Morning Folks! I’ve been cycling through a lot of games lately… namely because I am in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for Friday’s Path of Exile event to begin. I’ve also been working through a number of books in audio form, which means I can’t really juggle story content while also listening and enjoying a book. As a result, I have been playing through a number of mechanically enjoyable games where I either don’t need to see the story… or I don’t really care about the story. I apologize to all of the narrative team that I am certain is doing some amazing work New World… but I really do not care about what is going on with the story of that game. For me it is a big fun sandboxy crafting MMORPG nonsense fest and as a result it has been in this limited rotation of games that I have been spending time playing. I realized this morning that I had not really talked much about it.
The first cool thing that I want to talk about is that the game has an extremely robust appearance system, where you can essentially take any item you loot and convert it into an item skin that you can then apply to items freely. While I had a pretty large collection of skins from various Twitch drops and a handful of store purchases… there is one appearance that I really wanted. I hate the highest tiers of the Syndicate armor, because it is just some boring assed robes. However, I loved the mid-tier design that was just a nice simple armor with a purple Syndicate tabard over it. I liked this vibe so much that even though it was not the gear that I was wearing at the time, I had Ammo draw my character wearing it when I added New World to the site masthead. I can now run around in the game with something pretty close to this appearance permanently.
The only negative of the system is that you pretty much have to buy these from the in-game shop. It is roughly $2.50 for a single transmog token, which then can be used to convert a single item into a skin. I vaguely remembered them talking about these dropping out in the world as well when the system was first introduced, but so far the only two tokens I have found came from the free track of the battle pass system. This means that If you really want to convert large swaths of items into appearances you are probably going to be shelling out $20 at a time to pick up 10 tokens at the cheapest conversion rate. I’ve not been running dungeons, so maybe they are dropping there and I have just not encountered them. That said I have even gone to some elite areas and looted a few of those chests and gotten bubkis.
I’ve played through most of the content in the new area, but the piece that I have been focused on lately is trying to get all of my gathering abilities up high enough to be able to partake in the new resource nodes when I find them. Essentially everything in the game has been raised a tier so that you can take your character up to level 65… you can also raise all of your professions by another 50 points. The combat leveling was super straightforward and I blew past those levels well before finishing the campaign. The profession leveling has bit considerably slower and I need to get everything up 5 points to 205 to harvest the new stuff. For example, the above screenshot shows some Mythril nodes that I was way too low level to harvest… which made me sad. Skinning of course levels super fast because it is fueled by murder, but I have been roaming around some of my old world haunts to push up the rest of the professions.
I really like the new weapon type that was added to the game and have mostly been running around with Flail and Greatsword. I can’t say it does anywhere near as much damage as Greatsword does, but it is still fairly fun. I seem to have a One Handed Weapon and Shield Fetish when it comes to combat in games, and the Flail of course just furthers that fantasy. I still need many levels with the weapon but I have taken it up to 14 and unlocked a lot of the goodness. I opted to go down the tanking tree which should shock zero people who have read this blog for any period of time. I might at some point respec and play around with the cleric tree though as supposedly it gives you some ranged attacks.
The biggest improvement that I have seen has been in itemization and loot drops. What I would have considered previously to be “great gear” has been dropping like candy. I’ve seen many in world legendary drops and a ton of “named” item drops that come with fixed stats. All of the gear that I had previously was taken up to at least level 600 when the patch dropped, and now I am very regularly seeing upwards of 680 gear dropping. A new Artifact rarity tier of gear was added to the game and I’ve managed to pick one piece up from completing steps in the campaign, and another piece because I happened upon a group of a dozen folks farming a boss. Any time you see a cluster like that you might as well stick around and farm too… which netted a light armor chest. I do not fully understand how artifact gear works, but it appears that it can be configured at least somewhat by the players.
