Video Games: Join us... It is your Destiny

[Black Wolf Smith]

So after many years of not playing video games, I treated myself an early B-day present of a PS4. I got the Destiny version, as it was the best deal they had going. That was about a week age, and I was being good, playing an hour or 2 each day learning how to. Having never played games like this, I didn't really know what I was doing, but it was fun.

I was at work and saw one of those "how to" Youtube video, I looked, listen, and learned. So when I got off I went straight home, and turned on Destiny. Long story short, I played for about 11 hours, didn't sleep, and I am stuck at work, regretting not sleeping. Well at least right now. I did moved up 8 levels to 18.

[The Anti-Targ]

The console makers are hedging their bets and testing the waters on streaming but there are ALOT of technical issues in the way of that.

Which is why I hedged my bet and gave MS and Sony a 50/50 for launching a 9th generation console. :-)

They might conclude that streaming only is still another generation away, but I don't think it's further away than that.

Bandwidth is not that big of a deal, If you can stream Netflix movies reliably then you can stream games.

[The Anti-Targ]

Looking at my shelves, I'm acutely aware of how many books I haven't yet read.

Thing is, I'll be able to read all my books when I'm retired, because they're good old paper books, not kindle stuff that will be obsolete by then. Only limiting thing will be my eyesight, so let's hope I don't get blind.

With games, no one can be sure to be able to actually play them 10/15 years from now. Heck, I had trouble re-installing the remake of Pirates (2004 game) on my Windows-7 PC 2 years ago, install-CD just didn't work at all; I eventually re-bought it from Gamersgate or GOG, where the install was optimised.

Pressure to play games because the medium might soon not allow it is by far the strongest I can see; DVD/BluRay or music format might go obsolete, but it's longer term (30 years rather than 10), same for ebooks probably, but real physical books are here to stay for a lifetime, at least.

That said, you're probably right that the constant flux of new young gamers might probably offset the drifting older gamers, who might be tempted to buy less and less. Though the market will peak sooner or later, because everyone who might be loosely interested in playing will actually play.

Which is again where streaming comes in with a big bright future. You will have no hardware issues, so no pressure to play before any hardware obsolescence. The risk of course is that the game you thought you wanted to play 15 years ago is no longer available on any streaming service. But if you only thought you wanted to play it 15 years ago and never actually did, it probably means you didn't really miss anything.

[Fez]

Hit lvl22 in Destiny, and I'm actually all the way to 40 light without all my gear upgraded; so even without anymore drops I may be able to hit lvl23. I also got my first legendary, a shotgun, which isn't ideal because I generally use a fusion rifle; but still, its nice to get one (Also, it came from a blue engram, so I guess that makes up for all the green gear I've gotten from those). Its called The Comedian, its flavor text is just laughter, and its got really good stats; unfortunately it doesn't look or feel any different from other shotguns, which is disappointing. On the plus side, its reload and impact are high enough that even though damage is normalized in PVP its still helping me do a lot better than I had before.

On a different note, I'm starting to think the RNG in the strike playlist is not equal. I've played maybe 15 strikes through it, and gotten Earth once, Mars twice, the Moon zero times, and the other dozen or so have all been Venus; and of those dozen, eight or nine have been the Nexus. The Nexus is the shortest strike, and its really rather easy, so that makes farming it simple, but I really would like to see the strikes more.

[Rhom]

So from what I'm reading, the route to go for Crucible is to find a fusion rifle with a short charge time?

[Muttering Bill]

So I made it lvl 27, and I'm a little unsure of what I want to do next. Getting through the Raid is going to a considerably easier if you go in at lvl 28. And I can upgrade my gear to get there. But if I'm just going to replace it with Raid gear then I don't know that I want to spend the Ascendant Shards on it.

Its called The Comedian, its flavor text is just laughter, and its got really good stats; unfortunately it doesn't look or feel any different from other shotguns, which is disappointing. On the plus side, its reload and impact are high enough that even though damage is normalized in PVP its still helping me do a lot better than I had before.

On a different note, I'm starting to think the RNG in the strike playlist is not equal. I've played maybe 15 strikes through it, and gotten Earth once, Mars twice, the Moon zero times, and the other dozen or so have all been Venus; and of those dozen, eight or nine have been the Nexus. The Nexus is the shortest strike, and its really rather easy, so that makes farming it simple, but I really would like to see the strikes more.

I get Nexus constantly. So much that I've already gotten tired of doing Strikes. Plus there's not really any good rewards from playing lvl 24 playlist. Winters Run seems to come up fairly oftern too. I have never gotten Dust Palace, and I'm almost convinced that they left it off.

It seems to be similar in the Crucible too. I'm fairly bad at PVP, and have an Exotic Bounty to get 500 Void points in there. Every kill with Void damage gives +5 points, every death gives -2. I tried using a shotgun, because that's supposed to be seriously OP in PVP. But it's constantly sending me to Bastion, and just get shot down before I can even get close enough to use the shotgun. So far I have 16 points. I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish it.

