Good Morning Folks! For anyone who has tuned in more recently during the “Genshin Boom” as I am calling it, there is this thing that I like to do semi-monthly where I review the games I have been playing and talk about them a bit. This also serves as a reminder for me to update the regularly playing widget in the sidebar of this blog. Even more than this it is also a time for me to finally admit that a romance with a game is over and send it off on its way, while also talking about the new things that excite me. I actually legitimately did one of these in September so maybe this is the beginning of it actually returning to being something I do each month.
Essentially I like to divide the games up into a few categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
To Those Remaining
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
I am a sucker for this game. I am not playing an awful lot of it right now because we are in the doldrums between finishing one season and starting a new one. However the next season is right around the corner and it should be a very interesting one. During the season the Kanai’s Cube is expanding to four slots with the fourth being completely open to what you want to stick in it. I am assuming that most builds are going to go with some sort of double weapon buffs, but it should be super interesting. Given how packed that November is going to likely be gaming wise, it probably means I will be Demon Huntering it up given that tends to be the fastest route forward.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4 / PS5
I am one of the lucky few that managed to snag a PlayStation 5 preorder, or at least hope that I was successful. I am not playing this game a lot, largely because I am waiting for the improved visuals of playing it through a PS5… but I am occasionally popping it open and wandering feudal japan from time to time. Glorious game and I look forward to focusing on some more at the tail end of this year.
Hades – PC and Switch
This game is now officially out and you should probably be playing it. I’ve shifted things up a bit and I am now playing a lot more of this on the Switch from bed than I am on the PC. I am looking forward to cross save being implemented because while I am not super progress on either platform I would love to just have one that I am focused on period. This is a really great game and I am constantly in awe of how well Supergiant makes games.
New World – PC
I am not actively playing this game but lord I wish I was. I keep hearing rumors about new phases of testing starting up soon, and I am down for this. I had a blast in August and September playing the last extended phase of testing, and the phase prior to that one. I am super on board with this game whenever it actually launches and I would love for if the next phase included a friend code… or if they just rolled into Open Beta soon. I cannot fully conceptualize why I enjoyed this game so much, but I am wanting to get in and share it with some friends. I have this sneaking suspicion that the AggroChat group will be drawn towards Team purple, even though I myself tend to gravitate towards Green. I will make the sacrifice of course for them however, but it is definitely an experience where you want everyone on the same team.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch
I started this last time as a general catch all category for poking around with emulation and my Retro Freak console. I’m not really dug in deeply into any games other than maybe the current play through of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest that I have going on the switch. I also picked up a mega pack of Sega Genesis games recently when it was on sale for the Switch and I’ve been playing quite a bit of classic Streets of Rage 2. I’ve yet to really go spelunking into the closet, but given that I am going to have to rearrange my set up to make room for the PlayStation 5… I have a feeling that I might be doing this sooner rather than later. I need to devote a weekend to organizing and hooking up my office for playing this sort of nonsense. I still want to dig out the NeoGeo CD and see if I can get it running on HDMI.
World of Warcraft – Retail / Beta
Shadowlands has been delayed, but we should have the pre-patch event starting next Tuesday. I am hoping to spend some time this weekend maybe finishing leveling my rogue, but other projects have stolen my attention. Additionally we should have the beginning of the Halloween event soon, and you can damned well bet I am going to be spending each day running it on each of my available characters because I really want that damned mount finally. I mean it is highly likely that I won’t get it… but I am going to at least make a good effort this year given that I actually am enjoying the game still. November is likely going to be heavy shadowlands time for me so this absolutely retains its spot.
