Friends… I have been playing an excessive amount of Honkai Star Rail. I realize that I am about a month late to this particular party… but at least I eventually made it here. I’ve talked a bit about this game in another post, but one of the points that I want to underline again is how much better of a game Star Rail is than Genshin was at launch. I mean it makes sense, at this point Hoyoverse has more than one major hit under their belt… but everything about this game really shows the lessons that they have learned. The narrative is extremely solid, and I would put it up there with other greats of the RPG genre. I made the hot take the other day that this is at least as good as Final Fantasy VII with zero digs meant towards either game in that equation.
Right now I have landed on a primary party of the fire incarnation of the Traveller, March 7th and Dan Heng… largely because I have become attached to both of them as characters, and Natasha is another character that I really love… but I’m mostly using her because she is a healer. All of these characters are given to you by the game as you wind your way through the story. I have a handful of characters that I have pulled through the Gacha system, but I wound my way around to just using this four-star team and I don’t really feel like I am missing out on anything. It feels like there is a really strong synergy between abilities, and wide enough elemental coverage to get weakness breaks in most fights. I did not feel nearly this strong while using only stock characters in Genshin Impact for example, and honestly think the free characters there were fairly awful compared to what you could get through pulling.
That said I feel like it is also important to talk a bit about how generous this game is. Right now I would be what you would term a “low spender” in Gacha games. I bought the $5 monthly pass because those generally give you a ton of pull currency over time and other side benefits. However, the game itself seems to just be constantly throwing pull currency at me and I’ve pulled the slot machine enough times to get three pity five stars. At the moment I am saving up my currency because I know a new banner is coming soon that is probably going to have a few characters I might want on it. I picked up the chase 5-star Jin Yuan seen above, while also picking Tingyun and Sushang while getting enough dupes to take them to 3 and 5 eidolons respectively. This just feels WAY different than Genshin Impact did, which makes me wonder what other lessons they learned from that game. At least as an outsider, it certainly seemed like they had trouble sustaining widespread interest in it.
The other thing that I think is interesting about Honkai Star Rail is that it is honestly much more mobile-friendly than Genshin ever was. Touch controls are not great at replicating a controller and doing complicated combat, but they are really good at letting you complete turn-based actions. This puts Star Rail in this weird hybrid category of allowing you to move around freely but when the action really matters… you are able to strategically work your way through combat in a strict turn-based system. A lot of the reason why I never played Genshin on mobile is that I just did not feel that I could trust the touch controls to get me through anything other than the most simplistic of combat scenarios. With Star Rail I can happily play this while sitting in the backyard on my phone because it isn’t like I am concerned about the limited range of motion of touch controls will screw me over.
The first two acts of the story so far have been phenomenal. Essentially your tutorial takes place on a Space Station and after you resolve that core conflict, there is a constant dribble of side missions that let you get to know those characters far more over time. The second planet Belobog is equally rich and has this whole… Firefly meets Wildarms meets Frostpunk. This also serves as the planet that lets you see the dire consequences of a Stellaron gone out of control and brings you further into the central conflict. It also introduces this wide cast of characters that you legitimately come to love, even though they are largely just playing bit parts in the tale. This makes it all the more rewarding when one of these characters reaches out to you over the in-game “text message” system asking for your help again.
I am working my way through the third area of the game, and it is effectively “Space China”. So far I am not the biggest fan. Generally speaking much like Liyue it is a grossly inefficient bureaucracy filled with a lot of annoyingly self-important people who care way more about appearances than they do about doing the thing that needs to be done. After seeing this setting effectively playing out in two different Hoyoverse games… it does make me wonder if there is a bit of a thinly veiled political statement being made here. I’m hoping that the deeper I get into this story, the more engaged I will become with these characters… because at the moment I would be fine with pushing them all off a pier into the sea. If you have a game about planet hopping… they can’t all be winners and so far the first two were amazing so I guess they are due for a stinker.
I think what has impressed me more than anything, is that I am still having fun with the game when I have effectively bumped up several times against hard barriers. Like Genshin Impact or Tower of Fantasy, there are some hard daily progression caps where you can only really make so much progress in a single play session. I’ve been bumping up against this barrier of needing to increase my Trailblaze Level in order to be doled out the next chunk of the story. If you played Genshin you would be familiar with this quandary of needing to keep increasing your Adventure Level. The thing is… even though I have been stalled for a few days, I am still finding things that I want to pop into the game and do, and there is enough fun to be had in activities that don’t have some sort of daily limiter on them. I am not certain how long that will hold, but for the moment it seems to have more staying power for me personally than Genshin did at launch.
I realize that I am coming into this game a month late, but my hope is that I can catch up in time for the first update. Last week there was a bit stream that announced the 1.1 Patch called Galactic Roaming which will be launching on June 7th. Essentially it adds new storylines to both Jarilo-VI and the Xianzhou Luofu. Then there will be two different sets of banners, one for Silver Wolf the hacker you meet very very early into your story, and Luocha that you meet during the Xianzhou area during a side story with Dan Heng. I have no real interest in the second character, but I am absolutely stockpiling currency now in a vague attempt to pull Silver Wolf. I dig the retro arcade-looking effects that they showed of her attacks.