I think my focus in the short term is going to be to push my trade skills up a bit so that I can start crafting some nice upgrades. When I last played the game I was capped on Armorcrafting, and I would like to get it up there again so that I can maybe craft some artifact gear. After that, I really want to push up Engineering so I can make a new set of harvesting tools. The prices on the market in the game are insane… and item level 700 gathering tools are around 30-100k gold which seems like complete and total nonsense. Since I enjoy the crafting system I might as well push my trades up and craft them myself and then sell the botched crafts.
I doubt that I will ever go back to playing New World as a mainline game, but I am enjoying poking at it from time to time. The community surrounding the game is still not really my crowd. It is entirely too PVP-focused and the player base tends to make some interesting decisions… like this mess of a house, I took a screenshot of this morning. I admit it sort of makes me wish there was a roleplaying server as those servers tend to just have a higher caliber of player when it comes to community interactions. While not a roleplayer myself in the game, I’ve always flocked to those servers as they seemed to be more my speed.
If you have New World in your game library, you might patch it up and give it a shot. The game has improved massively since launch and I have been enjoying myself.
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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been working through the Craft Sequence series by Max Gladstone. The problem is I have no clue why I even know this series of books exists. Generally speaking, I can usually pin down a recommendation to a specific friend or group of friends who have been actively reading a given book. For this one however I am at a bit of a loss, but at some point over the last few months I added this to my “Want to Read” queue in Bookwyrm. I love Bookwyrm and for anyone who does not know what that is… it is essentially something akin to Goodreads but that exists as part of the ActivityPub “Fediverse” and federates freely with Mastodon. You could in theory use it as your primary Fediverse account, but I tend to treat it as a separate thing and then boost my activity there to my main account. I wish there was a way to formally link a Bookwyrm account to a Mastodon account, but in spite of that issue, it still works extremely well. I’ve been using it to track my progress with the various books I have read this year.
The Craft Sequence as a whole piqued my interest when I heard it referenced as another “Urban Fantasy” setting. The thing is… this is a wildly different flavor of Urban Fantasy than something like Dresden Files. In the Dresdenverse there is a veil between the true world and the world that the common folks understand, and it is maintained to keep both sides safe. In the Craft Sequence, it is a fully fantasy world that just happens to have evolved to modern levels of civilization. The thing is though… you don’t necessarily get this feeling in full effect until you get past the first book. Reading Three Parts Dead, it feels like you are reading any other fantasy novel save for the fact that it has a lot more modern language. It is a tale of necromancy and gods… and the legal contracts that bind them to their followers and what happens when a god dies. I loved the character of Tara Abernathy… a young associate at the Craft firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao on her very first project for that group. I described the feeling to a friend like “What if Hermione was a Necromancer and got kicked out of Hogwarts”.
The second novel Two Serpents Rise takes place with a completely different set of characters in a different kingdom. This is the point where I realized we were building a universe more than we were going to be getting serialized content focused on a single group of characters. This novel was deeply interesting because it focused more on the ramifications of an event that took place 50 years before the events of these novels. Craft practitioners and the Gods went to war… and the Gods lost. Two Serpents Rise is set in a pseudo-mesoamerican-inspired culture where 50 years ago… human sacrifice and the worship of the gods… were outlawed. There is an older generation that feels like this was not a good idea and as a result, the city has been in a bit of a cold war with the theists ever since. Your primary point of view on this situation is from Caleb Altemoc who works as a Risk Manager for Red King Consolidated and is attempting to make sure that city services are not negatively impacted. I did not think this book was nearly as dynamic as Three Parts Dead, but I still found it enjoyable.
Last night I finished Full Fathom Five, the third book in this sequence and this is the point when the methodology of this series is starting to pay off. Once again we are focused on a completely different setting, this time the Island kingdom of Kavekana. This is a place that lost all of its Gods during the God War and instead figured out how to create pseudo-gods in the form of “Idols” which are used as essentially savings accounts for storing “souls” as part of the banking industry of the magical world. This gives the island significantly more power than they have any right to, which places it on a precarious balance between assorted Military powers… but its Financial clout keeps them from being invaded. Your point of view character is Priestess Kai who works for the group that shapes the idols and worships them in order to imbue them with something resembling life to keep the financial transactions safe and secure. There is however a plot in the works to destabilize the entire system and a few characters that we met in book one and book two as minor side characters shift to the focus in this book.
