Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are down a Grace and a Kodra but carry on with the long list of topics left over from last week. We start the show with a discussion of Trek to Yomi and how it is the video game form of a samurai movie. Bel revisits New World and talks about all of the improvements, and how it is very unlikely to change anything population-wise. Folks played Necromunda in person using the 2018 rules set and share their experiences. Bel talks a bit about his rabbit hole from last week of looking at just how far off Kickstarter estimated delivery dates are for Video Games. Finally, we talk some more about Star Citizen and the 3.17 patch, along with some long-time daydreaming about a world where Tam gets to ferry us around the galaxy going on delves through abandoned space hulks.
Good Morning Friends, this is going to be a bit of a weird post but it was spurred in my head by watching a long-form video essay last night, or more so listening to it… while I played a game. First off I feel like I need to begin with a number of disclaimers. This is a blog post from my specific perspective, which is inspired by watching a video from a wildly different perspective. My thoughts come from the place of being a white male gamer born in 1976, which creates specific biases and experiences. If you were not white and not male, you’re experience potentially felt different. The last thing I am trying to do here is sugarcoat an oppressive system or apply a coat of rose-tinted varnish.
Over the years though I have struggled a bit with the terms Geek and Gamer because as time has passed those terms mean far less than they once did as far as describing a particular experience. I am not saying this is a bad thing, and in truth, it is a very good thing because today geeks and gamers have way more opportunities and varied experiences than they ever did before. However it feels different and given that the video above comes from the perspective of someone on the cusp of the millennial and zoomer boundary, and mine comes from a decidedly “Gen X” background I still found the similar but different experiences interesting.
I think one of the pivotal defining aspects of growing up a geek in the 80s and 90s was how rare it was to find a geek property. Lady Hawke for example was effectively a romance movie, but given at the time it was so rare to have access to anything even vaguely fantasy-related… I am pretty certain that geeks of a specific age have watched this film more than once. I think the same is true for a lot of geek adjacent media that came out over the years, which lead to a sort of shared culture and experience brought on by scarcity. I remember being somewhat excited about the completely awful made-for-TV David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie… because it was Nick Fury… in a movie, something that I never thought I would actually see. My teen mind could not fathom ever getting the Marvel mega-franchise that has taken place over the last few decades.
There is a reason why geeks of a certain age revere certain franchises in the way that they do… because we had to exist on fumes for decades. I know I personally watched a ton of low-budget Horror films because they were exploring the sorts of themes I was interested in, which eldritch horrors coming to life to wreak havoc on the populace. The stuff of science fiction was pushed to sources of low repute, and I gobbled it up in desperation. Every so often we would get thrown a bone in the form of a movie like “The Crow” that drew its roots to comic books or otherwise geek media, but those were truly few and far between. This tapestry of desperation had led most of us to watch a lot of the same things and have a similar shared media landscape. If you lived in a small town like I did, it was escalated by the fact that media was hard to come by, which lead folks to dub off bootleg copies and spread them around among their friends.
The same was true on the video game side of this equation. Gamers of a certain age likely remember playing the gold box series of D&D games from SSI, or the completely nonsensically awful Nintendo Entertainment System ports of those games. I ravenously consumed Ultima, Final Fantasy, Drakkhen, and pretty much anything roleplaying adjacent I could get my hands on. I did not get access to a computer until 1991, but when I did I went through a whole renaissance of discovery of games I missed along the way. I remember the release of Wolfenstein 3D and it completely blew my mind, and when Doom came out… it was an almost life-changing experience.
I mean for decades we would have moments where geek and gamer culture would flirt with the mainstream, but never quite break through. The turning point for me was really when Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition was released and the entire D20 system. Living through this was weird because suddenly you saw gigantic kiosks of reasonably priced books everywhere. Prior to the launch of this system, you had to go to either a comic book store or a dedicated game store to get your pen and paper fix, but now in the middle of Barnes and Noble were aisles of prime real estate selling copies of the three core books for $15-20 each instead of the previous $40-50 each. Having survived the Satanic Panic, and the era of having to hide your roleplaying game books from parents… I was completely flabbergasted seeing these things not only in public but prominently advertised.
The video I linked above specifically pointed to The Guild as the origin of the rise of geek culture, but for me by the time that happened the ball had already been rolling. For the first time in my life, I felt truly seen as a geek and gamer. However, it also diluted the potency of what those things meant. For most of my life reading comics, playing video games, reading fantasy novels, and obsessing about science fiction branded me a member of an underclass. I don’t have quite as many harrowing stories of abuse at the hands of peers as some members of my generation do, but I did develop a hearty dislike towards the jock supermen that ran the defacto social structure. Suffice to say though that it was really fucking weird to see the things we practiced in the dark for fear of safety, being drug out into the light for all to see.