To The New and Returning
Genshin Impact – PC / Android
If you have been reading this blog at all this month and the tail end of the last month you will know that I am completely obsessed with Genshin Impact. This is being called “Breath of the Waifu” by many a person online, but I am not even sure if that covers it. I am absolutely not playing it for the Waifu or Husbando, but instead because it is this insanely good action RPG that sort of came from out of nowhere. It is this expert blending of Breath of the Wild, Trials of Mana, Modern Dragon Quest games, Open World Exploration and the addictive as hell Gacha mechanics of Dragalia Lost. I am still shocked at just how damned good this game is for as free as it legitimately is. Sure I have spent money on the game but I also didn’t feel like I had to. If you are not playing this you should be, and probably on the PC/Mobile since they cross save and the PS4 is locked to only that platform. That said there is cross play between all of the platforms regardless, I just like the freedom of being able to farm materials from bed on my phone or tablet and also play primarily on my PC.
To Those Departing
Avengers – PC
Oh Avengers… its not me… its you. I feel like this game probably needed another year to mature and develop enough interesting combat to really be the sort of game that it was trying to be. This is the Anthem of 2020, a game with a lot of promise but also a game that felt pointless after awhile as I chased rewards that didn’t really matter. The difference being that the moment to moment gameplay was so much more enjoyable in Anthem. Avengers needs significant tweaks in its combat system to make it feel more enjoyable in the moment to moment gameplay. I leveled and farmed up a full set of yellow gear for Captain America, leveled up Thor, and then realized while I was leveling Ms Marvel that I didn’t exactly know why I was doing it and logged out never to log in again.
I rarely do two pictures for a single game, but here we are breaking that rule. This is a snipping from Steam DB for the Avengers game, and notice that its peak concurrency was at launch… and only ever hit just over 31,000 players. The few times I attempted to match up with other players, the queues were too long and I eventually gave up and went back to soloing content. The storyline for this game was great and I made me fall in love with the character of Ms Marvel, and since then I have been pouring through her comics through Marvel Unlimited and having a grand ole time. The game however just becomes repetitive when you realize there are six maps in the entire game and everything is carved out as chunks of those as they send you on the same handful of mission types with semi-randomized objectives. Maybe I will revisit in a year or so and see if the game has improved.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I still don’t know why this game and I struggle to get along. There is so much about it that I adore, but at the same time I feel absolutely no desire to actually log in and play it. I left it on the list last time, but to be honest I don’t think I logged in at all during September. With everything on the horizon game wise with the launch of the PS5 and World of Warcraft Shadowlands… I don’t expect to probably play it for the rest of this calendar year. At some point I will return and gobble up a few patches worth of story content, but I am already behind in that department. I love Lalabel, and I will come back to visit him at some point in the future but for now we are admitting to ourselves that the game just isn’t going to be played in the near future.
Ships Passing in the Night
The Division 2 – PC
I gotta admit I teetered back and forth between putting this on the new and returning list. I had a really fun week/weekend hanging out and playing this game and I could see myself returning to it on a more permanent basis. That said… there is just so damned much stuff on my radar right now so I am going to put it in this category for the moment. If it becomes more… then it can trickle upwards on the list. The game has either massively improved since its launch, or I never really gave it enough of a chance because I became enthralled with Anthem. Either case… I am compelled to spend some more time here at some point.
Swords ‘n Magic and Stuff – PC
This charming game is an Early Access title that Tam stumbled onto and I have poked my head into a few times. Not really actively playing it, but it is something I am definitely going to be watching. They are doing active development on it and I am hoping some rounds of combat balance are in the works. if you want more detail you can check out my write up from a few weeks back.
Summary
There really wasn’t a ton of movement, but that is usually the case when I actually manage to do these on a monthly basis. Looming on the horizon is the launch of the PlayStation 5, World of Warcraft Shadowlands, and Cyberpunk 2077 which are all going to steal some of my time. Past hat I am really not sure what the tail end of this year is going to lead to. Time is moving so damned fast in part because every day is effectively the same as I rarely leave the house. I can’t believe we area already knee deep in October when mentally it still feels like it is maybe April. 2020 is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” I think for me, and while I have stayed busy… it all just sorta flows together.
What are you “regularly playing”? Drop me a line below.
