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  • Really enjoying Dragon Age: Inquisition; Not so much for Divinity: Original Sin

    These two games with three-word names with colons in the middle are RPGs I bought last week on sale. both are set in fantasy worlds where you fight baddies using swords and magic. Both have a player character and companions to help the fight. Both have made up BS names for bad magic stuff, like the “fade” or “source.” Both also have seemingly high production value and look pretty good. But the combat is very different, and that makes all the difference for me.

    Divinity: Original Sin is an old school-looking game, with isometric views, but of a real 3D environment, so the camera angle, position, and zoom can be changed if desired. The game world looks good and the story seems about average. The problem is that it is way old school in the combat as well. The combat is turn based, so everything must be micromanaged. Every attack, every movement, every healing potion, all of it. I guess I’ve been spoiled since Dragon Age: Origins where your companions had AI and rules that you could make and change, so they could participate in the combat productively and without micromanagement. Sure, you could micromanage if you wanted, but it wasn’t required. Because I can’t be bothered with this level of micromanagement at my advanced age (and I wouldn’t have bothered much when I was younger as well), Divinity: Original Sin will be put on the back burner. I won’t be asking Steam for a refund, because it isn’t the game developer’s fault that I bought a good game that I just don’t like.

    Dragon Age: Inquisition, on the other hand, is very compelling and good fun. The combat system is significantly simplified from the Dragon Age: Origins rule making, but it works very well and I rarely have to micromanage. My biggest problem was with the keyboard and mouse control (I’m playing on PC). The right button view controls were awful, and when you’re trying to close a fade rift that’s above you (and all of them are), getting a view on it to be able to affect it was a real challenge. Luckily, the game was also designed for controller support, and that works fine. The views and movement work great, and I can still pause the action (called “Tactical View” now) to select targets or issue commands. The biggest problem is that they’ve created a beautiful world that is much more open than in any of the previous games, but I’m usually so busy looking with a slight downward angle that I don’t get to take in its beauty.

    The other problem I have with DAI (and with another EA game, Titanfall) is that it is really stupid about resolution settings with my 4K monitor. My graphics card isn’t powerful enough to play smoothly at 4K, but is great for 1080p. So when I set 1080p/60 in the game, the game (both DAI and Titanfall, in this case) decides that I really must have meant 1080p/24 and sets the monitor for that. Well that’s a disaster in Titanfall, but even DAI looks jerky and the voice sync goes out of whack at 24 frames per second. So I have to manually set the resolution to 1080p/60 then start the game. Titanfall would let me play at 1080p/120 with no problem (yes, the monitor supports 120 Hz at 1080 resolution), but DAI is very confused by that and refuses to go into full screen mode.

    So despite the technical glitches, Dragon Age: Inquisition is great and has at least partly broken my obsession with Destiny. Divinity: Original Sin looks like a neat game, but the combat system isn’t my cup of tea.

  • A couple of relaxing evenings playing Destiny

    After last week’s rush to experience all the new things in Destiny’s second DLC expansion, I’ve been taking it easy this week, which means I’m more relaxed and less stressed while playing.

    For the last two nights, I’ve been playing with a friend from LOTRO (and her husband one of the evenings). We’ve just been doing bounties and patrol missions and generally killing the heck out of the roving bands of “wolves.”

    This kind of play is what makes Destiny fun for me. Sure it’s great to do the raids and such, but in those activities, there’s a lot of pressure to be good and not screw up. In the final stages of both raids, a mistake by one person can doom the whole team to have to try again. So, while those activities are fun and sometimes rewarding, they are stressful and sometimes take a long time.

    Running missions with friends, however, is pretty easy, very low stress, and generally more fun. Mistakes tend not to cause much trouble for others, so it is okay to experiment with new gear and techniques, and even to mess around a bit and just punch everything to death, for example (particularly if you’re a Titan and need to punch things).

    In short, playing Destiny with friends while doing low key, comfortable missions is Destiny at its most fun!

