Self Similar – Page 24 – self similar's personal gaming nonsense blog

Wars Among the Stars

Other than my semi-regular Oblivion updates and my Wing Commander review it seems like it’s been awhile since I’ve discussed any real PC gaming, and outside of a few dips back into World of Warcraft, I think the last time I really discussed spending a lot of time on a semi-modern PC game was when I reported my adventures in Rust two years ago. The biggest reason for that, besides my mighty backlog of console games, was that my PC was approaching relic status and not really up to some of the more demanding new games coming out, to put it mildly.

“Back in Black!”

In late July I finally had enough reasons to justify building a whole new machine. Beyond gaming, I was planning on going back to college and needed a machine capable of running multiple VMs for labs. I also had plans to virtualize one of my servers which was running on even more ancient hardware than my old desktop was. Outside of the additional challenge of building something stout enough to run at least one VM fulltime and handle a modern game simultaneously, the build was quite easy and a lot of fun. It also happened to coincide with the release of Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 10 series, and I managed to score a nice overclocked 1070 early into the chipset’s life.

So what did I played with my hot new gaming rig? The latest AAA games? Did I hook up an Oculus Rift or an HTC Vive? Nah, I actually decided to play some older games that I had wanted to revisit, for one reason or another.

First was Planetside 2. Failing to resist my own monumental hype for this game, I managed to download and install the massive client on my old machine. Performance was beyond terrible and I couldn’t even play it long enough to get a feel for the flow of the game. They did some major performance patches shortly after that but by the time I went back to try it again they had removed support for Windows XP so that was the end of my tour of duty.

“On the losing end of a firefight.”

Since giving it another shot on my new machine my time with Planetside 2 has been largely fantastic. For a free-to-play MMO that feels, for the most part, quite polished, I can’t believe more people aren’t playing it. It has some issues, sure, and I was definitely skeptical about some of the design changes from the first game, but all in all I was pleasantly surprised with how close the spirit of the gameplay experience is to the original. The same type of absolutely epic combined arms battles still happen constantly, though, as with the first game, I often find myself enjoying some of the smaller battles than following the zerg, using the open nature of the battlefield and numerous options for classes, weapons, and vehicles to give me far more tactical choices than typically available in most normal FPS games.

“Anti-aircraft duty is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”

Unlike playing a 25-40 minute Conquest game in Battlefield, the always-on nature of the PS2 battlefield and the various ways of quickly dropping into existing battles and skirmishes makes PS2 a great “gap filler” game too – just have 15 minutes to play? Not a problem. 2 hours to play? Where’d all of my time go? I spent quite a while ping-ponging between roles – at first I fell in love with the Lightning tank, then spent a lot of my time as a Combat Medic or Heavy Assault, then I dabbled with the Stalker cloak Infiltrator, then I discovered the majesty of the Engineer’s wire guided anti-vehicle, then spent a bit of time running various type of MAX units, and as of my last few sessions, I’d finally really clicked with the Light Assault class. Between all of that I had some amazing moments. The first few times I watched a gunship get blown out of the sky, spinning out of control before violently crashing, I had to pick my jaw off the ground. As with the vaguely similar Battlefield series, SOE managed to really nail something about the sound design and, despite the style being somewhat divisive, the graphics of the game, that helps keep me deeply immersed in the action.

My only real regret is that, unlike my time with the original Planetside, I’ve been playing PS2 mostly solo. Despite being a very easy game to pick up and play solo, I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that games like this are a thousand times funner when playing cooperatively with friends. The best way to leverage the combined arms style of combat is to, well, combine arms, and the few times I’ve grouped up with some random organized outfit squads were highly memorable.

“Guarding a bio lab landing pad.”

I’ll almost certainly keep dabbling in PS2 from time to time in the future, but for now I think I’ve just about had my fill and will probably spend more of my meager amount of gaming time on other games. That said, if I ever had any friends interested in playing it I’d be back in a heartbeat. If you liked the original or like games like the Battlefield series and this looks interesting, definitely check it out. There are still plenty of people playing and the game has a surprisingly good out of game community, with tons of YouTubers uploading new content on the regular and an active Reddit community, for instance.

