Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I reached the point of realization that I am just not enjoying Diablo IV. On one level this should not shock me… given how much I have talked about this game not being the game I was wanting it to be. However yesterday over lunch I was playing for a bit and it hit me that I was really not enjoying myself. I think so long as I had the clear objective of “finishing the campaign” I was able to find some joy in the experience. Now that I am turned loose in the world post paragon… and realizing I have a fairly scuffed build that I am uncertain how to fix other than grinding for legendaries or respeccing to whirlwind… I am just not certain the struggle is worth it. I am not necessarily saying I am “done” with Diablo IV, but I am saying that I sincerely doubt I will make it super far running the grinding and gearing treadmill with this game because the moment-to-moment gameplay just doesn’t feel great to me.
I’ve said this in my own fifteen-minute-long video complaining about Diablo IV, but the core problem I have with this game is the way that the world scales as compared to how your power scales. Yesterday Action RPG released a video essentially underlining the same points. Diablo is a game about feeling powerful and smashing demons to jangly chords, and while after the second act, the jangly chords come into play… the cost of entry of the feeling powerful bit seems like it is a bit much. Every level I put on in this game makes the game feel worse until I get a drop… which patches over the problem until I ding again. There is just something about the moment-to-moment gameplay that feels off and maybe it is that the cooldowns are longer than I would expect or that the resource generation isn’t high enough… or that the resource spenders don’t deal enough damage. Whatever the case… I just can’t seem to get to a point where the game feels good.
I still have a lot of maps to see out there, and a ton of dungeons to complete in order to unlock the patterns contained within them. I’ve also not really made a concerted effort to go after the Lilith Statues, so in theory that is probably what I am going to be devoting my time to in the coming weeks as I continue to poke at this game’s carcass. There is a whole lot of map that I have not uncovered, especially in the last few acts of the game where I focused entirely on the yellow quests. Additionally, the Tree of Whispers is not an awful way to progress, and I’ve done a bit of that though really do not enjoy the short timers on all of those missions. I did not realize that your progress expired because I had completed 8 grim favors before logging out when the servers went to shit last night, and logging in this morning all of that progress is gone.
I will say that I had more fun than I would have expected watching the World’s First Hardcore race and I got to see several of the streamers that I follow hit level 100 over the last several days. I find it pretty awesome that a team of Path of Exile streamers ultimately got the first four spots on the unofficial Hardcore Leaderboard. Carn was technically the first to level 100, but Zizarin, Steelmage, and Nugiyen followed a few hours after. Then several hours after that I watched Raxxanterax who is probably the D3 player that I have consumed the most content from hit 100, and a few hours after that seeing Wudijo become the first SSF Hardcore 100 player. I normally do not watch streamers and largely consume content from them when it makes its way over to YouTube, but this time around I was curious how the race was going given that I am familiar with a lot of these people from other ARPGs.
Other than Diablo IV, I spent some time last night screwing around in Last Epoch. I am still working on my wannabe squirrel build and attempting to get the stupid helm to drop. I’ve also contemplated respeccing my Necromancer over to a necrotic/life leech build that I saw yesterday but I do not know how much work that would end up being to relevel my skills after the swaps. The current state of Endgame in Last Epoch feels a little lacking. I feel like I need an overarching goal that I am working towards to disguise the fact that I am grinding. Since there is no real targeted way of farming the exact items that I need, I find it hard to stay focused. In Diablo III, sure I farmed the same greater rifts over and over but often times there were goals that I was working towards like pushing up my GR level higher or leveling Legendary gems. Those took the focus away from the repetitive behavior. In Path of Exile I am doing maps to gain Sulphite and then doing Delve while hunting for City or Boss nodes. The hunt gives me focus and takes me out of the mindset that I am repeating the same loop over and over.
Speaking of Path of Exile… I need to spend some more time in that game soon. I know with Exilecon in July will represent the launch of a new league and I need at least ONE MORE challenge in order to get the pitiful little 19 challenge totem pole. There are three that seem like they are the most likely to finish up so I guess over the coming weeks I will spend some time working on knocking one or more of these out. After that, I am not sure what my focus is going to be. I had hopes that Diablo IV would coalesce into something that I wanted to be playing on the regular but unfortunately, that is not really the case. To be truthful… I didn’t really enjoy Diablo III until the first expansion dropped and changed a number of systems, so maybe there is hope on the horizon. Talking with a few friends, I seem to not be the only one for which the game is losing its mirth. Even then though… I might try leveling something else and see if it is more my speed.
Anyways I hope you are having a great week, and if you are playing Diablo IV that it is giving you what you want from it.
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Last week I talked about rediscovering X’s Adventures and the fact that he is currently doing an adventure in Minecraft Hardcore Mode. I also talked a bit about how I thought it might be fun to do the same thing given that I had no clue Hardcore Minecraft even was a thing that existed. Since then I have started recording clips of me playing Minecraft in Hardcore mode and uploading them to my YouTube channel. They are pretty low production value because I am recording them directly from OBS and then uploading them more or less uncut. If you are interested in listening to me ramble while trying to sort out how Minecraft works, then this may be your jam.
As of this blog post, there are three parts to the series and each of them are in the neighborhood of 30 minutes. It seemed like 15 minutes wasn’t really enough time for me to actually accomplish much of anything. Seeing as I am not exactly doing this thing to get internet famous and really for my own personal amusement I am sticking to that format. The funny thing about this video series is that I don’t believe I have ever used my name aka “Belghast” as a seed for a Minecraft world. Turns out that seed is really solid because it put me really close to a village.
I need to sort out what exactly I want for a goal, because right now I am more or less going through the same routine that I have always gone through. Initially it was a hunt for Wood, Coal and Shelter and that evolved into a search for Iron. Which will in itself lead to a search for the bounty hidden without the bowels of the earth like Diamonds and such. However I am not entirely certain what my goals SHOULD be. An initial goal was to get a full set of armor, but past that I am going to have to sort out what my long range goal needs to be. I could in theory hide within mines for any number of videos because that is something that is relatively safe to do.
However I somehow doubt that watching me hollow out the innards of the earth is exciting content. I have various projects that I would like to complete, but the challenge with that is a lot of them are going to require large chunks of time to do them. My fear at doing “offline play” and then showing the results is that since this is Hardcore Minecraft… one death means the end of the run and should probably be something that is recorded. I’ve done a few things offline now, but they are simplistic like building some proper stairs or organizing my inventory. Something like “Let’s build an inside garden!” would take significantly more time and also with that brings forth significantly more dangers. I might be able to do the safe indoors tunneling work offline and then do the final bits while recording.
I will have to figure out exactly how to make this work. For now I have been releasing a video each day, but I somehow doubt I will be able to maintain that schedule for very much longer. It isn’t like I have an awful lot of viewers right now, but what are some projects that you would like to see tackled? It seems like a double edged sword because there is a certain act of discovery from not having played in so very long and not fully understanding how the world works. However that also means I don’t know a lot of things that might be interesting to go after.
The post Bel Bungles Minecraft appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Tonight we talk about a bunch of differing topics… that sorta blend together into a mix of ideas.  We start off with some discussion of Thanksgiving Leftover abominations. From here Belghast talks a bit about his experiences with extremely Hardcore players on mobile phone games.  This sorta leads its way into discussions of MMO Design problems, which itself leads to talking about the FFXIV Shadowbringers expansion announcement. We discuss the problems with the Blue Mage and how the Limited Class construct is probably not the right way to do it.  This leads eventually into a discussion of the shenanigans that Tam and Kodra and crew have been up to in Fallout 76.