However, it also set up this weird dichotomy where if everyone was a geek and interested in geeky things… was anyone really a geek? There had almost developed a tribal language shared among geek culture as a sign that you were “among friends” and could loosen up and talk shop, and the signals started to get a bit confused. In the 90s if you saw someone wearing a Vampire the Masquerade T-Shirt, you knew without a doubt that you had found a member of your tribe. If they had a D&D players handbook or a copy of Shadowrun tucked in their book bag… then you might have just met a brand new lifelong best friend. The shared social fabric was so strong in part because there was so little material for us to consume. Now that geek culture was blowing up… the shared narrative also disappeared and what geek meant to each person was wildly different.
It was admittedly a bit of an adjustment when I realized that this shared experience that I had and that my friends had… was not as “shared” as I thought it was. That this culture that I found safety in, was openly harmful to so many. As Geek culture became mainstream, it to some extent failed to realize that it was becoming mainstream. I know for me personally, growing up feeling like the underdog… made it really hard to reconcile that I was no longer the underdog and in fact held way more power than I ever realized I held. Some folks never got that memo or had that realization and started to weaponize this “sense of oppression” into an exceptionally toxic culture of gatekeeping. It was a ball rolling down the hill gaining momentum and reaching its horrific crescendo with GamerGate.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped “feeling seen” and started “feeling exploited”. It is weird how Funko Pops for me is the focal point of this shift. When they first came into existence I thought they were pretty cool. As a kid, I wanted nothing more than He-Man, GI Joe, and Star Wars to all be on the same scale and be interchangeable so that all of the geek properties that I loved could exist in the same universe. Funko did this and created a ubiquitous look and feel… and happened to gather up all of these properties that I loved. Then over time combined with the deluge of so many figures every single year… I noticed how mass-produced everything felt.
The video specifically calls out Loot Crate, but it is even more than that. Walmart has an entire aisle now with nothing but merchandise tailored towards geek properties. I remember my jaw dropping and hitting the floor the first time when I saw a Dungeons and Dragons boxed set in Target. “Geek” is now the new “Sports” memorabilia and you can get a triforce branded on any item you can imagine. Our passion for these properties we grew up with, and that were the source of deep emotional bonding moments… are now being churned out and mass produced. The industrial machine does what it always does and finds a way to market its products to every generation. We are in the era of video games and geekery, and as a result, everything is applied with a coat of nostalgia to sell to that specific sensibility.
The wake-up call though is this foundational identity that I have carried with me into my soon-to-be late forties… isn’t really a thing. I’ve branded myself a gamer and a geek, and I find myself increasingly questioning what those two titles even mean right now. At a point in the past, they did have specific meanings associated with it but are no longer quite the cultural monolith that I thought them to be. Every gamer and every geek now has wildly different experiences associated with those words. The truth is… I don’t want to rebel against that notion but instead, embrace it. It is maybe time for those labels to die. If everyone is a gamer and everyone is a geek, then no one is really either and we are just people doing the things we love. There should be more people happy to share the things that they love in life. Hopefully, in time the toxicity will also fade and we can be okay with just liking the things we like, and not caring what others think about them.
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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I ticked something off my New World bucket list, and bankrupted myself in the process… but that is beside the point. I finished leveling Armoring to 200 and with it utilized the resources I had been gathering to craft a full set of item level 600 Voidbent armor. This is by no means the best and most optimal gear available in the game, but it is also the only gear that can be crafted at 600 by default without requiring you to have a full set of armoring gear and three armoring trophies to get that item level up there. It serves as a great option for tanking and also has a ton of luck on it, and I am already noticing a difference in the items I get as a result. While it cost me roughly 45,000 gold to finish leveling armoring and craft this, I consider it well worth it since on the open market each of the individual pieces goes for around 20,000 gold. Now that I have gone through this process I can now also craft it for anyone that provides me with the materials which is a side bonus.
I’ve been an extremely harsh critic of New World because quite honestly the game broke my heart. I was an alpha and later beta tester of the game, and I saw how much potential it had. Then I watched as it was mismanaged at every step throughout the launch with some exceptionally short-sighted decisions made along the way. I’ve written my concerns out many times through that process and have effectively been gone from the game for five months. We are now in a state where essentially the vast majority of PVE players have left, and the only folks remaining are the PVP diehards. However, after a few days back, I have to give credit where credit is due and tell you all that the game has made some pretty significant improvements.
