With WoW fading from view, I’m looking for something else to fill in bits of time.  I have my PS4 connected to a projector in the basement, but since I’m cheap, I don’t have the online services hooked up.  The time played in MHW on the PS4 was solo only.  I did start a recent replay of Horizons, but that time investment will be in fits and spurts.  God of War is still too fresh for a replay… and I unlocked every bit but 3 Valks in the last run.

The gaming laptop has a wide selection of options.  I completed the new season of D3 in a couple days.  Pillars of Eternity is about half way through.  I have an XCOM2 save that I’m holding off on until some of the interesting DLC stuff is out in a few weeks.  Dead Cells and Cuphead are on the wishlist for a rainy day – which seems to be the only type of day around here lately…

Nope, I’m heading back into the MH World.  It’s been a good 3 months since my last battle, and there are still massive amounts of content that I have yet to see.  It will certainly make the multiplayer aspect of that game an option.  There were quite a few battles that made me tear out my hair.  Tempered Teostra is on that list.  Plus, there’s something about the MH model of continual progression that just works.

The strategic layer of targeting specific monsters and making goals… that hits me right in the good spot.  Unlocking new camps, new pieces of food, finally getting that rare drop… feels good man!  The tactical layer of preparing for a battle, laying out the lines and traps. Then the actual battles have great moment-to-moment energy.  The individual phases of health, the set time periods of a battle in a specific location…it’s hard to get bored on any specific battle since they often have something new to add.

I remember farming a Tempered Jyuratodus (the fish one).  8 battles, 8 different fights.  Bazelgeuse joined a few times to throw me off my game.  The various little bits added make for an enjoyable and repeatable game.

I did dual blades last time.  I’m thinking full switch axe this one.  Always one for the glass canon approach.

Less interesting in the game as I am around the aura of the game.

Love the lens focus trick to make them look like miniatures

Recall that Anthem is launching on Feb 22, 2019.  Also note that while we know there are 4 classes, no one really knows what any of them do.  There are 4 people per server… which is more like Diablo 3 I guess, than Destiny?  No one has seen anything other than the demo level.  There’s been no news since PAX, over a month ago.

Oh, there’s some info on how to pre-order, and that the demo launched on Feb 1, and that early access is 1 week before launch.

I do recall when Anthem was being presented as the bee’s knees.  Not so much a Destiny killer (Destiny did that all on it’s own), but certainly as a competitor in the same vein as say, The Division.

In this age of early access, with media leaks all over the place… it’s easy to have an idea of how a multiplayer game is looking many months ahead of time.  It’s a bit surreal to have no real idea of what’s going on in this game at this point.  I can speculate until my head explodes, but why bother?

While I’m sure the developers are doing all they can to make a great game, we are talking about EA.  The company who makes mint off pre-orders.  Maybe they are waiting until the November rush?

As I mentioned a whole while back, I am just getting some popcorn and watching this story unfold.

Force of habit I suppose, but every new D3 season I make a new character.  More specifically, I re-use an existing one by converting them to season mode.  Long ago I ran out of character slots… and I cannot recall the last time I played in non-seasonal mode.

I usually level 2-3 characters then move on.  Typically the first one is a monk, since they are quite effective at leveling and are very fast in terms of movement with starter 70 gear.  This time, I opted for Demon Hunter, since it’s brain dead easy.

The leveling portion is as simple as always.  Get a Leoric’s Crown, run Nether Rifts until 60, then run bounties.  Or, get powerleveled and hit 70 in 10 minutes.  Going through the process solo, you can see that Blizz has streamlined where possible.  And spending 2 hours or so, doing it alone, isn’t too bad.  By the time I hit 70, I had the Ring of Royal Grandeur (so 1 less item for a set bonus), Kunai’s Cube (the magic making box), and a enough Death’s Breath/gold to upgrade every crafter to max level.

A while back now, Blizz put in Headrig’s Gifts for completing 3 specific steps of a hero’s journey.  Each of those gifts gives 2 drops of a specific armor set, per class, per season.  For DH, this is Unhallowed Essence, which is primarily a Multishot build.  You buff this with a Yang’s Recurve Bow, and a Dead Man’s Shot quiver.

The “trick” here is to craft level 70 gear and clear out the first Gift task.  Very easy.  The 2nd one is a bit tougher, and you’ll need a decent weapon for the damage boost – doesn’t really matter what type.  With the gear from the 2nd Gift, the 3rd task should be doable for most classes.  Worst case, you run some public rifting groups to gear up a bit.

So I ended night 1 with a level 70 DH, and all 3 gift steps complete.  Night 2 was spent initially getting the gems I wanted from Greater Rifts and getting the good ones to level 25.  Each successful run gave +5 levels to a gem, and runs took 4 minutes on average.  It was a bit more than an hour to complete this step.

