Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have almost too many topics, which is odd because normally this only happens when we skip a week. We start off with a discussion about Paradise Killer, the first game from the folks who created Promise Mascot Agency. From there, we talk a bit about the current round of Hugo Award Nominations since Thalen gets to vote. Ash talks about the existence of Beat Weaver, but is NDA bound and cannot go into much detail. This is essentially a spiritual successor to Frequency and Amplitude from Harmonix. We talk a bit about Vampire Crawlers and its shifting the Vampire Survivors formula to turn-based Might and Magic style combat. Bel has been playing Space Dad Simulator in the form of Pragmata, and it is delightful. Final Fantasy XIV had its Anaheim Fanfest, and we talked about all of the announcements that came out surrounding the upcoming Evercold expansion. Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launches on Monday and seems to be fixing most of the issues with the game, and Bel is looking forward to playing a SRS Warlock. We talk a bit about Crunchyroll and the recent anime trends, and then devolve into a bunch of us just suggesting various anime. Finally, Ace and Bel geek out about Eurovision because it is coming up in a few weeks, and they are pumped.
Good Morning, folks. I had to deal with labwork and a doctor’s visit this morning, so I am getting a bit of a late start on the whole blogging thing. Over the last few days, I have gone from not really being interested in Diablo IV Lord of Hatred to legitimately being pumped to play next Monday evening when it drops. Yesterday we got a Campfire Chat, but I have to admit it was a much better version of this construct than we have had previously. Generally, these have been deeply tone deaf and smarmy with a constant refrain of “we hear you”, but also not actually significantly changing the game. Lord of Hatred to Diablo IV feels like Reaper of Souls was to Diablo III, where they effectively changed everything about the game for the better. Of course, there were some weird product placements like some sort of collaboration with a guitar manufacturer, Korn writing a song for the soundtrack, and an inexplicable crossover with Trolli gummy worms. This is just a Blizzard thing, and sadly, we are not getting back the Horde flavor of Mountain Dew, which was fucking amazing.
I highly suggest watching the entire campfire chat, or at least something like the summary that Raxx released, because there is a lot of information there. I am going to talk through a couple of the things that really stood out to me. Probably the biggest is the fact that we are ACTUALLY getting crafting in the game with the addition of the Horadric Cube. This has been a problem-solving plot device many times in the Diablo franchise, and this time around, it seems to be replacing something like the crafting bench, harvest crafting, and crafting currency from Path of Exile. You can, in theory, take an item from blue to yellow, to unique, all while crafting additional affixes onto it to eventually roll something interesting. One of the big things that I noticed going back for Midnight is how much Blizzard has seemingly learned from other MMORPGs, and it feels like FINALLY Diablo admits that they exist in a genre… and should look to the exemplars of that genre for inspiration. Blizz has always had a bit of an ego that they were innovators, and should blaze a new trail… but at least in the case of Diablo, it just felt like they were providing a game void of expected “basic” features.
The other thing that really excites me is the introduction of War Plans. Diablo has had a bunch of relatively uninteresting activities, and not a lot of pressing reason for you to be doing any of them. Some of these are actually pretty fun, like Nightmare Dungeons, but it always sort of felt like there was nothing really pushing you to do them other than occasionally the open world objectives. War Plans, in theory, will be that guiding force that rewards you for doing a certain number of things in a row, with fixed rewards for doing them. This reminds me far less of Path of Exile mapping and more of Echo Chains that just introduced into Last Epoch. Still having any sort of guiding force in this game is a massive positive in my book, especially since they are also giving us a way to throw our thumb on the scale and determine what sorts of activities and rewards we receive. While this is not the Breach or Expedition or Blight style reusable content that grows season after season that I really hope they start creating, it is at least a massive leap in a better direction.
The other big takeaway from yesterday is that it looks like there has been a complete changing of the guard from the Campfire Chats that I found so grating. I hope everything that we are seeing is a sign that we have some fresh ideas feeding into the game and trying to actually make it competitive with the other franchises. Right now, as an ARPG player, I care about when Path of Exile 1 Leagues start, Path of Exile 2 Leagues, and Last Epoch leagues… but Diablo IV has never factored into that calculus of how I plan my gaming. I would love there to be some pressure that makes me want to choose a Diablo season over some other game. I think that would be pretty freaking cool because it will continue to push ALL of the games in this pack forward to try and create more interesting stuff. What makes this genre so different from MMORPGs is that they are ultimately designed for short bursts of massive engagement… and then folks fade away until the next exciting release. Thing is, so long as you keep giving us good shit…. we will keep showing up for our infusion of crack.
The other thing making me excited is that it looks like Warlock might support one of my favorite minion playstyles. Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons short-term minions, and you can give them something called Minion Instability Support to make them explode. This also exists in Last Epoch in the form of Volatile Zombies, and I really like the spammy playstyle of summoning minions and then making them prematurely explode when I oversummon to the limit. Command Fallen for the Warlock appears to be this sort of short-term, exploding minions gameplay, and I am all here for it. I think I have mostly cobbled together something that looks like a build. Granted, this is all based on the Maxroll D4 Planner, and I have no clue how up-to-date this information is, but I expect at least the shell of this build to survive. I am sure I will tweak and adjust as I go, but I think this more or less represents a reasonable template of abilities. I can’t honestly remember how many ability picks we get, but there is a ritual ability that I will add if I have more slots. This is pretty much what I am going to yolo come Monday evening, and we will see if I can make something stick.