One of the core problems remaining however is that the game has done a pretty awful job of actually telling players about them. Prior to sitting down to write this post I crawled through the patch notes and found no mention of the features I am going to talk about today. One would think that it would deeply benefit this team and the game that they represent if there were a running log of improvements since launch, or at least having them featured at all in the patch notes. The notes seem entirely focused on bug fixes and are hopelessly vague, completely missing any of the huge quality of life changes. So in this morning’s post, I am going to do my best to talk about some of the things I have personally experienced in the last few days.
Significant Fast Travel Improvements
Since the launch of the game traveling around the map quickly has required an expenditure of Azoth, a currency accrued and used in several different ways. The cost of azoth required for the teleport had multiple different calculations that scaled its costs including the distance of the teleport and the weight of your current character. The end result was that if you were at all heavily loaded down you could burn through literally ALL of your azoth in a single teleport. This also meant that you spent most of your time running around the map instead of actually doing the things that you wanted to. Folks used to use azoth vials like a fiend in order to fund their adventuring… which drove the price of those up to around 200-300 gold each.
Unfortunately, the azoth vial market has crashed, due to the fact that teleports are ridiculously cheap now. All teleport as far as I can tell regardless of distance or your carry weight is a flat fee of 20 azoth. You can get back twenty azoth trivially by killing a few mobs, harvesting a few nodes, etc. This means you are likely going to be near permanently capped at 1000 azoth, which leaves the only quality of life that I would love to see as a way to disable the “near cap” warning. I cannot fully explain how much this one change has improved the game for me because I no longer feel quite as chained to a specific location as I was previously. Additionally, house placement no longer needs to be near as strategic as it once was.
No Cost to Access Remote Storage
The Storage Shed was an interesting method of physically located storage, but it caused a lot of problems. Originally the design was to incentivize conquering adjacent territory but allowing players to transfer items between storage chests for territories that their faction held. In practice for any player that was not directly involved in the PVP nonsense, this felt awful, and as a result, was yet one more thing completely out of their control. Even if you happened to hold adjacent territories, the cost of gold required to transfer a stack of items became exceptionally cost prohibitive. The end result is that every player tried to build out as much storage in a single location, and the limited most of their activity to that one hub, causing Windsward, Everfall, and to a lesser extent Brightwood to be the ONLY viable crafting hubs… making all other territories feel empty.
This next change is massive, but you can store items in any storage chest and withdraw or despot freely from any other storage chest. If you are in Ebonscale Reach and need to pull a potion from your storage in First Light, you can do so easily and without cost. This means that every single player in the game now has increased their total storage footprint by massive amounts, making everything in the game feel so much less stressful. That is not even a complaint that I really dove into, but I felt like I was constantly having to micromanage my storage which made any sort of large crafting project feel cumbersome bordering on impossible. Now I am utilizing currently empty banks for bulk storage of resources so that I can batch craft my way to push up some of my other trade skills leisurely.
The other side effect of this change is that it more or less means that every single territory is now viable. Folks can spread out a bit and craft wherever they happen to be rather than relying entirely on one of three towns. This makes the world as a whole feel way more alive because between this and the fast travel changes, folks can move around more freely without feeling like they are giving up something significant. This also means that for purely PVE players… the whole territory conquest game has little to no impact on them anymore. You are no longer greatly limited by the faction you belong to.
Out of Combat Regeneration
This one is another massive quality of life improvement, but previously in the game, I used to constantly consume food in order to lower my downtime. It was the only really reliable means of healing back quickly after combat in order to prepare for the next encounter. Now when you are out of combat ability is triggered called “peaceful regeneration” which quickly heals back all of the damage that you have been dealt. Additionally, I noticed that my survival as a whole when it comes to higher-level encounters seems to be better. I am uncertain what other changes might be factoring into this, but I can happily clear camps in higher-level non-elite areas and farm resource chests again to try and get materials needed for crafting.
Easier Access to Dungeon Keys
I still feel like the whole dungeon key concept is bad, but it feels like they are married to it. Previously it was ungodly resource heavy to craft any of the higher tier keys. This led folks to have 2000 gold or higher buy-in in order to get into a group running a dungeon. This felt awful and while I believe some of the crafting requirements for keys have lessened a bit, the bigger improvement is that you can now purchase these keys on your faction vendor. The keys are around 500 gold, which sounds like a lot… but I have also noticed that in general the amount of gold that I am making has significantly increased. Just running around and killing stuff in the world netted me almost 2000 gold last night, and I was not purposefully farming anything of significance.