  • Hits and Misses in Destiny’s House of Wolves Expansion

    I played WAY too much Destiny over the last week because of the new House of Wolves expansion. In some ways, HoW has revitalized the game. In other ways, it has made it more depressing. First the good:

    While HoW doesn’t have a raid, it adds new (and quite fun) story missions, though now that I’ve done them with all three characters, I can’t imagine actually wanting to complete them again. On the other hand, they were all better than the ones from Destiny’s first expansion, which Bungie tried to get us to repeat every day via the daily mission rewards.

    HoW also adds a new strike, which is pretty good and quite difficult, particularly as the Nightfall strike (where everything is much tougher and if the entire fireteam wipes, it dumps us back to orbit). Notice I said “us” in that last sentence – my fireteam wiped several times, including once at the end when the boss had just a sliver of health left. Darn…

    HoW has two new types of cooperative game play: Prison of Elders and Trials of Osiris. PoE pits a 3-person fireteam against waves of ever-harder enemies, but can give nifty loot if you survive. ToO is PvP and I haven’t tried it, so I can’t comment on it other than saying it sounds hard and very unforgiving.

    I have done PoE a few times, and it is a mixed bag. There is matchmaking at level 28, so you can always find people to play with. On the other hand, they are all better than me. I came in with the lowest number of kills in all the rounds that I played, sometimes by a lot. This is depressing, since I felt that I was always contributing and making kills, reviving others, etc., but when all it shows is that kills stat, then it looks like I’m being carried. Maybe I am, but it doesn’t feel that way at the time, so I’m pretty annoyed about this.

    The other issue with PoE is that you need a key to get the good loot. We all got a key for finishing the story missions, but the rest must be “farmed” by killing “wolves” bands out in the wild on Earth, Moon, and Venus and looting the chests after they are defeated (often speeding away to re-loot the chest if there’s time). So I’ve looted a lot of chests and have yet to get a key. Some of my PSN peeps have managed to get several, and there are always groups in the Skywatch on Earth waiting for the wolves to spawn. It’s almost back to the bad old days of the loot cave – unless you waste a lot of time farming, you don’t get the good loot.

    Which brings me to the bad stuff (in my opinion). All our gear got invalidated by the new expansion, but not as badly as with the first expansion. Now we can upgrade our stuff to the current levels if we have certain very rare components. I’ve already upgraded several of my exotic weapons and armor, so one of my characters can be level 33 (max is 34) and all of them have one or two fully leveled guns.

    So what does all this mean? Well, to paraphrase Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, it’s all about the numbers. We need to play harder missions to get better gear so we can play harder missions and get better gear. This was Yahtzee’s complaint about World of Warcraft, but is true about most MMOs, and particularly Destiny now. The materials needed to upgrade gear is almost impossible to get unless you play the highest level cooperative Prison of Elders missions, so those of us that aren’t very good or aren’t part of the “in crowd” will be left farther and farther behind.

    Speaking of which – the raids needed fireteams of 6, so it was fairly often that you’d run into someone trying to put together a raid run, so even I could run the raids reasonably often. PoE will be a different story, since it is only 3 people. And the missions are hard enough that it won’t be easy to carry an under-levelled or under-skilled player. So I think PoE may actually lead to more frustration and disappointment.

    I haven’t mentioned Bungie’s new emphasis on PvP with better daily rewards as well as the new weekly bounty system, but these seem to be improvements. But overall, while I like the gameplay improvements in HoW, I am disappointed in many other parts of it, including the race to get better gear for the sake of getting better gear. Since I just bought Bloodborne, we’ll see how much hold Destiny retains over me.

  • Fretting about what games to play!

    I have an odd problem, though probably not so unusual these days when people have Steam libraries that number in the hundreds of games as well as consoles full of PS+ and Games with Gold “freebies”: I can’t find a game that I want to play.

