story – AggroChat

AggroChat #457 – Complex Payoffs

November 19, 2023 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen Hey Folks! We start off with a topic that has been bumped for time a few weeks in row as we discuss how complex video games can stick the landing with their denouement. Bel has been playing Alan Wake 2 and talks about how Remedy finally has achieved seamless integration of FMV and rendered gameplay. We talked a bit about Risk of Rain 2 and the buildcraft surrounding the game. Kodra has officially gone further in Path of Exile than the rest of us and talks about his adventures in bossing. We wrap up the show discussing how Path of Exile does a poor job of telling its story in spite of actually having a very good one compared to other ARPGs.

Topics Discussed:

The Ending Payoffs for Complex Games
- How to stick the landing
Alan Wake 2 is Great
Risk of Rain 2 Buildcraft
Kodra Kills Against the Bosses
ARPGs attempting to tell stories

The post AggroChat #457 – Complex Payoffs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Luofu Caught Up

June 1, 2023 by Belghast

So when I wrote yesterday morning, I was lamenting whether or not I would actually be able to catch up in the story for Honkai Star Rail by the time the next content drop happens on June 6th. Then last night… I apparently caught up. The conflict on the Xianzhou Luofu has not completely resolved itself, but I did manage to get a massive story drop that ultimately concludes with the game telling me it is time for an intermission. I am certain there are still a number of side quests that I have to catch up on, and I need to do more daily content on the Luofu to be able to gain enough of the shop currency to purchase the rest of the Eidolons for the Fire form of your main character. This is probably a good thing honestly because it means I can likely rip through the content remaining in an hour or so… rather than needing to mainline the game.

What I did not expect was to care so much about some of the characters. There are some storylines that just hit you right in the feels. That is something that I did not really remember from Genshin… actually caring about any of the characters. There were a bunch of storylines that were “cute” or “entertaining” but I never really felt like I had any actual emotional connection with those characters. Most of my choices were because I liked the way certain abilities felt or the way specific characters looked. I love how side missions are presented in this game, through text messages from the characters because as you meet new people you are teaching them how to join this global network that all of the planets are connected to. It is allowing extended stories to roll out slowly over time and fill in the details that took place after the main conflict involving those characters was resolved.

The other thing that I am deeply enjoying about this game is how Hoyoverse seems to be making some very specific statements about things. Like yesterday I talked about their characterization of “Space China” as a large inefficient bureaucracy. The more I think about this, the more certain I am that this was very purposeful. For example above is an example of them making comments about ChatGPT, and there are other places where they have thrown digs at the “Metaverse” as a concept. One of my favorite tropes is the fact that March 7th… keeps pointing out every time we are walking into a situation that seems like the beginning of a horror movie. At first, I thought this was a single throwaway line… but she has pointed something like this out like three times so far. The characters in Honkai Star Rail feel so much more vibrant than what I remember from Genshin Impact, and I think in part that is what is making this game so enticing for me.

In other news… since I own Diablo IV and it was given to me as a gift… I figure I am going to go in for this madness and see if the game has improved or gets better as it approaches the end game. I have the game installed and ready for the launch this evening. Blizzard can play the game by saying the launch date is the 6th, but really it is launching today and this early access nonsense is really just penalizing players who would not pony up the extra bucks to play it. Anyways I am not overly positive about this game but I am also a sucker for anything actively in the zeitgeist so… shocking to no one I will be joining the madness. Of my immediate circle of AggroChat friends, I fully expect I will be the only one save for maybe Eliyon who is way more of a “Blizzard gamer” than the rest of us. I know my friend Cylladora is really excited for it, so if nothing else I hope to spend some time hanging out with her.