“Exploding the local wildlife.”

The next game I went back to was Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s infamous Star Wars MMORPG. My trajectory with this game has been fucking weird. Loving Knights of the Old Republic and being both a Star Wars and an MMORPG fan in general, I was completely hyped for this game but once it got closer to release and I discovered just how much of a World of Warcraft clone it was I was definitely let down. Then I got into the open beta and opened my mind a bit. Sure, it’s a WoW clone, but damn if it isn’t the best one I’ve ever played. By the time release hit, however, my free time was non-existent and between that and the group of friends I had guilded up with losing interested (like most of the rest of the subscriber base) I ended up bailing after only a month or so of infrequent play. Coincidentally ALSO about two years ago I came back once and played just a bit, as detailed here, but I decided to put the game down until I had a nicer gaming rig to enjoy it on.

This time I immediately scrapped my poor level 20 something Sith Inquisitor to go all-in on one of the classes I had tried out last time: a Bounty Hunter. This wasn’t really my favorite class or anything, but I liked the idea of playing a cold as ice female Bounty Hunter and, as usual with SWTOR, I quickly felt attached to my character through my dialog choices and the headcanon I filled in the blanks with. After I committed to playing again my mission was simple: play through the entire 1-50 class storyline and as many side quests as I could handle, and then move on to the next class. I wanted to play them all!

“Bounty Hunters are prone to frequent Dirty Harry moments…”

Of course, it’s been a few months now and the end of just now coming into sight, and this doesn’t even include venturing into the various expansion storylines, which also interest me, so maybe my plan was a little ambitious. Maybe not too ambitious though, as one oddity about SWTOR these days is that they drastically increased XP rewards so my new main, as it were, was max level long before I got into the last chapter of my storyline. In theory they’ve tuned this so you only need to do your character’s story missions, and each planet’s story missions so if you do all of the side quests, like I’m doing, you’re going to be way over level. The flip side is that when I finally do get around to playing some alts I can skip all of the side content and breeze through the story, which is greatly appealing to me.

“My pet Jawa and I taking on a Jedi.”

I’ll admit I’ve also been distracted by playing with the cartel market, the auction house and, particularly, the new stronghold system since coming back. Ever since Ultima Online I’ve always love having a house I can customize and/or decorate which included chasing down expensive decorations, and SWTOR’s Galatic Stronghold system scratches that itch. I’ve also spent some of the “cartel coins” I had been building up while unsubscribed on various random loot packs and made a tidy sum auctioning them in game. It’s been kind of an addictive mini-game, one that I’m sure makes BioWare quite a lot of money. At first I was concerned that playing around with auctioning these items might not be viable given how dead the auction house was, but then I paid to transfer my characters to a much more active server and my experience has been great ever since.

Like Planetside 2, despite being free-to-play (now) SWTOR has impressive production values and a lot of meaty gameplay available, and the fans that are still into the game are rabidly into it. In fact BioWare continues to release new items into the cartel market, new patches, and even new major expansions. Maybe it’s more the Star Wars nerd in me than anything else, but I absolutely love this game. The fact that it has kept my interest this long, and that I still want to play some of the other classes, really says a lot about this game though, especially with World of Warcraft: Legion out there constantly tempting me to drop everything and head back to Azeroth.

F.E.A.R. Too

Ahhh, F.E.A.R. 2. As I mentioned in my F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon overview back in May, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was what really drew me into to finally getting into the series. I thought it looked awesome, with its semi-forced first person perspective and much more detailed environments. When I started to research more about the F.E.A.R. series I was surprised to find that most of its fans didn’t view Project Origin all that positively, and even those that did often still regarded the first game as superior. After completing F.E.A.R. 2 I think I actually agree.