I’ve also heard rumor that all of the open world camps that had been broken with patch 1.1 are now viable again, but no one seems to be running them due to the ease of access to dungeon keys. For whatever reason, the New World team really wants folks to be running dungeons and has heavily incentivized them by flooding you with loot. Given that I am playing by myself I do not have a team to actually go test this theory out about the open world camps. The community is doing what all communities do… and optimizing the highest chance of getting drops which seems to occur in dungeons. Maybe if I stick around long enough I will try to pug tank again.
Expertise System
I still think that the Expertise and Item Snapshot system is a bad design. However, with the addition of the Gypsum Orb system, it has become pretty easy to get multiple guaranteed improvements each day. You can purchase an Orb from your faction vendor for tokens, you can get 3 special loot bags a day which gives you diamond gypsum, harvesting resources gives you emerald gypsum, and if you participate in two Outpost Rush per day it is trivial to get ruby gypsum. In an hour or so of game time, you can pretty easily get four item slots daily upgrades. The items that you get are not great, which means you are still going to need to be farming up equipment in another fashion. However, getting your expertise up does manage to open up other avenues like purchasing gear on the market board.
Outpost Rush From Anywhere
Outpost Rush was an interesting game mode option, but ultimately AGS made it less than viable. The problem was that you had to queue up for the game from a town, namely your faction merchant, which lead to players just not queueing up very often. It was really hard to go do anything in the world, yet need to be back in a town to queue up again after the match finished. This has thankfully been improved and you can join a match from anywhere in the world by opening up the game menu and choosing modes. I am guessing this is also where the 2v2 and 3v3 duel modes will eventually be added as well. Win or lose you end up getting some Umbral Shards and Ruby Gypsum so this makes the process way more viable. I’ve not really talked about Umbral Shards yet but that is a currency used to upgrade gear from 590 to 625, and obtained through “endgame” activities.
Easier Access to Unobtainium
I specifically called out that one of the core problems with the game previously was that there were a number of chase resources that were exceptionally difficult to get. This led to overfarming of resources in the vague chance of getting the one item that was useful… and more or less throwing away the bulk of the product or flooding the market with it cheaply. I specifically compared this to the scene in Willy Wonka where Veruca Salt is surrounded by workers unwrapping chocolate bars as fast as they can looking for the golden ticket and then throwing all of that chocolate away. There was never enough of these high-end resources to make crafting with them viable.
Since I last played they put in a system called “Aptitude” which kicks in when you max out your skill to level 200. Every third of a level bar gained after that point earns you a cache of materials. The above screenshot is an example of a cache that I opened for mining, and I got both Cinnabar and Tolvium, the materials required to craft higher rarity items as well as a few other baubles that might be useful. Not pictured is the fact that I got around 200 gold for opening the cache as well, which leads to a constant flow of coins for those who are harvesting regularly. This has balanced the market for high-end materials and is in part what lead me to be able to craft my Voidbent armor set from the top of this post. The first of these caches that you earn per day rewards you with an Emerald Gypsum, which feeds in to the Gypsum Orb unlock system as well.
Ammunition No Longer Required
This is a weird one but I just found out about it last night. You are no longer required to use ammunition when using Bows, Muskets, or the newly added Blunderbuss. This was honestly one of the parts that made using these weapons awful is that it required you to constantly be either crafting more ammo or buying it at a pretty hefty loss on the market. They changed completely what ammunition does, and now it simply adds bonus damage to your weapons instead of being required to use them. This means that you can carry around a stack for specific fights, but also if you run out it isn’t the end of the world. For farming materials or questing, you can run around without ammo and be just fine. I wish I had known about this before burning through my first stack of ammunition leveling Blunderbuss.
Improvements Across the Board
The thing is not a single one of these on their own is significant to make the game feel better, but taken collectively… it feels like maybe the game has a chance. What worries me though is that MMORPG players tend to be a fickle lot, myself included. Once we get a bad taste in our mouth about a specific game, it is exceptionally hard to turn the tide and convince people to give it another shot. I still am not entirely certain what lead me to install New World and give it another chance. I am thankful that I did because the game really has improved significantly. The only thing that really needs to happen now is to have an influx of PVE players drown out the edgelord PVP community that has remained. I am not sure that is going to happen, however.
I have hope for the first time in six months about this game. I think maybe the team at Amazon Game Studios has learned some hard-fought lessons and has backed away from some legitimately bad decisions made along the way. I hope they can pull it off and I hope that players are willing to give the game a second chance. I will say that if the state in which the game is today, was the game at release… we might be having entirely different conversations about New World in general. I still think it has a lot of problems, but the game feels way less openly antagonistic towards its players. If you have the game you might give it a reinstall and check out the things that have changed. I am glad that I did.