I've taken to just playing the Daily Heroic on max difficulty. The Queen's Wrath missions have been ok too. Even though they are just the same old missions with modifiers, at least they're different missions. They're a nice challenge too. And I've had to spend a lot of time in Patrol gathering upgrade materials.

[The Anti-Targ]

Gosh he got to that pretty quick. Yahtzee Destiny review.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/9749-Destiny-Review-Bungies-Halo-Followup

Aggressively boring!

[Fez]

So from what I'm reading, the route to go for Crucible is to find a fusion rifle with a short charge time?

That's one option. But the thing is, there's lots of routes you can go; what seems to trick people up is that you don't want to use any of the normal weapons, except maybe the auto-rifle. Stick to your special weapon of choice, shotgun, fusion rifle, sniper rifle; pick up heavy ammo anytime it come in (but only use rocket launchers); and figure out the most effective way of using your melee and grenade. Because pretty much everything outside the normal weapons is a one-shot kill, two at the most, and none of the normal weapons can get off enough rounds before you die except some auto-rifles.

I get Nexus constantly. So much that I've already gotten tired of doing Strikes. Plus there's not really any good rewards from playing lvl 24 playlist. Winters Run seems to come up fairly oftern too. I have never gotten Dust Palace, and I'm almost convinced that they left it off.

Glad its not just me. And I don't even have the option of Dust Palace since I'm on the 360. Its not a huge deal though, I'm just in "killing time until something else comes out" mode with this, and even that time is being split with Wasteland 2 (which is not just for killing time, but I usually can't play that kind of CRPG for more than an hour or at a time). The gameplay is solid enough that I'd keep at it if any more content was released for free, but I have no interest in paying for DLC for this.

[Muttering Bill]

Dust Palace is actually the best Strike. It's a shame that XBox players have to wait a year for it. And that they neglected to put in the playlist for PS players.

The gameplay is solid enough that I'd keep at it if any more content was released for free, but I have no interest in paying for DLC for this.

I've already bought the first 2 DLC's due to getting the Limited Edition package. Took Bungie on faith, so I'm going to wait and see how it turns out. But from what they've shown us so far, I'm not sure they're going to be a good value. They should offer an entire new planet and everything that comes with it. We'll probably just get the couple of areas that are already in game but blocked off - like King's Watch and the Jovean Complex in the Cosmodrome. Hopefully I'm wrong, and those areas will open for some other upcoming events.

[aceluby]

GAH!!!!

DS2 last DLC was delayed a week. Took yesterday off and everything!

Oh well, started the other DLC on another character and DAMN is it hard with my battle mage. Everything is resistant to magic. Still fun though :)

[MerenthaClone]

Wasteland 2 question.

How many NPCs can you have in your party, how many do you build yourself, and how many are pre-built characters/how much control do you have over their development? One of the frustrating things with this genre is that when you're designing a character, you don't know who else is going to have what skills, so you might make a totally superfluous character. If, on the other hand, you always have the ability to create your own NPCs, that's not an issue (or if the skills are designed such that having two lockpickers isn't a waste, for example).

[Fez]

Wasteland 2 question.

How many NPCs can you have in your party, how many do you build yourself, and how many are pre-built characters/how much control do you have over their development? One of the frustrating things with this genre is that when you're designing a character, you don't know who else is going to have what skills, so you might make a totally superfluous character. If, on the other hand, you always have the ability to create your own NPCs, that's not an issue (or if the skills are designed such that having two lockpickers isn't a waste, for example).

You get four main party characters. There are about ten pre-built ones, but you can edit them however much you want or replace them with completely new characters. You completely control their growth either way. I don't know how if you can replace them if they die.

There are also 15 NPCs who can join you. Unlike your main party they have a bit of personality and sometimes interact with the other NPCs. One of the reviews said that the max party size is seven. I don't know if that means there's three-NPC max, or if you can have more if some of your main party die. Once in your party you control their growth fully as well, and you control them in combat (although they can go rogue and ignore orders). Apparently they can leave your party too, and sometimes that's unavoidable. And they are definitely missable if you don't know where to look.

Unless someone dies, its absolutely a waste to have any characters share skills (except weapon skills, if you want them to use the same weapon type); and there's a ton of skills and not many points to put them in, so you don't want overlap. In first two minutes of the game there's an NPC with a bunch of useful skills (Brute Force, Weaponsmithing, Outdoorsman, Hard Ass), but she does eventually leave the party, so its not a total waste if there's some overlap. No sense leveling those skills on your characters until she leaves though. Your main party starts at level one, she's level 14, she's better at it all.

[MerenthaClone]

Oh, awesome. That sounds like it works out pretty well then. So you could get all of the core skills/combat roles on your main four and then use the other 3 NPCs (or however many) to fill out the missing roles. With 15 to choose from, it sounds like you'd be able to get everything you need.

