Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I had a rather busy weekend and I am still sorta feeling out of it as a result. I had to run up and help my dad with a few things, including getting several items that are too heavy to lift solo off to the city dump. The last few times I have been up there I have made friends with Fang. Either through battle damage or birth defect, Fang has a permanently exposed canine too and snarled lip. It makes him look rather fearsome but he is one of the sweetest cats. He now follows me around because he knows that eventually, I will stop to give him head scratches. This makes actually doing work with my dad a little challenging because the last thing I want to do is kick him when we are carrying something heavy and my visibility is limited.

I am pretty sure that Fang is the evolved form of one of these three pokemon taken from 2016. The problem with barn cats is that they sorta come and go over time and we have no clue what happened to two of the three. Fang however has grown up to be my dad’s buddy. He apparently comes into the shop with him and hangs out while my dad putters around tinkering on things. He also occasionally comes into the house but from the sound of it, he doesn’t really like being indoors. During the winter months, dad leaves the heater on in his shop so I think Fang more or less lives there. I’ve not gotten a picture of it but apparently, my dad also has a pet turtle that sometimes keeps him company. Driving down the dirt lane I had to carefully straddle a few massive terapins, which were more or less a common order growing up as well.

Lately, I have not consumed media as fast as I used to, and there was a time when I would have ravenously consumed Stranger Things as soon as it was released. This weekend I finally got around to starting the season and only made it four episodes in before taking a quick break. One of the problems of being “of” the era pictured in the show is that sometimes an anachronism stands out. For example, this bag was zoomed in close during an airport scene… and we very much did not have these in 1986. My wife was the first to notice it and this led to doing some research. Sure enough, this style of bag was invented in 1987 but did not really reach mass market adoption until the mid to late 90s. I know we did not really have fancy luggage like this until the 2000s, but mostly because we had to wait for it to get cheap. Season 4 is set in March of 1986, and I would have been 9 years old at that point, so I deeply remember some aspects of the show but was quite a bit younger than the cast of characters.

As far as gaming goes this weekend, I ended up missing Tequatl both Saturday and Sunday because life was happening. I did get in some co-op gaming with my friend Grace and we played some Gunfire Reborn. The game is very much Borderlands 2 meets Roguelike experience with really interesting weapons and some fun powers for your classes. Over time you unlock more of a cast of anthropomorphic animal friends. This is honestly the only complaint I would have for the game is that maybe it would have been better to just let players pick from a wide cast of characters, rather than having to unlock them through grinding it out.

Some of the weapons are deeply entertaining. Grace found this weapon that was essentially a firebreathing lizard and in order to reload the game you had to sort of smack it. I am running around with an exploding kunai. There are times when the runs go extremely smoothly and you get good picks from the additional perks. Then there were runs where everything went wrong and you might as well just start over. Regardless of your choice, you want to finish the run because this gives you experience points that you can then spend on a talent tree system that carries over between runs. Definitely a fun little game and extremely cheap if you are looking for some co-op nonsense with friends. The post Fang, Bags, and Fire Lizards appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Diablo Immortal potentially has one of the worst game announcements I have ever experienced. Fans like me were hoping to see the next chapter in the storied Diablo PC franchise and instead got a mobile game. That said while I was disappointed… I remember talking on Twitter about how I was interested in a phone-based Diablo game. The app stores are chock full of Diablo clones, some of which are actually really good. The thing is… none of them really FEEL like Diablo and I hoped that Immortal would package up the gameplay that I really enjoyed on Diablo 3 into a handheld format. Then all of the bullshit happened over the last two years with Blizzard and it made me significantly less interested in playing any of their games. In fact, I had not touched anything Blizzard-related since April of 2021 until yesterday when I gave Diablo Immortal a spin because I figured at some point I would want to talk about it based on what I had been reading.

If you want my 500 ft view of the game… it looks like Diablo and sounds like Diablo, but does not FEEL like Diablo. There is just something missing about the way the game functions that pushes it into this uncanny valley of not really feeling like the game I was looking for. It is little things like breaking objects… if they are breakable at all… doesn’t really do anything. I’ve been smashing barrels for fun and profit since Diablo 1, and while there are a handful of breakables early in the game… there seem to be way more vases and jars that are untouchable. That is by no means a fatal flaw, but just indicative of the sort of thing that I am talking about here. Something just feels off about the game and I will dive a bit further into that.