    I’m still playing Destiny more than is healthy, and I sometimes dip into LOTRO and Star Trek Online, all of which I enjoy, but I feel like I want something different. I don’t think I want another MMORPG, and if I did, I have Guild Wars 2, but never got into it. No, what I really want is a space game.

    Some of this came about because Elite: Dangerous became available on Steam, so that got me thinking about the genre. I love the X games from Egosoft, from X2 through the various incarnations of X3. I bought X: Rebirth some time ago, but just couldn’t get into it. I started it again last week, since many patches and expansions have claimed to have “fixed” and improved the game. As far as I can tell, nope. X: Rebirth’s universe seems at once more crowded, yet more tedious than those of the other X games. Travel is done via space highways, which seems restrictive compared to the time-accelerating travel mechanism in the other games. I presume they want to make the universe more connected and continuous than before, but so far, I have the opposite impression. And since stations are now massive conglomerations of modules, you have to hunt for places to dock rather than just approaching the station and asking to dock. Even after I’ve visited a station, finding the docking areas is still a huge pain. Maybe it gets better when I add more gear to the ship, but so far, the game remains almost unplayable.

    So looking through my enormous Steam library, I saw that I had bought Galaxy on Fire 2 HD when it was on sale some time ago. I also have it on my iPad, but the controls were pretty bad, so I hoped the controls and graphics would be better on my PC. Well sort of, but it is still a tedious and not fun game. It is basically a space dogfighter with little to no aim assist, with a little bit of trading and mining thrown in. In essence, not much fun. And, frankly, that’s what I’m worried Elite: Dangerous will be like. I would hate to spend $60 for a game that is by all  accounts half baked and have it not be much fun either. The reviews are suggesting that I’d like it, but who knows?

    So for a change of pace, I figured I’d try Baldur’s Gate 2 EE that I also bought on sale on Steam. I never played BG2, but I loved Neverwinter Nights, so I figured it would be good. Well, no, I don’t have time to manage the spells and attacks for a whole party through a tedious interface. In Dragon Age Origins, your party members act appropriately for the role you assigned, but in BG2, they seem pretty useless unless you micromanage them. Well, since computers are better at tedious micromanaging than I am, I think the computer should have done more.

    So I will not be continuing with BG2 or GoF2 since they are bad at letting the computer do things it should be doing. I may end up giving X: Rebirth another shot, but I don’t think I can justify $60 for Elite: Dangerous when I could hate it.

    Oh well, Destiny is calling, as always.

  • Some success in Destiny’s Iron Banner tournament

    I’m not very good at Player versus Player (PvP) gaming. The only time I was pretty good at it was back in the Unreal and Unreal Tournament days. These days, I avoid PvP, except Destiny won’t let you get away with that. First, three of the five exotic bounties (that give nifty exotic weapons: Thorn, Bad Juju, and Invective) require Crucible (PvP) play, with various restrictions in some cases (void kills, etc.). Second, the Iron Banner tournament is a great way to get armor that can help me max out my character level.

    So while I’ve managed to muddle my way through the Crucible to get 3 Thorns, 3 Invectives, and 3 Bad Jujus, I’ve never had any interest in playing Iron Banner. First, Iron Banner rank resets each time it comes around. Second, a character needs to be rank 3 before anything good is available. Finally, each armor piece or weapon is very expensive. So while I’ve been able to get enough raid gear to get my Warlock to level 32, both my Hunter and Titan are languishing at 31. I thought the solution would be to put my Titan through the Iron Banner to get the chest armor and boots that are the only armor pieces available this time.

    So I started midweek and quickly made rank 1. Then I got sick and skipped a day or two. When I returned, I made it to rank 2, but rank 3 took a while. At ranks 1 and 2, I bought the emblem and shader that boost Iron Banner reward points, so that helped, and, of course, I bought the ever-increasing  buff every day from Lord Saladin. Finally on Saturday I made it to rank 4 and could buy the armor pieces and one of the guns (the other takes rank 5, but I don’t want it anyway). The problem was/is that everything is very expensive, so I’ve been grinding out glimmer so I can afford the bits that I want. And while grinding in Destiny is pretty fun, it can get tedious, so I think the Iron Banner should give glimmer as rewards to so we don’t have to grind so much!

