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Friday, December 22, 2017

Moving Websites.

So I've been using Blogger for a long time for reviews but I its served its purpose and I need a better platform.

As such I am moving to Wix. If I actually had the money I'd move to Squarespace but, this'll do.

Anyway, here's the link: BronzeGaming

Monday, November 6, 2017

[Review] Destiny 2

Destiny 2.

Destiny 1 was released by Bungie on PS3/PS4 a while back, and it was acclaimed as a mild hit for some time, before people started hitting the gear wall. I personally wanted to play Destiny 1 but could not for lack of a PS4, and the PS3's Destiny 1 servers were separate from PS4 servers for some reason, so I never bothered picking it up after the beta.

After playing Destiny 2 for a week now, all I have to say is: I am deeply sorry (but not sorry console shooter plebs) that I did not play Destiny 1 on PS4. Destiny 2 has turned out to be a very fun experience, especially with a clan. My current clan is always topped off at 100 members and we're always helping each other and doing fun activities. It's a great way to get your dose of "socialness" for a week whether it's doing a raid, or just farming Strikes for Exotic weapons.

However, the game has hit a real snag for me: At about 278-286 gear level, you don't get any more powerful gear (not to be confused at this point with the REAL Powerful Gear engrams), and your gear flatlines with a 1/beat per minute heartrate as you tirelessly grind Strikes, Nightfall Strikes and the new Leviathan Raid (New as of 11/6/17 or a few days prior) for an Exotic piece of gear that's better than your current piece of gear, or a Legendary that you can fuse into your existing Legendaries somehow, some way. However, the real actual powerful gear you can guaranteed get is once a week, every Tuesday on reset day. Reset day is the day everyone probably boosts a power level or two, because completing certain activities awards a certain engram at certain NPCs at The Traveler, called Powerful Gear engrams. These engrams open as soon as you click on them at the NPC, awarding gear that, provided you want to use that piece of gear unless you're going for a specific build, should increase your Power Level (some people call it Light Level, I believe as well). The gear once a week is meant to further power up your characters and make you more powerful, thus adding more DPS to a group to get further through a raid, or get through Strikes quicker with your 3 man teams.

This is a real problem, because people are complaining about not progressing fast enough or enough to suit their liking (which, to be honest... I mean come on. The max Power Level (Light Level) right now is 305 and I got to 284 in my first week just by acquiring some Exotics and powering up my armor with mods that add +5 PL as well as powering up weapons and armor. You're only like barely 25 or so points off. Not that much to complain about) so Bungie is apparently doing something about this in the upcoming Osiris DLC, but we'll see how that goes.

If anything I would complain about lack of content, since you can blow through the story in a few hours (especially if you have a dedicated team of 3) and you can blow through every strike and the Nightfall in the same 24 hour time span (probably, again if you had a dedicated team and that much time on your hands). And this game is severely lacking in content. I get put to sleep queuing for strikes all the time, and running around with randoms (since I typically play 10PM-6AM or around there) in the Public Events that are around the map and trying to trigger them to make them Heroic (which is an elevated level of the Public Event that awards better gear) and frieakin' annoying, because people think it's random when it happens, and it's not. As seen here:



Heroic Public Event triggers are very important to get Exotics and Legendaries from them. I actually got an Exotic and a Legendary from ONE Heroic Public Event one time. Extremely lucky.

All in all, the graphics are amazing even on the medium/high I play at, the music is the best part of the game (especially that intro music, dear jebesus I love it) and the loot collecting is fun, and playing with friends is great.

8/10 game for sure from me. Destiny 1 would have been better on PC though, just saying.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Shroud of The Avatar and What I Think of Richard Garriott.

So.

Shroud of the Avatar is an upcoming MMORPG from... well, here's the direct text from the website.


Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is a new type of third person fantasy RPG that combines a single player narrative with a sandbox MMO. It is being created by a team that includes:Richard “Lord British” Garriott the creator of the Ultima series, Starr Long the original Director of Ultima Online, and Tracy Hickman the author of the beloved Dragonlance Novels and Dungeons & Dragons modules.

