Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the official launch of the Outriders Worldslayer expansion, but I have had access to it for a while now. I did not really spend much time in it because there were some early server issues, and I had other things I wanted to be playing. Last night I pushed my way through the new story content and unlocked the new endgame area. I figured this morning I would talk a little bit about that experience. It is my goal not to really spoil anything in the story, but to be honest this is not exactly an epic fantasy tale… so I am not sure you would care if I spoiled it in the first place.
So I figure I should start out with an explanation for anyone who has not experienced Outriders before. This game is essentially a third-person run and gun looter shooter with a loot system that feels very similar to that of Diablo III. When you deconstruct an item you collect the mods that were on that item and then can modify any other gear to replace a single mod slot from one of the ones you have collected. You play as an Altered, or a character changed by the anomaly that ravages the planet. There is a class system and each class has a talent point system to build your character. I personally spend most of my time playing the more tanky close ranged earth-elemental-themed class called the Devastator and have specced down the Seismic Shifter tree that increases the damage I deal with my “earth” themed abilities. Pyromancer is medium ranged fire-focused class, Technomancer is long ranged focused on turrets and poison damage, and Trickster manipulates time and space while in close range.
The world of Outriders is extremely bleak, as humanity essentially exhausted the resources of the earth and attempted to find a new planet… and then found out when they arrived that it was also ruined in a different way. It is the sort of bleak that sees you nonchalantly climbing up a pile of corpses as you walk through a city that was quite literally a concentration camp. As such, I feel like you need to be a certain brand of desensitized to be able to look past this and see the deeply nuanced gameplay that it offers. If you can deal with the emotional barrage of the story… Outriders is quite possibly the most interesting looter shooter out there with fun and engaging gameplay and an “avoid cover at all costs to keep healing yourself” gameplay strategy. Unfortunately, most of the AggroChat crew could not look past the harsh exterior and get through the game in order to experience the “good parts”.
Unfortunately, as the story goes… Worldslayer is a tale of going from bad to much worse. You are presented with a new threat to humanity as the Anomaly keeps getting worse, this time deciding to freeze the planet in its wake. You also have to contend with a renewed focus on the civil war between the last remnants of the colony forces that you represent, and the insurgency camped just outside its gates. You also find yourself squaring off against “The Commander” of the insurgency which is an ultra-powerful Altered that seems to be able to channel some sort of hentai void tentacles nonsense. The story is still very bleak… but also maybe has a ray of hope for the future. I have to say that across the board the story does flesh out quite a few details about the world itself, and the people who lived here before. We find out that they seem to have also ruined the planet in their own way before figuring out a method for turning back the anomaly.
The new content area is rather small and consists of six story areas and a seventh are containing the new endgame activity. All told it took me around three hours to burn through the story, and I was doing so at a fairly leisurely pace. If you were moving faster there is probably only around 2 hours of solid gameplay here. If that is a thing that concerns you, then you might take that into account because this expansion is more a systems-wide upgrade than a juicy slab of story-driven content for you to explore.
Quite possibly my favorite aspect of the expansion is the unification of the challenge system. Above is a chart that I made trying to relate the two different difficulty systems to each other. Previously you had Story Mode World Tiers, which went up through 15, and that 15 related to around Challenge Tier 8, which was used for Expeditions. The problem is that if you preferred to run World content over and over, it essentially capped out at Challenge 8 and you could get no loot higher than level 42. Now Apocalypse Tiers essentially unify all of this mess. I had progressed through Expedition Challenge Tier 13 before, and the game started me at Apocalpyse Tier 13 with a maximum difficulty rating of 40 that I can unlock over time. This means stupid story mission farms like the Outhouse mission that I enjoyed doing over and over… are a completely valid want to level and get loot.
There are a few new systems that are added into the game, like Ascension points which are a direct equivalency of Paragon Points from Diablo III. You can essentially max this out and earn 200 of these, slotting 10 points into each attribute line. For example, I have already out 10 into bonus anomaly power, and now I am working on weapon damage. Given enough play time, we will end up maxing each one of these out at 10 points per attribute. This is not a terribly interesting way of gaining power, but it does help out nonetheless.
The more interesting new system is the Pax trees. These give you broad sweeping modifications to your existing builds. There are only five of these points in total and they are unlocked through completing the story, with the final point being tied to completing the Trial of Tarya Gratar end-game activity. I admit I am a bit torn here as to whether I should drop the apocalypse tier down and just burn through the activity to get my final talent point… or if I should gear up and do it at a reasonable apocalypse level for the loot rewards. I guess that ultimately is the decision always if you should grind it out… or go for the quick loot at the highest challenge you can complete.