    So how did I do? Not great, especially when people were watching. When I was alone and randomly matched, I came in at the top of the leader board a couple of times (one for a win and one for a loss), but usually was in the middle. But when I was teamed with my raid buddies (well, they’re not really my buddies, but they sometimes let me tag along), I was consistently near or at the bottom of the list. One way to view it is that they are so good that they clearly outshined me, and to some extent, that is true, but the more reasonable explanation is that I did poorly. I don’t know if I got too aggressive, or what, but it was embarrassing.

    Even more embarrassing was that after we lost a match yesterday, I got a network error that dumped me to orbit and out of party chat, so they probably thought I rage quit. I was unable to rejoin the party chat because of a nasty little bug in the system software: if there are 2 party chats with the same name, joining the one I wanted always put me in the other one. Damn.

    The ironic ending to all of it is that I was talked into doing the Crota raid in hard mode on Friday night, so I took my Titan in for the first time (both my Warlock and Hunter have finished it a few times). We had a great time and I got a raid helmet and boots, so I didn’t really need the Iron Banner gear I worked so hard to get. Oh well…

  • Tried to PUG the Destiny Weekly Strike

    A couple days ago, when few of my PSN friends were online and the ones what were playing Destiny were busy, I tried to PUG the Weekly Strike at the hardest level. For those that don’t play MMOs, a PUG is a “pick up group,” essentially some randoms that you play a mission with. Since the Weekly Strike now has matchmaking, it is easy to group up with randoms to do it.

    It didn’t work out well. This week’s Weekly has void burn, which means those damn Vex Minotaurs and some of the Hobgoblins hit really hard. I loaded up with void weapons, including Atheon’s Epilogue, a fast shooting, but light hitting auto rifle, a void sniper (I think the Vault of Glass one, but I don’t remember), and a void machine gun. I think one of the randoms I was grouped with had the Word of Crota, a void hand cannon, because he was hitting the enemy hard. The other guy didn’t seem to have anything void, so he was using Ice Breaker, which does Solar damage.

    Because I was all voided up, I was overconfident and did a bit too much hotdogging, and died a lot. Sadly, I tended to die in unfortunate places were I was hard to revive (more precisely, the attempted reviver tended to die while trying to get to me). The hand cannon guy also died a fair bit, though often in more accessible places. When the poor third guy would try to rescue us, he’d die and we’d have to start the area over.

    This clearly wasn’t an ideal arrangement, and none of us were in the fireteam chat channel (which was good, because they’d be swearing at me for getting killed so far away from them). In this challenging strike (my least favorite of the ones in the weekly rotation), communication is key, and we failed. Eventually, I got tired of disappointing my poor group, so I left. I don’t know whether the other two left also or they waited for another player to join, but I kind of feel bad about not being very good. Oh well…

  • Destiny Flawed Raider

    So there is an achievement in Destiny called “Flawless Raider,” which is earned when all members of your fireteam complete a raid without dying. This is not a thing that I ever aspire to do, because I tend to die a lot. That being said, I have done the raids a few times. The first time I went through the Vault of Glass (the first raid), we made it all the way through, but couldn’t kill Atheon, the final boss. We tried lots of times, and I learned a whole lot, including that if I had to, I could carry the relic after being teleported, but I wasn’t the best at it.

    The issue with Destiny’s raids is that they require everyone to not screw up. In the Vault of Glass, 3 people are teleported to either a past or a future version of the vault, filled with nasty enemies. Even worse, glowing balls called Oracles spawn, and, if they are not killed quickly enough, everyone dies and it’s back to the checkpoint. So if someone dies after being teleported, it can spell doom. Those left unteleported need to kill a bunch of enemies and stand in a certain spot to open the gate to allow the others to get back. If they fail, everyone dies. Falls and enemies can kill players as well, so it is a challenge. And in hard mode, you can’t even revive a downed teammate.

