The Sunday Stream Recap is a new weekly post chronicling our Saturday night streams over at WelpSquadTV. You can learn more about WelpSquadTV here. Catch us live every Saturday night at 7pm EST.
Unfortunately, our stream last night was plagued by technical issues. For starters, I couldn’t figure out how to get discord to keep my stream running while watching everyone else’s stream. It took me a bit to figure out I had to pop out the screen share window to get everything running. My wife was attending a virtual concert downstairs and I forgot bandwidth was a thing until she started telling me her stream kept buffering. So we had Greg stream instead. Greg didn’t have a scene for our multiple view discord set up so we quickly had to cobble one together for him. We didn’t end up starting the stream until about 8pm last night.
There were a few hiccups in the game as well. I crashed to my desktop at one point when trying to load into a map. Greg’s voice chat went completely out in game so we had to use discord chat for a good portion of the night. Since proximity chat is such a big aspect of the game this was pretty immersion breaking. And as usual, Josh, who plays in VR, was unable to talk to us in the lobby at various points of the night. But it’s early access and we’re playing the beta build so these things are expected.
We started the night with a Ridgeview Road House. I wanted to try a run without a thermometer to make things a bit more challenging and this was the perfect, small map to try it on. I thought it would lead to more tension and a longer gameplay session on the map with out finding the ghost’s room right away. While it did extend the playtime it didn’t add any tension. If anything, it added some frustration. At this point, we’re past the point of being scared of the game. It’s more fun to find the ghost, yell at it, and see what happens.
We took the EMFs as our ghost detecting equipment. At first we though it was in the kitchen as we got an EMF reading as soon as we walked in the house. We set everything up and tried to stir up some activity. 10 minutes went by and nothing, another 10 minutes went by, still nothing. So we started looking around again. We got an EMF 5 reading in the living room so we set everything up in there. We still couldn’t get any activity to fill out our journal. We ended up guessing a Shade because it hadn’t hunted us and we were correct but the experience as a whole wasn’t as fun.
There also seems to have been a change to how the video camera works. The video camera you can set up in a room to look for ghost orbs. If there’s a light on in the room or any of the adjacent rooms the image will be too washed out to see the orbs. However, it looks like there was a flashlight effect added to the camera itself which makes small and medium rooms almost too bright to see anything even with all the lights off.
One of my favorite parts of the night was towards the end when we were in one of the farmhouses. I died early on and was walking around the house as a ghost following everyone else. Now I assumed that as a dead player I couldn’t interact with anything, but I was wrong! I couldn’t pick up any tools plates, cups, and dishes seemed to be fair game. I seemed to only be able to pick up things sporadically and I couldn’t figure out what triggered it .I don’t know if this was intended but the items I held would only reappear once I threw them which lead to some hilarious moments. Then Josh, our man in VR, died and that’s when things got real fun. When he picked object up they floated around for everyone else to see. When a floating stuffed rabbit is chasing after you it’s terrifying…
Apparently, as a dead player you can also body block the ghost when it’s hunting. I’m sure this isn’t intended either. I was trying to get a good screen shot of the ghost on the stairs from the attic. I was expecting it to walk through me but it got stuck and couldn’t get past me. Thus I was the hero who saved our party from being picked up that hunt. I tried to do the same thing in a door way later but the ghost got past me.
Many Welps 