That said… there are a fair number of really good sidearms in the game like Last Hope that seems to tear people up in the crucible. I personally do not like sidearms at all… but I did pick these up this week simply for the unlock. There is just not a lot more I can say about these… if you love sidearms or you also want the unlock… go for it.

The Titan armor is one that I have gotten several times from exotics… and keep infusing away to increase my power level. That is not due to the fact that it is not a good piece of armor but instead just to play the increasing your level game. For whatever reason I am just not feeling the Sunbreaker Titan as much as I was in Destiny 1, that said… if you do this is an amazing item. Functionally the perk is giving us back “Simmering Flames” from Destiny 1. Sunfire Furnace causes all of your solar abilities to recharge faster while you are sitting on a fully charged super, which in truth I seem to do more often than not because I am looking for the idea time to unleash it. That means more solar grenades and more solar melee abilities which are really the bread and butter of play for me personally. I went ahead and picked this back up because while I had this unlocked it was at 205 light… and I had shards to burn. I might play with it a bit and determine if it is useful enough to start playing more Sunbreaker.

Do you “Gotta Go Fast” and “Faster Faster Fa Fa Fa Fa Faster”? These are a weird item that I have used quite a bit largely because they were the highest light boots I had on my Warlock for a good long while. The perk Strange Protractor causes your sprint to move a heck of a lot faster… like it is noticeably faster. While sprinting it also causes your energy weapons to be automatically reloaded. This again is one of those situationally good items. I found it really useful in the crucible since I tend to mostly use Uriel’s Gift… and it also meant sprint cancelling a reload caused me to get the full reload. If you greatly favor energy weapons or just want to go really fast… then these might be the boots for you. Personally my exotic armor slot goes to Eye of Another World which highlights priority targets and increases the regeneration speed of my melee, grenades and class ability. If these sound like great boots for you however pick them up, or at least get them so you have them unlocked in your collections.

What are your thoughts? Did Xur bring something you really wanted or did I completely miss the special utility of a given item when I talk about them? I’d love to hear your feedback about this weeks offerings and in truth if anyone is actually finding this a useful thing for me to do on Friday mornings.

Racing Juggernauts

September 20, 2017 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of an odd post, but it is something that has been kicking around in my head lately and something that we have discussed a bit on AggroChat. Back in 2015 when I attended Pax South 2015… I walked away with one game on my lips… Gigantic. It was what I felt at the time a fresh take on the whole MOBA genre and the state at which the game was in at the show… I fully expected it to be launching within the next six months. Sure Blizzard had just announced Overwatch a few months earlier… but this was here and playable right now. We scan forward several years… and Gigantic finally launched on July 20th of 2017. It launched into a climate that has Paladins, Smite, Battleborn, and a plethora of other similar games vying for the same eyeballs on the same screens. Most importantly though when Overwatch officially launched on May 24th of 2016 it sucked every last drop of oxygen from the room. Sure there are a ton of differences between each of these games, but in the eyes of the customers… I am not actually sure any of them matter. They all fall into this broad category of cartoony stylistic shooter… and the one that gets the most time on the lips of players… is Overwatch. I’ve not played Gigantic in a long while in part because there is some nonsense of multiple competing versions for Windows… but in truth because that moment passed and I moved on to other things. To be fair I am not playing Overwatch either.

When Dauntless was announced at The Game Awards in December of 2016, I thought it looked really interesting namely because there really isn’t a great PC resident Monster Hunter experience. Sure there is Godeater but it is sorta doing its own thing that is not entirely connected to the Monster Hunter fame. I realize Toukiden also exists but neither has really developed the same sort of following. At Pax South 2017 I got to lay my hands on the game and give it a shot, and while I was completely horrible at it… the experience seemed like something that with time I could get into. However soon I started to see a very painfully similar pattern emerging with this game that I did with Gigantic. At E3 2017 Capcom announced Monster Hunter World and with it for the first time in the franchise PC support. At this point Dauntless was on a clock, they either had to get to market first or would have all of their available oxygen sucked out of the room as well. A few days ago it was announced at the Tokyo Game show that Monster Hunter World would be shipping in all markets on January 26th 2018. While they say the PC version will follow later… this still adds additional pressure to Dauntless to release and firms up the time table of when they have to launch. The game is currently in Closed Beta but has never really had a more firm launch window other than “2017” of which we are starting to run out of months.