The post Regularly Playing: October 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday after making my blog post there was an extended back and forth that took place on twitter between me and my friend Pete. When I wrote the post yesterday, I largely considered it to be a positive review of Avengers. However Pete latched onto the fact that I said from the start that this was not a “must buy” game. I feel like I need to delve into that statement a bit further, because one of the things that you have to take into account is that I poke my head into a lot of new games. On a pretty regular basis I will have friends ask me, if this is “the one” aka the game that is going to unite the tribes for an extended period of time.
I have disposable income that I can use to purchase games without really impacting my quality of life. That is not the case for a lot of my friends and there are many folks who can’t afford to pick up a game on the day it is released, or in this case the day that the pre-release happened. It may be two or three pay periods before there is enough free cash to be able to purchase a game. So often when that mythical date finally comes around that someone can buy their way into an experience… that the zeitgeist has already moved on past it. So in the case of Avengers, I do not think this game is going to be something that gains permanent traction, at least not without a good deal of content being released.
I have no clue what the case is on consoles, but at least right at this moment it does not have great traction on Steam. The all time peak was 4 days ago when the game had just over 31k active users. The 24 hour peak was 19,602 so a fall off in concurrency of 37% since launch and the game is effectively nine days old. I’ve not played multiplayer, as I am largely focused on the core single player gameplay loop with bots, but based on the experiences of friends it seems that maybe everyone is doing this thing? The queue times are rough, so unless you are bringing your own team with you, fast groups are not a thing that is going to happen.
All of these things are why I am saying that if you are looking for the next big MMO, then this probably isn’t going to be it. That does not discount the fact that I think the main story is extremely good and that I am still enjoying myself. Honestly based on the conversation with Pete it comes down to a difference in perspectives. I tend to latch super hard onto a single game and play the shit out of it until I reach a point where I disengage because I ran out of content. I’ve already begun to encounter the frayed edges of that now, because as of last night I have collected what is effectively an end game set of gear. I will likely jump around to some other characters in the coming days, but I am not sure how much alting I am going to be down for given that I have clear favorites and then heroes that I cannot stand playing as like Iron Man.
As I talked about yesterday, the highest gear that drops is 130 power level. After that you can raise that gear 10 points if it is epic or legendary, and the Major artifact will add another base 10 points to your power rating. So if I pour a copious amount of materials into the full legendary armor set and then my two minor artifacts and grind out the rest of my Major artifact I will be at 150 the gear cap. This will of course take a really long time, and will be nowhere as enjoyable as actually getting things to drop. However I have effectively reached a point where Captain America is “done for now”, allowing me to shift over to other characters and try bringing them up to level 50.
I thought I would share my farming run with you, because I am absolutely abusing the system in how to get drops. There is a mission called Stark Realities that has a few side objectives that are actually more valuable than completing the mission itself. Avengers uses a check point system, and unless you have completed any objectives you can exit out of the mission and start it again to keep farming the side objectives over and over. Sure this is degenerate gameplay, but it also was a fast way for me to raise my gear level. Lets just say that I did this for science, and for the ability to write about it.
There are three areas on the map that have things that you might be interested in, but after having run this several times I feel that it is best to focus on two specific side objectives for the maximum amount of benefit. The first is the hidden shield vault, and when you drop into the mission you are going to turn left and follow the zone wall around until a tracker appears under the objective on the left hand side of the screen. You could of course play hotter or colder until you find the switch on your own, but it will always be located in the same place so run towards that single solitary tree in near the center of this clearing.
Once you hit the switch the shield bunker will open and inside are two chests, one of which will contain a guaranteed piece of gear and a guaranteed minor artifact. I’ve never seen a legendary minor artifact, so it seems like the best possible thing you can get here is an epic which I have. After this you are going to follow the icon to the mission objective. This route is going to take you in from the side and will end up causing you to miss a bunch of packs, which in this case is a good thing given that you can effectively run all the way to the shield bunker without killing anything.
When you get to the objective a pack of 5 elites are going to spawn in around a bunker. You are going to completely ignore this pack and try and avoid them while going through the bunker gate and then hanging a hard left to go down the path shown in the above image. This will eventually dead end into an area with two side objectives. The first is going to be a single elite that has a guaranteed item drop, and the second is a chest that appears behind one of those destructible walls. Since I have been playing Cap, and there is seemingly no way to break down those walls I have just been farming the mob that has a guaranteed drop.
