This is one of those blog posts that I am not highly likely to syndicate widely. There are essentially two reasons why I do this… the first is that the content is of a deeply personal nature and the second is that I am writing about something that I don’t think anyone is really going to care about. This blog post is the later because I don’t have a ton of import to discuss, but also sort of feel obligated to make a post given the whole weekly blog posts schedule thing. Firstly I wish Henry Kissinger a long well deserved stay in the deepest levels of hell. Last night was the first time Mastodon/Fediverse felt like Twitter as everyone came out of the woodwork to dance on his grave. I know it is generally thought poorly to speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose truly awful policies are responsible for roughly four million deaths and throwing several countries into decades’ worth of turmoil is excluded from that statement. Congratz to the Grim Reaper for finally getting that epic pull.
Next up on today’s wild ride of topics… I finally left the Hinterlands. For anyone who does not understand that reference… in Dragon Age Inquisition, the Hinterlands is this massive nigh endless zone full of busywork that has stalled out many a playthrough. I know for me it personally wrecked at least two attempts to actually get through that game. Act 1 in Baldur’s Gate feels like a similar experience. That first area of the game is so packed full of content that you feel like you have to complete everything before just moving on with the damned story. I have graduated into Act II, and have now officially made it further in this playthrough than I have before. My previous run stalled out in the middle of the Underdark segment, and last night I crossed that barrier and finally met “Not-Gandalf”.
I have to admit that I have really mixed feelings about Baldur’s Gate III thus far. I love the story, and I love the dialog options… and the truly stupid level of detail brought on by the smallest changes in the way you approach things. However, I still feel like combat in the game is a deeply tedious process. There are times I realize that my tastes have changed and while I loved Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 back in the day… and ravenously played them… my tastes have changed. I would kill to have a version of this game with action combat, because I get so overwhelmingly bored while waiting on combat to resolve. Were this more akin to something like Mass Effect, it would easily be my game of the year. I’ve realized this is a “me” problem and not a game problem because I find 4x games similarly tedious when I used to lose entire weekends playing them.
Nick aka WithoutAGout replaced Bex as the community manager for Grinding Gear Games. If his tweet yesterday is to be believed… the theories surrounding a return of Sentinel are wrong. That is not to say that they could have simply not renamed that mechanic or this tweet could be a troll… but I guess we will find out in a short enough period of time. I think this does however indicate that we are likely to get a full patch notes drop shortly after the reveal. I am still banking on there being some sort of a Ritual rework coming with the Affliction League. What I however am most interested in is knowing when I can set up the “Bel League” private league and get that ball rolling.
This is your reminder to make sure your Twitch account is connected to your Grinding Gear Games account and that if you watch 45 minutes between 12:30 PST and 21:30 PST you can earn a set of cosmetic wings. I can’t say that I am terribly interested in insect wings, but I am going to try and watch this regardless so I might as well get some free mtx? You will of course have to redeem them from your Twitch Drops Inventory before getting them in game. I am sure tomorrow I will be making a post talking about my thoughts about the announcement as a whole, and as such today is this awkward middle ground of almost being there but not quite knowing much.
SirGog has once again done a big ole video talking about his thoughts about 3.23 and what is likely going to be on the chopping block. Various other folks have thrown out a few ideas, for example, Ghazzy thinks it is time to nerf Righteous Fire. However as an “RF Enjoyer” I hope that this won’t be the case, and I honestly think it isn’t likely because it isn’t like that build is overpowered. It is widely played because it is the best new player experience and has hands down the best guide creator supporting that build. GGG desperately needs an approachable onramp to the game, and right now RF provides that… and I feel like they would be shooting themselves many times in several sets of feet if they did anything to damage that. The only thing that is going to pull me away from RF for Bel League is if Guardian moves forward completely untouched.
I hope you all are having a wonderful week. Tomorrow I am sure I will have more cogent things to say about both the Affliction League and whatever comes from the Diablo IV Campfire chat.
The post Maybe Not Sentinel appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning’s post is almost entirely thanks to SirGog a YouTuber who does an admirable job of providing Path of Exile information and largely just getting straight to the facts or data-influenced predictions. I am writing a blog post about today’s spoilers because they represent a whole order of nonsense. Essentially tomorrow is the big reveal stream for the Affliction League and generally speaking in the days leading up to this stream, we start seeing spoilers from the community staff at Grinding Gear Games. This league has been a bit odd, and the spoiler started later than normal… and have been not terribly forthcoming with information. This could be caused by many different things, not the least of which could be that this is the first spoiler season since the departure of long-term community manager Bex.
