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kiyote23 · 6 years

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One Person’s Broken Is Another Person’s Perfect (Classic Flashback)

This post originally appeared on dorkfam.net on July 1, 2016.

“Are we ever going to play The Division again?” OtherMark asked.

“I dunno,” OtherOtherMark replied, “Is The Division going to not suck anymore?”

I winced, partly at the reply, and partly because I was repeatedly falling to my death in the Vault of Glass jumping puzzle. Four months ago, OtherOtherMark was really excited about The Division. Destiny was looking long in the tooth. Our raid group completed King’s Fall. This was the end game content that we’d been working on together for a couple of months, since early December. And with the end game content mostly completed, the group started to drift apart as players started playing other games. Destiny was no longer holding their interest.

Destiny was the first modern online multiplayer game I had played where I became really involved in a group. In Destiny, you can group up into a fireteam of up to six people, and to do the raid, you’ll need six, so the first step was finding a group of people who could play together. It started with friends, and then friends of friends, and pretty soon we had a group of six who played at the same time and played well together. And so we did strikes, and played in the Crucible together. And it got to be a thing, you’d look to see who was online, and you knew you would be playing with them, often until late into the night. It became this wonderful social aspect to an already almost sublime gaming experience. I finally started to understand why this was all my friends were talking about last year.

But that social aspect was diminishing, and it looked like we were going to move to The Division. And that didn’t quite happen. Not every one in the group made the jump, and The Division didn’t have the end game that we needed, or wanted. It didn’t have much of an end game at all. Certainly not the raid that we worked towards as a group.

I spent most of March leveling up in The Division. I completed the story, and then there wasn’t much to do but to grind out better gear in the Dark Zone. The Dark Zone is an a special area within The Division. The Division is a beautiful open world design, where players move freely through a detailed recreation of midtown Manhattan. You complete missions and encounters on this map to get better gear and to advance your character. But in the middle of this map lurks a large section that is walled off, and can only be entered through select portals. This is the Dark Zone, and within the Dark Zone, The Division becomes a significantly different game.

In the regular game world, the player runs into randomly generated groups of bad guys to fight, but also civilians to help, and most significantly, no other players, except for those that you invite into your game session. You could play the entire main game solo if you wanted to, though you will see and run into other players within the safe areas where you restock armor and sell your loot. But once you leave the safe areas, the streets are yours and yours alone.

In the Dark Zone, you run into other players, players who are ostensibly agents of The Division, like yourself. But the Dark Zone is a place of no rules, and so not only can you see the other players, but you can shoot them. The Dark Zone was The Division’s unique take on PvP, and it could have been very interesting, creating a unique gaming environment.

I didn’t find The Dark Zone to be much fun. I don’t mind PvP, and while I like to keep my PvE and my PvP separate, I can play in a mix. I used to love to play on PvP servers in Warcraft, even though I almost exclusively played PvE. I wouldn’t even duel with people. I tried it once, found it tedious, and moved on. In Warcraft, you knew when you were in a PvP situation. It wasn’t ambiguous. But The Dark Zone was a big mess of ambiguity. A player who was helping you could turn and stab you in the back at any moment. A guy who ganked you earlier could help you out. You couldn’t trust anybody, and basically came down to people taking advantage of weaker players. Maybe if they had disabled level advantages, it might have been better.

I saw a lot of people defending the Dark Zone on Reddit, and I spent a lot of time wondering why they liked it so much. I think they wanted PvP. Some people really enjoy PvP, the challenge of playing against other actually human players instead of the somewhat limited and predictable AI. And that’s fine. I’ve been playing death matches online since Quake. I play Crucible in Destiny, though it’s not my favorite. I think that if you enjoyed The Dark Zone in The Division, it was because you decided that you were going to go rouge. You either went in with a fire team with the intent to go rouge, or you were a solo rouge. Then the ambiguity is gone. Or you play with the notion that everyone you see is a rouge, and stay away from them. And it did make it spooky, because other, so-called friendly agents wouldn’t be tracked on your HUD, so suddenly you’d see a group of gunmen appear out of nowhere.

The problem was that you couldn’t preemptively defend yourself, without going rouge yourself. It was like a game of chicken—you didn’t want to be the first one to shoot. If you went rouge, then not only could they kill you without getting marked for it, but they’d get bonus experience for it. So, if you’re going to play with the mentality that everyone in the Dark Zone is a rouge, then the only way to play it effectively to plan on going rouge yourself.

Which is why I think it’s flawed design on the developer’s part. The idea was to create this sense of ambiguity, this idea that these agents that are supposed to be on your side have flipped to the other side, and you don’t know who is who. But with no real consequences for flipping, in fact, there are actual bonuses and better gear for flipping, then the ambiguity is gone. Everyone is out to get you, because it’s really just a free-for-all.

