Hey Folks! Since today is the Memorial Day holiday I opted not to do a traditional blog post. However, I did decide to record a video. This is another of my bits of nonsense where I talk about some aspect of a video game I am playing. In this case, I have been playing a lot of Honkai Star Rail and I thought I would talk a bit about Simulated Worlds. This Rogue-Lite mini-game within a game does not require any of the limited daily “activity currency”, which means you can effectively farm it forever for at least some amount of resources per run.
Unfortunately, it just takes a significant amount of time to run through a Simulated World, which means this is clocking in at roughly 24 minutes long. If you are curious about the game and have not given it a shot, feel free to watch the video. I am running on autopilot largely because I was trying to keep the size of this video down, and the NPCs can complete battles much faster than I can when I am being more strategic.
The post A Simulated World appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
For a while now we have known that Blizzard was working on a game with Net Ease that would translate the World of Warcraft experience to the mobile platform. I think many of us became deeply concerned about what this might look like when Diablo Immortal launched and turned out to be the egregious money grab that it was. Yesterday Bloomberg broke the news that it seems like the partnership between Netease and Blizzard is strained and the World of Warcraft mobile project has been canceled. This game had reportedly been in development for three years and the only reason reported was a “conflict about financial terms”. So this leaves us to speculate exactly what happened and given that I like theorizing things I can see three paths that might have taken place. I have no knowledge if what I am about to say is true, but I am just theory-crafting the downfall of this game.
The Backlash from Diablo Immortal
Giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt, it is entirely possible that they were caught off guard by the negative reaction towards Diablo Immortal by the traditional gaming audience. It is possible that they thought they were releasing a game that would play by mobile gaming practices and it would have no blowback on their existing franchise. This was wrong and Diablo as a brand has been deeply tarnished by this game. So for theory number one, it could be that folks inside of Blizzard realize this and do not want to do anything to harm the recovery trajectory of World of Warcraft. Interest in Diablo 4 has seemingly fallen as a result of Diablo Immortal, and there is no way that the Warcraft brand can sustain another hit to the player base. So it is entirely possible that WoW Mobile has had the plug pulled on it to stem the bleeding and signal a shift in direction.
NetEase in Hot Water
Anytime you talk about Chinese politics, things get confusing quickly. Right now both NetEase and Tencent seem to be singled out by China as “problem children”. There have been several stories indicating this including one from June where those two publishers were specifically excluded from getting games approved by the regulatory bodies. Video Games in general is getting caught up in a sweep of things being deemed harmful to “cultural unity”, and I do not have enough time to really address this point today. However, if you are curious look up the Tang Ping aka “lying flat” movement, and Bai Lan or “let it rot” movement. Essentially there is a group of disaffected youth that are actively rebelling against the “996” culture or 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. As a result video games, take-out food, and social media are being blamed… and the Chinese government has been actively targeting these sectors.
Diablo Immortal was clearly banking on the mobile game spending habits of the Chinese market for success and in order to bring a game into that market, you need to partner with a Chinese company. Generally speaking, this is required to navigate the regulatory red tape in order to get a green light. However, with NetEase already being shunned by these regulators, it is entirely possible that Blizzard is considering this a risky proposition and actively chopping for another company to collaborate with that is not being actively targeted.
Doing It On Their Own
I am certain that part of the equation with NetEase is also that they acted as a springboard to develop a mobile title. Diablo Immortal for example was built using the existing NetEase Messiah engine which likely sped up the development time considerably. Blizzard had released a few mobile apps but never anything to the level of a fully 3D action RPG, and as such, they were able to lean on a company that had released several. In the meantime, Blizzard has seemingly been actively building ArcLight Rumble, which itself is rather impressive graphically and by all accounts runs beautifully on various mobile devices. This appears to either be their own engine or leaning heavily on some tech from King, but whatever the case is not tied to NetEase.
So this makes me wonder if the canceling of WoW Mobile is a signal that they feel like they can do this on their own now. Granted this does nothing to help with the Chinese regulatory hurdles, but it seems as though as a company they are feeling like they may have mastered mobile development. With some experience in building a mobile title, maybe the company views it as a little less daunting. Maybe there are even direct assets that they would want to reuse given that ArcLight Rumble is set in the Warcraft universe. I’ve not personally had a chance to play the game but from what I have heard from friends it really is a solid outing.