To this point we have had a Divination Card spoiled, and some general quality of life changes like the ability to split stacks of currency in the trade window. We’ve also received notice that Trial of the Ancestors league would not be going into standard, and that all of the uniques associated with that league save for the ones that have specific interactions with the tattoo mechanic would be going into the general “drop anywhere” unique pool. Players have focused heavily on the specific wording of this notice “Trial of the Ancestors won’t be going core in 3.23” as a sign that we might be seeing some of these mechanics returning later. I would honestly be shocked if we do not see the Trial in some form because it seemed like it was a huge amount of work to make that content and tattoos as a mechanic were really interesting.
Yesterday/This Morning because timezones are nonsense… Grinding Gear Games released a relatively innocuous image that I have edited to highlight a few things. Firstly the obvious “spoiler” is showing that there is going to be a nice quality of life change that indicates how many character slots you have on your account and how many you have available. Given that I have reached the point where I have to start deleting my characters… this is a good change. What is less than obvious are the two character names. Firstly it was pointed out that those names are too specific to be a community manager banging away at the keyboard. As SirGog states in his video, try typing them and you will see just how awkward it would be to arrive at them by random chance.
This led to speculation and eventually a solution presented by Neversink the dedicated person behind the best series of loot filters for Path of Exile. It was a Caesar Cypher, where you essentially shift the characters by a fixed set of letters to get the original message… in this case an 8-character shift. The end result gives you the message “IWONDER INALTESSENTIALS” which sort of screams Anagram. After many attempts including some rather rude ones… Neversink landed on “Sentinels Atlas Win or Die” which folks are taking to mean that Sentinels are going standard, that Affliction is going to have an Atlas Rework of some sort, and that Ultimatum league is going standard as well.
I admit I did not fully understand what players meant about Ultitmatum coming back, because in patch 3.19 GGG gave us the ability to collect a bunch of nonsense from Vaal activities in order to summon the Trial Master. I’ve done this a few times because one of the rarest items required drops down in Delve. However. since I did not play in this league, I did not realize that there was an in-map component to it as well. I gotta say I am kinda excited about the prospects of something like this permanently getting added to the game. I assume there will be Atlas support for both Sentinels and the Ultimatum Trial encounter, and that the Trial Master will still exist as a weird Vaal crafting recipe.
Sentinels and Ultimatum Trials would already be an awful lot of new content added to the game, but I can’t see that GGG won’t have something new and unique for Affliction. I still think that we are going to see some sort of Ritual rework as part of this patch cycle because the trailer clearly shows a ritual totem. I am definitely looking forward to the stream tomorrow where they announce the full features of the league. If you can tune in tomorrow the stream will start at 12:30 PM PST and drops will be available until 9:30 PM PST featuring a set of Huntsman Wings. Funny enough Diablo 4 is having a stream just ahead of the Path of Exile proceedings where they are going to talk about the upcoming additional changes to Season 2.
I am amped to see what all the Affliction League is going to entail, and I am also bracing myself for some nerfs… specifically to Guardian.
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I’ve been on a narrative game kick of late, starting and finishing Alan Wake II, and then wrapping up the back half of Jedi Survivor. Essentially I know that as of December 8th, I will be once again enthralled with Path of Exile and the new league that is about to start. More importantly, this is the league we are planning on doing a private guild-only type of league which will mean we will all be leaning on each other heavily to get the things we need to complete builds without access to the larger trade league. Thursday is the big reveal of the rest of the information surrounding the league, and in the time between now and the start I am trying to catch up on narrative gaming that I have been ignoring for the sake of more Path of Exile.
I had been gone so long from Baldur’s Gate 3 that I decided to just reroll. I had never made it out of Act 1 and I was not really feeling my Duergar Barbarian so it did not seem like a massive loss. This time around I rolled a more traditional “Belghast” appearance character which means Human Male, Black Hair, Some sort of Ponytail or longer haircut, and a trimmed beard. This is a character template I have returned to time and time again over the years and feels like the most cogent realization of me I sort of wish I was. Also in Dungeons and Dragons terms I always play Rangers and Clerics… so I opted to go for a Ranger and down the dual-wielding path that I did so many times in Neverwinter Nights. Of course, I have a bear friend… and mostly Ranger was to have easier access to talking to animals. So far I like how things are going a bit better and I have corrected some early mistakes that I made.