I am a glutton for punishment and plan on rolling another Barbarian, because at the end of the day… that is really my class of choice in most Diablo games. If the Crusader existed, I would probably play that but for the moment I am loosely planning on leveling as Upheaval since I enjoyed that fairly well during the last test period and it also gave me some ranged gameplay options for fights when I could not stand in melee. I fully expect to recreate something close to this beefcake murder hobo from the last testing round. I’m hoping there have been some significant changes since the last round of testing, but I am not banking on it. My personal preference would be to bip around the map doing all the side content and leveling myself up… to over level the content and then steamrolling the story. However, Diablo IV doesn’t exactly work that way and all that seems to do is serve to make story fights more annoying. So I will likely mainline the story at least until I have consumed everything in the first area… then spend some time catching my level up doing side content. If we are mutuals on any social platform, feel free to add me to your friend list. My Battle Tag information is over in the sidebar of this blog under the Diablo III graphic, or you can go to my one size fits all rarely updated list of game account information here. If you use a name that I don’t recognize however you might expect a “new phone who dis” message from me. The post Luofu Caught Up appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Last Epoch 0.9.1 Patch Review

May 26, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the drop of the latest Last Epoch patch, and as a result, it meant that Ace and I spent a chunk of last night hanging out while we both explored the changes. Since a big part of the content drop was a completely reworked leveling experience. This received mixed feedback when this news was dropped on Monday, but I absolutely understand why the focus was on the early game. Essentially you really need to grab the player in the opening minutes to an hour of the game if you really want to keep them engaged, and the previous starter experience was a little odd and uneven. It also was some of the very earliest content that had been released and was starting to show its age. If you want to see all of the features you can check out the highlight reel trailer below.

I used the patch as an opportunity to reboot my Rogue character that I never leveled far enough to actually specialize. That is the first major positive change is the flow of the content makes it so that you arrive at the “End of Time” zone which is the gate for specialization… at about the time when you would normally be needing to choose a specialization. The previous flow of the game made it so that you were usually wildly over-leveled by the time you reached the core hub of the game and could choose which specialization you wanted to go into. On almost every character up until this point, it meant that at about level 20 I just had to stop choosing passives because I could not put them into the specialization trees. On this latest character, I reached the End of Time at roughly level 16 and that felt pretty freaking solid.

The start of the campaign attempts to actually give you a reason for some of the things that you are doing and spends some time setting up a few of the core conflicts lore-wise. Previously you sort of just stumbled into bad things happening and rolled with the punches, now you are introduced to some conflict, get introduced to a bad faction doing bad things, and then are introduced to a plot MacGuffin that said bad people are after, and that you need to get to first. It flows so much better and a number of the content blocks and zones and been reordered in a manner that makes much more sense. It is still very much an “ARPG Story” which is to say it is pretty light on details and largely talks about things in broad terms… but I more or less find this as sufficient motivation to kill lots of things and chase loot. Someone on the team also learned how to draw women’s faces that do not all look like they are 10 years old, so that is a huge positive as well.

There are a few hilarious timing moments where an enemy swoops in to capture one of the NPCs… but there is this weird lag involved with it. You end up sitting there wondering what exactly is going on… and then suddenly someone flies away with the NPC and you are left to think “Oh, okay bye then”. This post is coming across as way more snarky than I intended it to. Maybe it is just that I have played so many of the early missions in this game that I am overanalyzing the changes. The biggest cool thing from the new content though is all of the really interesting enemy types. Ace and I talked last night about how much we are looking forward to seeing these new areas as endgame Monolith Echoes. Patch 0.9.1 was a good step forward, and I am hoping that also means that they plan on going back and smoothing out some of the other awkward transition points later in the campaign. For example how you rapidly go from being in frosty tundra land, and then extremely rapidly transitioning to adventuring on the literal ocean floor.

Another new feature of 0.9.1 is the introduction of “towns” as hubs that blend together random players who happen to be visiting an area. This is cool in theory, but also I have zero interest in grouping with a bunch of randos… but I guess maybe someone out there wants to do this. Right now unfortunately there is a bit of a performance hit every time you zone into areas that would be flagged as a town… so essentially any encampment that has a stash chest and vendors. I am sure they will iron this out over time, but for the moment it just takes a long while to load into any of these social hubs. As the game grows and has more activities that require you to group up with other players, I am sure this will become more relevant. For now, it feels more like they are laying the groundwork for something else and now have to solve the technical changes that come with it.

