I have to admit I feel a little bit bad for the Guerilla Games. This game released in early 2022 and was somewhat screwed over by Elden Ring releasing within a few days of it. Now the PC version is finally out and it is colliding up against the release date for Dragon’s Dogma II. For me… not being a souls-like fan I played this game originally on the PS5 but bounced around the midpoint of the game, or at least what I feel like is the midpoint. After some time I made the decision just to wait and revisit it when it released on PC since I enjoyed the first game infinitely more with a mouse and keyboard. Sony really needs to tighten up the release cadence of these games because two years waiting on a PC release seems a bit brutal. Complaining aside… Horizon Forbidden West is a beautiful game.
On so many levels, this is just mechanically a better version of the first game. It does everything that Zero Dawn did right and then adds multiple layers of nuance and enjoyment on top of that. The addition of gliding really improves the entire experience and makes this quite possibly the best version of “Breath of the Wild” that exists. The mechanics of hunting dinobots is just so much fun. Focusing in on specific weak points and weak elements to quickly decimate these gigantic machines is just pure enjoyment for me. However few moments beat this massively long glide down from the side of a mountain after finishing an epic climb.
The other thing that I really feel like calling out about this game is that the side content is so much more developed. In the first game the main story was the highlight but you still met a lot of really interesting side characters. In Forbidden West every interlude seems to be filled with characters that I legitimately care about. I was happy to see a bunch of folks returning like my Petra, my favorite side character from the first game. However there are a bunch of new characters like Silga… who once heard a radio broadcast for a brief moment and it sort of dominated her destiny from that point forward. So many heart felt stories woven through the forbidden west that I have spent way more time focusing on side content than actually moving the main story forward.
There are also so many freaking vistas that are just breathtaking. Like who else could have made a swamp look this interesting? The color palette of the game is part of what makes it all work so well. Everything is so vibrant and really pops on the screen, even without leaning on the gimmick of HDR since I generally play with that turned off. For the most part I have been playing the game at 1440p at at 144hz and it looks amazing. There have been a few times I shift it up and do 1080p 60hz when I am downstairs and playing on my laptop remote into my gaming machine upstairs via Parsec and that still looks gorgeous.
That is not to say there are not some performance issues with the game. There are some areas surrounding the region known as “The Grove” or “Lowland Territory” that have volumetric fog that seems to slow everything down. The game has received a few minor patches and I have not experienced since the first days, so maybe that is now taken care of… but I did experience some sluggish experience in a few specific areas. This was also something that impacted cutscenes where the dialog and the animations were wildly out of sync with the animations playing much too slowly. Like I said I have not experienced this in a few days and there were some patches… so hopefully it was a bug that was taken care of but I can’t talk about the game without at least mentioning that there were some issues from time to time.
I’ve passed the point where I was in my previous attempt at the game, and I have no clue how far I am from the end… but it is my goal to wrap this up prior to the launch of the Path of Exile League on Friday. That is going to happen fairly late in the day and I am off Friday so if nothing else I should be able to wrap up loose ends then. The Horizon series is just a phenomenal experience and it gives me some hope about the talk of an MMORPG version of this game. If I could have a game that is a mishmash of Horizon, Destiny, and Monster Hunter that I could play with friends… I would be in heaven. The only thing that gives me some pause… is that this project is being led by NC Soft… a company that is not known for creating games that I love. Sure they published Guild Wars 2… but that is more Arena.Net than anything that NC Soft did. They also had the short-sightedness to cancel City of Heroes so… suffice to say I am cautious about that project.
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This weekend we talked a bit about Last Epoch and I get the impression that I came off as a bit more negative than I had expected. When I said “I think I am done with Last Epoch”, it was meant to indicate that I had seen all that I really wanted to see during this cycle and not that I was done with the game completely. At this point, I have pushed my Echo Warpath Void Knight all the way to level 100 and seen all of the content that there is to see save for doing higher corruption pushing which feels largely pointless. On top of that I created another character for an attempt at making something Righteous Fire Adjacent… only to fail completely but still managed to get Forge Guard to 88. Then I rerolled yet another sentinel and succeeded in creating the Ignite Warpath goodness that I was trying to make in my now level 89 Paladin. I also managed to pick up a Helm of the Scurry and pushed a Bleed Squirrels Beastmaster all the way to level 84 along with an attempt at a Flame Reave Spellblade that I stopped at 65.