Bits and Pieces of the Above
It could be bits and pieces of everything that I just talked about. I would love to think that Diablo Immortal was a bit of a wake-up call that while it quite literally is a machine for printing money, it is also damaging the company as a brand. I do not think Blizzard could survive another fiasco this time centered around the, even more, beloved brand of World of Warcraft. Even if you are not actively playing the game you have nostalgia for it, and that nostalgia can be weaponized if it is handled improperly. I also think that the current state of NetEase in Chinese politics is probably a non-starter as well. There is significant cultural turmoil happening and video games are getting caught up in the mix. Finally, I do think that after ArcLight Rumble, Blizzard as a whole is in a better state to take on their own mobile development. As a result, I would probably bank that it is a little bit of each of the above topics wrapped up into one mix that lead to the cancellation of this project.
Then again… as I said before I know nothing about this situation other than what I have read in the reporting so it could genuinely be none of the above. It could simply be as simple as what was stated that it was a “conflict about financial terms”. Maybe NetEase simply demanded a bigger cut of profits and that was enough to sever the relationship on this project.
The post Farewell to WoW Mobile appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I give you this lovely picture of Moogle’s doing a chorus line to brighten your Friday. This is evidence that I did in fact finally get around to finishing the Dark Knight storyline in Heavensward. No, it doesn’t make any sense why Moogles should factor heavily into the edgelord Dark Knight storyline, but this is Square and never question their madness. I am feeling heavily distracted right now, but even in that state, I am still putting on levels, which means I am still ultimately serving my final goal of 80 everything by Endwalker. I mean for reference when I made yesterday’s post I was 66 Dark Knight and 56 Monk and I have put two levels on for both classes, which is just about all one can really hope for without excessive grinding.
I ran another Syrcus tower, getting me my final Aether Oil needed and allowing me to turn to get my Hyperconductive Nothung. I don’t love the appearance of the Nothung in general, and for glamour, purposes am still using the Awoken Deathbringer look. The next step involves a lot of slow grinding out materials, but luckily it does give me a really great poetics sink if I find myself needing one. If I so choose there is a method for this next part that involves burning through Leve Allowances and farming “Amber-Encased Vilekin”. This material is a guaranteed drop… but sadly from the random chests that appear during levequests. The preferred method of farming is to start a levequest, fly around looking for a chest… then abandon the quest and start another one doing the same thing. This seems wasteful and by god, if I am going to do this thing I am going to at least complete the quest and get the gil/items.
Since I am very easily distracted apparently… I also decided to knock out the first two parts to get a nifty glowing weapon for Paladin. Ultimately I want the final step for paladin because like Dark Knight it looks really cool, but at a minimum, the first few parts were easy enough to do since I could run all the dungeons required to solo. At some point, I need to return to FATE grinding for Atmas, but I figured I would save that for a time when Bee is also around and we can farm together. Running FATEs with at least two people feels significantly better than soloing them.
In other news, I have been spending a lot more time with my Gamesir controller and my phone. I don’t have a proper photo of how mine looks set up with the Razer Phone 2… because the device is also what I tend to use as a camera making it extremely impossible to take a picture of itself because android doesn’t offer an astral projection mode. In practice, it feels like using a much more narrow switch, and it does an extremely solid job of playing emulators and I am slowly branching out into more remote play options. The Xbox Game Pass app works great, meaning you can stream anything easily through XCloud that you would normally.
The other thing that I have been messing around with is streaming games from my PlayStation 5, though in practice it would work the same for a PlayStation 4. There is an official Remote Play app, but sadly it does not seem to work as expected with the Gamesir controller. Instead, I had to move over to one of the third-party unofficial apps and am running PSPlay which costs $5 on the android store. By default the Gamesir is configured for Japanese style controls with the bottom-most button begin “back/undo” and the right-most button is “confirm”. However, I was able to remap all of the controls through the PSPlay app and have been enjoying the heck out of playing PlayStation games in this pseudo-android-switch sort of setup. The PSPlay app offers a local-only mode, which greatly reduces latency, and of note when you are not touching the screen to take a screenshot… those on-screen controls touch controls go away. A tap of the screen or a swipe translates to taking the same action on the controller touch screen, which is nice.
Like I said though, I am slowly easing into testing different apps. The next on the docket is going to be to start trying out Steam Link and maybe Moonlight if I have to fall back to that instead. One of the reasons why I wanted to explore this was to find a way to play Final Fantasy XIV from bed… and I already have a very viable solution for that. The only gotcha is that I need to devote the hour or two of time to set up my account with the crossbar UI, and then get used to actually using a controller. I am wondering if it might be easier to set everything up on the PC with a controller, and then synchronize those UI settings over to the PS5, given that on PC I at least have access to a mouse when it comes to dragging windows around. All in all, I am very happy with this solution so far, and while the screen mapping functionality for android games is still not the best thing in the world when something supports a controller the experience is flawless.
