My Time With the Evolve Big Alpha Weekend [Part II]

Welcome to Part II of my exceedingly late posted experience with Turtle Rock Studios and 2K's #BigAlpha test weekend for the upcoming FPS MMO monster hunting game, Evolve.

Before I get into the actual gameplay, I will say that Saturday of the alpha weekend was spent exactly like Friday: trying to see if the game would start and being greeted with the Steam Service Component and Bootstrapping windows.  It was not until Sunday afternoon, right after I had put some chicken in the fridge to marinate for an hour, that the game booted up and I was able to play, so let the game begin!

For my first game, I was with two other human teammates (and one computer controlled teammate) playing against a human controlled monster in "The Dam" setting which was randomly selected.  I played the Tank (TF2: The Heavy).  Prior to actually being thrust into a game, I was given a brief video only tutorial on Markov's abilities, gun options, jump/boost jump and how to work with my teammates.  This I found to be very useful considering everyone I was teamed up with was above a 1, which is the level that I was at as I had yet to play the game.  Theoretically, I was teamed up with people who were at a similar skill level, so I'm not what that said about the people I played with, but ah well.

I'm not sure what the flying guy counter in the upper left is all about.

First off, the biggest issue I had while playing was lag with two possible causes.  The first cause being that computer was not up to snuff for the minimum requirements for the game.

• CPU
• Intel Pentium D 3GHz or higher
• AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 6400 2.4 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4GB
• GPU:
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 or higher
• AMD Radeon 5770 or higher
• HDD: 15 GB install
• OS: Windows 7 64 bit

I will just say that my processor is old by today's processors standards, which is probably the main reason my the game jumped/lagged/skipped very frequently.  To note a 1.7GHz processor vs. a 2.4GHz.  Apparently those .7 GHz are very important.  The other possible cause was that our internet connection was lacking for a came/build of this caliber.  

For this reason, I often felt that I was behind the other players in my team.  I did manage to catch up with everyone and helped in the loosest sense of the word to take down the Monster.  I will say though that it was very difficult to lock on a shoot at an angry moving target while playing at something like 10 frames per second, maybe less.  After the match, I was shown the amount of damage I did with each weapon as well as a comparison to the rest of the world's average for playing as Markov as well as player/weapon mastery/progression.

As you can tell, I was not a very productive member of society for this particular match.

The next game, after "helping" to take down the Monster, I spent as the monster.  

Prior to playing as Goliath, I was shown another tutorial video about how to control the Monster, their special abilities and how to generally delay death.  I started off with three skill points that I could put into any four abilities: Fire Breath, Charge, Leap Smash and Rock Throw.  I recall putting two points in Fire Breath, one in Rock Throw.

In that first battle/hunt, I was unable to use Rock Throw to deal any damage as the Hunters were too quick.  I was able to breath some firey death upon the Hunters though.  And by "death" I mean some first and maybe second degree burns.  Sadly, no one died.

Unlike playing as one of the Hunters, playing as the Monster was in 3rd person, which was fine by me, but I could understand if some people were offput by this perspective considering that the rest of the game was in first person.  Additionally, despite being so much larger than the Hunters and being able to cover more ground at a faster speed, I was still hunted down like the proverbial rabid dog the Hunters saw me as.  It probably also did not help that I was unfamiliar with the setting as this time around I was playing not in The Dam but in the Fusion Plant.

Things did not pan out for me in that round, that very short round.  I lasted less than three minutes and had nothing to do with the pictures I was trying to take.  The second game (third overall and last game before I had to go and cook the chicken for dinner) lasted just over four minutes.  That game (of which no pictures exist from) went a little bit better.  I was able to hunt down some of the smaller wildlife and consumed them to build up my defense capabilities and heal some damage caused by the Hunters.

As was the case with playing as Markov, playing as Goliath resulted in the same graphical issues that I experienced.  Granted the graphics look great in the pictures that I was able to take, even with the video settings at their lowest possible settings the game still had significant troubles on my computer.  Enough so that I would not be buying the game unless I were to play a demo and found out that I could play the game in a playable capacity.