Other than Baldur’s Gate 3, I started playing some more Guild Wars 2 and actually started the Secrets of the Obscure expansion proper. I gotta say the first map is really good and in spite of requiring flight… it seems like it would give folks a Skyscale almost immediately. I’ve just randomly happened across the meta event three times and enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems to be a happy medium between something forgettable like the Svanir Shaman and something way too difficult and cumbersome like Dragon’s End. It doesn’t really feel as rewarding as one of the big metas but also still produces quite a bit of stuff so that seems fine as well. It grants access to a loot room at the very end which is like a cut-rate version of Auric Basin which again… makes sense given that Auric Basin is probably way too rewarding.
Just the act of bopping around the landscape and chasing Rifts to close seems quite enjoyable as well. I decided to go ahead and start the content on my Ranger, in spite of never quite finishing up the Path of Fire content. It seemed very much like this was disconnected from the chronology of the previous expansions, so I was happy to see that was mostly the case here. There are characters that maybe had more dialog since I had encountered them before, but other than being “The Commander” and being known for ending the Dragon Cycle… there really is not much feedover. It also seems to assume that I finished End of Dragons because it talks about events as they have happened for someone who has finished that content. This might make the experience a bit disconcerting and spoilery if you had never completed any of that content on any other character.
Lastly, I have continued to slowly chip away at leveling classes in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve fallen into a very casual rhythm of popping in long enough to do a set of beast tribe quests, daily cactpot, and a daily frontline… which combined usually ends up adding up to a full level. At this point, I have leveled Monk and Samurai doing this and am sitting at level 88 on my Dragoon and should in theory get 89 today and 90 tomorrow. When I was leveling classes prior to Endwalker, I was super focused and spent a lot of time maximizing my experience gain… and it wound up just burning me out. Instead, now I am doing three easy things every day that I find enjoyable, but also seem to be making serious progress at working through my backlog of classes. In theory, the goal behind all of this is to finally have a great purge of gear before the launch of Dawntrail.
I know several of these things will probably fall by the wayside on the 8th when the Affliction League launches in Path of Exile, but for the moment I am having quite a bit of fun picking away at the edges of things.
The post Talking to Animals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I hit the credit roll on Jedi Survivor. I’ve always thought the “production babies” screen on these games is fun and tends to illustrate the scope and timeframe required to create these experiences. In High School I saw Jurassic Park and Lord of Illusions back to back… and I have never been entirely certain if Lord of Illusions felt awful because Jurassic Park was so brilliant. Similarly, I am not sure if I am judging Jedi Survivor harshly due to the fact that I just finished Alan Wake II and it was so brilliant. While I enjoyed myself this game was a bit of a mess, and nowhere near as focused as the first game Jedi Fallen Order. This morning I am going to do my best to give a non-spoiler explanation of my thoughts.
Jedi Survivor is simultaneously too large and too small… in that, you essentially have one massive world called Koboh that allows you to explore every inch of it and a bunch of very shallow destinations. So much of the gameplay revolves around going and collecting some MacGuffin, flying across the galaxy to have a conversation, and then flying back to Koboh to do something. This cycle repeats several times during the course of this game and it ends up making the entire experience feel like a series of fetch quests. I feel like I am supposed to be in awe of being able to explore this planet and find all sorts of little diversions… that do not really matter to the game as a whole and only serve to muddy the waters when you are attempting to follow the golden path. The first game felt like it did a better job of giving you a concrete reason for going everywhere, and if you wanted to go back later and 100% that area it was up to you to do so. Fifteen hours into the game I was still being introduced to new NPCs with their own currency chase to unlock a different sort of cosmetic.
What the game does nail however is giving you these perfect vignettes of action scattered between miles of mashing the shift key in order to try and make yourself run faster through the boring bits. How clean and tight these corridors are designed, only serves to illustrate how muddy the waters really are. Jedi Fallen Order was a game made up of only the good bits, and Survivor feels like a game that has been watered down significantly in order to increase “player engagement” artificially. The game has a fast travel system, but it never seems to really matter because anywhere you might need to go… is down a path that you did not have access to previously. So ultimately you still end up spending huge amounts of your time running past landscapes that are all too familiar as you seek that one area that a new widget or ability allows you to access.