This patch also introduced the cosmetic shop and it largely seems fine. There was some gnashing of teeth over the pricing model when this was originally announced, and EHG has significantly watered down the cost since then. I have a bajillion fake shop currency points because I was a pretty early supporter of the game. Essentially everything is now priced in increments of 50 coins aka $5 and the highest items that I saw for sale were 150 coins each or $15. The options are pretty limited at the moment but we knew that going into this release. They are essentially just testing the waters and ironing out any problems with making purchases before adding what I am sure will be a steady drip of cosmetics at “priced to own” values.

The only problem that I have at the moment is with the way the supporter packs are being handled this time around. Traditionally Last Epoch supporter packs have been a tiered affair so that if you bought pack D you also got all of the benefits of pack A, B, and C. Now this might just be the challenges of working within the pricing structure of the Steam Store, but right now… you have four packs that each gives you a backpack, a generic colored-coded pet, and a portal. They all award you the same amount of cash shop currency, but each one is $10 more than the previous one… for “reasons”. It feels pretty bad, to be honest, and I am not sure if this is designed to engender some sort of elitist “I bought the most expensive pack” bullshit or FOMO… but whatever the case I do not like it. I did in fact buy the most expensive pack but largely to test this theory. I don’t mind giving EHG more money to support the development of the game, but it doesn’t make it feel any less shit.

I think another aspect of why it feels so bad is that I have gotten used to Path of Exile supporter packs which are admittedly more expensive, but have the structure I was expecting. So for example if you buy the $60 pack you get everything from the $30 pack, all the new stuff at the $60 tier… and the full face value of the pack in cash shop currency. So similarly I at least expected some sort of similar structure in Last Epoch where if you bought a $50 pack you got everything from the packs leading up to that tier as well as 500 cash shop coins aka the face value of the pack. In Path of Exile, the supporter packs feel like a phenomenal deal and there are folks… myself included, who tend to buy one every season even if we have zero need for more currency. They just feel like a value proposition that is worth partaking of and also has the side benefit of supporting more of the madness you are enjoying. My hope is that EHG goes back to the drawing board and at a minimum makes the packs additive. As they stand now they just seem like we are giving them more money out of the goodness of our hearts… which admittedly is a thing but when you are giving me back kitsch that has no real-world value… it seems like you should be generous.

The super fancy wings that you get from the $50 pack seem to be bugged as well and look nowhere near as large as are depicted in the artwork advertising the pack so I am hoping that is also a bug. Do I regret buying the pack? Not really. I was going to throw more money at the game regardless because I feel like EHG deserves it. That said… I want them to be better than the competition and that definitely means that they also need to be a better value proposition. So here is hoping that they rethink their pricing model a bit further and become a bit more generous with the swag. At this point, I have spent zero time with endgame content changes, so I fully expect that to be the next thing I dive into as last night I finished up all of the new story. I know there are some tweaks and changes to the drop rate of uniques that drop from specific timelines, so here is hoping that maybe just maybe I can get that dang Herald of the Scurry. The post Last Epoch 0.9.1 Patch Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Destiny 2: Thoughts after Beating Story

September 11, 2017 by Belghast

There have been many points during my leveling process where I looked pretty damned cool. However in my current state I look a bit like a rejected He-Man toy from the 80s. The important thing however is that I am sitting at 265 power… which is effectively the first soft cap you can hit… or more or less means you are “done with blues”. Now I will have to rely on a much smaller list of items that I can get potential upgrades from, but even then… it does feel like I am stalled out. The next plateau is 280, which unlocks the Nightfall and some of the advanced features of the Gunsmith, and I might have to wait until the weekly reset to be able to get there. At this point by my estimations I have spent over 30 hours in game, but the PS4 doesn’t really have a proper way of tracking this time spent. Unfortunately Destiny Tracker seems to have some issues with the API currently and is only showing the most recent information. I officially “beat” the game on Friday when I crossed two different finish lines… the first being level 20, and the second being the completion of the main story quest. Both of these are important for different reasons… level capping of course lets you start gaining power level which is the TRUE leveling system of Destiny 2. When you beat the story however the flood gates open with a ton of options that were previously locked… including one of my favorite Destiny 1 activities… Patrol Missions.