I have to say so far… Full Fathom Five was my favorite of the Craft Sequence to date. Like I said we are beginning to finally see the payoff from all the work building this world and setting up its political and theistic structures. I think going forward the plots will begin to interweave a bit more as the entire sequence of books is likely leading to some crescendo. This is very much a series of books that has been constructed with a plan and I am exceptionally interested in seeing where that plan is going. I’ve tried not to read up too much on this series but it seems like Chronologically Book Two takes place before the events of Book Three… and then Book 4 is technically the beginning of the series. There are apparently Six books in the main sequence and then two additional books that begin another series that is connected to the first six. I think at this point I am bought in and will be reading through these until I reach the end.
It has been a bit of a wild ride for me when it comes to books and reading. Generally speaking, I tend to only read a few books in a given year, but as of last night, I had completed forty-three and will likely close out the year around forty-five. I’ve had a blast and in part, all of this was prompted by my wife and I finally renewing our Library cards last December in order to take advantage of the easy book checkout process brought on with the LibbyApp. We both have three different library cards connected to that system now each with their own slightly different collections of what we have access to. It does however make me a little frustrated that I did not do this sooner given how much I have thrived while reading all of these books.
Right now I am taking a bit of a break from the Craft Sequence as the second “Viv” book by Travis Baldree was released yesterday. I did not realize this was going to be a prequel and would technically be book zero in this series. Legends and Lattes is probably my favorite book that I read this year, and it was such a cozy and comfortable setting to spend some time in. I fell in love with all of the characters, and so far Bookshops and Bonedust seems every bit as delightful as the first book did. I’ve only put in about a half dozen chapters but I will be burning through this one over the next few days.
What are your favorite books that you have read this year? What series should I check out? Drop me a line below.
The post The Craft Sequence appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! I went down a brand new rabbit hole in Final Fantasy XIV… or at least one that was new to me. After being prompted by friends for the hundredth time… I unlocked the Island Sanctuary. This seems like it could be an all-consuming addition to an already all-consuming game. I would liken it to something akin to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley in that Tataru gifted us an Island… only to do the hard work of getting it up and running and making it profitable for her wide-stretching enterprises. Essentially the early functionality has focused on gathering resources and building out a base of operations, fields to grow crops, pastures to keep animals, and a workshop to churn out tchotchkes to sell to tourists.
There seems to be a pretty hard limit on how much you can reasonably progress in a single day, but right now I have my second version of the lodge up and running, my crops and pasture upgraded to rank 2, and a workshop that I am starting to sort out how to schedule items to be produced. A lot of this involves retreading the same areas of the island and collecting resources to then funnel into further production similar to any game of this sort. Yesterday’s mission was to farm up enough resources to make enough nets and then run around the island capturing all of the Small-Net-Capturable animals that I could. While I failed miserably at the only Rare I was able to find… aka the Ornery Karakul I did eventually pick up all five of the baseline small animals.
The biggest project from yesterday was completing my first “landmark” for which I chose a big Tree House because I figured it would be cool to be able to climb up inside it and look out at everything. The other option was a Lighthouse which I am hoping eventually I can have both. I am very much in a phase of the island where I am not getting much in the way of directions. The quest objective is something generic like “develop the island”, but I seem to have built everything that I can reasonably build and the little mammet that has a quest is red with no clear indication of how to make it not be red. My guess is that this is probably a time-gating thing, so I will likely spend a bit of time gathering resources and making sure my crops and animals are doing well, but essentially wait for the next phase of the island to kick in.