    The new Raid is, if anything, worse. Instead of relying on 3 people at a time, the success depends on one sword carrier who must whack Crota with a sword. Sure, the others have to take down Crota’s shield, kill various enemies, stop pairs of Hive knights that are shooting deadly weapons down on everyone, etc. If anyone dies, there is a new mechanic called the Oversoul that everyone else must attack or else everyone dies. So if the sword carrier dies, it is very bad news, but if even one of the others dies, killing the Oversoul is tough. In general, if someone dies, we all just get wiped by the Oversoul and start again.

    So the group I sometimes play with have the Vault of Glass down to a science. Some time ago, I got invited and we finished it one normal mode. Then a few weeks ago, I went with them and finished it on hard mode  on all my characters. I ended up with a few nice goodies, but the raid armor is no longer very good, since the DLC bumped the levels up.

    Still, Crota tasked me. I tried once with a group that was mostly not the folks I play with regularly, but we tried for hours and couldn’t beat Crota. We mostly knew what to do, but always someone made a mistake and we wiped. Once or twice, we even managed to kill the Oversoul so we could continue, but that was a terrible waste of precious ammo.

    So last Thursday night, the group I sometimes play with invited me for a normal mode Crota’s End raid. We made it through and killed the bugger! Yay! And my Hunter, who didn’t have a tracking rocket launcher got the Hunger of Crota which does track, so I was happy. Finishing a raid, even in normal mode, is quite an accomplishment for me!

    Then on Friday night, the group invited me again, but for hard mode this time. My Warlock couldn’t quite get to level 32, but was close (limited only by 1 or 2 Radiant Shards), so I brought him along. Despite a few glitches, mistakes, and problems, we got it, and I got the raid scout rifle, which I like quite a bit! Then the group decided we needed to go kill Atheon in hard mode on all three of our characters. So while we needed a few tries to kill him, we took down Atheon 3 times in about an hour (from the Gatekeeper checkpoint, so we didn’t do the entire raid).

    Because of all this, I went from having exactly one primary weapon that caused elemental damage (Vision of Confluence – a great scout rifle) to 8 or so in the space of a week. I got an auto rifle and 2 pulse rifles from the Crota raid, as well as a couple of the raid auto rifles and pulse rifles from the Vault of Glass.

    That being said, I didn’t get the holy grail of guns, the Vex Mythoclast, nor have I got the Black Hammer sniper from Crota. So one of these days, I suppose I’ll have to try again to complete these raids. While Destiny’s raids are stressful and challenging, it feels great to finish them!

  • Finally arrived at Dol Amroth in LOTRO

    After a bit of questing in West Gondor, my Lore Master finally made it to the city of Dol Amroth in LOTRO. The city looks great with tremendous detailing on the stonework and the doors. Swans and statues of swans are present everywhere. The city has a number of districts, and you are given a quest by a grumpy guard to visit all of them (I say the guard is grumpy, because he didn’t have nice things to say about elves, the race of my LM). When I got to the dock area, I was given a couple of quests regarding fishing. So while I was sent off to collect fish and to fish from a pier, nobody even mentioned the Corsair ship blocking the harbor entrance, nor the Umbar fleet in the surrounding waters. Nope, far more important for me to collect crates of fish than to worry about the blockade…

    Other areas of the city have similar nuisance quests, yet there are some serious quests, as well. There is a quest line to join the city guard, which seems like a lot of work, but I’ll do it, most likely. Overall, Dol Amroth seems like it will be an okay place to stop and quest for a while.