The thing you probably want to hear about however is the story, since that was the chief complaint about the original game… or at least the lack thereof. I personally enjoyed it greatly but your mileage may vary. It is hard to separate the part of me that is a lore junkie from the original game and poured over countless YouTube videos, grimoire cards and is even in a discord group specifically for… pieces together the story. Objectively the story works significantly better than that of the original game, because you are given a more traditional plot structure. Going into the game you have an event that has thrown your world into turmoil, and you are presented a very clear nemesis that is responsible for those events. From there it sets a path in motion, first of survival and then of figuring out a way to fight back. All of this works pretty well, and the game crescendos during the last four or five missions until you reach what feels like a pretty damned epic climax. More importantly than all of this… you are invested in the people you meet along the way. In the first game… especially in the year one content… everyone was just a name without any attributes really associated with them that would make you start to care. Now you get introduced to a bunch of new characters along with the characters you already knew… and at each step of the way you are given little bits of story about them that make you start to care about their situation… not just how they might benefit you. There are several NPCs in Destiny 2 that I genuinely like and enjoy doing further content with and for… because I get to hang out with them again. Functionally this is a world I start out much more invested in, and it isn’t up to me to go digging through the debris to find meaning… the game keeps delivering that on a silver platter.

As far as “end game” content goes there seems to be plenty of that as well. The above screenshot is of part of the director map for European Dead Zone, the little blue diamond represent events… and in truth all of these have yet to actually start. You can over your cursor over a given event and it will tell you what the rewards are and how long until it starts… or in this case you can look at the orange ring around the outside of the diamond because that also serves as a visual timer. You tend to get about five minutes notice before an event starts and the white circle symbol with the big triangle and small triangle represent transmat warp points, allowing you to quickly jump around a map without the need to traverse the whole thing like in Destiny 1. Additionally the orange icons on the map represent the adventures that I have talked about in other posts… which are functionally story missions that occur “in world” where one of the NPCs will direct you through a sequence of objectives and then gives you some rewards at the end. I need to spend some time doing these because several of them reward upgrade points… which are ultimately the way you unlock “powers” on your sub classes. Additionally each of the original vanguard members gives you some sort of end game activity that happens on a weekly timer. Ikora Rey for example has you replay missions from the main story, each time gaining a little faction and in my experience doing an entire batch of three gives you enough currency to get one of her faction packages. Cayde-6 lets you purchase treasure maps… which unlock a series of chests… that can reward you everything from an Exotic engram… to a spinfoil hat with varying degrees of “worth it”. Additionally there are other quests that start to open up that lead to good old fashioned Exotic weapon quests… like one to regain the MIDA Multi Tool for example.

The Crucible is still very much a thing, but seems to have way fewer options than before. Right now you functionally choose between two different lists… Quick Play or Competitive… the difference being that the first is supposed to be for casual play and the second is supposed to feed into their ultimately ranking system. The only part that is jarring about this is that in Quick Play you alternate between game types… so you might do a Supremacy and then the next match might be Control or Clash. There are times I feel like I am getting the hang of the four player crucible experience… and then there are times when I feel like I know nothing. The positive or negative of this experience is that the game is getting me to play Crucible by danging rewards in front of my face. There is an item called a Luminous Engram, that can be achieved by completing a handful of weekly milestones… one of which being to play a number of crucible matches… which seemed to be something in the range of 10 of them. This is also potentially gated on your performance because I never seemed to get the same amount of percentage advancement in the milestone each match. Regardless the reward was enough for me to spend my afternoon yesterday doing matches until I got my shiny reward at the end… which is effectively a really powerful faction package that is a marked jump in your overall power level… generally up to 10 power levels over your current rating. The Crucible is just one of many of these that effective have you out doing different kinds of content chasing these big rewards. Effectively I like that the game is going to dangle big enough carrots in front of my face to make me want to do things… that normally I would not.

