Good Morning Friends! This weekend was a bit packed with both Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest in Las Vegas and ExileCon happening in New Zealand. Throughout the weekend I consumed quite a bit of information related to both, but of the two events the one I had been looking forward to the most was getting some more information regarding Path of Exile II. I wrote a bit in June talking about my hopes for the game, especially in light of not really feeling Diablo IV. Quite honestly I had reached a fairly unhealthy level of hype for the game and had begun pinning my hopes on it coming in and being the one game to unite them all. This was at least influenced by me dealing with the emotional hit after waiting a decade for it… Diablo IV was really just not designed for my tastes. This weekend was a bit of a second volley though as I am realizing that Path of Exile II may also not be for me. Maybe we as gamers should learn not to pin our hopes and dreams on something we’ve yet to play… but the heart wants what the heart wants. Gamers in general would be a lot less toxic if we were better at handling disappointment.
A lot has changed since Exilecon 2019. At that point, it was announced that POE1 and POE2 would effectively be the same game, and essentially would just be an additional campaign that dumps out into the same endgame. In the four years since the last ExileCon, a lot has changed… not the least of which has been deciding that the two games had simply grown too far apart. Now the plan is to have two games that share a pool of microtransactions, but each has its own gameplay and content. We got to see a lot of gameplay, and I have to say… after seeing what seemed to be a much more slow-paced and almost soulslike style of combat… I am kinda glad that Path of Exile 1 will remain intact. Watching the above gameplay demo… gave me some of the same concerns that I had watching gameplay from Diablo IV, that maybe it just isn’t for me. I don’t get my joy from reveling in difficulty… I get my joy from blowing up entire screens of enemies and getting a massive loot explosion.
I have to admit I had some concerns in the back of my head. It seemed like Path of Exile was really pushing its Ruthless mode very hard. I spent some of the weekends playing Ruthless (shown above) just to get a feel for it, and it took me way longer than I want to admit just to get through the first act. I think Ruthless was essentially Grinding Gear Games’ way of testing the waters to see how players were going to feel about some of the design decisions that they were going to be making with Path of Exile II. In fact, at the start of the Crucible, they decided to make the league start race be in Hardcore Ruthless Solo-Self-Found… and had the lowest race participation in Path of Exile history. So it makes me wonder… if the decision to split the games was made rather recently taking into account how the core Path of Exile audience seems to be allergic to that game mode. During a given league, there tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand players who participate in Ruthless as compared to the multiple hundreds of thousands that play the traditional trade league.
That isn’t to say that Path of Exile II does not interest me at all. In spite of not really feeling like an ARPG to me, I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of Diablo IV after all. The game seems to be leaning more heavily into class fantasy and creating some more clearly defined swimlanes for each class and ascendency. Essentially every attribute combination now will have two classes for a total of twelve with thirty-six ascendency classes in total. I’m really excited to see what the Druid and Monk for example play like, and I think even if it continues to double down on “super hardcore mode” vibes I got, since I won’t really be paying anything extra for it… it is likely going to be similar to the Retail vs Classic WoW dichotomy. If you have access to both you might as well dip your toes in occasionally.
There are a lot of really neat ideas that will be coming to the game. I like the concept of weapon swaps and being able to assign different skills to different weapons and have them change gear automagically. I also like the idea of being able to have conditional passive tree skills assigned based on which weapon set you are currently using. This is going to create a lot of really interesting build possibilities, but I am also concerned about some of the other things that appear to be happening. It seems as though movement abilities for example are just gone, as are some of the quirky spell types like brands, and it also feels like Auras will be significantly weaker than they currently are. Flasks are also designed to be more reactive than a defensive layer as they are today, which again… all of these things are probably better for new players but will serve to make POE2 feel wildly different than the original game.
