Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are back and instead of Bel being sick this time we have Kodra who sounds awful. First up we start with a discussion about Tam’s experiences with the Steam Deck and how it is a phenomenal device. From there we talk about Tam dropping down to 1440p high framerate after spending time running at 4K and how he has been a better experience. Ash talks about Digimon Survive finally released and his experiences with the game. Bel gets into Dragonflight Alpha for World of Warcraft and talks about his first few weeks. From there we talk about some of the early experiences with Multiversus and the high-quality smash bros style gameplay. Kodra talks about the upcoming Kickstarter for Nara: Facing Fire. Tam talks about Anno: Mutationem and its interesting take on Cyberpunk and that it is not at all connected to the Anno Series. Finally, we wrap up with some discussion of the recent Ocarina of Time TAS play for Summer Games Done Quick.
Good Morning Friends! I spent another night roaming around the countryside in Red Dead Redemption II. This is something that I have been told by friends who have played the game… but this world is damned gorgeous. Once I managed to slow down my own pace of only tackling a single quest at a time, the entire pace of the world seemingly slowed as well. I sat down to play this and before I knew it three hours had passed and it felt like minutes. This is really only something that happens to me in a large way when I get into the “just one more turn” cycle of a 4x game. There are so many times that I am on my way to do one thing, and a side event will pop up that catches my attention. I lifted a horse off a lady and took her back to town for example. I dig the way that the game gives you temporary waypoints for these activities without completely removing what was your previously tracked waypoint.
When I first started the game over a year ago, it was after playing Witcher 3. As a result, when it came time to name my horse I named it Roach since that horse was such a reliable companion. So far this Roach also seems to be an overwhelmingly reliable companion. Similarly, Roach seems to always be tied up nearby whenever I need a ride. I got waylayed by the O’Driscoll gang that just happened to have a stagecoach. After dispatching my assailants I hid their bodies and took the Stage Coach off to the fence to get a little pocket money. I wondered exactly how this would work, but after parking the Coach in the barn… my trusty Roach was tied up on the fence line waiting for me. It seems like I picked a fitting name.
The other thing that I have noticed is that while I am a bandit… I tend to make the good guy choices more often than not. I did not like being an enforcer for a money lender, and quite honestly wish I had an option to just give them some of my money as a result. It seems like I make more than enough money killing O’Driscolls who are constantly hunting me it seems. I made the mistake of riding into Blackwater the other night when the waypoint system went nuts and tried to take me through there. It is disturbing just how fast the roaming bands of lawmen found me. I’ve got someone down in that area that the game is pointing me towards and I am not really sure how best to get to them.
All in all this game is acting as the perfect diversion to keep me from burning out on Path of Exile. The new season dates have been announced and I know in a few weeks I will be grinding up an entirely new set of characters. I am pretty set on playing the Inquisitor, and as a result, I am cool to taper off my playtime for the moment and dive into something completely single-player. It is funny how for me at least I have to be in the right frame of mind to attach to a game. This was true for Guild Wars 2 and Path of Exile that I bounced off so many times, and has been true so far with Red Dead Redemption II. I have to be in the mood for a specific sort of game experience to really open up to it. I think this is why the whole AggroChat Gameclub thing galled me so much in the past, is that it forced me to play a game that I wasn’t necessarily into it at that exact moment… and wound up ruining the experience of playing those games because my brain viewed it as homework.
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Sometimes I get hit by a whim and have to indulge it. Last night was one of those nights and the particular whim was to boot up Red Dead Redemption II and see if I could get into it. There is something about the style of game that Rockstar makes that I do not love. Namely, I greatly prefer the open-world questing style of something like Witcher 3, where I can load up on a bunch of quests and then do them willy-nilly as I roam the countryside. RDR2 however requires you to focus on a single quest chain until it is complete and harkens back to an older on-rails style of mission-based questing. I think this realization ultimately caused me to bounce from this game when I first attempted to play it. However knowing this and expecting this, I had hoped that maybe I could return with the right frame of mind and actually enjoy myself.
In the grand scheme of things I think it worked. I enjoyed my evening roaming around on horseback and doing small adventures, including busting a character that I do not like very much at all… out of a jail. That mission was “a lot” but we survived… but I am guessing I won’t be able to go back to the town of Strawberry very soon. I also spent some time saving a drunkard preacher from getting hit by a train and am slowly working my way through the quests that I know I have. I am guessing there are also bounties that I can run for the local sheriff, which might be a good idea given that I have done a few unsavory things lately.