Here’s how I would fix it: once you go rouge, you’re cut off from The Division, and you have to find the opposition, and make contact with them, and build rank with them, probably through ganking Division agents in the Dark Zone. Eventually, you get enough trust with the opposition that they send you back to The Division to become a double agent, except The Division doesn’t trust you right away, so you have to rebuild some rank with them, probably through not ganking Division agents in the Dark Zone while killing rouges. Then you’d have to make a choice at some point, who to betray, the opposition or The Division. Man, now I want to play that game.

The problem was that there was nothing else to do. I had spent most of March in The Division‘s rendition of Manhattan, taking out looters and rioters and guys with flame throwers and mercenaries. Block by block, I took out bad guys to defend civilians. It was made pretty clear who was bad and who wasn’t, at least to me. The civilians were always a little jumpy around me, skittish if I got too aggressive, a nice touch since I don’t think I could hurt any of them if I tried. I could shoot the tires on parked cars (which I’ll admit, I did a lot) or stray dogs (I never did, and it bothered me when my teammates would), but I couldn’t shoot any of the bystanders.

It was a game without an endgame. You could grind gear in The Dark Zone, but since outside The Dark Zone I was already like a god, basically unstoppable, why bother? There was no reason to play a mode that I didn’t find fun, and that was all there was to do.

What is the end game? Most video games have a story, or at least try to, though in Destiny‘s case, it was sort of loosely stringing missions together with some sort of tangent. It really didn’t matter, because the missions were engaging and fun.

So, the end game is what you do when you want to keep playing the game, but you’ve completed the story. For a multiplayer game like Destiny or The Division, that usually means PvP or a raid. The problem with The Division was that the PvP was more frustrating than fun, and there was no raid.

They did add The Incursion, which was supposed to be the first end game option, but I never played it. From what I heard, it was wave after wave of bullet-sponge bosses, and you needed serious gear to run it. In fact, a whole new tier of gear was rolled out just for The Incursion. To help you grind gear outside the dark zone, a new set of daily and weekly missions were available, but again, it seemed like a lot of work to grind gear for a mission that just didn’t seem fun, which was disappointing because the main story had been fun, and the missions were different and varied.

What Destiny did was a brilliant. Players left because there was only two options for end game, PvP and the raid. The raid was difficult to set up because you needed six players who knew what they were doing, because it was complicated. And you only had a week to complete it, and that’s assuming that you started on Tuesday, which most people didn’t. There were checkpoints through the raid, and if you made it to a check point, you could start there the next day. And when you were learning the raid, you’d need the checkpoints. And really, you could say that part of the end game in Destiny, once you completed the story missions, was getting gear good enough to go on the raid, something that took a little grinding to do. Also, players left because they had completed the raid, and it wasn’t holding their interest anymore.

So, Bungie raised the light limit, to give players something to work towards, and then opened up new paths to get the light limit. Now, in addition to PvP and the raid, you could do the revamped Prison of Elders/Challenge of Elders, which was sort of like PvE Crucible. You could also get higher level gear from the faction vendors, and they made it easier to grind faction rep. So now, just running the daily missions became a way to get better gear and raise your light level.

What happens when you hit the light limit? I don’t know, probably drift into another game for a while. The next update will be in September, and there will be new content, and the light limit will be raised again. There will be a new raid. That will make four raids. I’ve only completed one.

The Division is still on my hard drive, and I’ve been updating it, though I haven’t actually played it in a long time. Things could have changed. The conditions that I’m writing about were in late March, early April. I had a lot of fun playing the story of The Division, and the mechanics and gameplay were pretty solid. It was disappointing that the game didn’t scale well. Once we got to a high enough level, the bad guys just seemed to become bullet-sponges, and the difficulty was upped by sending them at us in overwhelming waves. I think part of what propelled me through The Division through most of March was the uncovering the map, learning the game and how to play it effectively, and grinding out better gear. There’s a whole world of crafting and improving gear that I was just starting to get into before I hit the why bother point. I’m keeping it because there might come a time when I want to get back into it, a point where they’ve fixed things and made changes to end game, or created more story to work through.

I’m still grinding through Destiny, daily. Destiny‘s April update came right when I was losing interest in The Division. At its core, Destiny is a lot of fun. The first thing I did when I dropped back into Destiny after being in The Division for so long was jump. When you jump in Destiny, you can soar. You can float all around the map. In The Division, you’re stuck on the ground. But more than that, the basic mechanics of Destiny are smoother and sweeter. It’s more fun to pull the trigger in Destiny, more fun per round fired. It doesn’t matter than I’m ranging over the same maps that I’ve ranged over a hundred times before, it’s just fun to be there.