Another system that is shaping up to be extremely important is that of Clans. Right now the roster is screwed up as is the clan membership count, but what is working is Clan Experience. Effectively doing anything out in the world grants you a certain amount of Clan Experience, and in the second screenshot in this post you can see a little blip on the right hand side of the screen denoting that I earned some. There is a cap that you can reach each week for the total contribution towards your guilds leveling process, and if you do so… there is another one of those Luminous Engrams waiting for you. Where the Clan system really gets cool is that it functionally rewards every member of the Clan for the activities of its members. They turned on the Clan system Friday and by that evening we had maxed our our total experience for the week and pushed the Clan to level 2, and additionally when one of our members completed a Nightfall it unlocked a Legendary Engram for everyone in the clan. Similarly when someone finished the Crucible Luminous Engram… everyone got a Legendary Engram… and in theory the same will be true for the Raid and the Trials of the Nine which are not open yet. Its really rather cool that there is this sort of “share the wealth” type system that lets players who are maybe not as progressed as their clanmates have a nice hand up in that department. The Experience cap for the week was low enough that functionally it took three players capping their weekly contribution to get there… so in theory this is not going to be one of those systems that greatly favors massive Clans and screws the little ones with a handful of members.

Lastly I wanted to close out with the Shader issue again. I still am not super happy with the changes to this system, and I am hoping they come to their senses and tweak how it works. I would be fine with something along the lines of once you discover a shader, you can then purchase them from the various faction NPCs for glimmer. Once I dinged 20 the drop rate of these did in fact increase, and after 20 your experience bar effectively rewards you a Bright Engram each time you “level up”. This happens often enough that I’ve gotten somewhere around 10-12 of these just by going out into the world and playing through content. Additionally the NPC Faction packages and the random spawn chests throughout the world seem to reward a lot of them specific to a given planet. Prior to dinging 20… I had two different colors… and at the time I took this screenshot I had 27 and a good number of them with enough to actually dye a full set of armor. Basically it doesn’t seem like it is going to be long before I am absolutely swimming in shaders, like I seem to currently be with mods. Please note… I still don’t like this system change, but it also doesn’t seem to be the end of the world I originally thought it was going to be. Especially given how damned often I seem to be getting “free” bright engrams that are the same thing as you purchase with the in game currency. I’ve even managed to pull one of the exotic sparrows… of which a screenshot will be inserted below.

In the grand scheme of things… I could not be much more happy with my Destiny 2 experience. In the podcast I called it “The Destiniest Destiny” and this still holds true. If you didn’t like the original game… I am still not entirely certain you will like Destiny 2. Everything about this game is an iterative approach to the original… which things being so much more fleshed out and wildly more “stuff” to do… but it is still very much the same overall game play experience. If you were one of those players that sat back and thought “I like Destiny, but in order for it to be playable it would have to change drastically”… then this game is very much not for you. Calling the game Destiny 1.5 or 2.0… really is appropriate than really thinking of this as a sequel. I am completely fine with this notion and at this point I am absolutely chomping at the bits to start over from scratch on the PC. Very shortly I will begin working on the Warlock and Hunter on PS4 so I have the ability to get multiple characters worth of luminous engrams per week. There are some players that are even creating three of the same class to maximize this further… but I think I will stick to having three classes. All in all the game is still grindy but I find that specific brand of grind extremely fun. I am hoping that at 265 I can actually see the raid… but I am thinking that the more likely power level will be 280 which means I am going to need to do a bit more leap frogging in power level in order to get there.