Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back after taking a break last week due to the limited number of folks available. This week we start off with a topic that has bounced around a bit on our docket. Namely, we marvel at just how balanced City of Heroes/City of Villians is and what a pinnacle of system design it really is. Bel spent a bit of time playing Nightingale now that is available in early access, and talks about the mess of a game that it is. Finally, we dive into our primary topic this week and talk about the Last Epoch 1.0 launch and how phenomenal the game feels right now despite all of the server-side woes.
Good Morning Friends! I am nearing the end of the campaign. Last night before I finished up for the evening I got to the beginning of Chapter 9 and I believe level 55. This morning before sitting down to write I made it into Majelka in the Divine Era and apparently, you don’t have to finish the campaign to join a faction. Once you zone into town one of the quest givers will offer you access to either the Bazaar or the Observatory aka the headquarters for each faction. I joined the Circle of Fortune because in truth my preferred method of play is “Guild SSF” where you are mostly SSF but have a group of friends that you trade among. Trading feels like a necessary part of playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping that is not really the case in Last Epoch.
So far faction gains seem pretty quick. I did a single quest after joining the faction and am already sitting at rank 2. Upon joining the faction you immediately get a 35% additional chance at loot drops which seems pretty solid, and in theory, should make up for the general nerfs in loot drops that took place between 0.9.2 and 1.0. I am really happy that I managed to join so easily because as I started grinding out monoliths I really wanted it to count towards faction progress. I did have around 400 Favor but I spent some of it on my very first prophecy.
Once you enter the observatory, there are four telescopes that you can use to purchase prophecies. Each gives you access to a type of loot… Armor, Jewelry, Weapons, or Idols. Each prophecy has a favor cost associated with it, and has some specific parameters that will trigger the drop. The one I purchased was for a pair of rare crusader gloves, that will drop whenever I kill a boss. Since I have not finished the campaign I am hoping that this will trigger when I fight the final boss of the game if not sooner on an individual zone mini-boss. The one I have highlighted is for clearing Soulfire Bastion and will reward an exalted ring.
The prophecy seems to narrow down the type of loot that can drop, and then you can purchase lenses from another vendor that socket into the telescope further limiting the specificity of the drop. For example, the one I have highlighted gives you a 20% chance of a prophecy rewarding a one-handed axe. So in theory, if you have a prophecy that rewards a unique weapon, you might be able to skew the results to potentially drop one from the pool of available axes or hammers etc. I’ve not seen evidence yet of a prophecy specifically indicating that a named unique item will drop, but it at least might allow you to put your thumb on the scale to skew it in that direction. When combined with the existing methods of targeting specific slots via the monoliths… it might be enough to allow one to target farm specific gear.
When you start a character, you have a tag on your character sheet indicating that you are “Deathless” and I officially lost mine last night. I was playing from the couch with a laptop and at some point during Chapter 8, Josie decided to crawl out onto my chest and block my ability to see the screen. She is my baby girl and I did not want to disturb her because if she wanted attention… she was going to get attention. However, before she left I apparently managed to get killed by something that was near where I was idling. Kind of a bummer but I had to die at some point, and at least I can’t be blamed for this one. My cats have been the cause of many deaths, and I can’t get too worked up about it.
I continue to be overwhelmed by just how many facelifts the game got. For example, this abattoir in the Imperial undead area used to just be this hallway with grinders on either side. Now there is this whole raised catwalk and such with mood lighting, and it looks so much better. The sewers similarly in the same region got a massive rework and I will be playing along and just be struck with how good the game looks now. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything to someone who has not been playing this game for a few years but so much work went into the 1.0 release and I can see it clearly.
There are still plenty of problems though with servers and connections. Yesterday the game hit a new peak for concurrent players, and I imagine over the weekend this number is going to raise considerably higher. All in all though I knew what I was getting in for when they announced that they had passed a million copies sold. I am still able to play, the zone times just take for freaking ever. I am hoping they manage to scale things up and iron out the bugs and get everything nice and stable within a week. Right now the core problem seems to be surrounding the multiplayer nature of towns… because the only real issues that I have are either zoning into a town or zoning out of a town. When I am bouncing between single player quest instances, everything seems pretty solid.