The one name that stands out to me here is "Richard "Lord British" Garriott", which as we all remember this name from the failed Tabula Rasa many years ago. He may have created a flourishing community with Ultima, but times are a changing and I don't think he's kept up at all.


I had a go at the "demo" version of the game, which restricts you from choosing a talent tree path to one path, the lamely named "Path of Love", as well as the fact that the game restricts you in a lot of ways from enjoying the actual game. See here:


Free Trial Test Gameplay Differences:
  • Free Trial Test Current Time Period: July 3 – 26, 2017
  • The term (Visitor) is appended to their character name
  • Cannot give items to other players via Trade
  • Cannot purchase nor sell items via Player Vendors nor Public Vendors
  • No ownership of property nor use of lot signs
  • Cannot interact with public chests.
  • Cannot move/interact with items on a plot even if they are given permissions.
  • Cannot flag as Open PVP
  • Cannot gain nor create ransom items when you kill or are killed in PVP (in Open PVP zones)
  • Character data may be deleted after Free Trial Test is over if not upgraded to a paid account
  • Items purchased in the Add On Store cannot be accessed after the Free Trial Test Period is over unless you purchase Game Access
  • Cannot play in Offline Mode
  • Can only start on the Path of Love
Okay, it's a trial, there's gonna be some restrictions. I was okay with this and just wanted to experience a new MMORPG world to see how it was. I played through up to the first little "camping town" or whatever it is, and explored the different NPCs as well as crafting and the like. However, I found out there was fishing in the game, and I wanted to catch some fish. So, as a player who wants to do that is want to do, I immediately opened up my skills window (K), and went to the Crafting tab, and found "Fishing", and put the "action" to do it on my bar. 

But one thing was wrong. It wouldn't let me. The text on my skill bar said that that could not be placed there. I tried placing it on the water to see if it would do anything. Nothing. I could drag it around, but nothing was happening. So I googled the problem, as anyone with a problem with a game should do because 99% of the time it's been encountered before by someone else. Unfortunately I only found posts from, I think '16 or '15 that had instructions that were not applicable anymore, because I tried them.

So I tried googling for the game forums, and found them. And I was logged into them as well, which was great, 'cause usually you have to create a separate... well, I'm getting off track. I pushed the "New Topic" button, and GUESS WHAT GREETED ME THERE?

Add caption








Basically, if you can't read the text (I know it's going off the post and idgaf, sue me), it says:

Thank you for your interest in Shroud of the Avatar! Although our public forums may be read by everyone, posting privileges require a $5 minimum game related purchase. You can either make a store purchase on the main page, or buying the game on Steam will gain you access to the forums after you link your Steam account (see account page). If you pledged through Kickstarter you will need to link your Kickstarter account for forum posting privileges. 

Needless to say, I was outraged and appalled. Who asks for money to post on a public forum to ask questions about their game to see if maybe I did indeed want to spend money on buying a package? But, that's gone with seeing this. If they want to bar my way into learning more about their game so maybe I'd want to toss money at them, then that's on them. And I urge everyone else to do the same until they revoke this.

Unfortunately I had a lot of fun playing what I did at any rate which was like 20 minutes of gameplay before work, and 30 minutes of trying to figure out how the hell to fish, so. They already dun' fucked up.


0/10 won't ever play and hope it crashes and burns like Tabula Rasa.



Review: Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn is a game developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony. Guerrilla Games is a sub-component of Sony, which makes the game PS4 exclusive.

The game features a tribal girl, Aloy (pronounced E-loy) and focuses on her adventure through the land, tracking down her mother and stopping many various threats and helping many people along the way., and eventually fighting a greater evil.

The one clincher about this game is that most of the game is ranged weapon based, fighting mechanical robot animals, which made it stick out when it was first announced.

The game gathered critical acclaim from many video game reviewing websites and was an extremely hot item, the game is expected to sell between 4 to 8 million units in 2017, and it highly deserves it.