Last night we were playing Iron Banner with DMot, who wasn’t part of our core raid group, but had filled in a couple of times when we needed a sixth. He admitted that he hadn’t been playing Destiny for a while, but had been playing The Division. It was fun, he said, “But I always knew I’d come back to Destiny. You can always come back to Destiny.”

And we did. We all came back.

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kiyote23 · 7 years

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A Different Lens

Last summer, my son was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum. The diagnosis marked the end of one long road for us, and the start of different one. Helping him navigate through life, particularly as he started school became a focus of our lives, and while we’re making progress, there is still a lot of ground to cover.

To be honest, I was caught off guard by the diagnosis because of my preconceptions of autism. He had an autistic classmate in his pre-school class, and the two of them became buddies, I guess because they understood each other. And while a lot of people saw that as a warning sign that my son was on the spectrum as well, I took it to mean that he wasn’t autistic, because he wasn’t like his friend.

I think I was afraid of abusing the word “autistic.” I’ve a friend who a couple of years ago came to the conclusion that he’s autistic. At the time, I didn’t think it was true, because I didn’t really understand autism. Now, after working through my son’s diagnosis and educating myself about what we are looking at, I not only agree with my friend’s self-diagnosis, but I’m pretty sure that I’m autistic as well.

I thought that autism was a certain condition. Like a lot of people, I think my impression of autism came from Rainman. Autism is actually a spectrum, a range of behaviors, and people on the spectrum vary wildly in the degree to which they have different disorders. But as we were going over the problems that my son is facing, I was struck by the number of them that sounded so familiar to me.

I suffered from a series of severe depressions, starting around when I was seventeen and continuing into my late twenties. In the late 1980s, everyone was depressed it seemed. I think that there are actually parallels between depression in the 80s and autism today, in that there probably weren’t suddenly more depressed people than there were before, but that the clinical diagnosis of it was more and more common, and there was less of a stigma attached.

I spent several years in therapy, and even tried a series of anti-depressant medications, but the depressions kept coming. I would get better, and then try to go back to college, only to crash and drop out again. I repeated the cycle for years. I was pretty convinced that I had a seasonal depressive disorder, and that I was going to have depressions in the fall for the rest of my life.

But now, I’m pretty sure that was wrong. I gave up trying to go to school, and worked on just trying to have a job. I moved to Iowa, started over, and while I had some bumps along the way, I got happy. There were little depressions now and then, but nothing like the crashes that had come before. I got better, and started doing pretty well, and started building a life. And now, looking back on it, I think I can see how the depressions fit into the idea that I’m autistic.

I have a lot of social anxiety. I don’t understand “the rules” of how people interact. I used to think it was because I shifted from a public school to a private school in grade school, but then went to a public high school, that somehow that had isolated me socially, so that when I got to high school, I didn’t know how to act, how to make friends.

Looking back on it, that story doesn’t hold water. I had friends at the private school, and I had friends outside of school. I was active in my scout troop, and there were kids in the neighborhood that I hung out with. Yet, when I got to high school, the world became a lot larger, and the interactions between people became a lot more complex, and I was really lost.

People, in general, confuse me. I’m not sure what they’re thinking or feeling, and I’m not sure how they’re going to react to something. Most of what I know about how other people think and feel came from books, and so a lot of the time I feel like I’m visiting from another planet, and I have to refer to my notes on how humans react to things. For the longest time, I felt like I was constantly on the outside, looking in, trying to make sense of what was going on when I was at a social gathering.

It only took a few social miscues, a few bad reactions from people over what seemed to me to be innocuous things, to build a sense of anxiety over social interactions. I still remember, somewhat vividly, different moments in my childhood, where I discovered I was being a jackass and I had no idea. And it was terrifying.

So I became quiet, sitting back and watching people, only interjecting when it seemed safe, or when I knew was on safe ground. Maybe I’m a natural introvert, or maybe it’s learned behavior. Or maybe with my brain there’s no distinction. But even so, as an adult, there are still moments where I find myself being a jackass, and it still stings, mostly because I try so hard not to be one, but when you don’t really know how the game is played, it’s hard not to make mistakes.

Another autistic symptom that plagued me was lack of executive function. I really wanted to do well in college when I was in my twenties, but it was too hard for me to put in the effort for things that I wasn’t really interested in. I would drop out of a semester with depression, failing all of my classes except for fiction writing workshop, in which I’d be getting an “A”. And these problems pre-date the depressions, going back to grade-school, when I had a horrible procrastination problem.