If you are curious about the Gamesir controller, it is available in a Type C variant that I use as well as a Bluetooth version. From what I understand the Bluetooth version requires being charged before using, whereas the Type C is plug and play. It is of course available on all of the major Chinese websites, but based on what I am seeing the price difference is not enough to deal with the month long ship times.
The post Anima Distractions and Android Switch Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
One of the things that I noticed while going through my Giant Wall of Games list ™ is that during the 2020 Calendar year I pretty much played NOTHING on my phone. That isn’t entirely true, because I downloaded and tried a few things but nothing significant enough to actually log in the list. There were a handful of games that I installed and immediately uninstalled for various reasons, but in the past I had something like Dragalia Lost or Pokemon Go that was always on the list. So on a whim yesterday afternoon I put out a call to my Twitter family.
Okay friends. Since I have long considered mobile development a largely poisoned well. I figure I will crowdsource this… best mobile games available for Android that are not f2p monetization/gacha traps or match 3 games…. GO!@Belghast
The problem I have with mobile gaming is that the discovery mechanisms seem to largely be dominated by either Gacha games or games with otherwise similarly questionable free to play mechanics. There are also a number of games that I would clump into a category of being a port of a game from another platform but that are made worse by touch screen controls. I have a number of SquareSoft mobile ports and they are an infinitely worse experience than playing the same game on pretty much any other platform. What I seem to be lacking however are the games that either wouldn’t work without a touch screen interfaces are somehow uniquely enriched by having one. Some of the constraints I am looking for are as follows.
Must be Android – I have zero iOS devices by design
Must be a Direct Purchase, One Time Unlock, or Free to Play with very optional and non-obtrusive monetization
Should be a gameplay experience uniquely enhanced by the touchscreen interface and not just a port trying to make up for those shortcomings
No Match Three Games – While I love Bejeweled, I need to move past that
I have to say I absolutely love my Twitter family because once again they came through for me with a massive list of titles to try. This mornings post is as much for my own benefit as it is for sharing these picks with the world, because I wanted a nice clean way of keeping track of it. A few of the titles that were thrown out were games that I had tried and ruled out for one reason or another, so I am dropping them from the list. The titles that are currently in the running for eventually garnering my attention are as follows.
Ultimately the above block of six games is what I chose for my very first cohort. Monument Valley is a game series that I had heard really good things about but ultimately forgot existed. You Must Build a Boat is a game that I have heard someone at some time in the past raving about it… I thought it was Kodra but it might just be a fuzzy memory of Liore when Cat Context existed. Loop gets bumped up in priority because it is was created by a mutual, so absolutely going to check that out. Eve Echos is a game that I had already installed but never actually got around to checking… so just grouping it in by default. Pathfinder Adventures because i was curious and Pixel Dungeon because also curious.
Mobile gaming is pretty much a bedtime activity for me, and last night I managed to try out one of the games before sleep ultimately claimed me. I had not really been sleeping well for a few nights so I did not make it super far. Monument Valley is gorgeous and is exactly the sort of game I am looking for. I am not exactly sure how this game works without a touch interface, and as a result it isn’t just making up for that limited toolset but exploiting it. The puzzles are interesting and change enough to feel fresh each time you move onto a new monument. I made it through five before my eyelids were too heavy to continue, but I am probably going to be playing this one for awhile until I either complete it or get distracted by some other shiny object.
Since this has apparently turned into a post with just an excessive number of bullet point lists… why not add another? I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the folks who participated yesterday in throwing out game ideas. There was a flurry of them that all came in at once, and I think I have accounted for them all… but apologies if I inadvertently miss someone. Yall are awesome in my book.
Essentially over the years I have developed this borderline toxic attitude that mobile gaming is by nature mechanically worse than gaming on pretty much any other platform. I am trying really hard to break this mental block. My hope is that by exposing myself to the games that my friends consider the best, I will start to see the potential of this platform that I have largely relegated to idle match three games and Gacha gambling. I know there are unique experiences that can only be had on a mobile phone, so I am hoping to find more of them.
Now this is the point where I reach out to my readers as well. If you have any mobile games that you love and feel like are must play experiences, please drop me a line below in the comments. I will look into all of them and potentially add them to the list above.
The post Seeking Mobile Experiences appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