Horizon Zero Dawn revolves around a few things: ranged combat, melee combat, stealth tactics, and overriding machines. Since a lot of the world is inhabited by machine animals, at a point in the game you learn how to override and turn to your side, a lot of the machine animals. If the player goes to locations that are marked "Cauldrons" in the world, they can learn to override every machine animal and give the player a fighting chance.

The ranged combat in the game revolves around using a bow & arrows and bomb-type weapons. The bow and arrow weapons have 3 separate types of bows: One being a general all purpose use bow, the second being a sharpshooter's bow with an increased zoom and damage, and the third being an "elemental" bow per se. 


The normal bow, the end tier of which is the Shadow Hunter's Bow, has generally improved arrows, normal arrows, and fire arrows. 


The Shadow Sharpshooter's Bow is again, a sharpshooting bow. It comes with arrows that can knock components off of mechanical beasts, letting you pick them up (A Ravager's plasma cannon or a Thunderjaw's Disc Launcher) or picking up mechanical components to craft different things in your inventory or to craft ammo. The next ammo for the Sharpshooter Bow is the normal Sharpshooter arrows. These do roughly 30% more damage than the Hunter's Bow's improved arrows on the Shadow version, but they take as a tradeoff, about 20-30% longer on the draw for the bow. The third type of arrows are Harvest Arrows, but at the time of this writing I have not used them, but I would assume they assist in harvesting materials from machines/animals in increased capacities. 


The next bow is the Shadow War Bow, being the elemental arrow shooting bow. The third tier of the bow shoots shock, freeze and corrupt arrows. Corrupt arrows are interesting because they allow you to distract mechanical animals at a distance by corrupting them, and having them fight the other "normal" mechanical animals that are around.


There are also sling weapons, or rather, "slingshot" weapons. The first one uses 3 elements, frost, fire, and shock. These are applied through the use of shooting medium, hand sized spheres at opponents to apply the specified elemental effect. Personally I used the frost effect a lot, because of the damage increasing effects of the frost effect. Basically frosting them up, then spamming the normal Shadow Bow arrows to pretty much 75% more damage on whatever I'm fighting. Extremely useful for fighting large beasties as well as small ones.


The second "slingshot" weapon fires exploding spheres with different properties. The first property lets you lay proximity bombs that explode when an enemy walks near it. It also tosses the enemy to the ground, for you to rush in and get a critical hit in/critical kill. You can also fire these directly at enemies to have them immediately explode for the same amount of damage, which is smaller than the other two kinds of ammo. The next kind of ammo is the normal lobbing bomb that does roughly 100-130 points of damage to a machine and is capable of knocking humans to the ground and knocking down smaller machines, and bigger machines if you're assailing them with tons of fire. The third type is sticky bombs, which, so far I have just used like normal lobbing bombs. The bombs stick to their opponents and do a mid-range of damage between the normal bombs and the proximity bombs.


There are other, specialty weapons in the game, but all in all, the weapons are a core part of the game, and extremely well done, particularly the ones that are used the most, being the bows and slings. I'll leave those specialty weapons to be discovered, wink wink.


Next, I want to talk about overriding machines. Overriding machines lets you turn a machine to fight for you instead of against you. In this unfortunately, in the beginning you can only override Watchers, which, while serve as a useful distraction, don't really do much in the way of damage, unless you somehow get to override like, 5 at a time, which is extremely unlikely. Also, your overridden machines don't follow you anywhere either, they stay to one localized area, which is a shame, because if the machines recognized who you were (minor plot point) and the game said so so they followed you, it'd be a nice way to make a small machine army. But as it stands, nope.


Melee combat is alright, nothing special to write home about in my opinion. Honestly they could have done a much better job with it if people like CDPR can come up with flowing sword forms in The Witcher 3, they could have done better with spear forms. But, the melee combat serves its purpose which, in the end-game, is purely to try and knock down robots so you can tie them down, or freeze/stun/set them on fire, or just wail on them with your spear. Unfortunately during the game you can't buy upgrades for your spear, you earn one upgrade through a side quest (I believe) and the last "Epic" upgrade through the main story quest. For most of the game you are stuck with a low damage melee weapon, and even then the end spear does pitiful damage compared to your ranged weapons, so people should be sticking with ranged unless they're feeling ballsy.