I guess it is time that I should probably talk about the Trial of Tarya Gratar itself. Essentially this is a series of challenges that you need to complete in sequence and in a single play-through in order to reach the final boss encounter. I’ve played through two of these so far, the first being a ring-style encounter with three waves with the final wave being comprised largely of boss types. The second encounter was flagged as a “skirmish” and largely felt like playing through a normal map where there was a broad mix of enemy types and mini boss types in order to get a full clear. The absolute shortest route through the map sees you completing eleven events and you are given a limited number of attempts to get through the entire sequence. I think the fastest possible clears will take at least thirty minutes, with it taking considerably longer if you are struggling. Getting to the end apparently allows you to choose one of three apocalypse tier legendary items.
I think at this point we should probably talk about the changes to the loot. The above items are currently available as twitch drops, and if you are so inclined I would highly suggest farming them up, especially if you are a new player. Each of these new items has three mods associated with them, and specifically, these twitch drops include a Tier 3 mod that was previously only available on legendary items. So even if you are not going to these them specifically they are worth deconstructing to gain the mod for your character. Epic and Legendary loot now have the chance to drop with three stats like this, which means that a good number of the purples that you are going to be picking up will be functionally better than the original set of legendary items.
The other thing that I have noticed is that the game seems to be way more generous than it was previously. While I have only gotten a few legendary drops, the purples are raining down from the sky. All of the expansion world content seems to also provide drop pod resources, which were key to upgrading gear past a certain point. I will need to spend some time figuring out what the most lucrative solo farm areas are for me personally, and then I will of course share that knowledge at a later point. For a game that seems to want to be Looter Shooter Diablo 3, it is most definitely following that Loot 2.0 progression path and giving me a rain of shiny items to pick up.
So I guess we get down to whether or not it is worth buying the expansion. If you already have Outriders the expansion will set you back $40. If you are completely new to Outriders you can buy a combo pack for $60. Do I think the expansion is worth it for the story? No… it is a short campaign that will only get you around two hours’ worth of gameplay. Do I think the expansion is worth picking up for the other systems that it adds to the game? I am leaning towards yes because it normalizes the rewards structure, adds some long-tailed grinds, and also presents a new raid-type game mode that should be good fun with a full party of friends. I think Outriders is a mechanically better game than Destiny 2, that just does not get the love that it deserves. The challenge with Outriders however is the fact that it is not a live service game, which means future updates will be few and far between and will be largely limited to balance patches.
I am hoping to gather up a group of friends to take on the new Trial and see how that game mode feels with multiple people. I also need to get more serious about my build and tweaking it to perform better. Right now I am very much abusing a one-trick pony in the form of a couple of Tier III weapon perks on the same auto rifle I have been using forever.
The post Outriders Worldslayer Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Whelp friends… I am apparently playing Path of Exile. I’ve attempted to play this game so many times in the past but bounced off each and every time. The main reason because is the extremely obtuse nature of the game that I will get into shortly. As a heavy Diablo III player, I have always been jealous of the amount of love Path of Exile players get from Grinding Gear Games. While the seasons have gotten more creative, I think in an effort to compete with POE Leagues… we don’t really get much in the way of new kinds of content. Even more so Diablo III is not really growing its game, whereas a good number of league mechanics that work well… get cycled into the main branch of the game. Now with Path of Exile 2 on the horizon… it really probably is a great time to try and sort out this game and determine if it is something I can enjoy in the long run. Hint… I think it is, but there are a number of caveats with that statement.
The core problem with Path of Exile is the passive tree and its cyclopean nature. That in itself would not be a massive problem if the game supported some sort of reasonable respec system. The problem there is that it does not… I am 37 levels into the game and I have acquired six “refund points” which means every decision that I have made needs to be tactical and planned. I have an army of functional alts in this game, in large part because I made decisions that were too hard to undo without really knowing what the overarching picture I should be going for looks like. In Diablo III I am used to playing in a way where I level with whatever build I happen to make work as I go… and then completely respeccing at the end game into a specific structured build. Path of Exile on the other hand essentially requires you to find the build you want to play… and commit to it entirely. This level of required research really make the entire experience out of reach for a lot of players that simply don’t want to box themselves into a corner before they even start the experience.