Sometime in the mid to late nineties, my Mom found a book that she wanted me to read, called You Mean I’m Not Crazy, Lazy, or Stupid? about adults with ADD. I didn’t buy it at the time, being pretty convinced that I had depression and not ADD, but again, my impression of ADD was the stereotype, someone who can’t sit still in class, who needs Ritalin in order to focus enough to do their homework. I could do my homework fine, it was just a matter of actually getting myself to do it.

But I am easily distracted. If we go out to a bar that has TVs on the wall, my wife and I will try to find a place for me to sit where I can’t see them, because otherwise I won’t be able to pay attention to our conversation. I find it really difficult to focus on a conversation in a noisy place, because I can’t filter out the background noise from what’s being said to me. I can’t not pay attention to the stimulus around me.

The lack of executive function would feed into my depressions. I’d have things that I’d want to do, like go to college, and when I’d fail at them, I’d get really down. I basically set myself up for failure over and over by thinking that I was perfectly capable of going to college, I just needed to get over the depression. But then I’d get there, I’d get behind, I wouldn’t get anything done, and I’d really get down on myself for messing things up again.

I’ve addressed my lack of executive function by building external systems to help me keep on track. I need more than a to-do list. In order to get by, I need a productivity system, and what’s really helped me has been Getting Things Done by David Allen, coupled with Omnifocus, a task-management app by The Omnigroup. I don’t know if I can do justice to the impact that these systems have had on my life, or how much I rely on them. A few years ago, I went back to school, and completed a degree while working full-time, managing a bar, and raising a kid, and I don’t think that would have been possible without my systems in place.

I have been hesitant to bring it up, to talk about it. If I am autistic, I’m pretty high-functioning. Most people have probably thought of me as just a little weird, a little anti-social. There are a lot of people out there who have a lot more severe problems with their autism than I do. And I don’t have a diagnosis. It’s apparently very hard to diagnose adults, because by the time you get to this age, you’ve learned tricks to cope and compensate for your autistic behavior. Unless you’re seeking disability, it’s lot of trouble to get tested, a lot of work just to get a label.

But looking back on my life through this lens has been eye-opening. And I hope that I can learn something that I can pass on to my son. It actually gives me a lot of hope for him and his future. He’s getting help and support now, to help him with his disability. And I’m going to be there to help him along the way.

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kiyote23 · 7 years

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Through the Glass

My son was watching me play a video game the other day. “When do we get to go in there?” he asked. I was thrown by the question. He’s pretty precocious, and sometimes I forget how young he actually is.

“We don’t,” I finally said. “It’s not real. It’s just an image on the screen.”

“Oh.” He seemed disappointed. And I think I was as well. So many times I’ve tried to escape through the glass, and get lost in another world. So many times I’ve tried to run, only to find myself realizing I’m still on this side of the glass, and I’ll never be able to get in there, into that other space.

I think that’s part of why I’ve get into large, open-world games, where there’s a lot to explore, a lot to do. But then there’s usually some let down when I’ve explored it all, done it all. It’s not a world I can inhabit—it’s just a place to visit, and like all places that you visit, you eventually need to leave, and go home.

I think I’ve referred to the shelf point before when discussing video games. You’ve reached the shelf point when your interest in the game wanes; it’s time to put the disk back in the case, put the case on the shelf. Usually, there’s a new game that’s arrived that gets your attention, and causes you to shelve a game, but sometimes it’s indicative of poor design, or shallow game-play, if you reach the shelf-point after a certain number of hours of playing. That number is a bone of contention among gamers. I’ve always used 40 hours as a yard-stick, but there’s the argument that is too many, that it’s unrealistic to expect that many hours from every title. And I guess the other side of the coin would be that you if you enjoyed the game, you shouldn’t pan it if you don’t get 40 full hours out of it.

But what about those games that you’ve put days into? The games that have proven themselves to be wonderful, but after a while, you’ve worn a groove in the gameplay. Even when new content comes out, the game grabs your attention for a while, but then it starts to feel faded again. How do you say good-bye to a virtual place that you’ve inhabited for so long? You played the game so much that you almost did it, you almost made it through the screen, you almost got to go there.

Eventually, even these games have to go back into their cases, and go on the shelf. And maybe you’ll look back at it, ten years down the line, and you’ll fondly remember how close you got to getting through the glass.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Carl and Kate are on the bed in the back bedroom. She’s playing “MouseBot” for him while he yells encouragement. Outside, a chill Spring rain falls from the damp sky, but inside we are warm, cozy, and dry.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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We’re at the end of the day that’s at the end of the week. All of us are unplugging in different ways. Whit is watching “Benji” on the couch. I’m sitting next to him, learning about micro-blogging while our feet get entangled.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Getting Past the Shelf Point

My current game jam is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I got it a couple of years ago when I first got my PS4, and was excited to get into it back then, but after grinding through it, I hit a shelf point and set it aside. Since then, I’ve become more aware of my own sensory processing issues when it comes to games, but also more comfortable and capable with the controller.

