Thursday, January 23, 2020

SWTOR vs RDR Online

Well, another week passes today where I still haven't heard from my brother that my computer is ready. I think he's still waiting on the wifi card, which he had forgotten to order two weeks ago, and I think he's tracking one down on ebay, which maybe explains the delay. A month to six weeks ago I was super excited about playing SWTOR, and as time has gone on and my computer hasn't been finished, I've gradually felt that ardor tamp down. Now, that doesn't mean that when my computer finally does arrive that I won't install it and play it, but it does mean that in the meantime, I've gotten into RDR Online, and that's where my attention is right now.

Of course, as I pointed out the other day, RDR Online has plenty of bugs, although I haven't struggled with some of them as much as I have with others (I find plenty of animals over by Blackbone forest or Little Creek area, for instance—if you set up your camp nearby, you can keep Cripps stocked fairly easily). One glitch that I've had for the last two bounties I've attempted for the bounty hunter role, which I'm struggling to get traction on, and this partially explains why, is the bounties spawning too far away to be feasible. Last night, I picked a poster up in Tumbleweed for a woman who was "running for the mountains", i.e., the edge of the map. I did a quick look at my map to see where she was, whistled over my horse and mounted and started riding towards her, and before I even got out of town; like ten to fifteen seconds after picking up the poster, I got a message saying that the bounty had escaped and the mission was over. What?! I mean, I hadn't even had time to leave town yet from where I picked up the poster, and I wasn't dithering around at all either. It just ended almost immediately after starting, because they spawned her almost right next to her escape point. Seriously, what?!

This morning I woke up a bit early and couldn't go back to sleep, so I spend about an hour to and hour and a half on the game. Tried another bounty that I picked up from a poster at Wallace Station, since my camp is very close, and the bounty was at the Prinz slaughter house at the outskirts of Saint Denis. And the timer started right away. Seriously, what? It was almost as far away as it could be without me starting in New Austin, and it took two thirds of my time just to get to where the bounty was. If you have any hitches with catching the bounty, then you're screwed, because you have almost no time to deal with it if you have to spend most of your timer just getting to the area where the bounty is. I thought they were supposed to spawn relatively close to the town where you pick up the poster? Anyway, because I haven't bought the reinforced lasso or the bolas yet, it was challenging; the target ran while I was mired in fighting thugs, but I managed to get passed that, lasso him up and put him on my horse, but he got out of the hogtie and ran again and then I ran out of time.  Sigh.

The bounty hunter role was the one I was the most excited about doing, but I've so far had pretty miserable luck with it. I think maybe my strategy will be to keep doing stranger missions and trading runs until I can afford to buy the bolas and the reinforced lasso before getting too heavy into the bounty hunter missions. The bolas are often described by players as useless, but I actually think that they can come in pretty handy to trip up the target and leave him entangled while you fight with thugs for a bit, and the reinforced lasso, of course, hogties the target in such a way that he can't escape. I'm hoping that these two items can make my bounty hunting a bit more successful. But if I have glitches like the two mentioned there, it'll still be somewhat challenging. There's nothing you can do if your target spawns so close to the escape area that you can't possibly hope to get there in time to catch her, for instance.

I also think some throwing knives would be good. I don't have those yet, and sneaking into camps of thugs and murdering some of them before you have to just fight a gigantic gang while the target is running would probably help. I don't have any method of stealth kills other than my Bowie knife right now.

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