Essentially since the launch of 1.0 and the very first cycle on February 21st, I have put roughly 300 hours into the game and I think it is time to stop for now. I have 11 tabs full of LP1 or higher copies of uniques, 10 tabs full of well-rolled Exalted items for slamming, and a full tab of dungeon keys that I have no real interest in spending. I could in theory cobble together a few more builds, I have five copies of the David Harbour collab helmet that summons a Wraith Lord and that was going to be my next character to finish leveling. I’ve just reached a point where I think I am done grinding for the moment. That is not to say I won’t happily return to the game at the start of the next cycle. This is sort of the way of ARPGs in that I get in… grind a copious amount of time… then reach a point where I am happy to walk away again and then dive into the next one.
I got roughly a month of constant play out of Last Epoch and that honestly seems really good. In general, I tend to get about two months out of a Path of Exile league and two weeks out of a Diablo III Season. What ultimately stymies me is that the Monoliths are not really done baking, and are in need of more different forms of content to break up the rhythm. Adding chests and rogue exiles went a long way to making them more exciting, but they are still a far cry from Path of Exile where running a map without support can yield content from some forty leagues that have played out over the last decade. I think each cycle the game will get better and add more things to break up the monotony, but the team at EHG just hasn’t had the time to build in the same levels of nuance and complexity. I got a lot of pushback from the AggroChat folks when I said there was no competition and that Path of Exile was clearly the better game… but what I meant is that there is more depth of content than any other ARPG currently has.
I had a heck of a lot of fun playing Last Epoch over the last month, and the game is in a far better state than it has ever been before. That said the well of content currently is not limitless. I could force myself to keep pushing, but with Path of Exile releasing its next league on Friday it seemed like a good time to get off the ride before my opinions started to turn. So like I said I feel like I came across as more negative than I intended during the Podcast. My joy in this sort of game is not necessarily building a bunch of characters and then never really pushing them very far. As always if I am going to play any game… the long-term grind is going to be about the acquisition of loot. I could keep pushing and trying to perfect my builds by getting ever better rolled legendary items… but what would I be doing it for?
In Path of Exile, there are a lot of pieces of content that require you to operate at a certain level to be able to attempt and ultimately succeed at it. While I am not necessarily a bossing motivated person, getting my four void stones was a nice accomplishment last league, and I was able to take down all of the non-uber bosses. More than that being able to survive juiced T16 maps and reap the rewards from running them was extremely cool as well. Pushing Monolith corruption doesn’t really feel that rewarding yet or more so… the things that I am chasing are not that fundamentally different than the things I currently have access to. At some point, I am certain there will be a reason for me to keep pushing, but for now, there really isn’t. I have a handful of functional builds and could keep churning those out for a while now if I really pushed myself but I would rather leave while I am still very happy with the game than burn myself out on it when my attention is waning.
So instead of being progressively more grumpers about the game… I am looking forward to the start of a new Path of Exile league and leveling once again from scratch. Right now I plan on going for something similar to the Righteous Fire Chieftain that I played last league as my starter. From there I will be able to farm enough currency to build whatever other characters that interest me. I am contemplating a trip down memory lane and firing up some sort of Toxic Rain build again, after spending a bunch of time playing Lightning Arrow for a map blaster over the last two leagues. I am also somewhat interested in some sort of an elemental strike build. I’ve also never actually made anything with Cyclone despite threatening to do so for years. I’m also interested in trying out one of the alternate Boneshatter builds using Trauma support and some other ability.
Last Epoch was a great run, and I look forward to being excited to start over again in the next cycle when 1.1 drops. We are already starting to get some teasers about what that is going to entail including several new bosses and a new pinnacle boss. That is cool and all but what I am really hoping is for some additional monolith content. We need something like Ritual or Legion to break up the monotony of the same three map types over and over: Arena, Ambush, and Spires. I would also love to see them get inventive and create new gameplay modes similar to Heist or Delve in Path of Exile. Dungeons are not really my thing and I would love to see those reworked to be more enjoyable. As it stands the lead-up to the boss is boring as hell and then you get a single attempt at the boss before having to go through the boring parts again. As much as I have maligned Nightmare Dungeons in Diablo IV, they would honestly be preferable to the Last Epoch Dungeon design.
In Path of Exile, you can really focus on a single game mode and have more than enough content doing just that in order to get an entire league worth of play. My hope is that at some point each of the game modes in Last Epoch will be equally rich. I have faith in how far I have seen the game come since I first set foot in it back in 2018 and comparing that to what it plays like today. I think the game will get there, and they have already added so much good stuff. The Circle of Fortune and the prophecies are brilliant and I enjoyed running them so much. I hope at some point we get character customization, something akin to the hideout system from POE, and the ability to unlock item drops as cosmetics. There is so much room to grow the game, and I think given enough time we will see all of it come to fruition.