As part of my recent foray into the Diablo Immortal quagmire, I ended up familiarizing myself with a number of the Path of Exile YouTubers who also gave it a spin. This leads me to watch a few videos from Zizaran’s PoE University series. I have this habit of listening to long-form YouTube videos thrown up on the second monitor as though they were a podcast. So when I saw a video proclaiming that it was “Everything Explained” I fired it up… only then realizing that it is legitimately 7 hours long… and this is only the first part. I by no means watched the entire thing, but I did listen to the first hour or so of gameplay and it piqued my interests enough to give out the build that he was playing in the video a shot. I liked the idea of playing a steel-slinging magneto character and thought the entire “steel” magic line was a cool idea and seemingly provided a gameplay style similar to that of the D3 Demon Hunter.
If we are going to talk through the Path of Exile rabbit hole in its entirety… we have to get into Path of Building. For those who are uninitiated like I was… Path of Building is a third-party open source software designed for trying to keep track of your build and how you should be expanding it at each phase of the game. For example, the build that I am working off divides the passive tree into 9 distinct phases and presents you with an ever-expanding footprint as you work through them. So when you are building to level 12, you are only shown those first 12 nodes… then you bump up to 32 nodes, etc until you eventually end up with the convoluted masterpiece that is the key part of what turns people off from the game. Often times there is a notes tab that explains the decisions you should be making along the leveling process, what gems you should be using, and what gear you should be seeking out.
The other component that I think is important to starting this game is being able to put yourself in the right frame of mind. I’ve mostly played games with classes that more or less align to the holy trinity of roles, with some pretty clear assumptions as to what type of gameplay provides. If you see a class called the Marauder, and it is a big hulking brute of a guy… then I assume that is the melee/tanky class. If I see a character called the Duelist, I assume that is the rogue type character. The truth is these names associated with classes or even the choice that you make… doesn’t necessarily intrinsically shape your character. All characters have access to the same passive tree, with the key difference being where they “start” on said tree. So it is best to think of the classes as something along the lines of this.
Marauder – Pure Strength
Ranger – Pure Dexterity
Witch – Pure Intelligence
Duelist – Strength/Dexterity Hybrid
Templar – Strength/Intelligence Hybrid
Shadow – Dexterity/Intelligence Hybrid
Scion – Pure Hybrid… Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence
The other thing that I have had to effectively “unlearn” is the importance I place on gear. Right now I am level 37 and wearing a level 6 chest piece, not because I have not had access to better-itemized chest pieces… but because I’ve yet to come across another item with Green/Green/Red with linked sockets. All of the abilities that you use in Path of Exile come from Skill Gems, and these can be connected up in different ways so that they provide wildly different effects. Right now I am using Splitting Steel as my primary attack and it is being augmented by Vicious Projectiles Support and Chance to Bleed Support. This is my core combo and gives me the ability to shatter my weapon into steel projectiles that ricochet across the battlefield and deal significant damage while having a good chance of inflicting massive bleed damage over time debuff. I am now seeking a Red/Red/Green/Green item so that I can build into Fire Arrow damage that this build eventually targets, but I am experiencing something that the community refers to as “socket pressure” where I am not able to find an item with the correct arrangement of linked sockets.
The thing is there is enough flexibility in this system that players more seasoned than me… would be able to pivot their build on the fly to work with what they have been given. For me, I am mostly following the build dogmatically, at least until I understand the impact of different nodes on the passive tree a bit better. I have a nice 4 link item, and the game gives you rare items that will reroll the colored gems… but I have yet to reroll to a RRGG like I am wanting. Truth is that I am not reaching the limit of what I can do with my initial GGR Splitting Steel combo, so I figure I have time to find the item that I actually need. The only problem is right now I am building into options in the passive tree that are giving me no real current benefit. That has not however stopped me from having a freaking blast playing this game.
As an outsider who is not already bought into the Path of Exile community, the game has a number of problems. I think the two largest however are the frustratingly obtuse nature of the passive tree overwhelming players with choice, and not giving them a free pass at changing their mind without rolling a brand new character. The second problem is that Act 1 is objectively not good. It shows off the most uninteresting parts of Wraeclast and it is painted in the drab color palette of the first quake game. This is not doing the game any favors when it comes to indoctrinating new players. Those who manage to push through this rough exterior and devote the necessary homework to learning the game… absolutely love it. However, for years I was one of the ones that bounced almost immediately. Now I find myself starting to lean towards the “omg this game is brilliant” spectrum.
The other thing that I absolutely love is the fact that after I got to a specific point in Act 2… I unlocked a Hideout. This is effectively ARPG Player Housing and I am hooked. I’ve also seen that there is guild support, but I am not sure what that even entails. I know there is Guild Hideout support as well along with a guild stash, but I have not gone down that rabbit hole given that I am playing alone. I am not going to undersell the amount of work that I had to do in order to arrive at the point I am at, in understanding Path of Exile. I am also not trying to say that I fully understand the game because I am extremely novice in my knowledge. However, I do feel like the game is more approachable with the right research, and once you get the ball rolling… there is an extremely fun experience to be had. Right now I am loving it and I look forward to seeing what the rest of the game gives me.
