Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start the show with a quick discussion about Path of Exile, and how we are now two months into a League, a position where things would normally be dead… and that the Currency Exchange is still hopping. This leads to a secondary discussion about Kodra’s woes as he attempts to do the Merchant Guild thing in the Last Epoch. From there Bel talks about Witchfire with its Hexen meets Destiny meets Hades PVE extraction shooter gameplay. Bel also got an invite to Soulframe Preludes the next game from Warframe maker Digital Extremes and shares some of his early impressions. From there we dive into the Magic the Gathering Commander situation with controversial card bannings, death threats, and Wizards of the Coast yoinking control of the format away from the players. Tam shares his thoughts about playing Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and Thalen his early thoughts about playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
On the 15th of October, New World is launching the latest version of itself as Aeternum. There has been a heap of confusing marketing surrounding this event, and quite honestly a bit of weasel wording when it comes to what is actually about to transpire. Essentially Aeternum is the attempt to launch New World on consoles with a clean slate, in order to wipe a bit of the bad taste of the dwindling PC player numbers out of the collective mouths of an audience that may have not actually played the game. Treating this as though it were a new and fresh gameplay experience, is what feels like a last-ditch effort to make this game succeed. The hard truth however is that PC players have not received any substantive updates since the launch of Angry Earth in October 2023.
The truth is that New World has struggled since its just slightly under 1 million concurrent player launch, and has never quite found a large enough player base to keep the game successful. It is very obvious that Amazon does not really consider this to have been a success, because while they often laud the achievements of Lost Ark… you never quite hear the same rhetoric surrounding their other MMO New World. Steam Charts paints the picture clearly of never quite getting a critical mass of players interested for the long haul. I feel like the console launch is essentially the last lifeline that the game has before Amazon ultimately shutters it. For that reason, I legitimately hope that this awkward rebranding is what the game needed in order to sell the notion of it to a new group of players.
I’ve loved this game deeply since its release three years ago. Over the course of that time I have dedicated 92 blog posts to the game, including this one… and probably would have had more except due to the fact that I spent a lot of time playing the game when it was under NDA. Unfortunately, New World is also a game with deep systemic problems due to the awkward way that this game was built. It is a game that needs about 1200-2000 players on a single server in order to make the game feel alive but was crafted in a manner that limits the total population of a server. It was designed more in the manner of a Rust private server than a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. We struggled at the release of the game to get everyone on the same server at the same time, and ultimately that is the core requirement of an MMORPG… the ability to play with your friends. This fresh coat of paint and renaming does nothing to solve this fundamental issue that exists at the core of the game.
At launch, there were one hundred and seventy-seven servers available, and it was simply not enough capacity to contain the millions of players attempting to play the game. Within days they spun up a number of servers at least doubling the total number, and quite honestly… I cannot remember how many servers that number eventually ballooned to. As the influx of players waned quickly, you were left with a ton of servers with little to no population and no way of those players migrating elsewhere. The game has been plagued with a long history of server migrations as we have now shrunk to twelve servers serving the global population. This gives players no real identity for what server they play on. I’ve not played in almost a year at this point and I could not tell you off the top of my head what server I was playing on. This makes it extremely hard to link up with friends wanting to play the game, which again is the most important requirement of an MMORPG.
I last played the game around the launch of Angry Earth and quite honestly… the game was in a pretty good state then. It was fun and the new story was pretty solid. The “new” zone was also pretty great, but I say new in quotation marks… because it wasn’t a new zone at all. It was taking the existing zone of First Light and changing everything about it to create a new endgame zone for the Angry Earth campaign. Similarly, the launch of Aeternum in 11 days is destroying the previous zone of Cutlass Keys to turn it into a new endgame zone that is half-dominated by full PVP. Instead of adding content to the game they are removing content by way of repurposing it. I didn’t care that much about First Light, but I loved Cutlass Keys and it was a destination that I went to regularly because I enjoyed the material farming loops there. the New World team has not actually “added” content to the game in the form of new open-world real estate since October 2022 when they introduced the Brimstone Sands region.