“Just hanging around…”

After playing the first game I was still quite skeptical about its supposed superiority over its sequel, after all it left a lot of room for improvement and F.E.A.R. 2 seemed to address a lot of those issues. Well it does indeed address them. First of all, it certainly looks good, with a more detailed, modern art style and improved animation. The story, for what it’s worth being mostly a retelling of the first game’s already confusing plot, is told with much better presentation overall. Also the environments are way less repetitive and monotonous which is a well known criticism of the first game. Unfortunately, for the most part, these improvements only serve to raise the game to the level of “average.” That is, while the environments might not be repetitive anymore, they’re also not that much more interesting or engaging. In some way, that actually makes them LESS interesting than those in its predecessor.

“Your squad, who your character is still inexplicably splitting up from constantly.”

That’s kind of the story of the game, really. Many things seemed to get lost in translation to this new engine. The lauded gunplay of the first games doesn’t “feel” quite as good. For the first third or so of my playthrough I was actually actively underwhelmed by it. I eventually settled on my two favorite guns and got used to them, warming up to the game overall, but for a while I was considering not even finishing it. The unique AI from the first game feels stripped down and while the enemies still do cool things on occasion it’s not quite as noticeable or dynamic. I did like the addition of iron sights on guns and ability to “cook” grenades (despite killing myself an embarrassing number of times from cooking them for too long.) Oh, and the slow motion power is still awesome and those mech stages? Sweet.

One oddity about the combat is that I sometimes found myself pining for a cover system of some sort. Perhaps F.E.A.R. 2’s nod to newer style cover mechanics (by being able to flip and move objects to use as cover) also included some additional tuning to encourage cover use, for one the engagement distances were often quite a bit longer than the almost exclusively close quarters fights of the first game, but without a good, ACTUAL cover system I felt overly exposed almost all of the time. Even the ability to lean would be a welcome return. *sigh* I did like the way the health and armor system worked though, keeping me in a near constant state of walking the line between having a good supply of armor and health packs and being moments away from death.

“Iron sights, yes!”

Something else that gets lost along the way are the horror elements. Yes, they’re still there, and no, they aren’t terrible, but just felt a little “by the numbers”. I was happy that I had a flashlight that stayed on and that the environments weren’t pitch fucking black, but the jump scares and Alma scenes were mostly total misses for me. Perhaps the fact that the levels were so much more linear and much more consistently paced than in the first game meant that those scenes were more expected when they showed up. Oh, and I also found F.E.A.R. 2’s soundtrack to be totally unremarkable, which is a huge letdown given how surprisingly great the creepy soundtrack of the first game was.

“Time for a brief MechWarrior break.”

F.E.A.R. 2 is still a fun, well made shooter, and by the time I completed the game I had warmed up to it a bit and was even tempted to try the well reviewed but (somehow still) overpriced expansion DLC. I guess my overall take is that the improvements are largely only skin deep and do very little to advance the series in any meaningful way. I’m glad I played it, but after just playing its somehow more captivating predecessor it just didn’t hook me quite as well as I hoped it might. I almost feel that if the best parts of both games could somehow combine together you might have an absolutely stellar game. F.E.A.R. 3, perhaps? Apparently not. The reviews of that one ensure that I’ll be giving it a miss entirely, unfortunately.

(As an aside, the tomes and tomes of PDA text that attempted to further flesh out the fiction really surprised me. I can’t believe anyone thought this was a good idea. They TOTALLY ruin the pacing, and I’m not sure what would compel me to have to stop and stand there reading these dry “intel” texts every few minutes instead of trying to complete my mission.)

The Tale of Garn Chapter 51

Warning: potential main quest spoilers ahead!

From the journals of Garn:

Reinforcement

Bedding down by my camp fire on the first night of my journey back east to Cloud Ruler Temple I’ve found myself admiring the fine Dwarven craftsmanship of Volendrung. I’m sure if this ancient weapon could speak it would have quite a story about how it came to be owned by a Daedric Prince. I’m mildly irritated at Prince Malacath rewarding with me with such a massive and heavy artifact when I have so far to travel to bring it back to Martin. If it were almost any other Daedric Prince I might suspect it was strictly for their amusement.