Once you take out that Elite, it will drop something and will be either a blue, purple or yellow. Once you wrap the pack up you can hit escape and choose the “Return to Quinjet” option allowing you to reset the mission and start it up again. When I was at my peak efficiency, this run was maybe taking two minutes to complete, and technically you can bail as soon as the elite drops. I however preferred mopping up the pack that spawns in with it because I have actually seen a significant number of bonus drops that way. Sure it is repetitive, but it is the sort of activity that is perfect to do while watching something on Netflix because it requires very little focus.
As for leveling other characters… sadly the most efficient way of doing so seems to be repeating the Harm missions over and over. Everything in the game gives you experience, even these tutorial missions. It seems like experience gain is not impacted at all by the difficulty that you are attempting, so that means your best bet is to queue up for anything with a large volume of mob encounters on the lowest possible difficult. You won’t get any gear drops in the Harm challenges, but you will get one to two levels per round until you get fairly high in level. At this point you can bump things up to Harm IV or Harm V which reward more experience, not because of the difficulty but because they spawn in a lot of mini boss type encounters.
I attempted to do some of this on Thor yesterday, and while I was perfectly fine grinding for loot… grinding for experience bored the shit out of me. So I figure I will probably go back to running missions because at least in that way I am getting some gear drops as I continue the leveling process and have a chance of maybe getting wardrobe unlocks through the rare and epic pattern drops. I’ve never seen a legendary pattern drop, but for all I know that might be a thing that exists in super rarity out in the wild. Grinding the levels also gives me a more reliable source of item materials which then can be converted into power level on Cap. For me at least that seems to be the best option, but for sheer speed… those Harm missions cannot be beat.
The post Legendary Farming Run appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I spent a significant amount of my weekend playing Marvel’s Avengers, and this morning I am going to talk about it. Last week I talked a bit about my initial impressions of the launch and getting my hands on the full game, and this morning you are going to get more of a 30 hours in view. Lets start off with a statement that I think folks are probably trying to sort out, and that is is this a must buy game? I can give you an unequivocal no. That does not mean it is a bad game or an un-enjoyable game, but I would never throw this on a list of must experience games ever. If you have limited funds and even more limited time, then you can probably safely give this game a pass for now.
Marvel’s Avengers by Crystal Dynamics is an attempt to take the huge stable of Marvel Comics characters and convert them into a reoccurring service game. The thing is… I have a soft spot for this concept because I loved Marvel Heroes the now long dead Diablo-like game from Gazillion. Really to be truthful I just want that game back, but unfortunately that isn’t in the cards. What you have with Marvel Avengers is a somewhat generic albeit competent hero brawler that sets itself in the general mission structure of a Destiny Strike. You take control of one of the heroes, drop into a “War Zone”, complete a sequence of scripted objectives, and win some loot in the process.
Where the game shines however is in the story content. That is the piece that Destiny never really got right. The first ten to twelve hours of gameplay are spent following a sequence of content through what is effectively the heroes journey of Kamala Khan, aka Ms Marvel. She goes from fangirl to glue that holds the team together and becomes a powerful hero in her own right. I personally think that it is worth the price of admission just to experience this story, but I also buy way more games than the average person so my barrier of entry is somewhat low. The story is essentially a “getting the band back together” experience, as you spend your time effectively rallying the troops. The events of “A Day” caused not only the world to lose faith in the Avengers but for them to lose faith in each other.
After the main story arc is finished, the story continues on a little bit further as you are asked to help Shield and the Inhumans on some side content. I am now working through the last bit of that, which I believe unlocks a new bit of story content. It should be known that I am playing entirely solo and in that mode the game includes a bunch of NPC Avengers to come help you complete missions. However based on my reading and watching of content, it seems like the Single Player and Multiplayer experiences are effectively the same with the insert of more humans rather than bots. Now we are going to get into one of the bad aspects of the game.