One parting shot across the bow. This is a screenshot from the presentation that shows the release schedule. It looks like the game is dropping at 6 pm my time, and I expect to be there with bells on. There will also be Twitch drops and all the normal fanfare. Reportedly, the game was available for preloading yesterday, so you can have everything ready to go come Monday. I admit, this is the first time I have been legitimately amped to play Diablo IV since release. I hope to see at least some of you doing the nonsense with me.
The post SRS Warlock Maybe appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, Folks. Yesterday, we got the teaser trailer dropped for the next Path of Exile II league/expansion, and it was extremely brief. More importantly, though, the community has been clamoring for some sort of notice as to when it was dropping. Folks take off work for these things, and in many cases need a decent amount of notice to get the time off. The good news is we are getting a reveal stream on May 7th. The bad is that the league itself is not dropping until May 29th, which is a significant delay from the original intended “every four months” pace of a POE1 and POE2 league. There will be gnashing of teeth, especially among the folks who only play Path of Exile II about this delay. For the Path of Exile diehards, SirGog announced yesterday that he was going to do some sort of a private league, and those are usually interesting. I’ve participated in one of these leagues before, and in that case, everything dropped scoured so you were forced to craft your own gear. It was interesting in an academic sense, but if that ends up being the case again, I am likely going to skip it.
The trailer shows a giant megastructure rising up out of the ground, and I personally think what we are seeing is somehow representative of the new atlas. This has been a feature that has been promised for a while, because the Delve-like Endless Atlas has generally been poorly received by the playerbase. As someone who loves Delve… I have to say that for whatever reason, when you apply this same concept to mapping, it just does not work. At least based on player behaviors in Path of Exile 1, folks tend to gravitate to a few map layouts that they really like and then run them over and over. Truth be told, the new way that the Atlas works in POE1 is brilliant, and I would love to see something like that translated over to POE2. I think the concept of Endless Atlas is cool, but I would love to see it as a side content. The reason why Delve works so well is that any given node only takes a few minutes to run, whereas every map in POE2 feels like it takes an eternity. It would be cool if they translated the Endless Atlas over to a sequence of micro objectives, building a sort of Delve 2.0 in the game with clearly marked rewards on each of the nodes.
Since POE2 is so far out, that has pretty much cemented the idea that I am going to be diving into Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred when it drops on April 28th. Yesterday Blizz released the opening cinematic, and I am maybe more interested than any of the Akarat nonsense has given me to this point. Right now, unless something drastic changes, I plan to try out the new Warlock class when the expansion drops next Tuesday. That is a chemo day for me, but generally speaking, I feel okay for the first few days after the poison is delivered… and then go downhill drastically as I approach the weekend. If, for whatever reason, I do not vibe with the Warlock’s particular form of summoning minions, then I will probably fall back on playing a Paladin. I think I will dig this expansion more than previous ones because I have figured out how to macro multiple abilities to the same button on my G600 mouse, given that D4 tends to be “spam every button on cooldown” gameplay, and I can reduce that madness to a single click. I did this with the most recent Last Epoch season and it worked swimmingly.
I am honestly vaguely excited about Lord of Hatred, because it seems like Blizzard has made some significant steps in the right direction to turning this game into something that has some lasting draw. The big problem that I have had up until this point with D4 is that leveling is generally pretty fun, but once you hit the end game… it feels boring and repetitive, and they ruined the one thing that was actually fun. Ace and I used to group up together and pool our resources and do a bajillion boss summons for drops… and they recently made it so that you only get loot if you are providing materials. The force multiplier of playing with friends stopped functioning, and as a result… we mostly just stopped playing together. Wudijo is pretty much one of the diehard Diablo creators, and he has released a bunch of information once the press embargo was lifted. He released another short video this morning showing off the new map overlay, which is pretty huge. That was one of the things that annoyed me the most about D4. You could not simply toggle the map overlay to stay on, rather than having to keep manually popping it up.
In the meantime, nothing has really been hitting gamewise for me, so I am back to playing Last Epoch. I contemplated rolling a Warpath Void Knight, but instead have gone back to leveling my Fire Aura Spellblade. I keep chasing slightly better gear, so that hopefully I can improve my survival. Ward feels way squishier than Health and Regeneration/Leech. It just seems like all of my ward evaporates at exactly the wrong time, and Omen windows seem to be the hardest content for me. Essentially, I have gotten to the point where I clear everything else in the echo but the Omen, and then do that last so that if I die, I have at least completed the echo and can move on with my life. Right now, I am farming the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline in an attempt to get a better pair of Frostbite Shackles. I love the new corruption system, but I refuse to “yolo corrupt” items and risk not having a copy… so I want multiple copies to play with. I could also use more copies of Last Steps of the Living for the same reason.