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With the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic, there has been quite a bit of talk in the Twitterverse and greater blogging community about this expansion. I have no plans to go back and try out the classic experiment because across the board I think it has failed. World of Warcraft Classic was quite a bit of fun… until we all remembered the work commitment that game required for doing anything serious at the endgame. I think I personally petered out somewhere in the mid-50s and I ultimately lasted longer than a good number of my friends. Those who remained however represented some of the more toxic players, and I’ve heard stories from folks who played like Namaslays about the sexual harassment represented in that community.
For years I have idolized the Wrath of the Lich King expansion as the last truly good time in World of Warcraft, and similarly, I have placed the transition squarely on the shoulders of the Dungeon Finder tool. It was late in the Wrath patch cycle that we were first introduced to this tool, and rapidly folks stopped forming groups on their own and instead relied on random chances to throw them together with other players. As someone who used to cultivate a wide network of social channels and friends lists so I could rapidly pull together groups from a huge pool of hundreds of “known good” players, this was an earthquake that shattered the infrastructure that I had built. However, as I look back on this era, I am pretty certain that I have been wrong about the Dungeon Finder all of these years.
I think the larger truth is that “online social interaction in a video game” no longer held the novelty that it once did. I very much remember my early days in Everquest were spent being amazed that I could be online with that many other players at once. We went into these games carrying with us the lineage of MUDs and IRC chat rooms… that were by nature deeply social enterprises. So the fact that we could play a game and do it while chatting with friends, was a groundbreaking scenario. World of Warcraft was probably the first MMORPG I played that was legitimately by its own merits a “Good Game”. What I mean by that is a game that was capable of enthralling someone who had no interest in “Online Worlds” and only really cared about the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay. I think those of us who came to these games for the social interaction that they provided… eventually “aged out” of it. It isn’t so much that we lack the desire, it is just that real-world responsibilities eventually replaced the ability to maintain in-game responsibilities.
Since then I have played a lot of different MMORPGs at a good number of different levels of seriousness. It is really Final Fantasy XIV that proved to me that the dungeon finder tool could be a seriously good thing. The key difference here is that Yoshi P and crew wanted to create a structure that rewarded the player for good play or at least good behavior. The subtle pressure of wanting to win a commendation has been enough to curb most of the worst behavior for years. That is not to say that a good deal of toxicity has not crept into this game as well, but most of that can be seen at the highest levels of play and not necessarily in the “duty roulette”. It did plant the idea in my head though that with the correct social structure and systems that reward fair play, you might be able to rehabilitate even the worst of environments.
I’ve also played a good number of games since then that have had no grouping functionality built into them at all. While I can go through the social labor of trying to find groups, it is so much harder for me to be willing to put myself out there when I am grouping with strangers. There has been a long series of games lately where I have been the last one playing or one of the last few playing. This means I am spending almost all of my time soloing, and do not have a ready-made pocket healer to go with my tanky nature. If I could somehow transplant the Final Fantasy XIV Duty Finder and its social structure into New World for example… I would do so in a heartbeat. I know with the removal of dungeon keys, they are putting in some manner of group finding tool, but I believe it is a manual process and not an auto-matching system. Regardless having even that minimal infrastructure is an improvement over spamming trade chat.
Guild Wars 2 has a lot of grouping options for certain segments of the game, but thus far has done little to help me ease into other areas. For example, if we are talking about Open World or WVW content, I can simply click on the commander tag on the map and join the group (pending the group is open, which most are). If it is some daily objective like bounties in a specific region, there are also often manual group finder groups active for folks trying to accomplish that. Similarly, big reoccurring meta events have group finder groups allowing you to drop into RIBA in Silverwastes at will. However, up until this point they have not been a terribly viable way of finding a Dungeon, Strike, or Raid group because those communities tend not to use them. Arena Net knows this and is trying to implement some changes to make them more random player friendly… but still it is not “push button get group” easy.
I think the thing that the Dungeon Finder tool did do, was limit the importance of a server community and the social structures that are entangled with that notion. At the time… I mourned this greatly, but modern me is generally in favor of just completely abolishing the concept of a server and opening up grouping freely across the entire game. One of the greatest faults that I can find in both Diablo Immortal and New World is the deeply limiting server infrastructure that almost guarantees that over time server merges will be consistently required. At the end of the day, the ethic that I care the most about in an Online Game is the ability to play with my friends, regardless of what region they might be playing in. Sure it might be a pain in the butt to organize a play session, but having any sort of basic social infrastructure greatly improves my experience in the long run. Given that it is deeply difficult to keep players engaged for more than a few months at a time, the ability to hop around between different pools of active friends is key to the long-term success of a game.
