Stardew Landmark Crossing

Good Morning Folks! August is turning out to be exceptionally busy with me doing some build testing ahead of the 3.22 League in Path of Exile, the Launch of Baldurs Gate 3, and in the midst of all of this I finally got my email inviting me to Palia. For those who have not been following this game, it has been billed in the media as coming from former Blizzard and Riot employees, but frankly… given the colossal turnover at both companies, you would be hard-pressed to point at ANY game without being able to say that. It does have a graphical style that reminds me of an amalgam of World of Warcraft, Wildstar, and Free Realms.
What the game promises is an interesting concept, a hangout MMO without combat. What this feels like in practice is Stardew Valley the MMORPG. More than that I also get Landmark vibes when it comes to hunting down rare resources, and even a bit of Animal Crossing. Essentially you are teleported to this world and given an instanced plot of land and some resources to be able to harvest and craft your way into making it a home.
The character creation system is “aggressively fine” but that opinion might be coming from the fact that I also created my character in Baldur’s Gate 3 within a few hours of each other… and that creation system is phenomenal. My key complaint is the lack of beards, which is often a complaint I have with various games. However one of my friends came to the rescue to inform me that this is on the roadmap. Other than being clean-shaven, I was able to create a reasonable facsimile of “Belghast” as I often appear in various games. I would never wear skinny jeans, but I am going to blame some non-GenX artists for that one as they were the most non-descript black pants option I had. I assume over time more clothing options will open up. It would also be cool to have some different body options given that I am a very large man and I would absolutely give my avatar a belly.
Just like in StarDew Valley you are given an area of the map that is littered with volunteer trees, stones, assorted collectibles, and the remnants of a broken down fence and housing foundation. My OCD required that I harvest EVERYTHING within the boundary of my fence line. So now I also have a bulging storage shed filled with basic resources, which should hold me for a little bit when it comes to crafting.
The initial objectives were to build a tent, a workbench, and a storage bin and then the game sent me into town to meet a bunch of town folk. This in turn gave me a whole slew of other objectives. I’ve also learned how to hunt and fish. Hunting… I am extremely bad at it as it involves trying to slowly fire a bow as woodland creatures scurry around the map. Fishing… I got the hang of it pretty quickly once I figured out that I needed to move my mouse from side to side to keep up with the bobber. I’ve yet to learn how to actually go to sleep, or even if I need to but I have a way larger than I expected tent filled with nothing at the moment.
The game is charming as heck and I look forward to watching as it progresses. It definitely fills that Stardew Valley with friends vibe, and I want to see what grouping up while harvesting does. Landmark used to have this mode where if you grouped up and then gathered resources, everyone in the party got a copy of everything that was looted. I could see something like that going really well here. I would also love to see this game implement some sort of large-town project system. In Horizon/Istaria, there were these massive crafting projects that involved building bridges to new areas or building out towns, that essentially required the entire community to pool resources. This sort of experience would fit this game especially given that there is no combat.
I figure most everyone that is interested in this game has already signed up, but if you have not… please feel free to use my Referal Code. As far as I know, it does nothing to expedite your access to the beta but does give me sweet stuff for signing people up, and I believe you get a care package when you first log into the game. I know I had stuff waiting on me from the code I got from Scopique when I finally got access yesterday. All in all, this looks like a really cool game to watch as it develops into a chill game for nights when you just can’t handle anything too terribly complex. I am of course Belghast in the game, so feel free to friend me if you are already there. The post Stardew Landmark Crossing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Revisiting Wildstar