On the job leveling front, I got my Samurai to level 90 over lunch when I was doing some quests and shifted gears to working on the Monk for anything that might gain experience. I also capped out my Wolf marks so I spent that down on some trophies for the house. I am not really focused on leveling so much as doing a little bit of a few things each day. Mostly I am doing my Hippo Rider quests to level that faction up and then queuing for a Frontline and between those two activities I am flying through levels pretty quickly. At some point, I will probably start queuing for dungeons and such but I am also not super worried about doing things quickly.
I am of course still tracking progress… because I like spreadsheets and data points… but I am trying to approach all of this in a fairly chill manner. I don’t really care if I get everything to 90 before the release of Dawntrail. I think setting that as a hard goal that I was working towards for Endwalker led me to push myself a bit harder than I really should have. To some extent there were a few other people that I felt like I was “racing” at least unofficially… and I don’t really want to get myself in that situation again. That said I do really like having all of the jobs at level cap, and gearing them all up… because it satisfies something in my soul.
At some point, I will return to the MSQ which I have largely stalled out on this week because I have been doing the thing where I listen to an Audiobook while I play. I am way more into the book than I have been in the games I am playing. I know this weekend I will be focused on the next Path of Exile event and trying out a Righteous Fire Chieftain to see how I like that as a prospect for “Bel League”. It still feels egotistical to call the private league idea I had that… but all the rest of the AggroChat folks are so I have also adopted that nomenclature.
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Good Morning Folks! I have to be honest… I had every intention of writing a post on BlizzCon this past Friday as the event was going on but that never quite came to fruition. For those who do not follow such things, this past Friday and Saturday was the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. I know a ton of friends who were very happy about the return of the event and made plans to travel to Anaheim for it. I’ve always wanted to go, but tend to have a fairly fraught relationship with Blizzard games in general. I feel like it is probably a good idea to get this out of the way, but I have not actively played World of Warcraft since December 2020, though I have followed from afar and did some alpha testing for the latest expansion Dragonflight. I’ve grown apart from the fandom and Diablo was really the last vestige that I clung to.
If you are so inclined, you can watch the full uncut presentation for Blizzcon 2023 here.
All of that said… I am shocked to say that I thought this year’s BlizzCon was almost universally positive. I found it extremely interesting that within 10 minutes of the event starting, we had a speech from Microsoft’s Phil Spencer. He said all of the right things, but I find myself wanting to believe them. As someone who has been a Windows programmer for most of my career… I have a fraught relationship with Microsoft as a whole. That said… I can’t see that Microsoft has done wrong by any of the companies they have acquired. They have most definitely been a steadying force for Mojang and Minecraft. The one strike that I could throw against them was Redfall, but who knows precisely how that mess unfolded because it was a game so far out of the comfort zone of that studio. As compared to the reign of Bobby Kotick… I have to imagine that Microsoft will be a positive force for Blizzard as a whole.
Another thing that I have to admit is that there is a lot of presentation that I just did not care about at all. Overwatch is a setting that seems interesting, but I am not going to engage unless they shift gears and turn it into a looter shooter. Hearthstone is something that I did care about for a while… but now that Magic that Gathering Arena exists and is relatively enjoyable… I have a good representation of the game I actually care about and don’t really need the Blizzard clone. Rumble is outside of my wheelhouse especially now that my aging phone seems to have trouble running any modern games that are not the most simplistic of 2D graphics. So essentially for me… BlizzCon was a show about World of Warcraft and Diablo, both of which got some interesting announcements.
Based on the schedules that came out ahead of the show, I fully expected that we would not get a Diablo IV announcement this year. I am pleasantly surprised that we did and it is going to be set in the area of the world from Diablo 2 Act 3 the Torajon Jungles. This should in theory be southwest of Kehjistan in the current Diablo IV areas. They were pretty limited on their information but did drop that we are going to be seeing a new class that has not existed in the Diablo franchise before. Data mining leaks ahead of the show indicated that this was some sort of nature-based class. More important than all of this however is that they released some information about more endgame content going into Diablo IV starting this week and continuing into Season 3 in January. There is also going to be a winter holiday event which might be interesting for a bit. Unfortunately, the new endgame content starting this week is going to be gated behind the season’s journey, which means it is really only for folks who are languishing at level 100 and doesn’t do much to solve the problem of running out of an interesting reason to grind further after about level 80.