The word from Turtle Rock Studios is that the game that was available for the Big Alpha Weekend was only a single gameplay-type compared to what will be available in the official release.  I have read a bit on the Steam forums for Evolve that some people are concerned about the amount of content with the game running around $60.  I will admit that even with promised added maps, character skills and whatnot available upon release, I would be a little leary about spending that much for a multiplayer coop game.  The impression that I got was that it was like a coop game of Left 4 Dead 2 with no associated single player campaign option.  Maybe that will be part of the official release in February (10th to be specific), but for me, it may not be enough to warrant a release day purchase; even if my computer could handle the game without skipping.

Thanks for trudging through these last two posts, regular nonsense will commence on Wednesday with another MIDI Week Singles along with whatever Dr. Potts and I decided to babble about.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Did You Lose It In A Hateful Fight?

P.S.

In case you wanted a reason to buy Evolve, here are a lot of places/awards telling you that you should buy the game, which was a screen/advertisement of sorts after quitting the game.  So if you're one of those people who only buy popular games, I believe this one classifies.

My Time With the Evolve Big Alpha Weekend [Part I]

What follows is Part I of my foray into Turtle Rock Studios and 2K's Big Alpha release testing of their still in development game Evolve.

So the #BiGaLpHa weekend started out alright.  I downloaded the 14.8Gig file  over night from Thursday to Friday (of last week).  The game opened at 9am PST although I figured the servers would be flooded with people a la Elder Scrolls Online's beta weekend.  Around 11am I gave the game a go, and was greeted with a Steam pop up window showing me how far along my installation process was?

After a few seconds of looking at this window, I became disappointed as I was then greeted with another Steam pop up window telling me that I had to download some service something-or-other first.

"Okay, since this is from Steam, I'll take it as legit," is what my brain told me.  So I thought I would install whatever service I was apparently now missing, but then this happened:

That damn Bootstrapper again!  So I had to close down Steam, but thankfully the previous result with the Bootstrapper did not happen again.  Whew!

An hour or so later, I tried again, just for shits and giggles.  This time the installation window that popped up started at 1%, then progressed to 24%, 30%, 62% and all the way up to 100%.  And the game started.  Whew!!

I was excited if you couldn't tell from the extra exclamation mark.  The game, or at least the menu was running smoothly with the monster in the background, breathing with its mandibles occasionally reaching out away from it's mouth in a way that implies smooth movement (having already used "smooth" earlier in the sentence).  I went into the options, did the obligatory switching of the axis for the mouse/y-axis, changed the video settings from "High" down to "Low" as I was 99% sure that my little laptop wouldn't be able to handle graphics of this potential caliber.  Then I clicked "Play" and was brought to the character selection screen.

I wasn't really sure what the jobs meant, aside from Assault (Tank) and Medic (Medic) and those were roles that I wasn't comfortable playing on my first playthrough.  My thought process was that playing a role that I wasn't familiar with would be excusable if I were to fuck up the rest of the people I was playing with.  So I clicked "Accept" and patiently waited to be put into a group.

After 20 minutes I was kicked out for "inactivity."  I thought, maybe it was because I actually didn't touch my computer in those 20 minutes of waiting (and reading a textbook).  So, I re-entered the waiting queue room place:

Another 25 minutes later I was kicked out of the waiting room due to inactivity, although this time I was sure to move my mouse around every 5 minutes (I had a timer running).  I know that I could have just clicked the "Back" button every so often to try and reset the waiting room, but I figured that since Turtle Rock and 2K were testing server capacity, that I would just let the game try and find a group for me.  Testing doesn't always mean being able to play a functioning product and my time with The Elder Scrolls Online beta test taught me this.