The team at EHG is still doing a phenomenal job of communicating with the players and really, that is all I can ask of them. This is their first major launch and most of them did not come from the games industry at all. I think in the grand scheme of things they are doing pretty good for their first time dealing with the massive onslaught of players trying to play their game at the same time.
The post Circle of Fortune appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the 1.0 launch for Last Epoch and it was a bit of a wild ride. The servers came online at 11 am CST, and the 7.32 GB Steam patch showed up a bit later. Most folks had to exit out of Steam entirely to get it to show up correctly. After loading in I got a weird blank character creator screen and had to crash out to the desktop, but after coming back things seemed normal. That was until we tried to exit the first town. Last Epoch experienced its very own Raubahn Savage moment as folks were stuck trying to load into The Fortress Gardens. Essentially everyone was getting the [LE-61] Failed to Matchmake issue as the EHG servers were struggling under the load to spin up enough instances for the influx of players.
I eventually managed to get into an instance and moved forward with gameplay… that is until I reached the point in the story quest where it asked me to go back into town. Essentially I was stuck in this quest instance loop where I could not leave it, but because of the way the sequence of zones landed… could keep bouncing between two maps and resetting the mobs. So I decided to record some gameplay for future generations of that time when I was able to farm “SouthPark boars” style and get to level 11 by just resetting the same few screens worth of mobs over and over. Eventually, I attempted to invite my friend to the nonsense, and when they zoned in… it broke the quest instance causing us both to be locked out of the content.
As much as I do not love that Discord has become the replacement for forums… I have to give the EHG team and specifically Judd aka MoxJet for keeping the lines of communication wide open. In the news channel there was a series of scrolling updates starting out with individual messages and then eventually landing on just updating the same message over and over with news updates. I attempted to copy/paste the majority of the thread into an image. By around 4pm CST things hard largely stabilized and as a result, I was able to play all night with minimal interruptions. Sure there were the occasional flareups of LE-61 but after a few attempts to zone they went away. What I was most impressed by however was the general lack of lag. All of the issues that were happening were due to congestion and trying to spin up instances, and not server connectivity.
This screenshot was taken from SteamCharts this morning around 7 am showing that Last Epoch is having near-peak concurrent numbers. Yesterday they hit just over 148k players when the previous peak was around 40k. That is a lot of new players and while I think they made an attempt to scale quickly… that is still a lot for any company to handle, let alone an indie dev. I was really happy to see that Judd sent folks home early in the evening to get some rest because I am sure it was one hell of a day for their ops folks. For the most part ARPG players took it in stride, but there were a handful of toxic folks as you would expect. For years during ARPG launches players have been wailing on the point that games should have an “offline mode” so that even if the servers are down the game could still be enjoyed. Last Epoch absolutely has a fully playable offline mode… but that didn’t really stop the complaints telling me that folks are just going to be angry when they can’t do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it.
Once the servers stabilized though… it was on like Donkey Kong. I managed to get to level 28 and the beginning of Chapter 4 in the main story quest before calling it a night. I had a heck of a lot of fun and other than minor hiccups here and there was able to play without issue from about 5 pm CST onwards. I have to say the first thing that hit me with this 1.0 release is just how much better everything looks. This was especially noticeable during the world of ruin sections fighting void mobs in void-infested areas. These were originally some of the first areas in the game and they got a massive glow-up both in mob appearance and all of the set dressing of the world. Everything looks and feels so damned good and I am a huge fan of their new custom font that they integrated into the game showcased in the name bar of the elite mob in the above screenshot.
It also feels like they made some significant changes to the base character models. The sentinel for example no longer feels quite so “thicc” as he once was and the new armor set that you start the game in looks gorgeous. As I have pushed through the levels and swapped gearsets they all continue to look better than they did before. The thing that I was enjoying the most though were all of the “Deckard Cain” moments where they added a bunch of books into the game with voice-over dialog. As a whole the story feels so much more cohesive and comprehensible. Like before I knew there was some “timey wimey bullshit” happening but everything is coming together into a proper lore.
I’ve really enjoyed the chapter-end cutscenes that bring home the key events that are taking place. The artwork is gorgeous, and while it largely is a slide show with voice-over dialog it still feels awesome. I’m very proud of how far Last Epoch has come since the first time I screwed around with it. I first started playing the game periodically in 2018 and at that point, I was not too hip to what it was doing. Now however I consider it one of my “main” games along with Path of Exile, and Diablo III. Even over the last few years, it has improved massively and I look forward to seeing what all gets added now that they are over this massive 1.0 hump. I can only imagine how many resources went into getting the game from 0.9.2 to this point because it is immediately noticeable how much better everything looks and feels.