I think the biggest concern I have is just how slow combat felt. In the demo embedded above, the characters seemed to spend more time rolling around on the ground than actually fighting things. This is what Dark Souls feels like to me… and that is not exactly the fantasy that I want to lean into with an ARPG. Like I said before I want to melt entire screens of monsters at once and pick through the remains looking for treasure. It feels like at some point they made a decision that Path of Exile would be the zoomy game and that Path of Exile II would be more slow and methodical. My hope is if this decision has officially been made, they maybe ease up a bit on the reigns of POE1 since many of the last few league’s worth of changes have seemingly been to slow things down a bit. Don’t get me wrong… the demos look really cool but I think it can be summarized best by what want of the devs said. To paraphrase they said that they wanted people to see the game and think it looks like a really good action game, not necessarily an ARPG.
It isn’t just a “me” thing… I’ve had side conversations on social media over the weekend about my weird feelings regarding the POE2 reveal. Additionally… I watched a lot of streamers playing the game and seemingly trying to hide some measure of disappointment. They were warned before sitting down to play that the game was a bit overturned, but all of the ones that I saw streamed… got wrecked and overwhelmed as they attempted to play POE2 like they would have approached POE1. The only person who really was successful as a whole was Kripparian, who admittedly is primarily a Ruthless mode player so likely approached the game from that standpoint rather than trying to gather up big packs and nuke them down quickly. Mathil seemed to have really mixed feelings about the game, and a number of folks who watched from home shared their concerns in live talking head reactions. So I at least feel like I am not alone in this.
Now this may be “copium”… but like I said I spent a lot of the weekend consuming POE2-related content and saw lots of different folks from GGG talking about the game and more specifically the demo that was available. It sounds as though they specifically wanted to slow down the gameplay so that it would record better and show off all of the work that they have done on the animation and skill design front. Players had no access to the skills screen and were effectively forced to play the builds that were presented to them. Based on some information like seeing how far off the gear that Kripp started with for example as compared to a few of the drops he got during his demo… it seems like they were trying to play mid-game content with starter gearing. So taking that into account… the game may be WAY faster when you actually get to play and gear your own character and design a relatively optimal build. If they are designing the game to be completed with bad gear and bad character templates… then maybe it will be good for brand-new players.
The other big disappointment of the weekend is that the “Closed Beta” begins June 7th of 2024. So we have almost a full year to wait until players can realistically get their hands on the game. I would assume they will have an “Open Beta” period as well, which means we are realistically looking at a Q4 2024 release for the game. A lot can change in ten months. I know I will play it when it comes out, but I am also going to try my best not to pin my hopes on it. I love Path of Exile 1, and my hope is that this means that they are actually going to devote more resources to it. I heard during the event that for the last year and a half, there has been an eight-person team supporting that game, with all resources being siphoned off by POE2 to speed up its development. I would wait an entire year more if it meant that we get better leagues as a result. With that in mind… the last several leagues have been rather impressive considering how tightly constrained resources were.
I am super pumped about the next league, but that is another post for another day. What were your thoughts about POE2? Do you also have concerns or were you pumped at what you saw? Feel free to drop me a line below.
The post Digesting Path of Exile II appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We start off the show with Ash talking about playing through Wandersong. From there Thalen talks about his experience with Lost Words, and Tam dives into a discussion about how Far Cry does a shockingly good job with its cultural experience. From there we talk about Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest and the announcement for the Dawntrail Expansion. Then we talk a bit about the news coming out of ExileCon with Path of Exile II. We also discuss the changes coming to the first game with 3.22 and the Trail of the Ancestors League. Finally, we wrap things up with a discussion about Dave the Diver again and how it is this weird showcase for how to make an excellent mobile game… even though it isn’t one.
If you have not been following the saga of Glorbo, you might be confused when I posted a random comment last night like “Praise Glorbo”. Essentially fans have been trying to trip up AI-generated content on less-than-reputable websites… and likewise trying to see who will just run with it. The first instance I am aware of, and the one that made gaming press news… is a Reddit post about the introduction of Glorbo to World of Warcraft. This spawned a number of AI-generated articles including the one above that is archived here. A few days ago the Destiny 2 Community got in on the fun and spawned their own AI-Generated article about how tough the new Glorbo fight is to beat and even a post featuring tips and tricks.