All of that said, I guess it should not shock me with what they are trying to do with Aeternum, but renaming something that has existed for four years at this point considering pre-release gameplay time, and treating it as though it were a brand new gameplay experience. They have attempted to put a shiny coat of paint on things several times with limited results. I get that this might be a team that is strapped for resources and might not have the time to devote to building entirely new zones out of whole cloth, but do have time to rearrange a bunch of chess pieces on the board in the form of a zone redesign. However, as a long-term player, it feels like I am losing content much in the same way I did with Destiny each time they vaulted a zone… instead of gaining content.
I have baggage, and I know that. I still have bitterness surrounding the patch where they effectively killed all of the player-created elite farm trains out in the world that were amazing. Bitterness aside though I really do want this game to succeed, if for no reason other than that they might get the resources required to fix some of the deeper fundamental flaws that the game has. The game keeps chasing the PVP player base, but time and time again the MMORPG market has proven that this is not a big enough community to ever support a game in its totality. PVE gamers are deeply social gamers by nature, and all of the flaws surrounding server limits and connectivity have always been a giant impediment for that style of player.
I feel like the healthiest thing for New World would be a change in server methodology to something akin to Guild Wars 2 where servers do not matter other than for WVW combat, and now there is a semi-regular process of matching up different guilds into groups to balance that. I could see something like that where companies are matched based on activity level and assigned to a relatively leveled playing field so that they are vying for control of the map against a similar group of players. Then remove all of the negative things that impact PVE players from other factions owning territory. This would lean into the fun PVE nature of the game while also serving the desires of the more bloodthirsty competitive minority in MMO players.
I think half of the revamped Cutlass Keys zone being devoted to full-open PVP is going to be a mistake in the long run, but I feel like it is probably a carrot being thrown to the players who have stuck around and are more PVP-focused. I imagine a few months from now, it is going to be a dead space with the same few people dueling each other. That said… I have no clue how you sell this game to PVE players in a way that does not exist currently. The thing that killed the game for me, was the fact that I was competing for harvesting resources constantly with a bunch of bots who were running a loop constantly. I feel like the game would be better served with longer node respawns, but having them flagged to your account so that if you go out into the woods looking for resources you are not actively competing with other players for them.
I’ve not had the game installed for a few months, and I last played in May. Even then I only played for a little bit to poke my head and see how things were going. I’ve not played a ton since the release of Angry Earth last year. I’ve seen nothing about this Aeternum rebranding that is really speaking to me. For the PC players… there really isn’t a lot of change. I think there is some new story, a new dungeon, and half of a revamped zone to explore. Aeternum is not for us, it is an attempt at luring a brand new audience of previously untouched console-first gamers. I think this is probably a make-or-break moment for New World. If on the 15th it fails to find a brand new audience, it is probably the eventual death of the franchise.
I think what I would have personally liked to see instead of this, is a shift in the model of the game as a whole. Instead of being a persistent forever game… focus on being a seasonal game like many of the ARPG Diablo-likes are. In that scenario, the crippling server constraints are not that big of a deal, because you are playing the game for a three to four-month shot at a time. They would need to amp everything up… experience, resources, gold… but honestly some of the most fun I ever had playing New World was rerolling fresh on a new server when they launched the story updates and fresh start servers in 2022. I could see having a heck of a lot of fun rolling fresh characters and going through all of the content again at an accelerated pace with a group of players doing the same thing. I think it could have worked, pending they came up with some gimmick for each season in the way that Path of Exile does its leagues.
As it stands, I will have a lot of happy memories from the time I played New World. I hope they find a new audience and get the resources to make this game the game it could have been. I hope they come up with a hook to earn back PC players who have felt abandoned by the staff. I legitimately hope this dangerous gambit works, because the alternative is that the game goes away. The stakes feel extremely high… but given everything else coming out this month, I can’t bring myself to join the folks who will be playing on the 15th. I wish them luck, but will be doing so more than likely from the sidelines.
Are you going to be checking out New World Aeternum? Did I completely miss the mark in my assessment of the game? Drop me a line below.