Mostly I am hoping to get caught up enough to be able to participate in all of the new events. I’m also hoping that the team that I have chosen will effectively be good enough to get me through all of the content. So far the only thing I struggle with are the challenges that require you to kill things within a certain number of turns. My team is extraordinarily tanky… but not necessarily the fastest at destroying things unless wildly over leveling the enemies.
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Good Morning Friends! Yes, I realize I have already shared a version of this photo of Greybie but there is no reason not to again. Look at how precious he is. This morning however he is mostly just a placeholder because I would never actually post a photo of my wife on my blog. For the entirety of our relationship we’ve celebrated two dates as anniversaries… the date when we became a couple, and then of course the date we got married. As of today, we’ve been together Twenty-Seven years, which is one heck of an achievement if I do say so myself. We’ve long passed the mark of being together “half of our lives” and are well into “majority” territory. Heck, I am just realizing as writing that… that we’ve been in our current home for half of our lives, so I guess we are pretty much the picture of stability at this point.
Lately, we have been spending quite a bit of our evenings in the backyard hanging out with our adopted feral children. I am not sure exactly when it started, but Greybie jumping the fence has pretty much become a nightly ritual. Usually, my wife sent me a message whenever he shows up and I make my way downstairs and then take up a seat in the chair where Tripod is resting near. I’m the human that feeds the feral cats so apparently that affords me some sway. Sunday night Greybie had set up camp over near the diving board quite away from my wife, because while sociable apparently he is not super affectionate with her. The moment I sat down in my chair, Greybie came bounding across the yard for some head scratches and I gotta say… it about caused my heart to burst from sheer joy.
So much is the ritual that we caught on the security camera that he was roaming around last night looking for us. normally speaking I feed around 5 pm but at that point, we had a real “gullywasher” of a storm blow in really fast… dump a ton of rain, and then blow out. So our normal ritual of hanging out in the backyard was put on hold for a bit, but apparently, some 40 minutes later the backyard was relatively dry again and Greybie was looking for us. We never really made it out there, but I did go out and feed around 8 pm last night and by that point, I got to see him on the front porch. Far as we can tell his permanent roost is about three houses down in our culdesac. Apparently, he heard me step out onto the front porch because the next thing I know there is a grey streak careening across the yards running towards me. He’s always seemed way more interested in attention than the food, and last night was no different.
Tripod on the other hand was waiting around on me this morning. She tends to mill around near my chair just before I get up and then is waiting on me under the table over on the patio when I come out to feed. You can’t really see it in the footage but Splotchie another area tomcat is laying on the brown patio storage box. Tripod always acts like she wants attention but I’ve never been able to get close enough to her to touch her. Since she and Greybie seem to be getting along fairly well, it is sort of my hope that maybe seeing us pet him every night will eventually make her curious enough to come over toward us. There was one night when she ran over behind me while I was sitting in the chair… but then she thought better of it and ran back under the table. There is no doubt that I am her human… but she just doesn’t really know how to engage in that whole thing yet. I mean she’s been with us for roughly five years now, and I am largely just happy she is safe.
In other news, last night my Dad texted me a photo of his babies. I’ve shown off pictures of Fang, the Tomcat that is from a litter of kittens that showed up at their house some years ago. Well apparently Fang brought home a young pair of cats… one male and one female… obviously from the same litter. We have no clue WHY, but it seems like he told them my Dad was a friendly human and that he would take care of them because suddenly Bonnie and Clyde as Dad named them, have become a fixture of his world. Bonnie was very clearly “with children” when they showed up, and she now pretty much lives in his shop. He goes out every night, and she comes into the shop when he is shutting up for the evening and makes sure she has food and water.
A few weeks back she had her litter of kittens and now they are apparently old enough to be roaming around freely. There is a fourth kitten that is apparently shy, but they definitely look healthy and happy. Bonnie is extremely friendly and just like Fang comes up to me for attention whenever I come to visit. I’m hoping she will be fine with me playing with her kittens as well. A few weeks back for Mother’s Day it seemed like she was trying to run interference in the shop to try and keep me from finding wherever she had hidden them. So she clearly has protective mom instincts going on.
As far as gaming goes… I pretty much spent all of the extended weekend mainlining Honkai Star Rail. I’m really enjoying this game and yesterday I released a video of me playing through the second Simulated World instance. There is a game still under NDA that was having an event last weekend, and while I had every intention of playing some of it… I really mostly just kept playing Honkai. Originally I was going to write about my weekend adventures, but I sort of pivoted into anniversary and cat land. I am certain no one will mind me filling their feed with cute cats instead.
I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead of you. I’m already ready for another weekend. Thankfully it is a short week for me, so we will see how fast I can get there.
The post Twenty-Seven Years appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
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.
