Upgrading And Other Gaming Activities
I’ve been rather focused on Star Wars Battlefront for the last couple months, but it isn’t the only thing I’ve done lately. One big thing is computer upgrades.
First, I replaced my GTX 670 FTW edition (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130843&cm_re=GTX_670_FTW-_-14-130-843-_-Product) with a SSC 2.0 GTX 970 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487088). The 670 worked very well overclocked and delivered good 60 FPS game quality on the majority of the games I play regularly, so I didn’t strictly need to upgrade in order to enjoy my games. The 970 is roughly comparable to a SLI pair of 670’s, or a good 50% increase in performance. But it also comes with other technical improvements for quality, more memory, and the SSC version lives up to its reputation for quietness. It is also very, very fast, and as with the 670 overclocked well above its already fast speeds. It lets me push game quality up even higher, though more important for me was increasing the minimum frame rates. While average frame rates are important to keep at your desired screen refresh rate (at least 60 Hz for most displays), it is those odd random drops in frames which spoil the feel of fluid reality.
The 670 migrated to our 2nd computer, thus giving us two upgrades for the price of one. Running it in place of the GTX 570 reminded me of just how big an upgrade one generation can be for NVidia cards. While I do like AMD as well, sticking with Nvidia for all our machines makes this kind of hand-me-down upgrade program a lot more seamless.
I also put a 3 TB 7200 RPM drive in to replace one of my 1 TB gaming drives. That gives me another 2 TB of space for games and other things, which should be more than enough for quite some time. This was also a kind of double upgrade, because I put the 1 TB drive in our other computer. Because we share a lot of games, and I didn’t wipe the drive before the transfer, a lot of the space was immediately reused as Steam recognized the new Steam Library drive. I still have some duplicate installations, but it will be trivial to remove whichever one makes the most sense later, when we need the space. For just a little more than the price of a new game, we gained over 2 TB of working space for our games on two computers. Now we don’t need to worry about what games to leave installed.
Hard drive space is so cheap now that it doesn’t really pay to make stressful judgements of what to keep and what to delete, especially for gaming libraries where you never know when you might want to play a game. Space on SSDs is still relatively expensive, but there isn’t much reason not to keep old games you may still play someday on a hard drive. 3 TB is the sweet spot for price, though 2 TB isn’t bad, for 7200 RPM drive suited for higher performance gaming. But 4 TB is a pretty good size for slower storage, and despite 5400 RPM “Green” drives being nominally lower performance, they actually are more than good enough for many games which aren’t demanding of hard drive speeds. Most games don’t have extensive loading, which is where faster drives, especially SSDs, shine. If it takes a little longer to start up a game, it has little impact on how things go once you start playing, if the game doesn’t load new material constantly.
When I put the 3 TB drive in, I did it before going to bed so I could let the drive copy run while I slept. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that I partitioned it using MBR rather than GPT. For drives up to 2 TB, it doesn’t matter, but above that, you need to use GPT to use the entire space in Windows. Windows has a tool to convert the partition, but it doesn’t keep any data. Since I’d finished copying the 1 TB drive, I didn’t want to waste time doing that over again. There are commercial programs which can do the conversion and retain data, but there is also a free command-line tool to do it. Once the conversion was taken care of, resizing it up to 3 TB (instead of 2 TB) was fast.
One more small project to take care of: cleaning the CPU fan radiator of dust. I noticed when doing testing on my system that the CPU temperatures were getting high, and that leads to random crashes and other problems. The cooler can’t do its job if it is coated with dust. This needs to be done periodically for many computers, but higher performance systems need it more than most. For a household with cats, dogs, or other sources of hair and dust, it should be part of your regular maintenance program.
So, on to game play.
My GTX 970 came with a free game: Rainbow Six Siege. On my shopping list of tactical FPS games, this one is quite nice, adding a very nice, intense, realistic-feeling entry to the genre. I haven’t played enough to really give it a review, but it is worth looking at.
Star Wars Battlefront has grabbed a lot of my time. The game is a lot of fun to play, does justice to the Star Wars universe, and still holds my interest after I’ve ranked up and unlocked all the essentials. We got a 2nd copy of the game while it was on sale, because I expect it will be a while before another sale hits, though it is hard to be sure with EA. No word yet on when additional material will be out for the game, but that is likely to be the key tipping point for long term success. The game has sold well enough so far, but it is more important to keep players interested, so they keep playing. For a lot of people, the game is good enough now to do that, but more content will make it even more attractive, and may sway those who feel the game is lacking. Of course, that also means spending more for the game, but if it is good enough…
GTA V has had a fairly steady stream of new material this year, with no sign that Rockstar is stopping. While a lot of the items, such as the Ill-Gotten Gains packages, include items which are purely to show off your status and make you spend a lot of in-game money to do so, the additions also add to the game play. There are new missions and events for both free mode play, wandering the world, and jobs for players to join in on for fun and money. The experience of wandering in free mode has definitely been spiced up.
The Low Rider cars are very nice, and I couldn’t resist getting a Voodoo (one of the cars from GTA San Andreas) and upgrading it. But the upgrades are really, really expensive — million-dollar cars once all done, easily — so it is hard to do a lot of them unless you really have loads of cash. Along with them, we also get the ability to buy one or two (after the next update) additional properties, so we have more places to store our new car collection.