So with the FFXIV Fanfest and ExileCon both taking place this weekend… I thought it was fertile ground to fuck with the AI a bit more. Yesterday I contemplated writing up a blog post talking about how Glorbo had leaked just ahead of Fanfest or ExileCon and then trying to spread it on Reddit. So far various fandoms have been more than willing to play along, and it would have been very believable for something to leak just ahead of a presentation. However, at the end of the day, I decided against it. Firstly I was not certain that I wanted the spotlight shone on my blog, or the server load. Secondly, I was not sure I wanted to be involved in the spread of disinformation… even if it is just to fuck with some AI scrapers.
This morning I realized that I could join in with the nonsense in a relatively harmless manner. A while back I went through the process of getting Stable Diffusion models up and running on the tensor cores of my graphics card. This has provided me with some weird hours of fun from time to time, feeding prompts and going down rabbit holes trying to produce something interesting from the madness. This morning I decided that I would ask the mechanical hivemind what Glorbo looked like. So we start off with probably my favorite… and easily the most whimsical that was generated off the prompt “Introducing Glorbo”.
Next up I decided to vary that prompt a bit and feed it “Glorbo the Movie”. My favorite part about this one is how confidently the digital toddler produced something that looks like properly formed words but is complete gibberish. It definitely feels like we are going in a “Pokemon” direction with this one. I am not sure what is more troubling… the fact that his hand just disappears in the fur of whatever is going on with the left creature… or the very human hand on the shoulder potentially emanating from the large-toothed beachball thingy.
Next up I decided to go down a rabbit hole of trying to ask the art mangling machine what Glorbo would look like when he arrived in Path of Exile. This one specifically is off the prompt “Glorbo The New Uber Boss from Path of Exile”. Any combination of Glorbo and Path of Exile seemed to produce this wizard-like dude with very chunky man-nips. This is the most work-appropriate version of the various images that it generated. There were a handful that looked like Vladimir Putin with very aggressive nipples, and I will spare you the damage to your sanity. That said… other than the inexplicably blue beard… I could see passing this image off as something coming to Path of Exile.
The little engine that could completely derails however whenever I started trying to get it to show me Glorbo from FFXIV. This monstrosity is from the prompt “Glorbo Riding a Chocobo”. Like I have no clue what is going on…. with this Horse/Chocobo hydra being ridden by another Chocobo chicken thing.
Even after trying to do a few generations of steering it away from the void… it just kept getting worse. This was honestly the “best” version of what I was able to get from the nonsense machine. This is some kid riding the Human-Centipede version of a Chocobo… while inexplicably wearing what looks like stilts that have a pair of shoes on them. So I am deciding my friends… This is Glorbo. This is Glorbo in all his glory when it lands in Eorzea.
Anyways thanks for indulging me in this madness. I hope you all have a great weekend. Next week starts Blaugust and I figure we will also have plenty to talk about coming out of both Fanfest and ExileCon.
The post It’s Glorbin Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Yesterday I said some nonsense about wanting to finish up the campaign on my Arma Brand Scion. What I did instead… was spend all night last night running maps on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This was not necessarily one of those planned event sort of things, but just something that happened. Yesterday I talked a bit about needing to go for Pain Attunement for my Scion, to really make sense of running around in low-life mode all of the time. The problem is the node is way the hell over between the Witch and the Shadow on the passive tree. There are a few alternative ways to get this… the first being a Skin of the Lords but there are currently none available on crucible trade league with the correct combination of socket colors… and even with wrong colors, they start around 8 divines. Another option would be Crown of Thorns, but I am using my helm currently as a pseudo-six-link for Righteous Fire… so I don’t really want to do that.
