TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: Shooter

  • I really wasn’t going to buy Destiny 2 for PC…

    I played Destiny and Destiny 2 on PS4, but as we know, the console versions of Destiny 2 have been pretty much abandoned by disgruntled players. Lots of YouTubers have switched to the PC version and sung its praises, particularly with the weapon behavior, but even that it makes you feel more powerful in the Crucible (PVP matches). The fact that console Destiny 2 prices have dropped like a rock, while the PC version’s prices remained steady helped boost the conclusion that the PC version is good, thus high demand still, while the poor console versions were not flying off the shelves.

    I downloaded the trial version of Destiny 2 last night and liked it. It looks quite good on my 3440×1440 wide-screen monitor driven by a GTX 970. The mouse control is precise and accurate, so even hand cannons are worthwhile now. Overall, it was good. But I haven’t played a WASD-control scheme PC shooter in ages. Even when I do play PC shooters, I use a controller. All the damn buttons needed by Destiny 2 are somewhat annoying, but the mouse clicking may be the thing that really drove me nuts. My hand has barely recovered from playing Diablo 3 on PC a few years ago, but now Destiny 2 needs lots of clicking. Even worse, aiming down sights requires holding a right click. After playing for a couple hours, my right-click finger could feel it.

    Sure, I know I could hook up a controller, but then it’d be much like the PS4 version, so I wouldn’t get the benefit of the smooth mouse aiming. I may try that sometime, but it seems a waste.

    So this morning, I decided that I wouldn’t buy Destiny 2 for PC, because I didn’t want to pay so much and have to deal with a control scheme that may induce carpal tunnel or some other repetitive stress injury. And then Amazon put the damn thing on sale for $26… So I bought it.

    See you in Destiny 2 PC, I suppose.

  • Enjoyed the Titanfall 2 single player campaign

    I recently finished Titanfall 2’s single player campaign. It isn’t too long, but it is well done, fun, and hits you right in the feels. The story holds together with a fair bit of pilot (out of the Titan) action as well as some really fun Titan-on-Titan battles, and a Titan boss fight at the end of each chapter.

    The checkpoints are pretty frequent (with exceptions, below), so even if you make a mistake and die, you’ll be back in the action very quickly. In “normal” difficulty, the battles aren’t too tough, and since my goal was to experience the story, normal mode was good enough for me.

    The mechanics and controls are very intuitive and convenient, so the game felt very comfortable (I played the original Titanfall on PC and, later, Xbox One, but am now playing on PS4, and it works fine). The graphics are pretty good, as is the sound and voice acting (though everyone has a South African accent, which is somewhat amusing – I didn’t expect South Africa to be the first to colonize other planets, though perhaps Elon Musk had something to do with that). There are some very interesting game mechanics in the middle of the story that I won’t spoil, but they’re pretty awesome and lead to some nifty puzzles.

    There are some nifty collection parts to the missions too. Most areas have some pilot helmets hidden around them, so collecting them gives a nice sense of accomplishment (though I didn’t prioritize it, so didn’t always collect all of them). Some of the helmets are pretty obvious and easy to get, while some I stumbled upon by accident, and a few were visible, but in areas I had no idea how to get to.

    My only complaint is that some of the wall-jumping puzzle sections are incredibly frustrating, and there are no checkpoints in the middle, so I had to start over (and over and over and over…). Two in particular were really annoying. I knew exactly what I had to do, but getting the timing, jumps, and speed right can be a challenge. After making seemingly endless (but probably 25) attempts on one, I even tried lowering the difficulty to easy, but that doesn’t seem to affect the wall running difficultly. Eventually I got it by watching people do it on YouTube and tried to exactly follow their path.

    The campaign for Titanfall 2 is good fun, pretty challenging, and well worth it. Then I did just a taste of the multiplayer, and that was fun too (though I was pretty bad at it). Well worth getting!

  • Lack of gear diversity in Destiny makes it a chore to play

    How can I possibly say there is lack of gear diversity on Destiny, when there are hundreds of items in each category, more than anyone can possibly know, and all of our vaults and gear slots are completely full? Well, I think the current light level scheme and rewards mechanism are forcing us into using just a few guns and equipment pieces, and this lack of choice is annoying and tedious.

    The problem is twofold:

    1. Rewards drop based on your current light level, not the highest light you can be nor on the highest light item in that category in your inventory.
    2. Therefore, you have to always equip your highest light items at all times, thus neglecting gear that would be good (or at least worth trying), but it is a lower light level.

    So this is a different lack of diversity from when everyone was using Thorn and The Last Word in PvP and Ice Breaker and Fatebringer in PvE. Now the entire community isn’t forced into using the same guns, but each individual is. Sure, if you do the raid enough times, you might be able to infuse some of those lower light guns you’re interested in, but since we haven’t used them, we don’t know if it is worth it.