While you play through the story it feels like you are visiting a number of fairly unique set pieces. However once you enter the less directed Warzone play portion of the game, you quickly realize that there are something in the neighborhood of a half dozen maps in which every bit content takes place. Sure an individual Warzone might shuffle the elements, but you are going to memorize a good number of the venues quickly. The other challenge is that the mission lengths seem to vary wildly from dropping down a fighting a single elite pack to being lead through a sequence of five or six things. I am sure once I have memorized what every mission entails this will feel a little less weird, but for right now it feels a little jarring and makes it very hard to guesstimate how long something is going to take.
During the mission you do a lot of head hopping between multiple characters, but once I was given control I’ve spent the vast majority of my post story game time playing Captain America, who was my main in Marvel Heroes. As of last night I have hit the level cap of 50, which is the point at which you unlock all of your talent points, and I have my power level up to 136. Based on what I am hearing the power level cap is 150, which is achieved through wearing a full set of 130 yellow gear that you then upgrade to 140 with materials. The last 10 points is gained through the Major Artifact which serves as this games equivalent to the Destiny seasonal artifact and will give you those last 10 points.
I am certain at this point that there will be a limited number of things that will give me light levels… sorry I mean power levels. This very much follows the Destiny template, and it is a grind that I am deeply familiar with. The biggest challenge here however is that there just doesn’t feel like there is a lot of meaningful content to be grinding. Each faction gives you a daily mission to take down a boss, but as of right now there are 2 villains comic book villains in the game and 2 AIM mega robots that you can fight. Combine that with the six or so available map types, and the experience gets to feeling really repetitive really quickly. My hope is that we get a pretty rapid cadence of content drops, because at the moment the content available is feeling fairly threadbare.
At the moment I have spent the most time playing Cap and Kamala, but a close third would be Thor. They all command sufficiently differently to make them interesting, but after having ground Cap to 50… it seems like a big ask to grind them ALL to 50. For reference I had all of the heroes above level 5 by the time I finished the story and I believe had cap to around 15 and Kamala to around 10. So suffice to say that the story is not going to get you anywhere near the level cap, and if you want to do this thing it is going to involve a lot of grinding warzones. The levels come rapidly enough, but at this point I think I am around 30 hours into the game and just now have my first character to 50.
Marvel’s Avengers has some good bones, but I guess time will tell if this turns into a really great game or not. The story is solid and as I said before for me personally that was worth the price of entry. I just question if there is enough there in order to keep players engaged between now and when new content drops. The challenge cards I think were designed to be more of a thing than they really feel like, because you can progress them extremely slowly each day and they ask you to play in a very specific fashion to get that progress. I wish you could effectively grind your way through them, that every activity would add a little bit of progress.
So I spent my weekend playing Avengers, but in my heart I was just wishing that I could be playing New World.
The post Avengers After the Story appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! There is a thing that I occasionally do on my blog where I run down what I have been playing lately. There are games that I spend time in that don’t necessarily make it to the level of writing about. Regularly Playing has always served as a time for me to update the good ole sidebar of the blog and talk about the things that I am spending time exploring. It is also a time for me to push aside the games that for whatever reason I am just not that into right now. You have a lot of games that make their way back into the rotation, so when I say goodbye it is very rarely forever.
In theory this is a thing that I intend to do every month… but we are living in this time where it still feels like it SHOULD by all rights be March. I think this is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” because it feels like we are all still very much on pause waiting for things to improve. I expect a significant amount of shake up given that it has been a little over two months since my last update.