Recently, I read this article on Kotaku about a player who has put over 1,800 hours into The Witcher. I’ve been looking for a deep play game since Destiny 2 broke my heart, so I decided to load it back up again. I had been really grinding Monster Hunter World, but needed to take a break. So this seemed like a perfect time to start a long, in-depth role-playing game.

Part of what confounded me the first time through The Witcher was the control scheme, but this time things are a lot easier, mostly because the main attack controls are almost the same as in Monster Hunter. I need to learn to block more. Right now, Geralt (the eponymous witcher) is pretty fragile. I’m working on improving the armor, and I almost always use the shielding spell, but if he gets hit too many times, too quickly, he’ll go down. But one thing I learned from Monster Hunter is to dodge a lot, and that has really helped this time around in The Witcher.

I think part of the problem is that, at least early on, the combat doesn’t occur very often. When it does happen, it’s really intense and fast-paced, but you spend a lot of the game riding around, talking to people and looking for things. It actually makes me think of a fantasy-themed Red Dead Redemption, and the game world is gorgeous, so I don’t really mind walking through all this beautiful scenery. But I spend the first few moments of each combat sequence trying to remember how this all works again. It’s gotten better as I’ve gotten further into the game, and I’m getting more and more comfortable with it as I progress.

I’ve actually gotten past where I was before, so everything from here on out is new. I was able to get past my shelf point. There was a key mechanic in the fight that I missed before and this time it was a lot easier than I was expecting. And there is so much to see and do. I know this drum has been beaten time and time again for this game, but if you haven’t played it, I don’t think you can really get what this means. The opening map, White Orchard, is a pretty good size, and has enough quests and side-quests to keep you interested and engaged, as well as serving as a great tutorial on how to do different things in the game world. But then you move on to the second map, Velen, and it’s jaw-dropping the size of it. I think that it’s literally four times the size of White Orchard, and it’s littered with quest markers. Looking at the map, the question goes from being, “how does one spend 1,800 hours in a game” to “how are we not going to spend 1,800 hours on this?”

And then there’s Gwent. There is a collectible card game built in to the main game. This isn’t a card-based mechanic, like card-based combat. This is just a game, like chess, that people in the game world play. It’s completely optional — you could spend the entire game not playing a single hand of Gwent and do just fine. But a match of Gwent doesn’t take very long. The game is easy to pick up and learn, has a bit of strategy to it, and also a decent random component to it. And as you beat other players, you can get new cards. You can also buy cards from different merchants. It’s a whole set of sub-quests unto itself that have nothing to do with the story. And it’s a decent enough game that it’s been broken out into it’s own stand-alone version.

So, if you’re looking for me, check Velen. I need to go investigate the Crookback Bog. The Baron’s wife was dragged off by some monster, and there’s some witches there I need to talk to. Maybe they’ll give me some pointers on my Gwent game as well.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Walking on the West Side

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I finished up the Daily High Value Targets this morning, and then started working on grinding out world bosses and search and destroy missions. I started in Times Square, taking out the Bullet King, and then mopping up the three search and destroy missions. Compared to yesterday, they were a breeze.

I walked west a couple of blocks into Clinton, stopping at the Wolves Den to pick up the missions and restock. I cut south through the parking lot and took out Soretto, and then went further west down the street. I took out one of the S&D missions there, and then went down on the tracks to take out Strings and his gang. Once that was done, I went back east to take out the other two S&D missions. I tried out a little sniper’s perch I had found the other day, and it worked pretty well, though I did get shot up pretty badly. The third S&D mission also had a sniper’s perch, and that one actually worked much better.

I walked south from Wolves Den to Dante’s Run, and picked up the three missions. The first was right outside Dante’s front door. The second was in the subway tunnel. I knew from experience that if I followed the GPS, it was going to take me right into the tunnel where the fight was without any cover, so I started hunting around for another way in. I had to go way south, but I found it, and managed to take out that group pretty easily. The third was in a little storage lot under the bridge. They got tipped off I was coming when I engaged with a trio of rioters on the approach, but I still managed to handle it.

Then I walked further south from Dante’s to Hudson Yards. I went over the building and went west to take out Erskine, and then mopped up two S&D missions on the piers. Then I had to jog north a little bit to get back to the subway tracks to take out the third.