And an RPG game like this wouldn't be complete without dodge-rolling.


Also, the game features a talent tree to up your skills. Assisting you in fighting enemies, being stealthy, or crafting items/crafting large amounts of ammo at one time, etc. I'm not going to list every talent here (though, I could) but suffice it to say every talent in the game has a role to play, and you can also get every talent, which is a good feeling to see a maxed out talent tree.


[Too late for this review so I'm publishing as is unfortunately. 10/10 game though, buy it! Especially if you love third person RPGs!]





Friday, November 11, 2016

Summoner's War

I fucking hate begging pricks for YT asking for access to other people's accounts:


Here's the text from the post:

Whats up guys ! I know this will look scammy as fuck but i thought I'll give it a try :) I'm a small youtuber and recently started to make some summoners war videos with my brother, maybe you have even seen a video from me being posted here. Long story short I want to do a summoning video with some more accounts like those mass summons from YDCB or JewBagel. the problem is since i don't really have a big audience noone would ask me to summon for them so I have to do it the other way around :D I just hoped that maybe I can find some people here who are willing to trust me and want to help me out in growing my channel :) If you are one of those kind souls just write me a PM so we can discuss everything :) Here is my Channel if you are interested:[removed]
btw : if this post is against the rules please tell me so i can delete it.
tl;dr: Titel says it all :P

And here's my reply:

Dude I wouldn't let Jewbagel summon on my account or anyone else. He is able to buy his own scrolls and gems on his own account, he gets hundreds of thousands of views which means he is rolling in $$$ along with every other popular SW YTer out there. All of those YTers don't need other people's accounts to do "summon shows", they make a decent bit of money. If I got as many views as any of these people you bet I'd be buying frieaking scrolls and shit out the ass for content for YT for my channel.
Just save up mystical scrolls until the end of the month and do like 1 video a month man. (minus other SW news of course I suppose) idk probably like 20 scrolls a month if you're farming DB10/GB10/NB10 or whatnot.
The reason I'm nitpicking is because it is extremely rude and crude to ask for access to other people's game accounts. Just because Youtubers do it doesn't mean random people on the internet will give you access to their accounts that they've worked on for a couple years now. We don't know you, why would we let you know our account information? For all we know you could be a korean farmer baiting for accounts and changing them when you get the information for them?
There's absolutely no point to it, I don't get it. I've seen summoning videos from other SW YTers and I'm just like what is the point? There isn't any.
Think about it. Would YOU give me your account information for a "summonfest" if you didn't know me and I was some random person on Reddit? Probably not. Especially if you were sitting on like 10k in crystals or something, I definitely wouldn't.
Sorry for being a dick, I just hate posts like this because TYPICALLY (not saying you OP, I have no evidence besides this post which is weak evidence) people who are begging for stuff like this for YT have no common sense and are used to shit being handed to them.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

7 Days to Die breaks concurrent player record!

So recently the newest update for 7 Days to Die came out, Alpha 15.

It's a pretty good update, a lot of bugfixes and some mechanic changes, as well as a lot of recipe changes, making the game slightly harder. This was ONLY on PC however, as I found out The Fun Pimps actually sold their IP to another company to put the game on consoles. I can only assume they're getting royalties from it, which they really deserve for making such a good game.

However, I did find out today that at one point over this last weekend (October 7th - 9th I guess) there were about 22,500 concurrent players of 7DTD and made it into the top 20 on Steam's charts. Hopefully this made more people take notice of the game and pick it up.

Btw, if anyone's got a really active server with a community that works together, I'd love to join. Steam tag is Setari666 on Steam with the panda with guns image.

But yeah, I thought this was really cool and I wish The Fun Pimps much more success with their game and hope they don't ditch it in lieu of another project, I'll say that much. Like a lot of other developers -_-.

Remember to check out my Youtube for the latest and greatest games! http://www.youtube.com/c/SetariM

Tuesday, September 13, 2016