    So I can be 398 on my Warlock, and 397 on both Hunter and Titan, and I’ve been noticing this during this week’s Iron Banner. I started off around 390 on all 3 characters, but had some reasonable guns at that light level. As I get new drops, I tended to use the higher light drops to infuse my known good guns, thus (a) not being able to try out the dropped guns, and (b) leaving others far behind, thus leading to a lack of diversity in my choices. If I wanted to switch to an auto rifle rather than my Clever Dragon pulse rifle, too bad, I don’t have one anywhere near my light level. In other words, I felt forced to use the same guns over and over, and while that worked, I would have preferred more choice.

    How to fix it? There are many ways:

    • The Division’s gear score is one way, and since they don’t have gear XP, it is easy to swap stuff around to try out different loadouts.
    • Make loot drops take into account the maximum light of the character, not just the currently equipped light level
    • Even better, make loot drops look at the maximum light within the category of the drop. So if I have a 395 light primary gun and a primary drops, it would be higher than 395, even if I was being held back by the ghost and artifact. (And no, my ghost and artifacts are pretty good and not holding me back, plus I know how to get then in the Archon’s Forge.)

    So while I’m disappointed at being almost forced to use the same loadout over and over again and am not able to experiment as freely as I’d like, Destiny is still kinda fun and worth playing occasionally.

  • My luckiest Destiny Crucible match ever

    After I got all my Guardians to Iron Banner rank 5, I continued playing so I could keep getting that phat lewt Destiny was handing out (sometimes). Since I was just messing around, I didn’t have the pressure to win, which may have helped with my luckiest match. I was stealing kills (not on purpose) and having lots of good luck, resulting in my best K/D ever. It probably didn’t hurt that I had a full-auto Hawksaw as my primary gun and the sweet Lord of Wolves as my secondary (I can’t emphasize how much fun Lord of Wolves is). I realize this isn’t great by other players’ standards, but I was happy to have done better than usual.

  • The Division looks great, but they really dropped the ball here

    I like Tom Clancy’s The Division(TM) (and, yes, that’s the last time in this post that I’ll use the whole name), and I think it looks really good. The city is modeled and textured very well, and the guns and gear are lovingly rendered (especially the purple beanie and the stylish slouchie, whatever that means). But sometimes, the devs got a little lazy and used a lot of copy and paste. An example is the “Fashion” store in the video below. All the clothing is the same (and ugly as sin). Sure, it is good to reuse textures and art assets, but it’s like they’re not even trying. You can’t tell me there wouldn’t be a little black dress or a red sparkly dress in a fashion store in NYC. If this were just a random spot I wandered into, it might be okay, but we need to go into these stores to get crafting materials, so it is an integral part of the game. C’mon The Division folks, try harder.

  • Disappointing night in The Division. Going back to Witcher 3

    I had a decidedly un-fun night in The Division, so I rage quit and went back to playing Witcher 3. The first problems were glitches, while the final straw was people.

    After being unable to get to Manhattan on Monday night due to Ubisoft’s servers being melted into puddles of goo, when I started the game last night, I was stuck in Brooklyn without any obvious way out. The missions were all done, so there were no pointers to get me out of the map. Luckily, I found a guide on YouTube that showed the way to go through the streets to activate the final cut scene (and why did that Osprey blow up, anyway?) and get me moved on to Manhattan. So that was the first glitch, but not the most annoying.

    Next, I set up my Base of Operations and started the first mission in Madison Square Garden. Then I got bitten by a bug that also bit me in the beta and has obviously not been fixed: I got glitched into a wall. In this case, as I was evading some enemies, I glitched inside a wall and furniture. No movement I did could get me out, so the baddies walked right up and killed me. In the beta, I glitched into a column in a subway station, and that state persited even after reloading the game (luckily I had grenades so I could kill myself and respawn). So the night started on a negative and got worse.

    Then a friend and someone else joined me in the game, and we quickly proceeded to start the second mission (one that wasn’t in either beta). This was a pretty hard mission, but we were going along pretty well. Then the other guy separated from us to do who knows what, and he was higher level, so he was practically carrying the other two of us through the mission. So my friend and I started dying, then my friend went AFK for quite a while. There was no communications during this time. so I had no idea why everyone abandoned me. So I punched out of the group, decided I wasn’t having fun, quit the game, and went and played Witcher 3 on my PC.

    I presume I’ll try The Division again sometime soon, but I’m pretty sick of it at the moment.

  • Getting towards endgame in Fallout 4 and I’m not exactly pleased

    This post contains spoilers for Fallout 4, though because I haven’t finished the game, it doesn’t contain endgame spoilers. If you don’t want spoilers, go back to Twitter and read about Blade and Soul and its boob physics.