I’ve found zero of the uniques that I was hoping to find, and have not seen any runes of ascension to even try gambling for one. I think I will probably go after boots first as the movement speed boost from those is massive. The above screenshot is the assortment of five unique that I have found. The only one that I am actually using right now is the weavers will ring, and only then because it is giving me a massive chunk of elemental resistance. I screwed up and chose the wrong NPC and wound up with the crit neck instead of the elemental resistance gloves. Mostly I just forgot which one gave which reward. All in all though I have not seemed to really need the uniques, because I am clearing content and surviving very well as a spin to win Void Knight.
The other cool thing that was added to the game is a refer-a-friend program. Instead of needing to click a link and do some nonsense before you buy the game, you just go into the social menu (H key), click the referrals tab, and there you can find your code to share with folks. You can type the name of a player account that referred you, and they will get a bee pet. You can collect up to three referrals and each time you get a different more nonsensical pet… with the highest form being this swarm of 12 bees. If you don’t have anyone to refer might I suggest my friends Alzbeta or Dominia. Like admittedly this is an awful pyramid scheme since there are going to be a lot of folks who never get a bee pet. You can only enter one name for referral and I used mine already. I just wish it told me who all added me as their referrer so I could thank them directly.
We are not entirely out of the woods. This morning when I popped in to collect a few screenshots, I hit this weird bug where I was in the End of Time zone and able to move around, interact with NPCs, and my Stash tab… but had a purplish grey dimming overlay and the floating prompt “connecting”. I got past this by walking over to the monolith zone boundary and leaving the End of Time. It only happened that one time, but suffice to say there are still going to be bugs that need squashed. For those interested you can get the latest news about Last Epoch stability from the official discord. The team generally does a great job of keeping everyone informed with what is going on, even when there is not a major crisis. I am very curious to see as we get into the weekend if those concurrent numbers on Steam Charts go up significantly. I’m hoping to get through the campaign tonight and start chipping away at normal monoliths.
Are you playing? Are you enjoying yourself? What sorts of issues did you run into? Drop me a line below.
The post Rough but Stabilizing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Since the Last Epoch servers were down last night in preparations for the 1.0 launch today, and Nightingale opened up for early access I decided to give the game a spin. Right now the game is on an introductory price of $26.99 and I figured since I knew I was going to pick it up eventually, I might as well get in at the cheapest price. I feel like I need to set the stage for this discussion. I’ve played a lot of survival games over the years and most recently have been playing a heck of a lot of Enshrouded. This is going to greatly color my opinion of this game. After spending around 5 hours last night playing Nightingale I can state without a doubt that it isn’t an awful game, but so far at this stage in development it isn’t a great one either.
Let’s scroll back a few years and take a look at the original trailer that announced the game during the 2021 Game Awards. I realize this is setting us up for failure because early trailers are more akin to a “mood board” than anything related to what the final product is going to look like. What I got from that trailer is that we would be Cthulhu-style Victorian-era adventurers in cool costumes tromping through the fae multiverse looking for treasure and building settlements. I personally imagined something with a combat system akin to New World, with big chunky good feeling attacks and interesting combatants to fight and a bunch of gorgeous realms to explore. I imagined a building system something akin to Valheim where you recruit people and bring them back to your base to build up to some epic battles as the baddies attack you. I admit I have not followed the development of this game terribly closely, but these trailers and the ones that followed at Summer Game Fest recently set the expectations.
Nightingale has a bunch of really interesting ideas. It has one of the more creative character generators I have seen to date, where not only do you set the looks of your character but you also can define your background and lineage. For example, if you so choose… you can creat the appearance of every person in your direct line for three generations… and then choose to inherit traits in your appearance rather than set them yourself. This is some utter nonsense, but you can tell this is something that one person on the team was super passionate about. My only complaint was with the beard options where I could not have a nice full bushy beard and essentially had to choose between a svelt goatee and a lovely set of muttonchops.