The last option is to try and find a weapon with a Crucible tree that has the Pain Attunement node. These are apparently sought out because again… the cheapest one I could find is a shitty wand for 8 divines. So it made me remember that during the entire Crucible league, I have been chucking +40 Elemental Damage bases into my bank. The idea was that at some point I would run a bunch of crucibles in order to craft myself the PERFECT Righteous Fire Sceptre. This never happened, but I am finding myself in need of that pain attunement node so I hopped on my RF Juggernaut and tore through T16 maps all night long in search of this one elusive node. The thing is… I don’t even really care about the rest of the crucible tree and would likely craft on any base that I could get that node.
I think Crucible is one of those leagues that will be judged more fondly as time passes. When it was first revealed it had a bit of a “is this all” feeling to it. The league mechanic itself was not terribly rewarding, but it did allow you to do some really weird shit with your weapons and shields. It has also produced a number of completely broken builds. More than anything though, it caused someone like me… who doesn’t do a lot of crafting… to completely change the way I viewed items. Everything had its initial value, but also the possibility to turn into something interesting if it happened to roll exactly the right Crucible tree.
I am legitimately not joking when I say I have many stash tabs crammed full of potential bases for various projects. This is my sceptres tab, but there are also a number of these sitting in a dump tab as well that I never sorted into the proper tabs. I collected Champion Kite Shields because I was hunting for bases that happened to have the node saying that it sold for a unique. I was trying to get some cheap Aegis Aurora, but the market for that item plummeted given how much more common it was thanks to the crucible trees. I also cannot count the number of bows of various tripes that I unlocked Crucible trees for hunting for specific nodes to bolster my Toxic Rain and Explosive Arrow builds. It was not “bing bing wahoo” exciting, but it served as a constant project in the back of my mind which means that the league mechanic as a whole probably did what it was supposed to do.
While it is the end of the league and nothing really matters anymore… I gotta say I enjoyed zipping through maps last night and chasing Crucible trees. Admittedly this only really works because I have a fairly powerful character who can mostly laugh off the extremely rippy nature of Crucible mobs. Essentially my goal while running these maps was 1) to find another +40% Elemental Damage Sceptre base and 2) to find another t16 map… allowing me to basically infinitely sustain this nonsense. For the most part, it worked, but I did have to put a slight tweak into my loot filter just to make sure I was not missing Void and Opal Sceptre bases. I did this a while ago for Champion Kite Shields because I was doing the same thing, trying to sustain so that I always had an item to unlock waiting in the wings and was getting another map to keep churning the process out.
I added a few bonus objectives last night, namely trying to collect new bosses for the Maven with each map run and then eventually running at Maven Atlas when I filled up her bar. This led to more than a few boss maps, but the only one that I stopped what I was doing and ran was the Hunter map I got. Hunter bases are so freaking valuable as a whole that it felt like something that was easily worth doing. I got a Council of Cats card that I had never seen before which was pretty cool. It isn’t valuable really but still sorta neat as it unlocks a series of Feral-Cat-themed items. Maven’s Atlas fight is fairly straightforward on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut and in theory, I am building towards more attempts at the Maven if I choose to go down that path. I am not exactly the biggest fan of that fight as I am not good at the memory game.
One of the things that Path of Exile excels at is giving you missions. It isn’t so much that the game draws a line in the sand and tells you that you have to do this 400 times in order to progress. If it did that it would feel awful. What it does instead is give you the tools to go target farm something yourself, while knowing in the back of your head that there is always a way to just buy your way out of the hole you have dug. I know that at any point I tire of this mission, I can just spend the divines to buy the item I am seeking… but that sort of is what makes the search more enjoyable. Can I do this thing that has value in the game for myself, rather than just hitting the auction house? That is ultimately the question and at least for now, I am enjoying that search.
The post Searching Crucible Trees appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