    I have been really enjoying Fallout 4, but I think I’m getting near the end. I’ve spent the game recruiting settlements to the Minutemen, grabbing Technical Documents and Viable Blood Samples for the Brotherhood of Steel, killing synth enemies of the Railroad, and, in general, hating the Institute for kidnapping my son and killing my wife. Now that I’ve finally made my way into the Institute, I think they’re a bunch of misguided dopes that need to be stopped, but not necessarily to all die. Unfortunately, based on the way I see the upcoming conflict, they and perhaps some of my other current allies are going to have to be killed.

    It looks to me that the game isn’t going to give me a way to make peace between all the factions. Hell, I’m the General of the Minutemen, I hang out with the leader of the Railroad, I am the father of Father of the Institute (there was a helluva spoiler, so don’t say I didn’t warn you), and the Brotherhood of Steel likes the cut of my jib. If anyone could preserve the peace and make all factions get along, it would be me. But as far as I can tell, I’m going to be forced to choose a faction, and that will make me some enemies. Already, both the BoS and Railroad are a little pissed that I chose to enter the Institute with the help of the Minutemen. I’ve been asked to undertake missions against the Railroad for the Institute. The Battle at Bunker Hill had me going in with an Institute tough guy to recover some synths from the Railroad that was trying to hide and protect them. This turned into a huge battle between the BoS, the Railroad, and the Institute with lots of deadies and lots of loot to be collected. I managed to stay neutral by not shooting anyone, so I haven’t ruined my reputation with the factions yet, but clearly I didn’t like to go up directly against the Railroad and BoS.

    In the long run, I’m going to have to betray the Institute, since I think they are the worst of the bunch. That dick at the head of the BoS may make me go up against them too. So all in all, I’m not happy that the game is forcing my hand to make war, when I could be a peace maker..

  • Enjoying the Heck out of Fallout 4

    Since I last wrote, I played a lot of Destiny. I would even say too much Destiny, with the terrific Sparrow Racing League (getting all 3 characters a Class S license, but never getting any 320 gear), followed by Iron Banner where I got all 3 characters to rank 5. And that’s pretty much the last Destiny I played (other than getting the nifty Warlock helmet from Xur this weekend).

    I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 4 and enjoying it quite a bit. I loved Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and I’m enjoying this just as much. The combat is pretty good as are most of the missions. One of the things I most appreciate about Fallout 4 is the writing. I love finding notes and holotapes from people that survived the war but were then trying to find each other or get home. Some of the stories are quite convincing and moving. The developers didn’t need to add so much flavor to the wasteland, but I’m sure glad they did.

    I mostly like the four factions (though I have not met the Institute yet – more below), though some of the missions get a little tedious. Some of the escort missions from the Brotherhood of Steel are annoying, because the escortee tends to like running up to Deathclaws and the like. [Spoiler alert – don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want a minor spoiler.] While looking at the Fallout 4 Wiki, which is a good idea to make sure I don’t miss anything in the buildings I explore, I saw evidence that in the endgame, the factions will turn hostile to each other and, for example, try to attach the Prydwen, the BoS’ airship. I’m disappointed that I’ll be forced to make a choice to attack or protect one of the factions if I want to see the endgame content. I’m pretty happy being the General of the Minutemen, a Knight of the Brotherhood of Steel, and a Railroad operative. Having to choose and making enemies isn’t something I’m looking forward to.

    I like the voice acting quite a bit, especially Tim Russ (Star Trek’s Tuvok) as the captain of the Prydwen. Some of the NPCs, especially the guards on Diamond City, have too limited a phrase list, so it gets a bit tedious. It’s almost as bad as the “arrow to the knee” of Skyrim. But overall, the voice acting and behavior of the NPCs and the player’s companions is good and convincing. The background stories are well done too, though I heard Cait’s story last night and it was quite disturbing and sad.

    One of the things I don’t like about Bethesda games, and this one is no exception, is that enemies attack on sight, even if I am so much higher level that they are but gnats to be squashed. I remember in Oblivion when I was the Champion of Cyrodil and had braved Oblivion, but stupid bandits would attack me everywhere I went. So tedious. LOTRO has a nice system where if you’re several levels above the enemies, you can walk through and they don’t attack unless you attack them. Freelancer, from way back when, had a neat system where you could hear the radio chatter from other pilots, and I remember a bunch of baddies scanning me and saying “Nope, not gonna mess with that guy” or something similar, followed by them steering away. Why a modern game can’t do such things at least as well, I have no idea.

     

  • Started the Destiny King’s Fall Raid on Hard Mode

    Last night, thanks to a great bunch of Guardians, I managed to take my roughly 300 light level Titan in the hard mode raid in Destiny. While I was clearly the weakest player, we managed to do quite well up to the Deathsinger sisters. So this is not an article about the raid per se, but rather about the crazy “random” number generator Bungie seems to have employed (much like the one in the old Dilbert cartoon that keeps repeating the same number over and over).