What they nailed was the world. There were several moments where I just had to stop and enjoy the vistas. It has a very Myst like quality to it, as you explore these areas that were once inhabited by the Fae with impossible constructions, floating towers, and such. The world maybe doesn’t feel quite as atmospheric as the trailers would indicate. During tutorial quests you end up crossing through a Forest, a Desert, and a Swamp… the three biomes that exist in the game currently, and all of them very much felt like what you would expect from a procedural generator. While there were some cool set pieces, none of them felt terribly atmospheric. Each of these three tutorial realms had a very limited scope and served to teach you how the tech tree works.
This starts us down the problem I am having with this game. If I compare it against other survival titles… it is ploddingly slow. In this sort of game, I am used to hitting the beach… because it always seems to be a beach… gathering some twigs and rocks and outfitting myself in my first tools and weapons within the first fifteen minutes. Everything feels extremely drawn out as you have to wait for the game to give you permission to craft anything… which doesn’t really take place until you reach the second of the three tutorial realms. This sluggish quality seems to carry forward into all aspects of crafting. It takes forever for you to be able to craft your own clothing because in order to get to that point you have to have crafted three different sorts of machines to assemble some slapdash leather.
When you can assemble your first gear set… it looks like this. We were drawn in from the trailer and visuals of romping around the wilds in spats and petticoats… and instead, you look like every murder hobo in every survival game. I look like I am about to defend my steakwrap by shivving you. I get that this is the starter “tattered” gear, but in order to get started and run through the first major objective you have to upgrade out of what looked like much better gear. Essentially we are a few hours into the game and the anachronistic aesthetic from all of the trailers is already shot. I am sure that eventually, we will probably have access to get that looks like the trailers, but at the rate of progression through the game, it seems like it will be months down the line.
One of the biggest problems that I am having with the crafting system is “bag bloat”. Essentially recipes will request a type of ingredient, for example “t1 Bones” and that can come from any Tier 1 animal that can drop bones. However in your bag… the items are kept in separate stacks as to whether or not they came from a predator or a prey animal, or later when you learn fishing… each TYPE of fish is stored separately. This trickles through to the final produced material so the game can see that I have “16 Meat” on my hotbar, but in my actual bags this is a combination of grilled prey meat, grilled predator meat, and each individual type of fish that I have caught and cooked. The types of ingredients you put into a meal impact the stats of the meal slightly, but so far this has seemed to be negligible, and all I really care about how is healing myself and not dying to the hunger mechanic that slowly kills you. This isn’t so much a problem for your character’s backpack, but it rapidly becomes a problem in trying to store this nonsense in baskets. There really needs to be a way to convert up materials to a generic form that stacks cleanly.
The other problem that I am starting to get into is that every craft seems to require refinement of a bunch of different materials in order to craft it. This mostly just serves to slow down the gameplay as you have to wait on a bunch of machines to craft up enough of the refined resources in order to do the final combine. I’m more used to survival games using something like a tiering system… which the game seems to have… but isn’t utilizing in the manner I am used to. I would expect a Tier 2 machine would require Tier 2 metal and Tier 2 wood… not just refined versions of the T1 materials or the secondary byproducts of refining the items. For example, if you want to make a Candle you need a wick, and if you want to make a wick you need two twines, and if you want to make twine you need “fibers” either through gathering plant fibers or refining meat into animal fibers. It rapidly feels a bit tedious to actually make anything.
The building system feels similarly cumbersome. I would expect to be able to create a wooden shanty quickly by chopping down some trees and using the wood that I gained from said trees. That is not the case and all of the “wooden” block types require you to gather three resources… plant fiber, sticks, and proper wood. Stone however just requires stone… so I have been crafting everything out of that. Stone however is a limited resource and I am slowly running out of stone piles on the island to harvest because Nightingale is not a voxel game with destructable terrain, which means that I can’t just start excavating the side of a mountain to get resources. I have to harvest specific nodes that yield a specific type of material and then deliver it back to the build side and apply it to the designed form. On one hand, it is really cool that you can essentially plan out the entire building in blueprint form, but when you apply resources… it applies them to the entire blueprint at once and then chooses to “finish” seemingly random blocks.
One of the particularly cumbersome elements comes from when you want to remove an item and place it somewhere else. There is no easy way to remove a segment of the wall or pick back up a crafting machine to place it somewhere else. You can toggle on build mode with “X” key… which I had to find by sifting through the keybindings, and in theory, you can deconstruct an item. This will cause a pile of materials to drop to the ground. However, it does not seem to be ALL of the materials that went into crafting the item initially. The other option is just to break an item… at which point you lose ALL resources that went into building it. Sure it is probably more realistic that if you knock down a wall, you can’t just stand it back up again but we are already dealing with magical floating blueprints so I feel like quality of life is a more important trait here.