To Those Remaining
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Oh Diablo, my sweet Diablo… I can’t ever seem to quit you. This game probably spends the most time on this list, especially now that it exists in switch form. While I am finished with the current PC season, I do still fairly regularly pop it open from bed on the switch and chip away at the achievements there. What can I say that I have not already said a dozen times. I just hope I like Diablo IV even half as much as I love Diablo III.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Oh precious baby, you are hanging by a thread. I’ve been back a bit of late for the Yo-Kai watch event, but even that has mostly just been something to do while watching something on television. I know there is a whole new story arc that I need to play through since the 5.3 patch has landed finally. I will do that at some point but I am just not overly excited about Final Fantasy XIV right now. I wish I was because it truly is a wonderful game, but I am not sure what changed in me that struggles to latch onto the MMORPG gameplay experience for very long. I find myself being a strict soloist in the MMO space right now, and as a result I never quite fully buy into the good aspects of the culture and the gameplay offerings. I wish I could get over my fear of doing content with other human beings that I seem to have developed.
World of Warcraft – Retail and Beta – PC
I am not what you would call actively playing this game, but every so often I decide to poke my head in and work on leveling some of my alts. During this lull in the expansion I have leveled one of everything horde side by the Shaman, Priest and Rogue. I’ve been most recently working on the Shaman who is in Pandaria and I believe a few levels away from 100? This is often times the character that I play while we are podcasting, or if I am watching some show because World of Warcraft requires a bare minimum of interactivity to play it on the level I am playing it. I still get a stupid amount of enjoyment from its simple mechanics and my ability to just turn my brain off and rely entirely upon muscle memory.
To The New and Returning
Avengers – PC
I super did not expect to be playing this game right now. I had a lot of issues early on with it, but it turns out that I was more or less bit in the butt by my own shenanigans. There are still some minor issues of mouse and camera not exactly working in the way that I would prefer but it is extremely playable and the story is really solid. In fact I think at this point I am mostly playing because the story is extremely enjoyable. The game hits a deep uncanny valley at times because I think they are trying to shoot halfway between the more traditional comic appearance of the characters and that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve gotten used to it however and once I did the story being told has become pure joy.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4
I have been on a bit of a single player narrative game kick of late, and I have been playing a significant amount of Ghosts of Tsushima. I’ve not made it past the first part of the game, because I keep roaming around and killing baddies. I am more or less following the Samurai path where I present a challenge and then proceed to whittle down the rest of the masses after taking out their strongest. I love this game a lot, and the only thing that would have made it better is if I were playing on the PC with a Mouse and Keyboard. I’ve been a bit distracted the last week or so, but I am hoping over the extended weekend that I can return to this and keep moving forward.
Hades – PC
I am not entirely certain that this game has ever made the list, but I have had it in my arsenal for awhile now. I have a deep love for the types of games that Supergiant creates. Even when I don’t mechanically enjoy the game like was the case with Pyre, I really appreciate the story that is being told. Hades is effectively a blend of Diablo and a Rogue Lite game and involves escaping from the underworld, and powering yourself along the way to make that possible. It is a game or repetition because you are absolutely going to die over and over and over in your journey, each time starting back at the start and each time carrying some progress along with you. This has been in early access but we are starting to near an official launch, so I have been playing it again in anticipation. Really solid game.
New World – PC
I’ve not participated in two test events of New World and I am super happy to finally be able to start talking about it. The last long preview event that is wrapping up I believe today had no NDA and as a result I have been able to openly discuss it on the blog. As it stands I am so ready for this game to launch and to start being able to play it in earnest. I am hoping the next event is an Open Beta so that folks who did not pre-order can give it a shot and see if it works for them. This is definitely the type of game that I am going to want to find an active company to play in, and that does not mean that I am sold on the notion of leading one. I’m good at recruiting people, but I don’t seem to be good at keeping people engaged… myself included. So more than likely I will be looking for a company to join that would be open to any friends that I have who are also interested.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch
This is going to be a bit of a generic heading because I have been poking around in a lot of “retro games”. The thing is… I find it weird calling these game retro, because they are from my childhood. It is moments like this that I remember just how damned old I am at this point. Whatever you want to call them I have been back on a kick of trying to get my closet full of older systems and cartridges up and running on modern display technology. I’ve also purchased a Retro Freak console, which allows me to do a bunch of nifty things including dump rom and save games from cartridges and apply translation patches on the fly. The next project is to try and get my Neo Geo CD system up and running again and maybe apply the mod that replaces the very slow CD Rom with an SD Card interface.