    I started the raid with a 310 chest armor that I’d managed to get my first time in the normal raid (lucky!) and a 303 raid hand cannon. I also had 310 exotic arms on for a while, but had to switch them out so I could don Saint-14’s helmet for the actual combat portions. Since all my other items were in the 290s, the best I could do was either 299 or 300, depending on what gun I needed (my sniper was low 290s, sadly).

    So at the totems, I got nothing interesting, but I don’t think anyone else did either. The Warpriest dropped two machine guns. Yes, two machine guns, one 305 and one 314. I presume that’s because I was getting the normal and hard loot at the same time, but seriously, two machine guns? Then, Golgoroth dropped two chest armor pieces, one 315 and one 305. Well, I was already wearing a 310, so this was the least helpful to my overall light level, but I’ll take it, since now my other characters can infuse stuff up to over 300.

    Because my light was so low, I wasn’t good at keeping Golgoroth’s gaze, as the multitude of death balls he was shooting at me quickly killed me. So I was able to jump down and somewhat help kill him from the puddle of goo. I was almost always the lowest damage dealer to the bosses in the raid, sometimes only by a little, but always about half the damage of the highest players. So light level really does make a big difference. I died more easily too, as my armor was less effective.

    So now, the Deathsingers. I got picked to be the jumper at least 6 times in a row! No randomness there – the damn game was totally out to get me. And while I tended to make the jumps okay, I kept getting turned around once I slammed the first sister, so I was slow getting to the rest of the team to protect them with the aura. So it went badly and was freaking stupid that it kept choosing me rather than a more capable Guardian. I had to leave before we could succeed, which likely greatly increased the chances for the rest of the team.

    So thanks to a very supportive and friendly (and very capable) team, I managed to experience a lot of the hard mode raid, which was great. On the other hand, the crazy duplication in drops and repetition in the selection of the jumper make me think Bungie has it out for me. Oh well, they have it out for you too, so at least I’m not alone.

  • Left Behind in Destiny

    I’ve been playing a lot of Destiny. Really, too much Destiny. But I’ve become left out of end-game content, because of (presumably) unintended consequences of choices made by Bungie’s designers. They’ve had to deal with unintended consequences before: they made a couple of neat hand cannons, The Last Word and Thorn. They were so good that they were all that people used in the Crucible. Heck, even I was able to get kills with Thorn sometimes. So they nerfed them in particular and hand cannons in general, and now hand cannons just aren’t much fun.

    The problem now is the light level system and the new hard mode King’s Fall raid. In order to be successful at the raid, we need to have light level 311 or better, but there isn’t a way to get gear higher than Light 310 except in the hard mode raid. So the die hard raiders that struggled through the hard mode raid and are now 315 or more don’t want to deal with us 303 light players. 303 isn’t enough to be effective the hard mode raid, so there’s no point in trying.

    The way to get closer to 310, so we can be effective in the hard mode raid, is to do the normal mode raid. But since the hard raid gives all the loot from the normal raid, the group I hang out with has no need or desire to go through the normal raid with lowbies like me so I can get better gear. So I’m in a Catch-22: I can’t do the hard mode raid because my gear is too lousy, and I can’t get better gear because everyone only does the hard mode raid.

    This problem is different from the last two raids. In the Vault of Glass and Crota’s End, even in normal mode, we still got top-level raid gear, so we could equip ourselves with good stuff that would be capable in the hard mode. Sure, a few special items were only available in hard mode, but at least we could prepare for hard mode. This new way has essentially put up a road block between light 300 and 310 that will be very challenging to overcome. I doubt that’s what the designers intended, so that’s why I think it is an unintended consequence.

    So what would I do to fix it? I’d suggest the following:

    1. Make an incentive for people to run the normal raid in addition to the hard raid. Perhaps make some gear only drop in normal, or add legendary marks or some other reason for people to play normal mode so we lowbies can join them and get better gear.
    2. Speaking of gear, the normal raid should drop light 315 or 320 gear, just as the normal raids in the past dropped full-strength gear. That way we have a hope of being able to participate in the hard raid.
    3. Make PvE loot drops have higher light limits. Now, rare and legendary engrams are limited to 299 (I think), so let them roll to 310 so we can get gear that could be helpful in hard mode even from normal PvE activities.

    I’m disappointed, yet not particularly upset about not being able to participate in the raid. I did the raid in normal mode on my Titan, so he can be 303 light, and I got my Touch of Malice to use in future raids, yet the likelihood that it will get used is low.

    So what will I do? Probably get bored with Destiny soon and get back to Elder Scrolls Online. I also have Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V ready to be played. And there’s always LOTRO and Star Trek Online. I will keep myself amused even if it isn’t with Destiny.