After that, it’s more about chain running public rift groups, at the highest comfortable level.  That started at T6, then T8, and a while at T10.  T10 was where the big difference was in gear drops.  It was raining legendaries/set pieces.  I easily swapped out my current set for “optimal gear”, found a really good Witching Hour belt (great for any DPS), some Nemesis Bracers (for extra elites at every shrine), a set of 2 rings that had crit%/critdamage + socket, and a near perfectly rolled amulet with dex/crit%/critdamage + socket.  Those last 3 pieces were a massive DPS boost.

What was left was a decent weapon.  No real luck in drops, so I went another route.  I crafted 20 bows and tried upgrading them with Kunai’s Cube.  Of the 20, I ended up with 3 Yang’s Recurve, 1 of which was Ancient (meaning higher stats).  It had generally good stats, but the damage was on the low side.  I enchanted a much higher damage range (from 1400 to 1950), put in a ramaladadingdong to get a socket on the weapon, and proceeded to face melt everything.

T13 (or GR60) is where I draw the finish line for any character.  My DH hit that goal in 2 nights.  At this point, there’s only marginal gains to be had on each piece of gear.  I am quite literally searching for perfection in order to progress.  Even Paragon levels are coming 10+ at a time when I close a GR, so I’m well ahead of that curve.

Did RNGsus gift me with good rolls on the 2nd night?  Darn right!  My Crusader from season 14 didn’t ever get past T10 due to bad luck.  But that’s it now.  The DH is, for my purposes, done.  And with that, I think so is Season 15.  No way I can replicate this luck again.

Wilhelm’s comment was the trigger.  Testing is indeed hard.

I talk a bit about my RL job, without too many specifics.  At a general level, it’s a service for about 130,000 users and deals in particular with smartphones – so one of those things where an issue/outage has a rather up-front-and-personal impact.

Massive project, great team, more stress than is reasonable, less time than we need.  Sound familiar?

Typically, projects in my organization are full bake affairs.  It means that the entirety of all functionality is present before going live.  That makes projects take a supreme amount of time, since the last 10% is of function usually takes 90% of the overall time.  One of the early decisions I took was to take an iterative approach.  There are SDLC methodologies I could go into… but that can get boring quick.  TLDR; the large project was split into 6 releases.  The first 4 were time locked – e.g. what can we do in a month per, and the last 2 were more complicated and took a bit longer.  When version 1.0 launched, and it didn’t have all the bits working, it took a lot of effort to re-train people that this was OK and planned.  End result was feedback from 1.0 fed into 1.1, and so on for the duration of the project.  Not scope creep… but refinement of the functions.

Getting those releases ready was a challenge.  We had to build new testing environments and new processes.  We had to find more people to do the work.  Traditionally, all testing was internal, and it went from Dev — Staging — Production.  That wasn’t all that effective. So we added a new test environment, parallel to Staging, specifically for client testing and modified UAT process to essentially have public alphas.

Alpha vs Beta

Everyone has their own opinion, fine.  My is that an alpha is a release that is not feature complete, while a beta is feature complete.  The first is to test for success, the second to test for failure.  Historically, we’d do all this internally and when clients did do any testing, it was more of a sales show that actual testing.

We turned that around and asked each client to designate a representative for testing.  Huge benefits, since these folks were generally testing things we never even thought of trying.  It extended our testing window by about 20%, but the product bug rate dropped down by a ridiculous margin.

Our bug tracking system was further integrated into our release schedule.  Where previously we would launch with acceptable high impact bugs, we moved that down to medium because we were able to detect the bugs much earlier in the process.  That gave time to either fix it, or apply the mitigation/workaround to smooth out the bump.

Transparency

The other thing we did was publish the bug list.  Well the ones that weren’t security related at least.  It’s was a big file at the start, and quite a few bugs kept with us for multiple releases.  Some are out of our control, as the software developer needs to do some overhauling.

The core benefit here was that people complained a whole lot less if they knew that we were aware and had some sort of plan to address it.   It was a full time job to keep this list up to date and communications open with the clients.  They’d get a report, put it on the list, and another team would do the assessment.

Delays

There were quite a few times where a large release had to be postponed due to a major bug found late in the cycle.  In June we found a critical error that was patched by the vendor.  Our internal tests were clean on that patch, but the client testing found some serious problems.   That extra set of eyes found an issue that would have drowned our support team in tickets.

The thing is, by not drowning in tickets, we were able to resolve the issue faster as our focus was pre-emptive rather than re-active.  Sure, we took it on the chin for a delay to a critical function but it’s always better to be late and working, than early and broken.  And it’s even more important for overall sanity of the team.

Overall

Solid testing is how you get a game like Spider-Man or BotW rather than Alien: Colonial Marines.  Every single one of us has seen a game that didn’t go through enough testing, and yet was released.  In nearly all cases, that was an abject failure that cost that company dearly.  For every FF14 that comes back to the front, there are a dozen or more Hellgates.  People will continue to engage with a company if there’s a relationship, if there’s trust.  Otherwise, they will find alternatives (if they even exist).  And trust takes a while to build, and a fraction of time to lose.