I’ve made it much further east now, almost halfway across the province. I’m quite disheartened by the increasing amount of Oblivion portals appearing, seemingly randomly throughout the land. The few travelers I’ve encountered on the roads are calling this the Oblivion Crisis and believe it is only going to get worse. Judging from the many gifts and offerings I’ve been given by pilgrims traveling to far off churches and shrines it would seem that people believe the Nine are Tamriel’s only hope. From what I’ve seen they might be right.

“Preparing to assault the Bruma gate.”

I’ve arrived at Cloud Ruler Temple and presented Volendrung to Martin. At first he was skeptical about its Daedric properties but when I told him its name he appeared to be familiar with it and seemed satisfied that it would suffice. Martin made it a point not to ask me what I had to do to obtain such an item, probably fearing that I took part in some depraved scheme. Even though Prince Malacath’s request was relatively benign and I’m sure Martin would agree that Lord Drad’s fate, whatever it might have been, was a price worth paying for the greater good of Cyrodiil, I’m keeping the tale of Malacath’s Ogres to myself for now.

Jauffre sends word that an Oblivion gate has opened up outside of the Bruma city walls and requests that I meet Captain Burd of the Bruma guard to lead them into the portal, showing them how they’re closed. While I’m far from an expert on Mehrunes Dagon’s realms, my reputation has apparently been bolstered greatly by my victory at Kvatch. I’m happy to help Bruma’s men with knowledge and experience that could ultimately foil the Mythic Dawn’s plans, but I know it will not be done without much bloodshed.

“Captain Burd stares up in amazement at the sigil tower.”

As I feared, several of Bruma’s city guard have fallen. Some outside of the portal trying to clear a way from invading Daedra for Captain Burd’s retinue to enter the gate, and most of Captain Burd’s retinue itself once inside the portal. Still, the captain himself was able to stay with me despite a grievous injury early into the journey to the portal’s sigil tower. Together we fought against all manner of lesser Daedra, including a large number of fearsome Dremora warriors and Xivilai mages. The fighting in this portal is some of the toughest I’ve faced yet – if we survive this Oblivion Crisis it will not be without much loss of life. We were successful in closing the portal. Burd will be training all of his men on how to navigate the scarred landscapes and how to operate the unusual mechanisms of Mehrunes Dagon’s siege towers.

Jauffre is pleased with the results of my training with the Bruma guard but agrees with me that our most fearsome foes, such as the veteran Dremora I encountered in the portal outside of Bruma, have yet to emerge from Oblivion, and when they march in force our small militias of city guards, mercenaries, and adventurers will be hard pressed to stop them. He requests that I visit the Imperial City and each of the other major cities in Cyrodiil to try to obtain more soldiers to reinforce Bruma’s numbers. Knowing that the biggest strikes will be on Bruma, a decisive victory there could help set the pace for the upcoming war. With my experience traveling around the entirety of Cyrodiil in recent months and my stations in the guilds we both agree that I’m the perfect person to take up this task, though I don’t have relationships with too many of the Council members or Counts. I’ll surely think of some way to help convince them to lend Bruma a hand. It is in their own best interest, after all.

“No help from the Legion? Time to build our own.”

My first stop along this journey is a disappointment. I managed to meet with the High Chancellor himself but despite what seemed like a large amount of interest in our cause Ocato says he can spare none of his legions as they’re more than occupied with the Daedric invasion in other provinces. I have no reason to doubt his claims, I just hope I have more luck with the Counts.

I had decided to travel east to Cheydinhal to meet with Count Andel Indarys. The Count is quick to deny my request, citing the Oblivion gate that had appeared outside of Cheydinhal as his top priority, and that all his men would be needed to defend the city against it. He notes that his son, Farwil, has taken some knights and entered the portal and suggests I might lend a hand. The guards at the portal spin a different tale than the Count’s and suggested that Farwil and his Knights of the Thorn are young and foolish and are almost certainly in way over their heads. I figure this could be a great opportunity to help the Count and the rest of Cheydinhal, perhaps giving the Count pause to reconsider sending troops to Bruma.

