Video Games: Next Stop... Andromeda

[Argonath Diver]

Am I late to the H1Z1 King of the Kill thing? Was randomly watching a twitch channel - something I am only recently accepting as a pretty damn fun thing in limited doses - and came across this game. It's absolutely bonkers. I watched a single long match, bought it on Steam, and had a fucking awesome first half hour running around terrified of being found by anyone. Managed to kill some poor sod who is probably much more experienced than I am, and was later killed while dicking about trying to figure out the simple crafting system.

I honestly will probably only get a few hours of play out of it, as I am simply too shitty to really go around hunting like the streamers do. It's pretty damn fun playing against 150 other people on a massive map.

[The Anti-Targ]

8 hours ago, Stannis Eats No Peaches said:

Meanwhile at my parents' house, 20 miles from London, we get 3 Mbps on a good day.

Yeah, it's funny how spotty the broadband speed revolution is in the western world. The game dev company started by Dean Hall (of Day Z fame) in Dunedin is located in what was meant to be the first Giga town in NZ in 2015. But he complained that the broadband speed was like an internet backwater and he had to move some development work to London until the lines provider sorted things out. But it seems like lots of places in the developed west are still relative backwaters with sub 50Mbs speeds.

[The Anti-Targ]

4 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Just make sure your power supply will be able to take a larger video card.  I had to upgrade for darksouls 3 and ended up needing to swap the power pack too.

Yeah, that can be a trap for young players.

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Yeah, it's funny how spotty the broadband speed revolution is in the western world. The game dev company started by Dean Hall (of Day Z fame) in Dunedin is located in what was meant to be the first Giga town in NZ in 2015. But he complained that the broadband speed was like an internet backwater and he had to move some development work to London until the lines provider sorted things out. But it seems like lots of places in the developed west are still relative backwaters with sub 50Mbs speeds.

Sub 50Mbps is a backwater? My friend lives not far from my parents and got fibre a couple of years ago and gets around 20Mbps...

This whole conversation is making me sad.

[The Anti-Targ]

47 minutes ago, Stannis Eats No Peaches said:

Sub 50Mbps is a backwater? My friend lives not far from my parents and got fibre a couple of years ago and gets around 20Mbps...

This whole conversation is making me sad.

When you are promised to be a Gigatown with 1000Mbs speeds (that's for businesses with a P2P connections) and it doesn't deliver 1/10th that then it feels like a backwater. It's relative I guess. Still I got upgraded to 50Mbs at least 2 or 3 years ago. I think I'm sitting around 100Mbs these days.

I know a year or so back I was downloading games on PS4 at about 1MBs and now it's downloading at 2 or 3MBs

[Fez]

12 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Just make sure your power supply will be able to take a larger video card.  I had to upgrade for darksouls 3 and ended up needing to swap the power pack too.

Yep. It looks like I have plenty of juice to spare for the 1070. That'll be a fun challenge if I actually don't though.

 

Last week I was downloading games on Steam at a steady 3.7MB/s, now its between 21MB/s and 27MB/s. It's good.

[Corvinus85]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

When you are promised to be a Gigatown with 1000Mbs speeds (that's for businesses with a P2P connections) and it doesn't deliver 1/10th that then it feels like a backwater. It's relative I guess. Still I got upgraded to 50Mbs at least 2 or 3 years ago. I think I'm sitting around 100Mbs these days.

I know a year or so back I was downloading games on PS4 at about 1MBs and now it's downloading at 2 or 3MBs

How fast are you downloading on steam? 

[MisterOJ]

19 hours ago, Rhom said:

I keep trying to convince my city officials who are all set on downtown revitalization that moving in this direction would open up tons of new avenues.  So far no luck.

Dude... Russellville is a Gig City. (Actually, we were the first one in Kentucky.) If Russellville can do it, Etown sure as heck can.

[Rhom]

13 minutes ago, MisterOJ said:

Dude... Russellville is a Gig City. (Actually, we were the first one in Kentucky.) If Russellville can do it, Etown sure as heck can.

Wha... Wha... Whaaaaat?

Russellville?  Seriously?  I know Owensboro has a municipal internet provider, but they are not up to Gig status.

[MisterOJ]

1 minute ago, Rhom said:

Wha... Wha... Whaaaaat?

Russellville?  Seriously?  I know Owensboro has a municipal internet provider, but they are not up to Gig status.

Yeah, we've had it for about 3 or 4 years now.

It was somewhat out of necessity. The only cable company in Russellville was Suddenlink. It was seriously bad cable with crappy Internet. They didn't even offer any HD options with their television packages. The Russellville Electric Plant Board decided to get into the cable TV business and invested in fiber technology as a way to make that happen. They put up fiber lines all over the city and started offering TV, Internet and landline phone service through it. And, it's super affordable. I pay around $160 a month for my television (pretty much all the channels, but no premiums like HBO, Starz, Showtime, ect.), high speed Internet and a basic landline.

[The Anti-Targ]

6 hours ago, Corvinus said:

How fast are you downloading on steam? 