For me personally… that time is already over. Once Monster Hunter World was announced to be coming to PC, I for the most part stopped caring that much about Dauntless news. I was going to get my Monster Hunter game on the PC and it was going to come from Capcom and share all of the traits and lore and history of the Monster Hunter franchise as a whole. Dauntless on the other hand has to fight an uphill battle of coming up with a brand new IP and then trying to infuse enough into that world to make it feel alive and exciting and not just a sequence of arenas where you fight boss monsters. Even the monsters themselves are a challenge because they have to come up with a whole slew of brand new creatures with their own mechanics and tactics… whereas Monster Hunter world can draw heavily on fourteen years of experience and fourteen related games worth of monster battles. Basically the oxygen is gone for me personally, but if they hope to get Monster Hunter devotees their clock is ticking down quickly because the moment the actual Monster Hunter is available on PC… a whole lot of the unique gimmick factor of Dauntless goes away. I might be overly grim here, but I watched this all play out for Gigantic and I have a feeling we are just about to see a repeat of that story.

Learning Through Play: Competition

September 8, 2017 by Tamrielo

Consider that these are the cooperative games, the ones in which you are ostensibly working together. They’re structured to create for you an enemy to fight against, and when one isn’t immediately apparent, to create one. Even cooperative games are often focused around creating adversarial relationships, and it’s generally more important that you beat the enemy than help your friends.

What does this teach us?

Well, judging from the obsession with it in storytelling, it teaches us that heroic sacrifices are some kind of ideal, rather than a costly pyrrhic victory. “Go on without me”, the doomed movie hero claims, often attempting to redeem an extended series of flagrantly awful behaviors with a single ostensibly noble act.

It teaches us that the fight is more important than the team— it should come as no surprise that teamplay games such as MOBAs have such incredibly toxic communities– the games themselves incentivize victory over teamwork, to the point where a flagging team member is a target for derision, because they “bringing everyone down”, rather than an opportunity to work together.

It teaches us to identify opponents before identifying allies, and often to distrust allies, who by some quirk of AI or differing tactics or player skill are unreliable unknowns. If there is no opponent, we create one.

Likely half of you are rolling your eyes and saying this is an overreaction; the other half are nodding along. What fascinates me about this kind of thing is that it has very clear parallels elsewhere. There’s a chicken-and-egg argument about whether games are a reflection of real world mindsets or if the real world mindsets are what create games (to wit: why are so many games about violence? is it because we are violent and games are an outlet, or are we encouraged to be more violent and games reflect that taste for violence?). I think this is a false dichotomy– the two feed one another.

I talked with someone years ago who genuinely could not understand why someone would play a singleplayer game. “There are no opponents, you’re just playing against the computer,” he told me, “how does that not get boring?” The idea that you might play a game for some reason other than establishing dominance among other human opponents was entirely out of his comfort zone. That kind of thinking isn’t inherent, it’s learned– he got heavily into MMOs for the PvP and now plays exclusively PvE raids. The hops were fairly straightforward: solo deathmatching -> team deathmatching -> team objective-based PvP -> team objective-based PvP with progression -> team objective-based PvP with progression tied to PvE -> team PvP in parallel with team PvE -> team PvE supported by solo progression.

Each step along his path taught her about some new behavioral pattern, until his behavior changed entirely. Remembering our previous conversation, I pointed him at DayZ, only to hear him tell me that he didn’t like DayZ because it was “too oppositional”. Something of a surprise coming from someone who, only a few years before, suggested that a game wasn’t worthwhile if you weren’t fighting against other humans.

I think the heavily competitive focus of games — be it against other players or against the game itself — also teaches us to define ourselves by how we face opposition. It’s an interesting bit of identity generation, because it goes a layer deeper and teaches us to look for opposition so that we can define ourselves by how we face it.

It’s something I catch myself doing a lot– it’s very easy to see real-world situations as us-vs-them because both “us” and “them” are deeply trained to look for opposing forces. When none exist, they’re created, and you see coalitions disband and groups succumb to infighting.

At the same time, when an opposing force does surface, we come together rapidly and effectively, because it gives us an opportunity to define ourselves.