The game does however manage to set the stage for a whole slew of interesting characters that are not exclusively Human and Twilek. For example meet Skoova Stev, a delightful “Big Daddy” reference and the NPC that unlocks this entire fishing and fishtank maintenance mini-game. Someone poured a lot of love into this character and I find it a bit sad that it is entirely fluff… and does not really play any importance in the thrust of the main game as a whole. The game is littered with these loveable characters that don’t really matter and you could probably go through the entire game without ever actually encountering them. I love that they all exist, but wish they were more than glorified vendor NPCs.
The game hits the ground strong with one of the best tutorial sequences I have ever played through in one of these action combat platformer RPGs. The same is true for so many moments in the game, but the story that is attempting to weave them all together is a bit muddled. I think on some level I never really bought into the main Villain of the title. They are bad because the game tells you that they are bad and that they spend a lot of time doing “megalomanic monologues”. There is a mini-boss that is way more relatable other than the fact that they keep “playing with his food” as it were and letting you go every time you encounter them. When I finally had to kill them… I sorta felt bad because they had hitched their honor to a cardboard cutout of a villain.
Then there is the big reveal at the end… that legitimately did throw me for a loop and served to kinda make up for some of the muddled mess in the middle. The thing that I cannot entirely forgive however is that the game robs me of any agency. This is where we get into some light spoiler territory… but there are several points in the game where you must embrace the dark side in order to complete an encounter. I was given no choice save for a fail condition and having to restart that area. I am not edge lord enough to revel in Darkside Cal Kestis. I am a Paragon path player in Mass Effect, and no matter how much I might think I am going to do a renegade playthrough I always shift away from it quickly because it “feels bad”. Being the villain feels bad. Turning to the Darkside even for a moment… feels bad and feels like a betrayal of the character I have been building in my mind.
Do I think Jedi Survivor is a bad game? No, not at all. Do I think it doesn’t really deserve to be on any “games of the year” lists? Probably. It has some great moments but the muddy middle serves to tarnish everything that was great about the experience for me. It was a “mid” game for me, and aggressively so… but it was still something that I felt was worth finishing up. If you enjoyed the first game, then I would suggest you eventually pick this one up as well. I would probably wait for it to go on sale however as it was nowhere near as impressive as some of the other titles from this year. I still love Cal Kestis and the characters that are being woven together in this world. I still hope at some point these characters cross over into the Mandoverse that is being built on Disney Plus. It would be a crying shame for such a great actor as Cameron Monaghan to not get a live-action Star Wars debut.
Now that I have talked about the story and gameplay… let me dive into the other thing that harmed my experience. This fucking screen shows up every time you launch the game. You would think that once the shaders were compiled and cached… you would never see this screen ever again. However, you would be wrong and it takes a couple of minutes to load through this screen every time I launch the game. Worse than this is the fact that the game can only seem to run for about an hour before locking up and crashing to the desktop. If you happen to get a crash during one of the many sequences that do not checkpoint your progress in the form of a save file… you will have to repeat whatever nonsense you were doing before the crash. This meant that a lot of my gameplay was trying to log out every hour and reload the game in order to forestall a crash…. only to see this damned shader caching screen again. I get that I am a weirdo in that I want to play this with a mouse and keyboard… but I do feel punished for not just playing it on a console.
The game has a lot of really cool things going for it, and I know that I will be picking up the next game whenever it releases because you sort of end at the midpoint of a larger story arc. This is the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Respawn Jedi trilogy. While we end on a more hopeful note than Empire did… there is definitely a lot of baggage that our crew is going to be sorting out. I am “bought in” to the franchise and the characters at this point, and I will be here for the entire run however long that lasts. I hope however that they return to something closer to the first game for the third. This type of story was better served by a tighter style of gameplay as opposed to the more open-world experience. I get that this is odd since I never liked any of the Assassin’s Creed games prior to them attempting to replicate the Witcher 3 format… but I feel like it just does not work for the Respawn Jedi series.
Did I completely miss the mark? Did you play it and love the faffing about? Drop me a line below.
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