AggroChat #417 – 2022 Games of the Year Show – Part One

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that time again for our multi-part episode as we talk about the games that were important to us specifically during 2022.  A bit of a reminder for anyone who has not heard one of these shows before, we are not necessarily only talking about games that were released in 2022.  If we were late playing a game but it was extremely important to us, it might still get the nod here. Something that is working slightly differently this year is generally speaking we record a marathon show that runs about 3-4 Hours and then I crudely carves it up into multiple shows.  However, what happens is we have one show that is full of short topics and another show that has all of the long discussions.  This year I sorted the list so we got a blend of single honorable mention picks and meaty multi-member picks in the same show.  We are also recording it two weeks apart so none of us have to deal with the late night that this show always brought on.

Hopefully, the changes lead to a better listening experience.  So in this episode, we are going to talk about the first half of our games of the year, and next week we will continue with the rest.

Topics Discussed:

  • Digimon Survive
  • Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
  • TMNT Shedder’s Revenge
  • Trials of Mana
  • Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons
  • Elden Ring
  • Fallout 76
  • Star Ocean: The Divine Force
  • Wordle
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land
  • Cult of the Lamb
  • Path of Exile
The post AggroChat #417 – 2022 Games of the Year Show – Part One appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition

Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about. Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:
  • 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.
Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.
Cyberpunk 2077 – PC
While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.
Diablo III – PC
I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.
Fallout 76 – PC
Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.
New World – PC
If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.
Path of Exile – PC
I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.
Torchlight Infinite – PC and Android
I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.
Tower of Fantasy – PC
I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.
World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC
I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again. As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.
NDA Game – PC
Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out. The post Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Unsupported Alts

Good morning friends. Today is my Friday because I took tomorrow off and depending on my mood may be calling it part of the weekend. I am not sure which one of you commented that remembering random things is a sign of a midlife crisis, because lord is it hitting me with a vengeance right now. While getting ready this morning I remembered this one story from my childhood which is dumb but I am still going to share it. My entire life my father had the side hustle of a portrait photographer, this is in part why I tend to take those sort of things for granted because I effectively grew up in the darkroom and one of my first jobs was helping him photograph weddings. My dad gave his business a pretty generic name “Bill’s Photography”, and paid a local calligrapher to create a good clean masthead for him. During the 90s when direct mail started to computerize some weirdness began happening. Always in the past he would get mail addressed to himself and mail addressed to his business, because a human being was effectively interpreting that business name correctly. However at some point this shifted and he started receiving mail for the mythical being known as “Bill S. Photography” which at the time I thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened on the face of the planet. On very rare occasions it would come through as “Bill S. Photograph” which was even better. So here I am this morning giggling like a madman as I am remembering this, and I am sure my wife thought I had completely lost it.
I think I might be done with Outriders. Recently I started leveling a Technomancer in part so that I could see how the narration and story worked with the female voice actor. I’ve now been through the entire story and I have to say if you are wanting to start the game fresh… absolutely go with the female character because the line delivery just works better. There are so many times when you are playing as the male character, that the line delivery makes it sound like he doesn’t actually understand what he is saying. I was never certain if this was a problem with the audio editing, or the line delivery itself… but after playing through with the female voice actor it seems like maybe it was the later. Essentially I have reached this place where I don’t feel like going through the world tier grind once again with a second character. I think this is the general problem with the way levels and gearing works in Outriders is that there is zero “catch up” benefit to your alts. Sure I have a vault full of level 42 gear from my main character, but my alts can’t use a single bit of it because they have not “leveled” to the point of being able to use it. In theory this should have worked in a manner like Champion Levels in Elder Scrolls Online, where the World Tier and Challenge Tier are associated with your account and not your character, and once you finished the main story you would zoom forward to whatever your “Account Level” was at that point.
Outriders was an enjoyable but flawed game experience, which I guess is pretty par for the course with outings from companies who are not already seasoned in the looter shooter genre. Then again… I guess I could say the same about most of the other games in the genre as well, they are all sorta flawed experiences. I am hoping that Outriders sold well enough that we might see an Outriders 2 that makes good on the promise of this title, fixes some of the tonal issues of the story, and actually has a proper plan for what to do with players upon completing the final bit of story. They told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a “live service” title and I guess we should have believed them. There are a lot of things that need tweaking but I get the general impression that they are moving on to other game titles and not really that interested in anything that is not strictly a bug fix.
In other news… Fallout 76 is unabashedly a “live service” game and has seemingly found its stride. I have been enjoying myself greatly as I roam around Appalachia, which I really wish was easier to spell. At least with the Commonwealth it was two easy to spell terms jammed together, but maybe over time I will get used to it. That said it took me years to be able to spell shenanigans on the first try… and I LOVE that word. As of last night I am level 8 which means I am rapidly catching up to where I left off with the game the first time. The quests and the NPCs make the entire experience feel more enjoyable. The responder area is more or less intact with it being largely told through audio diaries, but what makes all of that feel more alive is that there are random human NPCs wandering the wastes adding flavor here and there and making it feel less dead.
I’ve built a somewhat nonsense house that cantilevers off the side of the main structure. Given that there is no actual gravity in this game… I didn’t have to do anything to make this more logical but I nonetheless added some support struts because visually it bothered me. Sometimes in a game like this I just keep building in a very “weasley house” manner until I run out of materials. Ultimately what I really need to do is pick up my camp and move it somewhere that works slightly better. For now it has been handy to be next to the Wayward while doing quests, but eventually I can see logic in uprooting it. I wish there was a way to do some terraforming, but you are pretty much stuck with way things are which is what lead me to have the second story wider than the first.
What I really need to do is sort out a more stable method of healing myself and a better source of water and food that don’t irradiate the hell out of me. I mean I have radaway, but I also know that is a fairly limited resource right now. I do pretty well in a stand up fight, but end up needing to heal pretty regularly afterwards. I did find an interesting option for grinding… up at the lighthouse on top of the mountain which seems to have a nigh unlimited number of rad toads. If I hang out in the house I can pretty safely kill those at range. There is also a quest up there for filling up the lighthouse with bioluminescent fluid that I should probably do as well. I wish there was a way to upgrade a piece of gear to the next level range rather than needing to craft a brand new item, but the game is what it is. All in all however I am having a blast in Fallout 76, so I apparently was away from it the optimal amount of time for it to feel fresh and for the game to have evolved while I was away. Maybe at some point I can return to Outriders and have that same feeling. The post Unsupported Alts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Unexplained Hankering