Essentially for the last decade and some change, I have branded the Dungeon Finder as the great killer of games when in truth that was a flawed perception. I’ve realized that Wrath of the Lich King is a specific moment in time for me that could never be replicated. While some of that experience was wrapped up in the social infrastructure that I had built, probably more of it was associated with the deep depression that I was in at the time. I was clinging to World of Warcraft and the friends I had made in it as a lifeline to keep me from fading away. It is weird to me that I hold the game in such nostalgia when I was playing it through quite possibly the darkest period in my life. I can’t go back to the way I felt at that time, and I honestly would never want to knowing how close I came to ending it all. Instead of realizing it was me that was changing, I placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the biggest innovation to be brought into the game that I loved.
The hard truth is, I would love to see the Dungeon Finder or something similar to it in more games. Even with the toxic community of players that it brings along with it… having access to run dungeons and harder content is far better than having to expend the emotional energy to make it happen without one. My more modern mindset is that all of the barriers that keep people from doing content, easily with friends should be leveled. Constructs like the Trust system in Final Fantasy XIV are great, but could be even better if they were more flexible and allowed you to build a group of what you had available, and then use NPCs to fill out the rest of the party. There were so many times I wish we had systems like SWTOR where you could run content with two people and two companions. No game has really nailed these systems, but I now have to fully admit that we are far better off with them than without them.
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This probably comes as a bit of a surprise given that I posted on the 24th about being torn up about the disappearance of the barn kitten that we were going to adopt. I am still kinda torn up about that to be honest, and none of the three kittens have shown up. My wife did in fact immediately return to bombarding me with kittens, but that is probably a good thing in the long run. Our local animal welfare shelter is full to the point of overflowing, and as a result, had waived all adoption fees. After work on Friday, I agreed that we should probably go out there and at least take a look because saving an animal from a Shelter is always a good thing. My adorable Josie butt came from this same Animal Welfare, so we had good luck before… what is to say we would not have good luck again.
We were not there for very long before Miss Gracie stole my heart. This is a picture of her that I snapped as we were on our way up to the front office to adopt her. She was the runt of a litter of kittens that had come into the shelter the same day we came by to look. One of the four was already adopted, but I have a serious bone to pick with whoever decided to name this group. You had Porkchop, Potato Salad, Fruit Salad, and Carrot Cake… so I am guessing either someone was planning for a picnic or they were just hungry. Miss Gracie was originally referred to as Fruit Salad… and there is no way we are actually going to keep calling her that. The funny thing is that my wife landed on the name Gracie, but in my headcanon, we named her after my good friend Grace. Both are “smol” and fiesty, so it works.
Right now she is sequestered in my wife’s office, as we usually do with a new cat for at least a few days before introducing them to the rest of the family. It was hilarious last night, that as we lay in bed… we could hear her running laps around the office and randomly pouncing on things. For being as tiny as she is… she certainly SOUNDS like a much bigger cat. The sheet on her cage at the shelter said that she was 4 months old, but when we got the official paperwork… it was more like 2 months. She is maybe the smallest cat that we have ever adopted… save for MAYBE Kenzie who did not go through a shelter system. She has very much not been weaned for very long… or was force weaned because of the loss of a mommy. Every time we love her she goes through the familiar behavior of trying to find a nipple. We went through this with Kenzie as well, and even years later she liked to go through a nursing behavior with a blanket for comfort.
Over the weekend we had a bit of a scramble for setting up the office for her. We technically adopted her on Friday, but could not pick her up until last night because she still needed to be spayed. Essentially we have plenty of toys around the house and even have them in a little toybox downstairs. However, we wanted to start Gracie out with some fresh toys of her own. Right now the clear winner is this little scratcher/playmat thing that we got for $4 at big lots. She loves pouncing on the little plastic rods with the doodads attached to them. We also got these adorable little fuzzy sloth toys that she likes throwing up and catching. Essentially they are about the size of your standard “mouse” toy, but much cuter. She has not really taken to the crinkle ball made out of like wadded-up iridescent mylar ribbon. I figure coming from the spartan confines of a shelter cage… she is maybe a little overstimulated.
Admittedly this post is largely just a vehicle for me to share a bunch of photos of Miss Gracie. Please love her as much as I already do. I hope she bonds with at least one of our two other cats, and the transition to the larger home environment goes smoothly.
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