Anyways, time for me to wrap this up and move on with life. Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV expansion when it drops next Tuesday? Are you looking forward to the Path of Exile II League and bummed by the delays? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning, Folks. Last night I managed to get a pretty solid night of sleep with only three wakes, but far enough spaced out that I managed to do some proper dreaming in between. I am not sure if it is related, but this morning was also much better than yesterday, and I managed to breeze through my normal routine with minimal rest stops. This gives me hope that Thursday might just begin the “back to normal” phase and allow me to do the list of things that need to be done around the house that I have largely just pushed off for when I was “feeling better”. As I said yesterday, I am spending a lot more time consuming passive media than I normally do. Even something like an audiobook has been a bit too much for my chemo-addled brain, but seemingly, television and movies hit just fine. I know I have talked in fragments about what my recent consumption diet has looked like, but I figured today I would abuse this topic as a crutch to lean upon as I cobble together a blog post.
I am uncertain how much I have talked about it, but I wrapped up Fallout Season 2 during my first week of lying around and being useless, and it was just about perfect. This is how I want video game adaptations to work in general. They are true to the source material but doing their own thing, rather than trying to retrofit specific events that never quite translate well to the screen. We got to visit New Vegas, years after the events of the titular game, and also, in general, see what has taken place in our absence with the forces in that region, like Caesar’s Legion. What I really dig about this show, though, is the b plot that is showing the events leading up to the end of civilization and how each of the forces in that power struggle was making moves behind the scenes. The first season was absolutely a story of the Vault Dweller arriving at the wild world for the first time, and this one… is a much more nuanced take that is essentially the equivalent of Fallout 2 or Fallout New Vegas that dives deeper into the political structure of that world. Highly recommend both seasons though, and I am amped to see where we go from here.
I generally hate watching series as they are being released, and tend to wait until there is a full season run before diving in. However, with Monarch, I could not help myself, and burned through the first five episodes and then have been catching new ones as they release. I believe the full run is ten episodes, and it will be over the first week of May. I love Kaiju movies, and this show is like the ultimate companion piece to the modern Godzilla/King Kong franchise from Legendary Pictures and Toho. What impresses me the most about this show is its effects budget, because we get proper big-screen Kaiju battles on the regular in these episodes, with a shocking amount of screen time being taken by the big titans. They also continue to flesh out the backstory of Monarch as an organization, zipping between multiple timelines with the brilliant dichotomy of real-world father and son Wyatt and Kurt Russell playing the same character in two eras. I love this show, and I hope it keeps getting more seasons, because it is phenomenal… if you are into this genre.
Another show that I jumped the gun on is Maul Shadow Lord, in large part because I love Sam Witwer and his interpretation of the Maul character from the animated content. I looked it up yesterday, and I did not realize that he played the live-action Maul from the Han Solo movie instead of Ray Park, so I guess at this point, he is just the definitive Darth Maul in the modern canon. What I am enjoying the most about this series is that it gives us a view into a planet that is too small for the Empire to notice… that is, until Maul shows up. There are elements of gritty crime drama happening in this show, as well as the gangland elements, as multiple factions vie for control of the planet. When the Empire comes in, everything changes, and it is interesting to see just how hostile this is for every single player, from the local police force to the street criminals. Against this tapestry is Maul, plotting revenge against those who have wronged him and also attempting to recruit a Padawan as an apprentice. I am six episodes deep, and obviously do not know the totality of the shape of this story, but I am very interested in seeing it play out.
If you check my Letterboxd profile… You will see that I apparently watch a lot of Zombie films. I have no clue why I have such an affinity for this genre, but I do, and seemingly always have. The hopelessness of fighting against unwinnable odds, I think, terrifies me more than just about anything else in horror. Cold Storage is not one of those films, however, and it is way more Kevin Smithian Stoner Comedy, shoved into a fungus zombie package. That is not to say the film is riddled with low-brow dick and fart jokes, but rather the easy-flowing comedic banter of folks put in a bad situation as they unwittingly staff a decommissioned military facility turned self-storage. I also really enjoy the side plot of a pair of grizzled “seen everything” secret agency aging action hero types, getting called back into action to save the day. This could simply be because I myself am rapidly greying and enjoy the irrational wish fulfillment of seeing someone older than me, kicking some ass. On top of all of this, it really is an interesting spin on the fungal zombie trope, and that in itself is pretty cool to see. I had a lot of fun watching it, and I highly recommend it if your sentiments align with mine.
Anyways, that is what I have been watching recently. I have a bunch of media stacked up to watch. At some point, I am going to dive into Daredevil Born Again Season 2, but I am trying to let that finish releasing before I start it. I’ve also got Starfleet Academy that I want to watch at some point, and almost the entirety of Strange New Worlds. I’ve also not watched Wonderman or the modern conversion of The Burbs into a series, and am interested in both. Finally, at some point, I will probably check out A Knight of Seven Kingdoms, even though I have been pretty sour on anything Game of Thrones connected since that series crash-landed so spectacularly. Essentially, I have plenty of media to get me through the next several rounds of chemo hell. That said, is there anything you feel that I should be checking out? Drop me a line below.
The post Convalescence and Cinema appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