“Farwil executes a Dremora prisoner.”

I stepped into Oblivion and almost immediately discovered the corpse of one of the young knights, clad in decorative steel armor, lying near the portal. I’ll need to make haste rather than move through this desolate landscape at my typical, more methodical pace. I could see the massive sigil tower looming in the distance but as I approached it I could see a valley open up before me, with a path twisting and winding down across the entire cave-pocked face of the hill. I’ve decided to save time by climbing down instead of following the paths and caves to the bottom. This may be quite difficult in my armor but should save me huge amounts of time. Wish me luck.

I reached the bottom of the huge valley where a huge stone bridge leads to the sigil tower, sitting in a sea of flame and find Farwil and one of his knights huddled together, nursing some minor wounds, and planning their next move. Another dead knight lay nearby. Farwil is rejuvenated by my greeting, instantly pledging to follow me into the tower so that we can defeat more of the Daedra who had killed his brothers. I attempt to talk him out of it but he and his man won’t have any of it. Inside the tower we’ve fought more foes than I can recall. Soon Farwil’s companion lay dead and Farwil himself has sustained further injuries. I’m trying to do the lionshare of the fighting, but Farwil is nothing if not foolishly brave and keeps rushing in to aid me even against unfavorable odds. Farwil and I have done it, we’ve slain the sigil keeper and shut down the siege portal, finding ourselves back outside of the walls of Cheydinhal surrounded by surprised guards. Farwil is eager to inform the Count.

“Anvil during the crisis.”

Count Indarys is overjoyed that I was able to save his son and close the Oblivion gate, so much so that he is going to pledge some of his men to help defend Bruma after all. Not only that, but he even rewarded me with a magical sword from the Cheydinhal armory that they call Thornblade. These were perhaps my hardest battles yet and my earlier thoughts about the extreme threat of these invaders now rings even more true – we’ll need to act quickly to stop this invasion before it truly begins. Perhaps I can convince more of the cities to focus on the bigger picture by helping to close Oblivion gates around their lands as well. I’ll attempt this tactic when I journey south to Leyawiin next.

I’ve just secured a small contingent of troops from Leyawiin. As I predicted Count Marius Caro was uncooperative when I initially petitioned him but changed his tune entirely after I closed two gateways nearby the city walls. As before, they were difficult fights. I had brought some of the Knights of Nine with me this time, which both helped me in my efforts and also helped to train them on fighting Daedra and storming the sigil towers. After a few more of these Oblivion gate battles I will dispatch the order to begin the task of helping to close the more dangerous around Cyrodiil. I’ll also attempt to lobby my guilds to lend whatever help they can to the cause as well.

“Climbing the tower, one Markynaz at a time.”

As with Leyawiin, another hard fight, and another Oblivion gate left burning in ruin outside of the walls of Bravil. Count Regulus Terentius was surprisingly helpful and is sending his captain of guard, Captain Lerus, and her personal cadre along to Bruma. Another small victory. I’m immediately continuing West.

The story was much the same with Skingrad. I decided to close the Oblivion gate near Castle Skingrad before ever confronting Count Hassildor. Having previously worked with him to defeat the necromancers who were attempting to infiltrate the Mage’s Guild, I expected a good response from the count. Still, arriving after already removing the immediate threat from his city guaranteed that the count will indeed send some of his guard to reinforce Bruma.

“Meeting with Chorrol’s Countess Valga.”

As I write this update I’ve just left Kvatch and I am surprised the report that Kvatch has volunteered to send aid as well. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, as Savlian Matius knows as well as anyone the dangers these Oblivion gates pose. I will journey to the coast to consult with the Count and Countess of Anvil next.

With much effort, closing a total of three more of these infernal portals, I’ve secured more troops from both Anvil and Chorrol. Without being able to secure more men from the Imperial Legion and us not having the luxury of time to visit other provinces, this is as good as it will get. I hope its enough. I’ll continue on to the Jerall Mountains at sunrise tomorrow to learn what Jauffre thinks our next move in countering Mehrunes Dagon’s pawns should be.