Hey Folks! This weekend I spent some time exploring the ARPG called Undecember. I was completely unaware of this game until the launch of Diablo Immortal, and shortly after that point, the folks behind this title started doing some sponsored videos. However similar to Diablo Immortal, discussion of the game also came with a discussion of its cash shop and pay-to-win elements. After going through what we went through with Diablo Immortal and being so egregiously monetized… I decided that I would just give this game a hard pass.
I had largely put it entirely out of my mind when this weekend on a whim I decided to go through steam recommendations. One of the things I greatly appreciate about the Steam interface is the recommendations by friends section because in truth… I care way more about the opinion of my friends than I do any gaming pundit. So I noticed that Teufelaffe had left a review and honestly… it was enough to spark my curiosity and get me to install the game. His stance largely aligns with mine… that I don’t care if there is a way to shortcut the process by spending money so long as it isn’t required to do so. That was the problem I had with Diablo Immortal is that you could not get a fully geared-out character without spending literally tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This created a hard wall that blocked my progression where I could not function in Hell 2 because I lacked the “gear score” to make it viable because the game was actively debuffing me for not having spent enough money.
As Teufelaffe said in his review, the game really does feel like a blending of the best parts of Diablo III and some of the better parts of Path of Exile. It is a game where you have no classes and that you get to create your own character and choose their appearance. Then the spell gems that you equip and attribute points that you spend, determine what sorts of builds you can do. I opted to go for a largely Dexterity-based character, trying to replicate something like the Diablo III demon hunter so I am wearing leather armor, spending most of my points in Dex, and using ranged bow abilities. The hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you do not have full control over all of your keybinds… left click is your movement key and there seems to be no way to change that. However, if you hold down your left click you can steer with your mouse cursor which is functionally what I do with putting “force move” on W in the games that will support it. It took some getting used to but now feels comfortable enough.
Instead of relying on getting gear with specific sockets on it, in order to make your build like Path of Exile you have a hex grid that you lay gems on. Each gem has six sides and each side can have one of three colors on it or be completely empty without any colors. Essentially you can use these special helper gems to link other abilities or buff specific things about it. For example, my main attack right now is a spread shot and I have it linked to cast the ability Chain Lightning on hit. That means I fire off this spread of arrows and the first time it makes contact with any enemy, that triggers a lightning bolt to course and spread through surrounding enemies. Spread Shot also has a green gem that increases the number of projectiles… and I am sharing that with another ability called Flame Shot. Essentially it becomes this puzzle game of trying to figure out how best to place your gems in order to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit.
One thing of note is that Undecember is also a mobile game, and is available on Android and iOS and with it… comes a number of very mobile mechanics. Every time you do anything in the game, you are going to see a dozen teal arrows light up on your interface drawing your attention to various systems. This means spending a lot of time clicking through various menus in order to get various “rewards” that are largely meaningless at the moment because I am not entirely certain what anything does yet. The same is true with the cash shop in general. There are things that the game would like me to buy there, but all of it largely seems like nonsense. The only thing that I did notice is that it would cost you about $40 to buy a full cosmetic skin because skins are broken up into 4 chunks: armor, helm, mainhand, offhand… and each of those costs around $10 in cash shop currency.
For those who have played Path of Exile, the crafting system will be very familiar. In fact, there are a number of items that you will simply recognize as their Path of Exile equivalents… like I got my first Chaos Orb and Exalted Orb the other day and the icons feel similar enough. You can do some basic crafting through the enchant system at the blacksmith, or more hardcore crafting recipes at the alchemy table… aka the crafting bench. One thing that takes a bit to get used to is the fact that you have to manually level your gems by feeding them magic shards. That means at some point in the future you will be grinding random stuff trying to get magic shard drops so that you can catch your gems up. Right now I have not really struggled but at 30… I am starting to notice that I simply don’t have enough magical dust to level everything up at the same time.
All told I have been enjoying myself quite a bit and if you also were looking for a happy midpoint between Diablo III and Path of Exile you might check it out. I will let you know as I progress through the game if I hit any hard paywalls. That will be the point at which I check out, because while I am not afraid of spending money on a game… I don’t want it to be a requirement to progress. We tried some of the groupings over the weekend and unfortunately, there is no level-scaling, so you can drag someone along like you can in Diablo III but if you want grouping to be meaningful… you will have to stay within the level range of your friends. I am hoping that when I reach the endgame the content will be fun for grouping because right now the normal leveling content isn’t terribly exciting with other players.