Anyways! At the moment I have been playing through Horizon Forbidden West on the PC and am hoping to wrap that up prior to the launch of the Path of Exile Necropolis league. I will probably talk some about that in the coming days. Apologies for the lack of blog posts for Thursday or Friday, but I took those days off and just was not feeling the blog.
The post Done Isn’t a Bad Thing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Thalen, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! Grace has returned to Stardew Valley and we spent some time discussing some recent changes… including the mayo meme. From there we talk a bit about Balatro as folks have had a chance to dive into it. Tam talks about his experiences with Pacific Drive and its unique blend of Car Survival games. This week was the full reveal stream for Path of Exile Necropolis League and we spent a bit of time talking through some of the significant game system changes. Finally, we end the show talking about some Last Epoch and the experiences that folks are still having with the game including a bit of a dive down the rabbit hole that is Spellblade.
Hey Folks! This is going to be a bit of a niche topic, but I guess in truth pretty much everything that I talk about is a niche topic. Most people do not give a shit about the minutiae of whatever build I happen to be working on in an ARPG that I have spent over 2000 hours playing. Anyways… some years back there was a dream proposed by GOG of having a single interface to interact with all of your games. The problem with that was that GOG Galaxy was a bit of a mess. It consumed a ton of resources and regularly disconnected from all of the platforms you were capable of connecting it to… never quite living up to the promise of giving you a single interface to view and launch all of your games through a single application. A few months ago I heard about an open-source project called Playnite that is attempting to actually make good on this dream and yesterday I finally got around to installing it and checking it out.
The base install of Playnite supports Amazon Games, Battle.net, EA App, Epic, GOG, Humble Bundle, Itch.io, Steam, Ubisoft Connect, and Xbox Gamepass. There are also a wide number of community-supported addons that grant further access to other game libraries. For example, I am contemplating installing the XCLoud integration that would add all of the games that I have access to via a web browser and Microsoft Gamepass on XCloud to the interface. There are also addons for platforms like Nintendo or Playstation that just give visualization into your total game library without actually allowing you to launch them. There is apparently fairly robust support for emulators and launching the game titles that you have sitting in rom/iso form on your system, which is something I will likely explore at a later date.
One of the aspects that I dig so far is that there is extremely robust support for filtering and grouping your games. Right now I am using the most simplistic grouping of “installed” versus “not installed” but I could easily do it based on genre or any number of other elements and also include any sort of sorting parameters that I might want as well. All of this seems to only take around 100 meg of memory and negligible system resources. I will say though getting everything set up initially required some manual intervention and several minutes of downloading media assets. Especially when it came to humble bundle I had to do a good deal of searching to find the specific game that was being referenced, and also a fair bit of hiding things that were not actually games. It was worth the hour or so that I spent to get things streamlined a bit.
The end result is a nice single dashboard giving you access to all of the games you have installed on your system. You can manually add games or have it search specific locations and then decide which games you are going to add manually. For Final Fantasy XIV I use the default launcher, so I had to manually add it. The only negative of all of this however is that many of the addons require you to have the official platform client installed somewhere on your system in order for the integration to work. I ran into this for example with Itch.io a client that I have never had installed before. That said the launching still works fairly seamless despite still requiring you to have the storefront-specific launchers installed on your system.
I think more than anything the thing that I enjoy the most so far is how fast I can rapidly switch between views of the games I have available. For example, I have all of these games that Twitch Prime has been giving me for years… that more or less were invisible to me. I was never going to install a dedicated client in order to play them, but thanks to Playnite and the Explorer view I can see everything that is being granted to my account by Amazon in a single location. There seems to be some weirdness with Humble Bundle though because I know for a fact that there are way more games that I have access to that are not showing up. I did notice a hide third-party games option that I probably need to tick off in order to get the rest of the humble stuff to load given that a lot of that was either tied to Steam or Origin.
I mean it isn’t perfect but it is a step closer to having a single launcher for all of the games that I have on various platforms. It also makes me realize how many games I have “entitlements” to on multiple platforms largely due to giveaways from Epic Game Store, Amazon, etc. For those with a massive backlog and that are seized by analysis paralysis… there is a random game button. That way when you are having one of those “nothing to play” moments the launcher will choose for you. It is worth a look if you were interested in GOG Galaxy but annoyed by its poor performance.
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