I wonder, then– what if games taught us to define ourselves in other ways? It’s hard for me not to think of Bioware RPGs here, with the sheer amount of fanfic and fanart inspired by a game that often downplays “fighting the threat” in favor of “hanging out with your friends”. I can’t help but wonder what we might look like as a community if those sorts of games were the majority, not the minority.

Learning Through Play: Competition

September 8, 2017 by Tamrielo

When’s the last time you played a multiplayer game that was purely cooperative? There aren’t many of them. Almost all of the ones I can think of and find also set you and your team against another entity of some form. Oftentimes, as in games like Divinity: Original Sin, Left4Dead, almost all MMOs, and similar, that entity is an explicit opposing force– some great monster or enemy faction or villain of some flavor. In other cases (as in a game like Mansions of Madness, Pandemic, or The Secret World), the opposing entity is more vague, an unknown that you have to give shape to before fighting. Consider that these are the cooperative games, the ones in which you are ostensibly working together. They’re structured to create for you an enemy to fight against, and when one isn’t immediately apparent, to create one. Even cooperative games are often focused around creating adversarial relationships, and it’s generally more important that you beat the enemy than help your friends. What does this teach us? Well, judging from the obsession with it in storytelling, it teaches us that heroic sacrifices are some kind of ideal, rather than a costly pyrrhic victory. “Go on without me”, the doomed movie hero claims, often attempting to redeem an extended series of flagrantly awful behaviors with a single ostensibly noble act. It teaches us that the fight is more important than the team— it should come as no surprise that teamplay games such as MOBAs have such incredibly toxic communities– the games themselves incentivize victory over teamwork, to the point where a flagging team member is a target for derision, because they “bringing everyone down”, rather than an opportunity to work together. It teaches us to identify opponents before identifying allies, and often to distrust allies, who by some quirk of AI or differing tactics or player skill are unreliable unknowns. If there is no opponent, we create one. Likely half of you are rolling your eyes and saying this is an overreaction; the other half are nodding along. What fascinates me about this kind of thing is that it has very clear parallels elsewhere. There’s a chicken-and-egg argument about whether games are a reflection of real world mindsets or if the real world mindsets are what create games (to wit: why are so many games about violence? is it because we are violent and games are an outlet, or are we encouraged to be more violent and games reflect that taste for violence?). I think this is a false dichotomy– the two feed one another. I talked with someone years ago who genuinely could not understand why someone would play a singleplayer game. “There are no opponents, you’re just playing against the computer,” he told me, “how does that not get boring?” The idea that you might play a game for some reason other than establishing dominance among other human opponents was entirely out of his comfort zone. That kind of thinking isn’t inherent, it’s learned– he got heavily into MMOs for the PvP and now plays exclusively PvE raids. The hops were fairly straightforward: solo deathmatching -> team deathmatching -> team objective-based PvP -> team objective-based PvP with progression -> team objective-based PvP with progression tied to PvE -> team PvP in parallel with team PvE -> team PvE supported by solo progression. Each step along his path taught her about some new behavioral pattern, until his behavior changed entirely. Remembering our previous conversation, I pointed him at DayZ, only to hear him tell me that he didn’t like DayZ because it was “too oppositional”. Something of a surprise coming from someone who, only a few years before, suggested that a game wasn’t worthwhile if you weren’t fighting against other humans. I think the heavily competitive focus of games — be it against other players or against the game itself — also teaches us to define ourselves by how we face opposition. It’s an interesting bit of identity generation, because it goes a layer deeper and teaches us to look for opposition so that we can define ourselves by how we face it. It’s something I catch myself doing a lot– it’s very easy to see real-world situations as us-vs-them because both “us” and “them” are deeply trained to look for opposing forces. When none exist, they’re created, and you see coalitions disband and groups succumb to infighting. At the same time, when an opposing force does surface, we come together rapidly and effectively, because it gives us an opportunity to define ourselves. I wonder, then– what if games taught us to define ourselves in other ways? It’s hard for me not to think of Bioware RPGs here, with the sheer amount of fanfic and fanart inspired by a game that often downplays “fighting the threat” in favor of “hanging out with your friends”. I can’t help but wonder what we might look like as a community if those sorts of games were the majority, not the minority.