Then it was into Chelsea to take out Fray and Five-O. I got a little lost walking from Hudson Yards into Chelsea, but managed to find my bearings and hunt them down. Took out Fray with two shots, which was nice.

Then east up the block into the Tenderloin. I went into the Meat Locker and picked up the targets, and then went east and south to find and take out Belzer. The first S&D was down in the tunnels, and then the second was back west up the block from the sewer entrance. For the third one, I found a way to get up on the roof, and managed to snipe the entire lot from a distance.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Cities

Cities is essentially a SimCity clone. It’s not even subtle about it. You build a city by placing roads, zoning Residential, Commercial, or Industrial, supply power, water, santitation, health, education, fire and police services. And build parks. And maybe SimCity is close enough to reality that you could say that you just based your game on how things really go instead of on SimCity, but it’s really hard not to feel like Cities blatantly ripping off SimCity.

But SimCity is one of my favorite games of all time, and as I’ve noted before, a game that’s suited to my neurochemistry. Any game where you can stop time and do stuff, or think about things, that’s a win right there. So I’ve happily sunk hours into Cities already, even though I’ve only had the game for a couple of days.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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The Division Recap

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I signed in tonight after things had reset. Ran the two daily hard missions, Napalm Production and Subway Morgue. Completed the daily crafting and combat assignments, and then went into the Dark Zone to complete the daily there. After messing around in the Dark Zone, I took a long walk back to the BoO. By the time I got back, it was time to sign off.

Just to make the game more interesting, I’m trying to use Fast Travel less, and also I’m trying to learn my way around without using the map. I started doing the same in Destiny, where instead of Fast Traveling, I’d purposely jet around on the Sparrow. You get in more fights, earn more XP, get more loot.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Running With Strangers

I like playing solo. I mean, I like playing the co-op stuff with the guys, and I’ll even do PvP if I’m playing with my friends, but what I really like is playing solo. Solo in an open world. With deep play. Not asking for much.

I don’t want to play a story. If I want a story, I can go read a book or watch a movie. I liked both Nier: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn, so much so that I’m sure that I’ll pick them up again someday, but I really enjoy games like Destiny, GTA, and right now, The Division. I like being able to go anywhere, and to call my own shoots on what I’m going to do, as opposed to stepping through chapters in a story.

The problem is, it’s really hard to create content for that environment, and for most open world games, multiplayer is added to keep things interesting. So wanting to play it solo makes it more complicated.

Right now in The Division, if I want to play solo, I can: do the Named Boss loop; do Search and Destroy missions; do HVT missions; and I can mess around on the West Side Piers. Oh, and I could play Survival, which I haven’t even tried. I’m not sure why. There’s something about those “Don’t starve” modes that puts me off, but it might just be fear of the unknown.

I could try the Underground, but it sounds like it might be a little dicey to solo. Mynbruje thought you could, RegularX seemed to think that was a bad idea. What’s interesting is that Regular used to routinely solo the Dark Zone, which both Mynbruje and I feel to be a bad idea. And you’re not really soloing the Dark Zone, as you’ve set foot into one of the game’s few PvP modes, and one of its most contentious.

There are also Daily combat and crafting challenges, and weekly challenges, though some of them might force me out of my comfort zone, might even have to run with randos. And in The Division, I’ve got my same old fear of running with strangers when I don’t know the mission, and what I’m supposed to do. Same thing I had all the way back in World of Warcraft, and that kept me from running a lot of the content.

You could play Warcraft solo; I did for years. As I got more comfortable with the game, I eventually started running dungeons with randos, and it was always a mixed bag. Sometimes it would be a blast, and sometimes, it would really suck. It’s the same with the strikes in Destiny, though for some reason, I’m less concerned with knowing the mechanics of a strike.

The Division is really hitting a sweet spot with me, with it’s open world, and multiple things to do. The part where it’s going to fall apart, I’m afraid, is the deep play. How much longer am I going to find it interesting to collect armor sets when I just seem to be running one and enjoying it. There are exotic weapons that I could collect, as well. And I do have a small crew forming. Like I said, I enjoy co-op with people I know and trust, so hopefully soon, we’ll be able to do some of the co-op stuff in The Division.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Afternoon Run

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I finished the World Boss route I started this morning, and then went to the West Side Piers for a while to mess around. It got a little hairy in there, with all the insta-spawns, but I did find a few more phones. And I got another Caduceus. That’s four yesterday and today, just running open world.

Then I started running HVTs, clearing out most of the dailies. I haven’t really come up with a strategy for cleaning these out. I can’t tell if I should start at the top and work my way down, or work my way up. I know I can handle the challenges on the bottom, and can handle them almost all the way up, but I’m not sure if I can handle the top tier challenges. I got overrun on one recently, though now I know the map better, and I think I have a better place to fall back to.