Testing has proven to me to be one of the best ways to build and maintain that trust level, that being transparent and honest with the clients that that their issues are acknowledged and there’s a plan to address them.  It takes an inordinate amount of time and skill to manage this type of relationship, but the results are worth every bit.

That was both quick and satisfying.

I wish I could say there are spoilers, but Spider-Man is like 60 years old (1962), and if you don’t know that Otto Octavius is Doc Ock, welcome to Earth.  Which in turn means that there are no twists in Spider-Man.  Sure, it’s not exactly canon but it sticks with the fundamentals pretty well.

In truth, there are 3 games here.  The main game is split into two large parts – pre and post RAFT event.  The first part is relatively tame, with exploratory work and some rather minor skirmishes overall.  The story progresses in starts and fits, with some main quests simply cutscenes while others are large orchestrated battles.  Then the RAFT event, which looks really neat (if for the fact that there’s minimal player interaction).  Then the world turns to hell and there are rocket launchers, snipers, tanks and all sorts of killer things on every street corner.  For optional difficulty, you can try to complete all the various tasks during this setting, but it’s a good way to die.  The good part is that you become ultra proficient at dodging.

The third game is post-credits, where the death world sort of returns to normal, but you still have all those tasks to complete.  It’s like a middle ground, but after spending a couple hours in hell, it feels like carebear city a bit.

Combat

Enemy variety isn’t the greatest here, but the density of the enemies and the floor layout is the challenge factor.  Taking on a few grunts is easy work in the open world, but a robbery where there’s no vertical movement will mean you get hit.  Or taking a Sable station where there are 40 guards, 2 tanks, 2 snipers, 3 hover soldiers, and 2 rocket launchers… that’s just a mess of fun.

I found that of all this, the only truly differentiating skill is the perfect dodge.  When on the ground, and you successfully dodge an attack, you can counter with a single button to take down that enemy.  It sounds simple, but in takes practice to get going.  When it works… wow.

There are other skills that are useful, but they are somewhat niche or playstyle dependent.  I had a few 100 hit combos because I knew how to link the various attacks and avoid all enemy hits.  But that took a lot of practice to develop.  I am marginally stronger with hits, but I am empirically more effective with those hits – meaning combat is a fraction of the effort from my first fight.  It has nothing to do with muscling your way through combat.  You must simply be better.

Gadgets and Suits

This is a neat flavor aspect to the game with some interesting customization options gained while you level and complete tasks.  I stuck with the “generate focus” suit skill, since it allowed for free healing.  I swapped a few times when I wasn’t experimenting with combat, but always fell back to a solid safety net.

Building suits and gadgets requires various token types.  You get them from all the tasks – finding backpacks, taking pictures, breaking up fights, taking out enemy bases.  All rather simple items.  Then there are Challenge Tokens from the Taskmaster.  These come later in the game and are time-measured events – find bombs, chase drones, take out enemies.  You need to have most of your skills unlocked and a really solid understanding of the game mechanics to get gold.  Fast swing speed is rarely a requirement in any part of the game, but there are quite a few tasks that demand it.  How to be fast and how to improve is hard, since there’s no real measure.   I do like the concept of the Challenge Tokens, but I found them a bit too much of a gate on experimentation.  Most of the interesting suits and gadgets require them.

Sinister Six

No real surprise, most people saw the Spider-Man trailer.  A few originals are here; Vulure, Electro, Rhino, Scorpion, Doc Ock.  Mister Negative is a relative newcomer to genre (2008 I think) and he is portrayed as the main villain for most of the game.  It works well enough, as he’s a villain with a complex backstory that is slowly revealed over time.  There are two other baddies, but they are here and gone pretty quick.

The fights with the Six are a mixed bag.  Vulture and Electro are fought together, through a pretty hectic fight, mostly in the air.  Rhino and Scorpion are also together, though that’s more of a quick time event than anything else.  Mister Negative has multiple fights, though I think the subway one is the most fun.  It’s very claustrophobic, and the style is just spot on.  Doc Ock eventually has a fight and a 3 part affair that is quite poignant.

I thought that there was missing an act where you had a better explanation for the fall of Doc Ock.  He is one of the nicest people Peter knows, and the sudden swap in character drive is never really justified.  Mister Negative has more development.  Doc Ock is a genius level intellect here… and the steps he takes are quite mundane and without clear purpose.  His fall could have been much more dramatic if it was more in line with the game character, rather than the comic book character.

Overall

Still firmly believe that this is one of the best console games this generation.  It feels like a Spider-Man game should feel.  It’s fun to play, there’s a lot to do, and it tells a good story.