I am finding myself in a familiar place where I am sort of flailing about between multiple games right now. I am logging into Elder Scrolls Online each night to play a least a tiny bit, even if it simply means getting my daily reward, sorting out mail and auctions, and then logging right back out. I am also playing a bit of Outriders each day, but I have finished the story on my second character and don’t really relish the process of grinding up world rank yet again. Finally there is Mass Effect Andromeda and I am not really sure I have it in me to replay that game right now either. I ultimately started again because Tam has been playing through it and I more or less wanted a refresher for the story. I feel like I have played enough to jog my memory for conversations, but also not really feeling the drive to push further especially knowing that I am going to want to replay Mass Effect when the Legendary edition comes out.
Last night I was struck with the unexplained desire to play some Fallout 76. I did not make it terribly far in the game and my highest character was only level 11 from the launch. In the time I have been away they have made some fairly sweeping changes to the way the game plays and the content contained within. The biggest of these is the inclusion of NPCs scattered throughout the area, which is sort of huge given that not having them made the game feel weird at launch. All of these combined with my relatively low level has given me the desire for some time to start from scratch. Last night that desire finally turned into action as I rolled out of the vault as Belgrave my second character in the wasteland.
I’ve not made it terribly far yet, mostly just down the hill from the vault to the first settlement area. Having NPCs makes a MASSIVE difference for me personally in how this game feels. At launch it felt like we were wandering around this dead husk of a world and now it feels like everything is alive. I set up my first C.A.M.P. just down the road from the Wayward. Down the road a bit further is a little camp of Brotherhood of Steel folks, and immediately this feels way more like Fallout than the 76 I remembered. I think the biggest part of this change in feel… is there is now an Appalachia radio station playing some very familiar Fallout tunes along with some new ones added to the mix.
I’ve created only the most basic of shacks on the road. I spent some of the Atoms I had on a scraptron but I am uncertain of how well it is actually working. In theory it is supposed to collect scrap for you and deposit it in the box. At least for now I am playing on a private world while I get my bearings in the game, which means I did have to pony up for Fallout First which has apparently had a number of the bugs ironed out. It is my understanding that a private instance exists for five minutes after you log out of the game, allowing you to pretty easily swap items in the world between your characters. Also it allows you to pop over to a public game for a few minutes, wait the timer out… and then spawn into a fresh copy of the world with fresh resources. That intrigued me so I went ahead and picked up a subscription, that along with the unlimited scrap box because I am addicted to the unlimited crafting bag in ESO.
I had an awful lot of fun last night just sorta doing my own thing. I don’t have a large social group in Fallout 76, mostly just the handful of AggroChat folks that I played with when the game initially launched. I am enjoying not having to see other players, because the few minutes I played on a public server already annoyed me enough to abandon ship. I was trying to solve a hacking puzzle and this dude kept jumping up and down on top of me making an awful racket. So I guess I am paying for the First subscription in part for the peace and solitude of never having to see another human being while playing. That does not mean I won’t pop over to public servers occasionally, but I am likely going to hide in my own little private box. The post Unexplained Hankering appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.