At a core level, Diablo for me is about building resources, spending resources, and the interplay of abilities. Diablo Immortal instead is a game about pressing buttons whenever they come off cooldown, which is ultimately the problem with every mobile phone Diablo clone I have experienced. You could have told me that Raziel or Lineage was having a cross-over event with Diablo, and I would have believed you. Essentially Diablo Immortal feels at a fundamental level like every ARPG I have played on a phone. There is something missing in the interplay of the abilities that makes it feel like I am just whacking buttons when they come off cooldown without a larger goal in mind.

The other aspect that makes it feel like every other ARPG on the phone market is the inclusion of ultimate. There is a meter that is slowly building over time through you taking actions, that ultimately unlocks an ultimate ability. When this ability is active you essentially shift into all powerful god mode which allows you to completely decimate any encounter. However, the end result of this is that you feel weak and useless any time the ultimate is not active, making it feel like you need to gain power in order to compete with this borrowed power system. Based on my brief research, there are apparently gems that you can slot that will build this ultimate bar faster allowing you to have this “borrowed power” up more often and burn through things more quickly. To be fair, Diablo has always had borrowed power in the form of the shrines, but I specifically call out ultimate only because they seem to be bog standard for all phone ARPGs and not something I have traditionally associated with Diablo in the past.

Then there is the monetization. Upon clearing the first dungeon and taking down King Leoric yet again in a Diablo game… I unlocked the Mad King’s Breach Trove. This wasn’t something I got as a loot reward but instead something that I can now purchase on the in-game store for only 99 cents. For that low price, you get one legendary crest, two basic crests, six gems, and 60 eternal orbs. It seems like the “crests” are this game’s “gacha” currency and allow you a chance at pulling legendary gems. The orbs are the currency for purchasing more of these crests or the various cosmetic items available in the game store. However when I looked through the store there was nothing that you could actually purchase for 60 orbs, and instead, you would need to add another 60 to that in order to get to the price for the cheapest item… a single legendary crest for 120 orbs.

This sort of thing is what is referred to as “predatory monetization” and I get that it exists in so many forms now. However, the fact that you get an amount of currency in one of their “cheap” packs that they are telling you is a phenomenal deal… but that is not capable of purchasing ANYTHING in the store by itself feels real bad. All cash shops are notorious for doing the thing where the amounts of currency that you can purchase never quite exactly map to anything you can buy in the store so you either have an amount left over or are just short. That sucks too, but this is a case where you are given an amount as part of a bundle and there is absolutely nothing that I could see in the shop that you could actually spend it on. The above video is one that keeps getting referenced over and over by various talking heads discussing this game, and if anything they say is true… it would cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy your way to a completely maxed out character.

For a very long time, Blizzard games have been riding a line when it comes to monetization. While lots of folks complained about Overwatch loot boxes or Hearthstone card packs, I thought those were mostly fine. Overwatch gave you nothing but cosmetics and Hearthstone more or less modeled the same sort of thing I was used to in purchasing card packs for Magic the Gathering. This however feels like another significant line has been crossed, and in doing so… it takes Blizzard into a whole new category of a games company. Genshin Impact is a DEEPLY predatory game when it comes to monetization, and if there is any truth to the rumors about what the endgame of Diablo Immortal looks like… then Genshin actually seems generous.

If you are enjoying Diablo Immortal however then by all means awesome. The combination of it mostly just feeling like every other phone ARPG I have played combined with the aggressive monetization ended up being a massive turn-off for me. I’ve tried both the Mobile client and the PC client and they feel fine enough. Both mobile and PC feel much better with a controller than they do with touch or keyboard/mouse. Touch screen interfaces still largely feel like garbage to me so I am not going to hold that against this specific game when ALL touch screen games feel like trash to me personally. If you are grabbing it for your phone prepare to have about 2.6 GB of free space all told once the many downloads finish. Other than gameplay problems, I still do not feel great touching anything Blizzard-related right now so long as Kotick is still in power. I am hoping that the Microsoft purchase goes through and that sweeping changes are made within the company.

Instead of playing Diablo Immortal from the bed as I had originally planned on doing, I decided to use Steam remote play and give Torchlight III another shot. I have to say I kinda dig the ghost captain class so far though I did not make it terribly far before sleep claimed me. I really need to do the whole steam remote play thing far more often because with my phone and the Gamesir controller it was a phenomenal experience. I need to probably sift through my game library and look for more similar controllers/bed-friendly titles. All of this said I really do hope you are enjoying the launch of Diablo Immortal. It was not for me but that does not mean it is not a game you are going to be interested in. The post Diablo Immortal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.