To Those Departing
Destiny 2 – PC
I am not sure where we went wrong boo, I’m just not playing you. I have no clue what is up but for whatever reason I just haven’t been interested in playing Destiny 2 in this current season. I am not sure if it is the impending gear sunset or the fact that they are “vaulting” content to remove it from the game, but whatever the case I am just turned off right now. I think games should get larger over time not shrink constantly, and I hate the FOMO aspect of seasonal play. The truth however is just that I have not been interested in playing a shooter lately, and this last few months has been largely marked by me playing more single player and narrative driven content. I am sure I will be back when the expansion launches in November and have a grand ole time.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
You know that mission that AggroChat folks have been on about playing Guild Wars 2 and getting others to play it as well? For whatever reason it never sunk its hooks properly into me. I still don’t fully understand why this game that on paper should be something I am deeply into… never quite seems to work for me. There is just something about the gameplay loop that I don’t find as enjoyable as I should. The story content also never really hooked me, so while I keep trying to revisit this game… it never really does it for me. I am sure I will be back at some point because I am a glutton for punishment with a very short memory.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I can’t fully explain what happened here and why I stopped playing this game, but it happened. I am not even sure what distracted me. I just know that I have not logged in for a long while other than to convert to the Steam client. I am sure I will return because I was having quite a bit of fun with it. I also know that I was only a few levels away from hitting the cap at the time, and that there is a raised cap now that we have entered Chapter 4. I think I mostly got distracted by a string of single player experiences like Death Stranding.
Torchlight III – PC
I really do want to like this game, but I have not been all that into of it late. I think the core problem I have with the third iteration is that there just isn’t really a class that I enjoy. In Torchlight there was the Destroyer that I played a ton of, and in Torchlight II it was the Engineer. Both were big and bashy melee characters and right now in the third game there are two characters that CAN be played that way… but they both sorta feel fiddly. So I have been splitting my time between the Forge and the Railmaster…. and to be truthful neither of them feel the way that I want them to feel. I know Torchlight is a game that tries to cast aside the traditional Mage, Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric blend of classes… but I mostly just wish they had proper representation of those archetypes. My preference is to play something akin to the Diablo Barbarian or Crusader and they just don’t really have that represented.
Ships Passing in the Night
Death Stranding – PC
Death Stranding was a phenomenal experience. I legit get emotional just thinking about it. This is the game that I needed to play at the time in which I played it. It has become this extremely relevant allegory for the time that we are living in. I am not sure this is a game that everyone would enjoy, because the whole courier aspect of it that I found enjoyable could be pure tedium for someone else. The story being told though is really good and if nothing else you should probably watch a play through of it at some point.
Horizon Zero Dawn -PC
I had been anxiously awaiting the release of Horizon Zero Dawn for the PC, and when it came out I burned through it like wildfire. I think I put in a solid 50 hours in a very short period of time and cracking this open and revisiting it all was truly magical. I love Aloy and the world of Horizon, and I am anxiously awaiting the sequel. This is pretty much the reason why I will be buying a PlayStation 5 as soon as the pre-orders open. If you have never played Horizon Zero Dawn, you owe it to yourself to experience the game and the bow combat just works so much better with a Mouse and Keyboard.
Summary
I guess this is what happens when I wait almost three months between updates, there is a lot of change. I’ve bounced a few things off the list that I am almost certain I will revisit. Hell to be truthful what usually happens is just writing about them ends up making me want to log back in again. I know we have the launch of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that will be eating some of my time, and I would really like to restart Jedi Fallen Order but this time play it with Mouse and Keyboard. Additionally I really want to play through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has been on my list for awhile. In between those I will be wrapping up Avengers main story and seeing if I like the group content or not, and probably poking my head into New World each time a new test event opens. All the while the backlog continues to grow, but I have gotten fairly used to knowing I will never quite conquer it.
The post Regularly Playing: September 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