[Relic]

One skill you should have overlapping between two character is field surgeon. You'll need it it you medic goes down. Otherwise don't over lap. Have one perception character, one brute force, and so on.

[kungtotte]

You also don't have to assign any points when you create the character, you can just roll it with everything unassigned and then assign them once you get into the game and see what the pre-built NPCs have as their skills.

[Alcibiades]

They just announced Total War: Atilla. Sega seems determined to run Total War into the ground. The series just can't handle yearly releases and have them be interesting and well executed. Atilla sounds more like an expansion idea than a sequal, almost exactly like Barbarian Invasion. I suppose they're wanting to reuse Rome 2 assets.

ETA: Atilla will be 2015 and Rome 2 was 2013, so I guess its not quite yearly. Even so, I'd rather they slowed down a bit and tried to get things right. Maybe this one will be more like Napoleon, which people seemed to like better than Empire.

[Fez]

Oh, awesome. That sounds like it works out pretty well then. So you could get all of the core skills/combat roles on your main four and then use the other 3 NPCs (or however many) to fill out the missing roles. With 15 to choose from, it sounds like you'd be able to get everything you need.

Yeah, but unless you fully explore everything, they can be tricky to find. In fact, Angela Deth, the one at the very beginning, I missed her my first start because I don't go down an innocuous looking side road before leaving the first area. I restarted after about four hours because I realized I wasn't well optimized, and this time I found her. She makes things a lot easier too. And the second one I found, I don't think she'd have been available if I made a different choice on where to go early on.

[Shryke]

Which is why I hedged my bet and gave MS and Sony a 50/50 for launching a 9th generation console. :-)

They might conclude that streaming only is still another generation away, but I don't think it's further away than that.

Bandwidth is not that big of a deal, If you can stream Netflix movies reliably then you can stream games.

No, this is not true at all. Not even close. A game is like stream a movie in HD on top of a reliable and fast back-and-forth communication setup. The infrastructure just isn't there for this shit. Streaming video alone is already slamming the telecom infrastructure hard and the telecoms are fighting back.

And that's in the developed world. Think about other markets. Why would you wanna tie your business exclusively to a reliable high-speed network? That's basically conceding huge swaths of the globe to your competitor running a traditional setup.

And then on top of that you get in to the technical considerations on the backend. This is one of the places where, I think it was OnLive, got fucked. Turns out to stream to X number of people, you need a giant facility with X number of consoles all running. Now you could potentially design your system around this issue but that's gonna radically change the technological landscape of gaming because everything that makes a console a console from the developers point of view is now gone.

Which is again where streaming comes in with a big bright future. You will have no hardware issues, so no pressure to play before any hardware obsolescence. The risk of course is that the game you thought you wanted to play 15 years ago is no longer available on any streaming service. But if you only thought you wanted to play it 15 years ago and never actually did, it probably means you didn't really miss anything.

No, you just need to play before the company decides to not bother supporting older games. Maybe to push you onto their new service with fancier hardware.

[Kalbear]

And that's in the developed world. Think about other markets. Why would you wanna tie your business exclusively to a reliable high-speed network? That's basically conceding huge swaths of the globe to your competitor running a traditional setup.

Well, keep in mind that outside of the US the world has significantly better broadband, and it's getting better every day. Japan, for instance, is massively wired comparatively. As to the developing world there's very little actual money coming from there right now - and the places that it is fairly decent (Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya) have better broadband and wireless carriers than the US does as well.

Basically using the US as a metric of 'is this hard' is not a good one. The US is the backwater here.

As to why you would do it - because being able to get subscriptions and monetize hardware is much better for businesses overall than selling actual hardware units + specific games. Having a game subscription model and service makes more money overall. It's far easier to service thousands of machines in a server farm than it is thousands of machines at people's houses. Add to this that it allows that service provider to give customers experiences that they can't get with a traditional console - things like upgrading graphics without any work whatsoever, or being able to stream to devices other than your TV - and it's hugely lucrative.

Not having to have massive infrastructure in place to manufacture consoles or the supply chain for them? Huge win.

Being able to upgrade system values on the fly? Huge win.

Being able to give consumers experiences on different platforms and scale them easily to the bandwidth and system they have? Huge win.

Subscription model instead of console model? Huge win.

There are some technological issues to deal with - mostly in predictive gaming and whether you can make competitive gaming still competitive - but these are known concerns with fairly good answers. And quite frankly this is where the industry is going. It's not an if - it's a when.

[aceluby]

You're right, it isn't an 'if' it's a when, but that 'when' is years, possibly decades off in the US market which is a HUGE chunk of the global market. Not only that, but most of the US landscape has difficulty getting enough bandwidth for basic gaming and movie streaming, much less game streaming.

What you don't want to do is go a stream only route and have a huge swathe of players unable to utilize it and force those who cannot either afford or get that fast of internet to go with a competitor.

I could see this taking off for rentals though.