In the realm of “why does this exist” we get to World of Warcraft and more specifically “Classic WoW”. Apparently, the classic servers are updating to Cataclysm… which seems really weird to me given that the sweeping changes to the old world that came with Cataclysm were the impetus for many of the unofficial emulator servers that eventually coalesced into the official “Classic” product. Does anyone actually want this? I am hoping that they maintain some Wrath servers for the folks who did not want to move forward into Cataclysm. Maybe there is someone out there who missed out on the first decade of World of Warcraft and is now interested in reliving it at a rapidly increased pace. It is however spawning a number of memes around this having to happen so that they could launch World of Warcraft Classic Classic. I have specific negative feelings towards Cataclysm as this is when I first broke from the game as a whole.
The other classic project however seemed really interesting. “Season of Discovery” is sort of a re-imagining of World of Warcraft with unique talent trees and class changes designed to make playing it wildly different. They specifically name-dropped Tanking Warlocks and Mage Healers as mutations available during this game mode. The irony here is that we absolutely had a Warlock Tank in Ahn’qiraj, and I myself tanked as a PVP geared Boomkin…. so this might be something that interests me in the long run. One of my favorite eras of World of Warcraft is Gladiator Stance and being able to dps with a sword and shield as a Warrior. If they bring this back… then they probably have me at least for a bit.
The big news however was the announcement of a change in practice towards expansions in World of Warcraft and while they did not elaborate on this… a shorter time frame between them. Not only did they announce The War Within which comes out next year, but also Midnight and The Last Titan as a trilogy of expansions with shared themes. We’ve learned that they always worked on multiple expansions at once from the fallout of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands… but I do feel like this would probably improve the narrative experiences of the Warcraft universe. Final Fantasy XIV was only as good as it was because it was a cohesive narrative that evolved over a decade rather than what felt like a serialized villain of the week type gameplay that we have had in Warcraft. My hope is however that they can be nimble with the mechanical side of the game because having the narrative be something that is building over time is good… you need to be able to adjust to changes on the ground when the player base is not reacting well to something like the “borrowed power” systems.
I think this is going to be the World of Warcraft expansion that wins me back. Almost everything about it seems to specifically cater to my interests. I love underground areas and this seems to be an entire expansion where we are diving deeper below the surface. I am very much dwarven-influenced, and I am all about tunneling through the earth to find interesting things. When I plan Minecraft I almost always start by digging a giant shaft to bedrock and see what I find along that path. I am also super interested in the Warband system as I have always wanted to be able to share more benefits from my Alts, given that I tend to be an Altaholic by nature. Almost everything that they announced seemed universally good and I am super interested in the Delve system which seems to be a dungeon-like experience that scales between 1 and 5 players.
I think more than anything… there was just a different energy in the air for this show. Gone was the “we know better ” attitude that surrounded a lot of the discussions from past BlizzCons and it was replaced by what seemed like a genuine unbridled excitement over what they were showing off. The vibe was just better than it has been in probably a decade or maybe even longer. Blizzard felt like a different company, and while we had the return of Metzen… he didn’t necessarily overshadow the other folks who were presenting things to the players. I want to see Blizzard thrive under Microsoft not in small part because I still know more than a handful of folks who work there. I want to play these games without having a bad taste in my mouth and feel like I am betraying my core principles.
This is the first time in a very long time that I have had hope for World of Warcraft as a franchise, and Blizzard as a company. I watched Diablo IV evolve from a complete shit show at launch to being a rather enjoyable if not somewhat temporary game with Season 2. Blizzard seems to be saying the right things and I just hope that they can back up those words with actions over the next few years. In the new year, I am probably even going to poke my head into the Dragonflight expansion and see what it has to offer. This is the best I have felt coming out of BlizzCon weekend in a very long time. Good job all… now keep that momentum going into the next few major launches.
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