Arthur Morgan is a really interesting character because he is not exactly what I would expect from the hero of a western adventure. He seems like one of the background characters from something similar to a Bioware game… that has been suddenly thrust into the forefront of the adventure. He is not unlikeable but also not terribly charismatic either. I guess this quality makes it fairly easy for you to insert your own intentions into his character because he doesn’t seem to have any particularly strong leanings from the start. It seems like his defining characteristics are his reliability and willingness to do whatever needs to be done. I have a feeling before we finish this adventure that those traits are going to be used and betrayed.
I am uncertain how often I am going to be returning to the winding world of Red Dead Redemption II, but I enjoyed my time spent better than my last foray.
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Last night I took a break from my Path of Exile Inquisitor shenanigans and played around in Dragonflight Alpha for most of the evening. Up until this point, the testing had been entirely focused on the Dracthyr and their starting area. As I had said before neither the Dracthyr themselves nor the Evoker class was really my jam and nothing that I could see myself playing seriously. I generally crave playing melee classes, and unless I am doing that… it doesn’t really feel like “WoW” to me. So starting yesterday the Alpha testers had access to a new zone and all of the other classes to test it with. So as a result I took my Death Knight that I created last week to play with the talents and ventured forth into The Waking Shores.
The Waking Shores is pretty large. If I had to give an example of scale I would say something in the range of Draenor’s version of Nagrand. The scale of the zone also feels very large and epic, in part because so much of the architecture was designed for dragons. With the introduction of Dragon Flying as a mechanic, it also has way more verticality than I am used to. The only weird thing I have noticed is that the world feels really spartan. Starting with the Timeless Isle, I am used to WoW maps being populated with a staggering amount of little detail to be discovered in the forms of what I am going to refer to as micro-objectives. There were mini-bosses to kill and chests to loot for interesting baubles, collectibles, and gear. This seems to largely be missing from the design of Dragonflight, or at the very least there has not been a pass of development to populate these doodads and widgets.
The world feels way more “Alpha” than I have come to expect from a Blizzard game some five months from release. I’ve been in a number of alpha testing processes for World of Warcraft and just as an example at this point in Warlords of Draenor all of the classes were effectively complete, and the zones felt more or less “finished”. We still have a number of classes without new Talent trees for example, so I have not been able to check out the Warrior and am leaning back on my Death Knight as a result. Granted if the entire studio does a full-court press, they can get this game across the finished line, but it does feel like it is going to be way more tentative than I am used to. I do wonder if we are going to see an impending delay of Dragonflight into 2024. That would honestly probably not be a bad thing given that I am not sure anyone actually expected this game to be released in 2023 prior to the announcement of the release date.
With this update saw another release of the new UI. This time added to the interface are the player and target frames and some additional options for the existing hotbars. I really like that we can turn on a visible grid while editing the UI. I am hoping that means at some point in the near future we will be able to turn on snapping to the grid. It is amazing how much of a difference having these few additions improve the experience. I’ve said it before but if the WoW UI can get to a point where it is at least as detailed as the FFXIV UI, then it is highly unlikely I will install addons in the future. For me the key things I need are the ability to move my player frame and target frame to the center of the screen, and also have hotbars that are slightly below them. Then finally the main addon that I installed every time was one that unified all of my bags into a single pane… all of which are features now of the default UI. Massive kudos to the team working on this.
There is still quite a bit of placeholder text, for example, I ran a quest and the two NPCs were named Left and Right, and were on the left side and right side of an objective. I laughed entirely too much from this giant dialog of menu options as to WHY we are visiting the Dragon Isles. I specifically like “You tell me. I don’t read quests. I just complete them!” because it clearly sounds like a quest developer taking out some frustrations. I really have not spent enough time with the content to get a feel as to how it stacks up against other expansions. So far it very much feels like a WoW Expansion, and honestly feels a bit more like something like Northrend than it does like one of the more modern expansions like Legion. I am not sure if this was the intent, but I do miss a lot of the small zone details that were added starting with Pandaria. Again I am not sure if this is just a case of it being “very alpha” and not finished, or if this is more of a minimalistic design decision.
Right now we are level capped at 62 and I will probably finish out the zone on the Death Knight and then maybe start it again on Paladin so I can test out Protection talents. All in all, it does not feel bad and I am interested to see how this evolves.
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