    The amenities are all present, but somewhat spread out and inconvenient. The LOTRO designers made such brilliant crafting halls in Forlaw and especially Aldburg, where crafting stations, vault keeper, auctioneer, and forge/relic master existed in a small, convenient space, yet here they are spread over a wide area and in different buildings, etc. So not great for crafting, but I can always jump to Aldburg when I need crafting time.

    Dol Amroth in LOTRO’s West Gondor is a treat and looks so good it isn’t to be missed. I’m glad I made it.

  • Getting into LOTRO again

    I’ve been trying to break my Destiny addition, or at least tone it down to just a habit, so I can play other games. I bought Gat out of Hell (along with Saints Row IV) for PS4 and have played that a bit. I have many other games that need playing, too, but the pull of Destiny is too strong. Like an abusive relationship, Destiny mistreats its players and abuses them, then, occasionally, gives us a neat gun or pieces of armor, and all is forgiven. While I’m not trying to equate a game with spouse beating, I wonder if the mental processes may be a little similar, since so many of us keep coming back for more abuse with no guarantee of good rewards.

    I’ve been playing more LOTRO lately, after MONTHS away. I’ve been logging in to LOTRO once a month to pay my housing upkeep, usually a day or two after my house and kinship house gets locked because my prior payments ran out. So I’d pay to unlock the houses and then pay another month in advance, then not touch it again. Well that’s changed, and now I’m back playing.

    My highest level character, a Lore-Master, was already in Western Gondor, and, at level 99, was able to take on most of the enemies there. I still haven’t made it all the way to Dol Amroth yet, but I’m enjoying the area and all the quests and killing the Corsair invaders.

    A few days ago, I took the “swift horse” to the Dead Marches, which was pretty neat. The Dead Marshes are very well done and look great. I ran into a “warband” solo hunter guy, who promptly kicked my squishy LM butt. I saw in yesterday’s patch notes that he’s been made a little easier to kill, but I didn’t run into him last night before I left the Dead Marshes. While the Dead Marshes area is neat, and the quests are pretty good, including the flashback one involving Frodo and Sam, getting around is a terrible slog. We can’t use mounts in the Dead Marshes, so travel is slow. And there isn’t a milestone at the Gondorian guy’s camp, so we can’t zip back when our quests are done. So while I liked the Dead Marshes sequence, it’s a bit too much work for a game, and that makes it less fun than I’d like.

    Now that I’m back in West Gondor, I’ll continue on to Dol Amroth and wherever else my Middle Earth adventures take me.

     

  • Destiny’s Dark Below DLC puts tension back into the game

    While Destiny’s new DLC, The Dark Below, has created a lot of controversy (the Reddit forums are aflame with burning hatred, whiners, apologists, etc.), I pre-ordered it anyway (because I enjoy the game, even though it is infuriating). I started it last night on my level 29 Warlock. The first missions, given to us by Eris, a new and creepy NPC, took us mostly to places we’ve been, often in reverse of the way we normally go, but because of Crota’s minions (the Hive), the areas are newly dangerous. These new missions are not quite more of the same. Instead, they are tense and scary and quite challenging. The reward of a fancy new gun is nice, too. That gun, which I’m told will be essential in the Strike, has become my new favorite gun, largely because of the sound it makes as it vaporizes Hive baddies.

    There’s no sign of Dinklebot in the new missions. Either he was unavailable, embarrassed by the scorn for his performance, or wanted too much money, so we get someone else. Eris is kinda creepy and I don’t trust her. Sure, I’ll do her missions, but I wouldn’t give her the keys to the apartment, if you know what I mean. She’s got darkness oozing out of her mask, so she’s not fully on the side of the light (and we don’t really know what happened to her and her fireteam). But she’s more generous than the damn Gyptarch (Cryptarch), because she just gave me a nice gun as a reward, rather than giving me a useless piece of class armor for another class like the Gyptarch always does. So I won’t throw her off the tower for the moment.

    In short, the DLC re-invigorates the game, at least for a while, and is worth getting if you like Destiny.