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Hey Friends! This morning is going to be a bit of a random mix of things because that is sort of where my brain is. There are times when I find myself juggling a number of threads and I appear to be going through one of those right now. Meet my big jade friend! I finished collecting the hero points needed to turn my fresh level 80 Engineer into a Mechanist. I’ve yet to do much of anything with it yet, but I am happy to have my robot friend. I’ve been utilizing a mechanic in World vs World to collect Hero Points for the classes that I am not actively playing.
As a result of my frequent participation, I get Skirmish Chests and one of the items that you can receive from them is Testimonies of Jade Heroics when then can be used to buy Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics allowing me to largely skip the hero points from Heart of Thorns which are all annoying. Granted I can do the same thing for Tyria, Path of Fire, and End of Dragons heroics, but I actually like doing those. This is how I have unlocked Bladesworn, Chronomancer, and now Mechanist so it is actually a fairly quick process if you are doing a good deal of WvW. The next target is probably unlocking DragonHunter on my Guardian.
In other news, I am closing in on having a full stable of professions at level 80 in Guild Wars 2. Here is a mildly modified image showing that I have everything but the Thief up to level 80. Granted I have cheesed some of these and abused the birthday rewards to push them up to level 60 before going the rest of the way. The longer-term battle however is unlocking heroic points on each of them and figuring out a viable build to go for, and then gearing them all. Right now Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer are pretty solid, and Engineer is slowly getting there. Everyone else… I am all over the place but I am starting to click the pieces into place on the Mesmer now that I have Chronomancer unlocked.
In Other Other News… The Housing Lottery system in Final Fantasy XIV should be rolling once again based on this post from 5/13. Granted I still cannot do anything related to it, because I have to wait around until May 26th at 8 am PDT in order for this first round to be finalized. I’ve had my character parked at the plot that I am interested in over in The Mists since this all started, and at that point, I am going to be putting my bid in place and trying for the one I like the best. I am trying not to get my hopes up because housing, in general, has been a giant clusterfuck, to be honest. The lottery will be a better clusterfuck, but it is still going to be one nonetheless. The biggest problem with housing is that I am also going to be chaining myself to logging regularly so I make sure that I keep it. I do need to figure out a reasonable way to weave this game back into my rotation, however.
In my recent dabbling around in New World again, I decided to give Outpost Rush a try. I figured that maybe something flipped in my brain to make me like PVP given that I am doing quite a bit of it in Guild Wars 2. Nope… whatever indoctrination that has taken place does not appear to universally apply to all games and Outpost Rush still feels awful. In spite of all of the improvements made to New World, I have to say that the core problem with the game now resides in the generally awful PVP-focused community. I think it is probably too little too late to ever turn this game around, given that they ran off most of their PVE-focused players last year. Chat on Valhalla is better than it was on Minda, but it is still filled with the same jackasses… just in smaller numbers. It is especially shocking coming from Guild Wars 2 which is pretty great so long as you avoid the Goons.
Another thing that I have noticed in coming back is that many of the rarer resources have plummeted in value. I am not sure if I talked about this the other day but Void Ore used to be the single most valuable chase item and would go for upwards of 10k gold each. Now you can pick them up for 150 gold without much issue, and after opening a few professional aptitude caches I understand why. Essentially every third of a level after maxing a profession, you get awarded a cache of materials… and these are chock full of those orange rarity items. I took a screenshot of an example where I got 3 vials of azoth (used to go for 200g each, now 5g each), 8 of legendary cloth Blisterweave, and 6 of the other legendary cloth Scalecloth. I believe each of those used to go for around 2k gold on my original server, and now I am sure they are peanuts given how much the game is throwing at you.
Like I said before right now it is shaping up that the community is the worst part of the game. While chat is calm most of the time, you are constantly seeing nonsense like this scroll past. The Edgelord energy is strong in this community. It is fine, but it is essentially the sort of thing that I would make sure anyone asking me about the game receives a hefty disclaimer. I have a few things that I want to do… just not sure if I will actually do them. I always wanted a set of Voidbent Armor and I might finish leveling my Armoring up to make that. I also always wanted to make one of the legendary hatchets, and I might spend the time to finish leveling up engineering to make one of those as well. Past that, I am not sure how long I will be back. Harvesting is still fun and moment-to-moment open world gameplay is still fun… but it also largely feels pointless given that you can’t really use it to acquire gear score improvements other than the daily gypsum orbs. I saw someone talking about the Priest farm in Myrkgard last night, so I might need to wade in deep enough to see if those are still viable.
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