So now to finish up with a bit of housekeeping. Last Friday I posted a note as a bit of a teaser stating that I was involved in the rollout of a gaming-focused Mastodon Instance. It rolled out on Sunday but I regret to inform you that I am no longer involved with it, nor can I suggest that anyone migrate to it. My yesterday was honestly pretty awful and it involved a sequence of events that led to me getting ejected from the planning discord, moderator status, and ultimately losing my account on the server. Granted I am being told that my account and the account of Scopique were not deleted… but they disappeared in sequence with me being shut out of the project so I drew what felt like obvious conclusions because neither account exists anymore. It was a bad situation but I am not going to go into details publicly, suffice it to say I am withdrawing my support in any capacity from the project. If you do migrate be cautious I guess that is all I would say.
I hope you all have a great day and a phenomenal week… and I am hoping my mental health improves because yesterday was a massive blow to it.
The post Exploring Undecember appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We have our Grace back from moving but we are still down a Thalen and now an Ashgar. Tonight we start off with some discussion about Warhammer 40,000 Darktide and how it draws from roots like Left4Dead. Grace and Bel talk about their recent foray into Undecember which seems to be a happy middle ground between Diablo 3 and Path of Exile. Grace also talks about playing the Slime Rancher 2 Early Access and tending to adorable squishy faces. Bel talks a bit about the New World server migration and how Themiscyra is no more and we have become Heliopolis. From there we dive into a discussion about screenshot capturing in games and specific “photo modes”. We talk about the Folding Ideas video essay called “Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft” and this week’s news that Blizzard is essentially done in China as their relationship with Net Ease disintegrates.
A quick disclaimer. In this show, I mention a Mastodon instance and it appears like plans for that are currently on hold, and when they resume I will not be part of it.
Topics Discussed
I logged in this morning and it appears that the merger has been completed. I am now on Heliopolis instead of Themiscyra and our old server is no more. Because we were not the server being merged into, it means that none of the companies that held territory on our server kept it. I fully expect the next few weeks to be a time of strife as far as faction conflicts go as the companies from three servers ultimately settle into a pecking order. Sadly I had made quite a few friends in the group that previously controlled Everfall, which is where my tier 4 home is located. Positive however is it seems that Everfall is just as well taken care of on Heliopolis with all but one of the crafting machines sitting at Tier 5.
The map on Heliopolis is seemingly more competitive whereas on Themiscyra it seemed like the heavy hitters were all Marauder or Covenant after the biggest Syndicate company transferred off the server. In truth, I don’t much care about who holds a territory so long as they are not being slumlords and doing nothing to maintain the crafting machines. Sadly on Themiscyra we had reached a point where Everfall and Windsward were the only two territories that seemed to put any effort and pride into maintaining them. My hope as well is that with more players there will be more activity happening in the various open world farms since that seems to be the side of the game that I really enjoy doing.
Speaking of farms, I went back out to the camp with Pit Lord Daeshi and have now picked up all of the gear drops off that loot table. It seems like folks are regularly farming this camp because it is where the legendary corrupted trophy material drops, which is heavily needed for invasions. In fact, at two different times out there I was with groups from major companies on the previous server trying to far trophies. Of those drops the one I was seeking out the most of course was the tanking sword… or at least I am turning it into a tanking sword. I figured with two different life-stealing traits on it and a base constitution stat, that screamed sustain and tanking. It does not hurt that it also looks really cool.
Other than farming gear, I spent part of my last night on Themiscyra doing another invasion. It was doomed from the start but we fought valiantly. We had even less than we had the night before and I think we made it to wave 5 before a boss type made it into the base… which caused everyone to collapse in to deal with it… which caused the other gates to fall. Essentially this is sort of what seems to happen as a cascade failure any time you need to call an all-hands-on-point type scenario. Invasions are very much a “manage everything all at once” type thing but once the plates stop spinning and fall down… everything goes south really fast.
Now to sort of bury the lede… I have been up to some shenanigans or at least I am supporting an initiative that is. A handful of my friends have been working on a brand new Mastodon instance that is gaming-focused, given that this seemed to be a niche that wasn’t really well served. Elekk.xyz is a fine server but it is deeply sequestered from the rest of the Fediverse, and really didn’t seem to be all that gaming-focused in the first place. It is nowhere near ready for sign-ups yet, but those of us who are going to be helping with the day-to-day stuff on the instance now have our accounts. Expect more updates as I have them as to when this is going to be launching. I think for the time being I am probably going to keep my Masto.ai account at least in the short run until we have worked out all of the kinks and have federation relays spinning. At some point in the not-too-distant future however I expect to migrate my account once again, but hopefully for the very last time. I have a lot of faith in this team and it will be nice to have a place to suggest where I very directly know everyone involved.