In total, I waited 1 hour 18 minutes and was kicked out three times (once was because the phone rang and temporarily killed our internet connection).  After that first taste of what was to be Evolve, I tried multiple times to log back into the game, but each time I was greeted with the first "Completing Installation. . . 1%" before being told that I needed to download the Steam service component whereby I can either hit "cancel" and I could forget about playing or click "Download" and have the bootstrapping error come up, and forget about playing.

The #BigAlpha weekend lasted from Friday October 31st until Sunday November 2nd and the article for Monday will include the 30 minutes I was able to spend actually playing the game.

Have a wonderful weekend.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

We Bring Forth Monstrous Birth

A Tale of the Terrors that is Involved with the Strapping of Boots.

I just had something terrifying happen and thankfully that moment, which lasted a lot longer than it should have but felt like it lasted longer than it really did, is no longer present.  I fixed it.  

So here is what happened.

I noticed that Loadout, an MOFPS (is that a thing like MMORPG?) akin to in look and style to Team Fortress 2, except that that I have never played Loadout, was in the process of auto downloading a patch.  Not a large patch by todays standards either as it was only around 34-40 MBs.  I noticed it this last night (5/20/2014) and thought nothing of it until a few hours later when I noticed that the Steam client was no longer open.  Again, I did not think anything of it as sometimes Steam will download its own firmware update and restart or simply close down after an update.  Nothing too out of the ordinary.

This afternoon however (Wednesday 5/21/2014), I became somewhat afraid.  I tried to open Steam only to have the little icon down there at the bottom of the screen become slightly highlighted for a few seconds, then it closed down immediately after.  A second try left Steam open and I noticed that something was in the process of downloading.  I was a little surprised to see that Loadout was either downloading a new update or the first one did not take.  I saw that it was again the 34-40 MB update and that it would not take too long so I let it be and went to do something else.  A few minutes later I noticed that Steam was again closed down.  Again I opened the program only to be presented with a window a few seconds later telling me that "Steam Client Bootstrapper has stopped working."

After an pseudo-intensive search online, I discovered that "Steam Client Bootstrapper" is the way that games are updated and installed using the Steam Client.  Various fixes I had read for this problem ranged anywhere from closing down Steam and simply restarting to "deleting everything in your Steam folder except Steam.exe and the Steamapps folder then reinstalling Steam."  This last option seemed like a terrifying decision that I was not ready to make.  For starters, I restarted my computer incase there was some sort of miscommunication after either Steam or Windows downloaded an update.  

Then, Steam refused to open.  At all.  Nothing.

But then it did open and I quickly went to Loadout knowing that something to do with the games update was causing this problem; I did not "know" know, but I just knew.  I clicked on Loadout and went down to "Delete Local Content" as fast as I could before Steam decided to close again.  That was when the program froze.  After I was able to Ctrl-Alt-Dlt the program closed, I went to my control panel, opened the Uninstall tab, found Loadout and proceeded to uninstall the program.  After a few seconds, Steam opened up with their own uninstalling window then promptly closed down.

I sat in silence for a few seconds/minutes wondering if I had done the right thing.  Maybe what I did would cause Steam to somehow not realize that the program was uninstalled and when opened would try again to download the update for the game that no longer existed, be confused and close itself down due to some kind of error that I do not understand.  I do not know if computers actually work/think this way, but this is what my brain was telling me could happen.  Thankfully, it did not happen.

In the end, I am not entirely sure what was going on with the Loadout update/patch/download and not having played the game before I had no qualms about uninstalling it and I probably will not reinstall it either, even if this was a one time fluke.  I even checked the forums for Loadout through Steam's webpage and did not see anything regarding what happened to me.

 I am not sure if this story has a moral, so I guess let this be a tale of caution?  


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental


P.S. In end-of-the-week news, Krillbite Studios will be releasing their Kickstarted game Among The Sleep next week on the 29th.  If you have recently joined us, there is an article I wrote last year regarding the pre-alpha release of Among the Sleep.  Happy weekend.