I got Mass Effect 2 a couple of weeks ago (as a freebee :-D) and I think that downloaded at about 6-7MBs

[KiDisaster]

16 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I got Mass Effect 2 a couple of weeks ago (as a freebee :-D) and I think that downloaded at about 6-7MBs

If you're paying for 100Mbps you might be getting screwed. Steam is pretty good at maxing your download speed and 7MB/s down = about 50Mbps. With a 100Mbps connection you should be getting 12-13 MB/s down on Steam.Try checking your speed on fast.com, that's Netflix's speed test site.

[Corvinus85]

19 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I got Mass Effect 2 a couple of weeks ago (as a freebee :-D) and I think that downloaded at about 6-7MBs

As KiDisaster said you might a problem there. I have 60Mbs internet and I typically download steam games at 7-8 MB/s

[AndrewJ]

Yeah - I think AT has assumed he must now be on a faster connection, because he's getting faster speeds when downloading on PSN than he was a year ago, when he got 1MB/s. But with 8 bits to a byte, that equates to 8mb/s.

So the reality is, while he might have had a 50 mb/s connection a year ago, he certainly wasn't getting 50 mb/s downloads. Meaning either his ISP was over-provisioned and giving him shitty speeds or, more likely, PSN was really, really shit a year ago and only pretty shit now (still only getting a maximum of 3MB/s = 24 Mb/s)

 

[The Anti-Targ]

The company only "promises" "up to 100Mbs", if I pay more they promise "up to 700-900Mbs". But maybe I'm also misremembering, because on the Steam interactive download speeds map my broadband supplier's average download speed  is 22MBs.

I dunno how much it affects actual speed of download from other places but we only have one pipe connecting us to the USA, and 3 pipes connecting us to Aussie. And those are the only pipes connecting us to the whole world. A company's broadband speeds are just the speeds of data transfer on that company's network. So forces outside the control of the ISP can affect download speeds right? The international pipes are big, but they still have an upper limit, right?

 

[briantw]

Played the For Honor beta with one of my friends and really enjoyed it, so we both picked up the full game.  A lot of people play like absolute bitches, but the game itself is a ton of fun and the combat is challenging and deep.  The story mode is somewhat unexpected.  I thought the game would be multi-player only.  And while the story mode is basically just multi-player with bots instead of humans and a few different objectives, the story itself is somewhat enjoyable, if a little dumb.  

Really enjoying the combat, though.  Gonna take a while to learn all the intricacies, but I like how deep it is.

[AndrewJ]

I'm not sure what broadband system you have in NZ. But with the "fibre to the node" NBN being rolled out currently in Oz, they always promise "speeds up to..." (25, 50 or 100 mostly). But it's well known that your distance to the "node" limits the speed you're able to achieve. Meaning, if you're quite far away and only able to get 20 Mbs, then there's not much point in paying for anything over a  25Mbs plan.

As I said, I have no clue as to the NZ situation. But if you're only able to achieve a 56 Mbs connection, you might want to consider a 50 Mbs plan (very slightly slower than what your connection is technically capable of, in exchange for whatever savings that would entail).

I believe the site to use to test your connection speed is something like www.speedtest.net (I'm not sure, I've never used it - nbn is still around 3 months away from being available for me, so I haven't had to worry too much about it yet. My ADSL connection currently is a spectacularly crappy 3Mbs or so)

[KiDisaster]

I restarted The Banner Saga last night. I was really enjoying it the last time I played it but, as is typical for me, I got distracted by something else and never ended up finishing it. Hopefully the third time will be the charm. 

I am really terrible at the combat. 

[briantw]

3 hours ago, KiDisaster said:

I restarted The Banner Saga last night. I was really enjoying it the last time I played it but, as is typical for me, I got distracted by something else and never ended up finishing it. Hopefully the third time will be the charm. 

I am really terrible at the combat. 

For me there was a point about midway through the first game where the combat just clicked and I started really enjoying it and finishing battles with ease.  The key is to just lower the health of the shittier enemies without killing them so that they don't deal any real damage but still waste a turn that would otherwise go to the more powerful enemies.  After you get all the enemies down to low health and thus low damage, then you can start picking them off one by one.  Once I started doing that every fight, it was smooth sailing. 

I think the reason the game's combat is difficult is less because of actual difficulty and more because it forces you to go against your natural instinct as a gamer, which is to whittle down an enemy party one by one.  The Banner Saga actually punishes you for that type of strategy, as the enemy always gets the next turn, even if there's only one enemy left and you have four people on your team.

[Fez]

1 hour ago, briantw said:

I think the reason the game's combat is difficult is less because of actual difficulty and more because it forces you to go against your natural instinct as a gamer, which is to whittle down an enemy party one by one.  The Banner Saga actually punishes you for that type of strategy, as the enemy always gets the next turn, even if there's only one enemy left and you have four people on your team.

Only the first game. The second game is like that also, until there is exactly one opponent left; when that happens, the entire other team gets to go in-between each turn.

Its one of many subtle, but very good changes to the combat between the games.