Loading Screen from in-game on Emulator Server
Friends I did some nonsense this weekend and I am going to talk briefly about whether or not you should also do some nonsense. Wildstar is a game that I genuinely feel was ahead of its time. Had it launched today, I think that it would be far better received than it was in 2014. Admittedly there are a lot of reasons why I would say that today, not the least of which has been the steady stream of players leaving World of Warcraft and looking for other options. Additionally, I think Wildstar in its combat style is very compatible with what Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy have distilled into a very fun action RPG formula. Wildstar was the slightly awkward pupa that eventually evolved into the glorious hack-and-slash butterfly that is the modern action combat MMORPG. If Wildstar could have launched as a hybrid game on both mobile and desktop today, it would be phenomenally popular.
Screenshot from Wildstar when it was still active
I liked Wildstar quite a bit, but never really managed to engage with it fully. I don’t think I made it past level thirty on any of my characters, and there was a snowy zone where my forward momentum would always die. That said… I had a ton of friends who were super engaged with this game and as a result, I stuck around and kept poking my head into it. I was saddened like so many were when it ultimately shuttered in November of 2018. Starting just before the shutdown of the server was a project called Nexus Forever, with the goal of trying to create a robust server emulator to allow the game to continue to live on after its ultimate demise. While I never fully attached to Wildstar, it was an extremely important game to my friend Ace, and as a result, I have been trying to keep loose tabs on the progress of a potential server emulator. I am not exactly certain when I joined the Discord community, but I believe it was at some point in 2019.
Like so many other things in my life… the pandemic largely caused me to lose touch with the Nexus Forever project. Like most of the discords, I am a member of… I’ve had it muted because the way discord works are extremely bad for spamming you with notifications. Scan forward to this weekend when the YouTube algorithm decided to deliver me the above video from the Lazy Peon. It turns out that not only is the server emulator progressing along nicely, but there is actually a test server where you can log in and play around with the game. Since I am the one of my friend group most likely to do stupid things for minimal enjoyment… it was left up to me to sort this out and determine if it was actually worth playing.
Character creation from in-game on Emulator Server
It turns out that the process as a whole is relatively straightforward. You can see above that I was able to recreate the warrior version of Belghast Sternblade that I played around with on the retail servers. I am not going to post specific links to how to do this thing, because I get the general impression that the community would rather have folks engage with it through Discord. However, for sake of understanding, I am going to outline the steps required to get everything set up and play.
  • Join the Nexus Forever Discord
  • Check the pinned topic in the #help channel for links
  • Download the client patcher and begin Wildstar downloading
  • Download the custom Game Launcher
  • Sign up for an account on the Test Server
  • Hum to yourself while the client finishes installing
  • Open the custom Game Launcher and point it at the Wildstar64 executable.
  • In the launcher, choose the test server you signed up on
  • Launch the game and play Wildstar
While that is quite a few steps, when it comes to getting up and running with emulator servers… that is honestly relatively simple. I remember the first time I started playing around with the Everquest emulator server it required me to set up a Linux server, download the source code, figure out how to compile said source code on Linux, and manually create content in MySQL to populate my own server. Basically, anything that has automated installers for setting everything up and getting running feels simple compared to those early days.
Screenshot from in-game on Emulator Server
Now we get to the “should you do this” part of the post, and I am afraid my answer is going to be no. The emulator team has made some massive strides in getting this game playable. It was fun to run around and experience this game again, but if you are hoping to be able to legitimately play it… like you might play a World of Warcraft emulator… we likely have a number of years before that could be a reality. The game is wildly incomplete and based on my understanding the only content that is really functional is the original starter areas. You can roam and explore freely, and the server has a number of slash commands to allow you to do some things that you would not be able to do otherwise, but it is far from a “complete” experience. However, if you just want to get in, create a character and revel in the nostalgia of the excellent level-up voice lines… then by all means download away. I do want to spend a bit more time exploring the limits of this experience, and honestly should probably see what sort of help they might need. I used to write code for one of the World of Warcraft emulators back in the early days, so I have minimal experience. Nonetheless, I thought I would present you with the process and let you make your own decisions if you choose to go down this path. The post Revisiting Wildstar appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #230 – Tonberry in Love

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat230

Tonight we talk a bit about Monster Hunter World Winter Star Event and how maddening the Tempered Kirin is.  From there we talk about the closing of MMOs and specifically the loss of Wildstar. Several of us have returned to Final Fantasy XIV as is often the case at the end of an expansion.  We briefly talk about some frustrations with World of Warcraft and then go into a discussion about puzzle games you can zone out while playing specifically Tetris Effect in VR and the amazing Lumines.