There is that element, of course, that players who are regularly active will have a lot of cash. You can make a few million dollars per month with daily play in the game, but there is a lot of stuff to spend money on as well, so it isn’t like you will necessarily have buckets of money for the new stuff which keeps coming out on hand. One of the game’s perpetual problems is that hacking cheats make it easy to get money and other things, as well as manipulate the game in other ways (teleporting or super speed in races, for example). Most of the cases where I’ve seen hack-mods in use lately have been of the relatively benign “make stuff happen at random” things, like Christmas trees appearing on the streets, rather than malicious random kills or event cheats, but it is all down to the attitude and choices of those doing it. The ability to make money appear in large quantities negates any need or value for actually working to get money in the game (though playing missions is its own reward in fun and accomplishment).
I got two of the Halloween special cars — nice for looks, not really for missions. The latest expansion, Executives and Other Criminals (http://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/52545/gta-online-executives-and-other-criminals-now-available), adds new cars, many new, more expensive apartments, a very expensive but cool private yacht home (which is movable, and comes with its own complement of boats, and depending on model, helicopters). It also adds a new layer to play, with the VIP players able to lead small organizations, composed of Bodyguards who join and gain benefits, including money, for working together on missions. There aren’t that many missions yet, but the idea seems solid and open for a lot more freemode fun activities for groups of friends, which is always nice.
GTA V’s Daily Objectives encourage regular play. It is fairly quick and easy, although you do need to find a partner (or any convenient other player) for some of them, and pays about $50000 in less than an hour. There are a lot of ways to make fast money in the game if you play it regularly, but the Dailys are generally the fastest and easiest tasks. You get bonuses for not missing days, which do add up. The game’s casual nature makes it easy to drop into it for half an hour a day, in order to keep up with your income and things going on in the game.
Spintires is a nice little game if you like driving offroad vehicles and shifting gears. It is much more of a driving environment simulator than GTA, which is fine, because the fun of GTA is doing quick, fun, often impossible things, though the racing games within it are decent.
I got the latest expansion DLC for Age Of Wonders III, and Endless Legend (with all its DLCs). Both are turn-based strategy fantasy games. While no game has yet replicated and updated the classic Master Of Magic fantasy civilization building, the Age Of Wonders series does a pretty good job of making a game with similar fantasy themes. It has the classic heroes, the spellcaster leader, both global on-map and tactical battle magic spells, and a good mix of city development and tactical combat. Age Of Wonders III did not come with all the content from its predecessors, which meant we had to wait for DLCs to get some of the classic races and elements, but in the end, we get a game which is somewhat deeper than its origins, and of course, upgraded for modern PC hardware.
Endless Legend is a rather different game, but in new and refreshing ways. While it does have a sort of tactical combat, you are more of an army captain or general, giving general orders (who to attack), but not directly do moves, choose weapons or abilities, and such. The combat system is quite nice, though, making use of the main map to set up the terrain, with elevation and impassable areas playing a big role, and with all forces within the area able to engage in battle. The more distant units from the point of engagement take longer to enter as reinforcements.
Endless Legend is a civilization building game, and doesn’t have the spellcasting hero (or player controlled spell casting) element from Age Of Wonders (or Age Of Magic). But the military units have a fine fantasy feel, and you can upgrade them with improved gear, rather than just researching new and improved unit types. The game has a strong story based side to it, with the various quests given by the game, and the many independent factions in the world, driving a lot of your choices. It is worthwhile to undertake them for the rewards, but doing so does greatly affect your play. For example, one quest wanted me to start a war, while another wanted me to to make peace with my enemy. While I may well have started that war anyway, the quests encouraged me to do so sooner, and also provided a nice incentive to end it after taking two cities and weakening my enemy. You never have a shortage of small things to take care of in the game. It isn’t a micromanagement style of game, either, which is different from the classic Civilization style.
I haven’t played it that much yet, but I found myself caught up in both the beauty of the world and the constant seeking of goals, always working on several plans of action at once. Easy to play for an hour or two and not notice the time passing, it is, like Civilization, a game where you are constantly tempted to play One More Turn.
Battlefield Hardline has a new DLC coming out soon, and despite a drop in players on the PC, there are still enough games and gamers out there to make it worth playing. Battlefield 4 has another new map and patch, and DICE LA isn’t done with it yet.
What else? A short look at Rainbow Six Siege, brief play in Elite Dangerous, and a visit to the island on ARK: Survival Evolved. The last is a game I’d love to play more, but it is hard to play it casually. Not impossible, but once you start playing, it is easy to get drawn into your virtual life as a surviving (hopefully) adventurer on a mysterious, dinosaur covered island.
Are you into Webcomics? There are a few that I follow, and all three have gamer-related elements. First, Girl Genius. A Mad Science Steam Punk Fantasy adventure story, with loads of quotable characters, Hugo-award winning fun.
Second, The Order Of The Stick and Erfworld. Order Of The Stick is a D&D RPG based story, with nicely done stick figure art, which fits well with its funny and sometimes deep story telling in a self-aware RPG based world. Erfworld is about the adventures of a gamer from Earth, pulled into a world where the rules of wargames are the laws of physics, and he’s faced with a desperate, unwinnable battle. How can he overcome it? By abusing the game rules (aka laws of physics of that universe). The story has a nice bit of perspective for 4X Fantasy strategy game players, because the characters in the story are units in the game. The latest predicament (as of January 2016) involves a series of actions specifically designed to invoke unusual rules situations, rather than just a straightforward fight, with the life (and side) of the hero of the story at stake.
I’ve been doing this blog for almost a year now, and I’d like to think it is doing some good out there. It has been a lot of fun.