You can recruit other survivors but they are honestly… kind of idiots. Here is my companion Agnes lighting herself on fire by walking through the cook stove. I legitimately was tabbed out last night typing a message and heard the clear sound of something catching on fire, only to flip over to this scene. I guess the positive is that Agnes appears to be immortal. She has very simple AI and that AI is to harvest every tree she sees… and gives zero fucks about whether or not that tree is going to fall on top of you and deal damage. You can be in the middle of combat and she is going to walk over and immediately start felling a fucking tree while you are skinning the corpse. She is as good at combat as she is at standing in fires.
This takes us to what I feel is the critical flaw in the game for me. Skyrim is a game that we all love and it did some groundbreaking things for open-world gaming… but even for 2010, it had what I would consider to be pretty shitty combat. Combat in Nightingale feels like Skyrim where mobs just sort of blindly rush at you the second they spot you… flailing wildly… and you sort of just have to swing blindly at them until you connect enough times to kill them hoping that your hitpoints outlast their ability to reduce them. There is no real strategy here. I found that I could just jump backwards in order to avoid most attacks and this became my strategy for ranged attacking them down until they died. Attacking with a melee weapon felt awful. Generally speaking, when you enter combat you have three to six things trying to attack you at the same time and your combat is mostly useless.
I completed the first dungeon and took on the first boss… and it was also similarly bad. It just sort of charged at you and you would need to duck out of the way and plink it down as it was ramping up for the next attack. I mostly used the pillars as a way of skirting around the boss because attacking head-on seemed like an awful idea. Its mechanics consisted on a dash attack and a big point-blank AOE, but otherwise, it just seemed to keep locking on my location and I needed to stop being there for a while. A lot of the selling point of this game is to go off on adventures fighting baddies and looking for cool treasure, and honestly… I am not sure I want any more of this combat. If this is representative of what the game has to offer, and based on some reviews I watched this morning before sitting down to write this… it seems like it is.
There is also the problem of loot. If I am going to go delving into dungeons I feel like there should be some reward at the end of my troubles. What Nightingale has for loot is what I could call “Minecraft Loot” aka some random resources. You might find a single ignot… or a wick… or maybe even some leather straps, but nothing resembling anything special and unique to that dungeon. If the reward for doing dungeons is the same bullshit that I can get anywhere else on the island… then why am I doing the dungeons? The answer is that you have to do the dungeons in order to unlock new cards… which then allow you to open new realms… where you can gather more resources and have more crappy combat. For me at least that mechanical loop is flawed because if everything is just more of the same… “we have Skyrim at home”.
The problem that I see with Nightingale, is it is trying to be a bunch of different games and not really succeeding at any of them. It isn’t what I would consider a good crafting for survival game, because everything feels way too tedious, especially at the beginning. It isn’t a good adventure and exploration game, because combat feels awful. It isn’t a good dungeon delving game, because there is zero loot chase. Nightingale is not a bad game by any means… but it isn’t a particularly good one either. It is launching into a crowd that is thick with really good games that are hitting all of these buttons. Enshrouded for example launched similarly in early access but landed with a game that felt pretty damned close to finished. Valheim a few years ago did what Nightingale is trying to do but just better in spite of being woefully unpolished and having its own stack of problems. The major selling point of Nightingale is adventuring in weird period outfits… and that goes out the window the moment you have to craft something for yourself.
I get that Nightingale is an early-access game, and there is a little warning at the launch to make sure you understand that. However generally speaking in spite of the flaws that a game might have in early access, I can often see a core of the game that is good and just needs as lot of polish and bug fixing. With Nightingale, I am just not seeing a fun mechanical game loop that warrants me spending much more time with it. I put five hours in last night and I would have expected in that time for the game to have set the hook. It is a perfectly reasonable game… it just isn’t better than anything else in the survival and exploration genre. When you are launching in the same year as PalWorld and Enshrouded… you sorta have to do something really good in order to stand out from the pack and I am not seeing it. Sure the world is gorgeous… but a gorgeous world only gets you so far.
The post Nightingale Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