Topics Discussed

  • Monster Hunter World
    • Winter Star Event
    • Tempered Kirin
    • Talking about Various Weapons
  • Closing of MMOs
    • The Last Hours of Wildstar
    • Star Wars Galaxies
    • City of Heroes
    • Games being Bought
  • Returning to FFXIV
    • Main Story Quest
    • Palace of the Dead
  • World of Warcraft Issues
  • Tetris Effect in VR
    • Lumines
    • Bejeweled
    • Peggle Loot
  • Missing Game Forums

Wildstar Thoughts

Wildstar Thoughts

I am having one of those mornings when I am not entirely certain I have thoughts that are worth sharing.  However because of the ritual that I have built up for myself I am going to share something anyway.  I consistently have a chorus of “no one wants to hear about that” running through my head as I write most of my posts.  I think that is in part why I struggle so hard when someone says something nice to me about my blog or any of the other things I do.  I feel like I really have no clue what I am doing and even more so why anyone would care about it.  I am super appreciative that people do seem to care, but I feel like one of these days everyone is going to pull back the curtain and realize what a boring person I am.  Worse I have an unshakable fear that I am a fraud and that some terribly clever person is going to write a lengthy essay on medium pointing out this fact and cause you all to hate me.  Medium feels like it is a site entirely about writing lengthy essays about exposing harsh truths about the things we love.

Wildstar Thoughts

Sometimes I start writing and things just veer wildly off course, and I have a feeling that is precisely what is happening this morning.  Yesterday afternoon at 2pm pst Wildstar went dark as a game and I have some weird feelings about it.  This was not an important game to me personally, in fact I struggled to figure out why everyone liked it so much.  That said I realize that it was a very important game for an awful lot of the people who I care about in my life.  This is in part why I kept trying to unlock the puzzle about what made it feel good to play.  Probably the happiest I was with the game was when I was playing my Chua Engineer and even then…  largely because of the adorable bot army that I drug along with me.  The core problem there is… that the vast majority of the friends I had playing the game on the regular were Exiles not Dominion.  Sure this eventually changed so that you could cross faction until your heart was content… but I think by then it was too far past that golden time in which a game really has to hook me on its charm.

Wildstar Thoughts

There was something about the game that caused me to struggle with it.  There was a certain sensory overload that I felt each time I played, with too many things going on with the UI and the telegraphs that just left my eyes feeling immensely tired after playing it for a short period of time.  I realize this is weird given that I have always been one of those people who prefers to have a massive number of UI elements on screen in World of Warcraft, but the combination of this and the action combat proved to be more than I could handle most of the time.  I am regretful that I never managed to make it to the level cap or really experience any of the endgame content.  I had multiple characters largely fall off the face of the leveling curve in Whitevale…  and I am not entirely certain what specifically about that zone caused me to lose all forward momentum.

Wildstar Thoughts

All of that said I have to tell you that Wildstar had quite possibly the best housing system I have seen in a game, namely the way you could set up your little pocket dimension to be whatever you wanted it to be…  along with interesting minigames to play.  It also had an excellent cosmetic gear and dye pot system that I hope going forward more games pay attention to.  It was a game that gave its players so many nice systems, and I think that is in part why it had a generally thriving social structure.  There are a good number of people that I met through the game that have become fixtures of my Twitter feed in a daily basis, and I am thankful that I got to meet all of them.  Said feed was completely breaking my heart as I watched so many emotional posts scrolling by in the last hours of the game before they finally shut things down.  I think what probably makes this worse… is the fact that Wildstar lasted far longer than anyone actually expected it would given NC Soft’s track record of shuttering still relatively popular franchises.

Wildstar Thoughts

At this point however I am not entirely certain which is worse.  Watching a game get shuttered, or having a game purchased by a company that you are almost certain is going to do bad things to the game.  I watched Hellgate London be bastardized by Hanbitsoft and then get regurgitated back onto Steam in a form that is at times barely recognizable to the original.  Recently Trion Worlds was purchased by a company that has games in its stable with literally temporary inventory bags that expire after seven days.  So I have nothing but the worst fears about how Rift is going to change under their stewardship.  So I am not sure if it is worse to see a game completely close its doors, or to watch it flop around in a zombie state for awhile muddying your memories of it.  As I have said before when this sort of thing happens…  these MMO games that we love are fleeting.  Grab on with both hands and enjoy them while you still can, because eventually…  they are likely going to shut their doors either replaced by something shiny and new or because the players disappeared over time.  In the case of Wildstar we can only hope that a Server Emulator is far enough along to be able to create a fan run server like the thriving Star Wars Galaxies community or the Age of Reckoning Warhammer Online community.