After doing that for a while, I finished up doing some more West Side Piers, poking around on the east side of the area. Found one more phone, and picked up another WSP combat mission. These are little short challenges that if you complete them, you get a WSP cache, which has a gold or a green, and some division tech. I picked up a lot of greens through the course of the day, but I just tossed them in the stash. I’ll sort through them later.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Morning Run

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Bought an exotic, “The Historian”, a marksman’s rifle that has the bullets explode shortly after they hit. Ran The Bullet King, Sorrento, Strings, and Erskine, and did the search and destroy missions along the way.

I got a note when I logged in that I had a GE participation award waiting for me at the Rewards Claim Vendor in the BoO, under the “Resources” tab. I found two chests, but also a bunch of other stuff, including a ton of Division Tech. I have no idea what that’s from.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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What’s Changed In The Division

I went back and took another look at how I felt about The Division after playing through Vanilla. My take was that the Dark Zone wasn’t fun for me as a solo player due to the ambiguity of the others players status, i.e., it’s actually always PvP since you have to assume that everyone is out to get you. And other than the Dark Zone, there wasn’t really anything to do other than the first, new Incursion, which was somewhat broken because there was no endgame scale. In order to make it a challenge to the overpowered endgame player, they threw a ton of bullet-sponges at you, which wasn’t that much fun to play.

With the release of 1.8, which is a free update to the game, they’ve managed to fix most of my complaints. There are lots of end game activities now, spanning PvE and PvP. Things are a little more limited if you approach it as a solo player compared to multiplayer, but multiplayer is what gives a game like this extra depth, especially at the endgame.

They made a significant tweak to the Dark Zone. By default, every player is an agent. You have to actively declare yourself to be a rogue, and it sets off an alert on the whole map to give other players a chance to prepare. If you’re in a group with someone who goes rogue, you’re given an opportunity to leave the group and not go rogue as well. While I haven’t played it yet, it seems to me that would eliminate the ambiguity. You would know if someone is looking to PvP with you or not.

The World Tier system allows them to scale the difficulty of the game without making the enemies seem like bullet-sponges. I had a supply drop that I tried to collect while I was on Tier 5, and I got my hat handed to me. I kicked it down to Tier 0, and it was a piece of cake with the same enemies. In order to get item drops at the level I currently need, I need to normally run on Tier 5, but being able to scale it and pretty much be able to scale it on the fly allows me to tackle all sorts of Content solo that I normally wouldn’t do, just because I would feel like it’s too hard. Of course, I’m doing things for the drops, so I’m still probably going to skip them, anyway.

The drops feel really heavy compared to Destiny. Almost every firefight ends with me collecting something; it’s actually rare that you get nothing. And while I understand the logic behind Destiny‘s token system, I have to admit that there is a more visceral sense of satisfaction to actually get a gun or a piece of gear than a token.

I reached a point where I needed to build sets of armor. The different sets have different themes which give you different bonuses depending on how many pieces of the set that you have equipped. I was able to get my current set after just a couple of hours of farming in the open world.

And since I don’t really know what I need to buy or gather, I’ve been alternating between selling and breaking down the different pieces of gear. Compared to Destiny, I feel like I’m awash in gear, credits, and materials.

Right now, The Division is offering a lot of end game activities, especially compared to where it was two years ago. Meanwhile, Destiny seems to have stagnated. I can drop into either one, and grind for an hour or two, but at the end, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished more in The Division.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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Flunking Flank

I spent most of this afternoon running around in The Division. I cleared out all the world bosses, and then started going after HVTs. I cleared a couple of weeklies, but then hit a point I just don’t know if I can cross solo. There were a lot of them. So, I switched to the dailies, and ran the ones there that dropped greens.

Then I went to West Side Piers, the new open world area. There were a couple of phone recordings that I wanted to track down, and I’m glad I did, because they reward a ton of XP towards the next cache. So, between fighting the guys to get to the recordings, I think I earned three caches for three recordings. This loot box mechanism is really similar to Destiny’s Luminous Engrams. Both reward you for simply playing the game. Unlike Destiny, however, there’s no drop off after the first three levels a week. You can keep earning caches as long as you’d like.

I’m now running a 4 Nomad/2 Lone Star build. The 4 Nomads give me an auto heal if I get killed, something that came up more than once today when I got in over my head. And the 2 Lone Stars give me double the ammo, so my pockets got a lot deeper. Both when I was hunting world bosses and running around in West Side Piers, I felt like I had to flick back to base a lot to re-up my ammo. This should give me a little more time in the field.