I’ve known about the possibility of this happening for a while but did not want to say anything until it was actually “for seriously” happening.
The post Successfully Merged appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Sometimes I don’t go looking for camps… but the camps find me. Last night was a bit of an interesting evening because I started out just returning to semi-casually questing in Shattered Mountain and wound up defending Everfall from an invasion. I’ve talked about the casual nature of rolling up on a “camp” in New World and either getting invited to a group or forming the group yourself. This has been way more commonplace than I ever realized, and now that I am actively looking for it… I find them constantly. This has led to me striking up random conversations will all sorts of players. Last night when I was in the middle of questing through Illurmin Rift, I noticed a handful of players standing around on this pillar pictured above. This sort of thing has now made me stop to investigate and see what sort of shenanigans I could get myself into.
It turns out there is a boss named Pit Lord Daehi that spawns there, and this one little spot on the column shown in the first picture is one of the few places you can stand in the area and not be ticking down a corruption debuff. So I stopped the quest I was working on and started farming with the group of folks that had gathered there. It is similar to most of the camps in New World where the boss respawns roughly every five minutes. It also suffers from the false spawn problem of it almost instantly respawning… but dropping nothing when this happens. So the pattern is… jump down and fight the boss, then scramble back up the column to wait for the next spawn and occasionally have to kill tendrils that can see you while standing on the column.
It turns out there are some pretty tasty drops that you can encounter at this location, and I really want the Pit Lord Dominator sword, which has not one but TWO life regen perks on it once upgraded to legendary. The above image is not a complete list of the drops, but everything that was seen by my farming party. Unfortunately, I saw none of the 590 Named weapons, but I did pick up two copies of Chef’s Shoes, a pair of Mining Googles, and Vengeful Fisherman’s Pants. I was getting a ton of purple drops, just nothing off the named weapon table. Unfortunately, we were only out there for about an hour and a half because in talking to the group… two of them happened to be the company that currently controls Everfall. They have done a pretty great job with maintaining that town and were sharing how low on people they were going to be for the upcoming invasion. Since you can now sign up for an invasion from the world map, I opted to do this in order to help out my new found friends.
So as a result just about 15 minutes before 9 pm, we called the group and all ported out to get ready for the battle. I opted to go into my “Basher” configuration where I am using a Hammer and a Great Axe like I have done before in invasions. Basically, this is the bog standard PVP tank configuration which exists largely to harass the oncoming attackers by slowing them or stunning them. In an invasion, you have to deal with multiple rounds of spawning enemies that all charge the point you are defending. The goal is to keep them away from the gate you are guarding and keep them from dealing damage to it. So when a wave of runners spawns I would throw down a gravity well or a well-timed shockwave to glue them in place while the ranged DPS grinds them down quickly. The basher looks like shit on the DPS charts, but the job of locking things down is critical both in invasion and in PVP wars.
I will cut to the chase… we did not win the invasion last night. We came damned close and far closer than I have ever before. I’ve not queued for an invasion since the early days of the game before folks had really figured everything out. It turns out this company had never lost an invasion, and last night we came within 26 seconds of winning. We were down a full squad and a half of players, which made all of the positions extremely tight. Unfortunately, the last wave was just too much to handle without spare bodies and we had to shift toward the middle to deal with a Spriggan, which is a boss type that can drop a gate down EXTREMELY quickly… and at that point, one of the other gates got overwhelmed. Once the invasion mobs are in the center of the base, it does not take terribly long for them to obliterate the central pillar and capture the keep. We were so freaking close and everyone fought valiantly, but we just could not muster the folks to make it happen. It is at this point that I realize that I should have been queuing for these invasions all this time because we are seemingly needed.
The problem that we are dealing with at the moment however is apathy brought on by an upcoming round of server merges. Themiscyra and Frislandia are being merged into Heliopolis and with that comes a shuffling of the deck as far as companies go. Because we are merging into Heliopolis, this means that no one that currently holds territory on our server will hold territory after the merger. There is of course a compensation package for those companies, but a lot of folks have lost the will to defend territories when they know it will be all for naught on December 2nd. I believe all of the invasions that happened last night failed due to a lack of attendance. Brightwood I heard only had two squads out of ten maximum squads defending the territory. My goal when we merge is to start attending more invasions because while I do not care about Wars… I do at least want to protect the crafting machines in a given territory as much as I can.
In the meantime, however… I do plan on going back out to Illurmin Rift in Shattered Mountain and trying to farm up a sword.
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