I’m getting better at the game, too. I’m learning how to line up my shot in cover, then pop-up by hitting aim and then shooting. With my marksman rifle, I can pop a series of targets like that. I feel like I’m swimming through jello though when I end up with a situation where I’m getting overrun and overwhelmed. I’m so spoiled by Destiny, where I can run backwards probably about as fast as I can run forwards. You move and jump at superhuman speeds in Destiny, so when you’re just a mere mortal in The Division, you can feel the difference.

But I think that’s a design choice. The game wants you to think in terms of tactics, to use cover, to not get flanked. Getting flanked is pretty much game over, though with this build I’ve got a little more survivability than I did before. I’m also getting better at figuring out how to deal with the different units, and not get myself into those situations.

I only had a couple of “glitchy” moments today: once when I meant to hit X to duck behind cover, I hit O and climbed over the cover and fell down to the floor below, where three yellow bar bosses were waiting for me. That didn’t end well. A couple of times I glitched when throwing the turret, mostly when I was in a hurry because I was being overrun. I’m also used to being able to quick toss grenades in Destiny, which is often my response to being rushed, and I couldn’t do that here. I almost feel like I need a something like a sawed off shotgun instead of my pistol, sort of a more potent “get-off” weapon.

Oh, and I was able to clear out my supply drop by dropping my world tier to 1 (or 0, whatever the lowest one is). I thought it hadn’t worked because there were still a bunch of gold bars waiting for me, but then I tore through them like tissue paper. I think I got a couple of gold drops and some Phoenix Credits out of it, so I guess it was worth it.

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kiyote23 · 6 years

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The Puddles In The Street

Back into The Division? A game that will be two years old soon? Why? You’ve got all these other games to play, yet you’re playing The Division. Again.

Well, it’s familiar. I spent almost a month playing Vanilla when it was released. I was queued up on release day, and that was early March 2016. I played all through Vanilla, but then there wasn’t much to do. I tracked down all the intel, and then there really wasn’t anything to do but the Dark Zone, which was an unleveled hell of a PvP arena. And I wasn’t interested in that, so I stopped playing. Destiny came out with the “Taken Spring” update, and I went back to grinding for light.

And yeah, I guess I hit a fatigue point with both Destiny and Nier, which is too bad, because I like both of them. And I’ve still got games that I’ve never played, and I came back to The Division.

I just don’t know what I’m doing. I can kick the World Tier up by notches as I improve my Gear Score. The higher the Gear Score, the higher the World Tier that I can access. The higher the World Tier, the better the Loot, ie, Loot with a higher Gear Score, and then you can go to the next tier, and so on. I found a guide on Reddit that basically said, do what you can to get your gear score up to 256 before going on to the next steps, and by the end of today, I’m at 253 or something. I just farmed out in the new district they added, and did some High Value Targets.

But I keep alternating between selling and dismantling the loot I don’t want. Oh, and part of the rapid leveling is through newly introduced Loot Boxes. Actually, I don’t know when they were introduced, but they were new to me. I had earned a bunch of them, and I didn’t really understand what they were, but they give you good loot.

But now I’m really in uncharted territory. I have no idea what the end game actually entails. Is it like Destiny, where I’m grinding light for no particular purpose? (Though I bet those missions in the Infinite Forest would be easier now than when I tackled them before.)

Right now, there’s a Global Event going on, which will apparently last all week. There are missions that will pay out GE credits, which I assume you turn in to some sort of GE vendor, probably to get a GE Loot Box. GE vanity items? I saw that for one “commendation”, which look like in-game trophies (also new to me), you could earn a new patch for your shoulder. It was a cute patch.

The game kind of wears on me, but it’s actually better for my neurology than Nier or even Destiny. You operate at a level removed from your character. There’s almost an X-Com-like interface, where you mark what cover you’d like the character to take, and then just hold X to get them to run to it. It’s actually pretty strategic, trying to find cover without getting flanked. Since I’m playing solo, it’s really important not to get flanked. If you get flanked, you’ll have some unbearable lightness happening.

But the constant combat is a grind. There’s some resource gathering. There’s a whole crafting system that I’ve barely scratched the surface on, as well as an optimization system to fine tune weapons. I’ve saved up a ton of crap because I know it’ll be useful someday. I just don’t know what to do with it.

But it’s definitely a game you can get lost in. There’s something sort of meditative about it, jogging down these city streets, watching the road ahead for trouble. The graphics engine is beautiful; earlier tonight I was running into a sunrise, lighting up the concrete canyon and setting the puddles in the street aglow. It was gorgeous, even though the city is ruined, and a firefight could erupt in front of me at any moment

So, yeah, I guess I’ve got some studying to do.

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