The post The Rebranding of New World appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Even thought I had used Modrinth to download and install mods, I had not actually been launching the game through it all this time. I had simply been copying the mods over manually into the appdata folder for Minecraft. However, I have learned… Minecraft mods update shockingly often. As a result, I have decided to copy all of my saved games over to a Modrinth profile and migrate to launching the game through it. All in all, it has been a pretty smooth transition save for the very first time I loaded the game. I am guessing there is some process of caching in all of my stuff that had to happen all at once. After that first time though, everything has felt effectively the same as launching through the Microsoft launcher.
I have been undertaking a few massive projects over the last few days. Essentially I decided that I needed a more reliable source of iron so that I could keep building nonsense. This meant that more than anything, probably the best option was to build a villager iron farm. This however is a massive pain in the ass and there are a bunch of competing ideas about how it performs the best. So just to make sure it worked successfully I decided to build it way the hell up into the air. This meant that I needed to get 3 villagers way up there… and a zombie. The zombie is the easy part, because they will follow you without much issue. Villagers however have to be moved either by boat or by baiting them with a work bench of some sort.
Unfortunately, I don’t have screenshots of this nonsense because I keep forgetting that this is what happens every single time I hit my default printscreen key instead of the F2 key. When I am in the middle of doing my nonsense, I fall back upon defaults and keep hitting the key that I hit by rote memory. It was a mess. I used a Composter since I had a few of those lying around, and took him as far away from the village by boat as I could before breaking the boat and dropping a composter… then dropping another one once they had bonded with the first one and then going back and breaking the one they were bonded with. I set the game to peaceful to make the move a bit less frustrating.
The biggest problem with all of this is the fact that the closest village to me is roughly 600 meters to the east of me… across a mountain range. I originally thought I would be making this trek no normal mode and spent some time laying down a pathway of torches… and then got the bright idea to just flip it to peaceful for the time being. I am not entirely certain how I would have dealt with the villagers constantly getting attacked, and I would have kept having to throw them in the boat to keep them from running away. Worse is that I would have had to do this three times, each time just as frustrating as the last.
For the “other side of the mountain problem” I did a bunch of pre-work and dug a straight tunnel from the Village side of the mountain to my side of the mountain, which would get the villagers close to where the Iron farm was going to live in the sky. Again I am coming in and taking screenshots after the fact so that I could have something for this blog post. Thankfully there really wasn’t anything messy in the route I randomly chose. I had to deal with a patch of gravel which is always annoying, but in large part, I could bore straight through the stone to the other side. Again I torched it off thinking that I would have to deal with mobs all along the route. If nothing else this gives me a faster path to get over to the village if I ever need to abduct more villagers.
As for the farm itself, it is the standard affair that you have likely seen dozens of internet guides on how to create. One room has 3 beds and 3 villagers, and then there is another room where you lure the zombie and set up so that the zombie can never reach them but has to have open air between the villagers and zombies so that they can see them at all times. The zombies trigger the spawning of an Iron Golem which then only has one area where it can spawn up top, covered with moving water… that pushes the Iron Golem into a pit with a block of lava that will kill it and drop the goodies into a hopper/chest system for collection. If you are wondering why I have a glass walkway… it is because the Iron Golems cannot spawn on glass making it a reasonable option for building scaffolding to check on things.
Each time you kill a Golem it drops at least four bars of iron and potentially some poppies. I have no clue at all WHY the Golem drops poppies but I guess I will never run out of red dye. It is honestly impressive how fast the farm works, and if I wanted to go through the hassle… I could set up three more of the exact same farm in the space I have set aside, but that would also involve luring 3 villagers and a zombie each time. Maybe I should have set up a Villager breeder farm first… but that sounded equally annoying. In truth I have replaced all of the iron that I used creating the farm already, so mostly I just need to spend some time AFKing in range and letting it do its work.
The placement of the Iron Farm is at least in part so that I can AFK down at the mob drop farm, and should in theory have my Slime Farm, the Mob Farm, The Iron Farm, and all of my automated crop farms running at the same time. At some point, I need to go into my drop farm and spiderproof it, which should be easy enough given that I now have access to moss carpeting from finding a lush biome during one of my nether portal adventures. I already have more string than I can ever really use, and if I need more… it would be more enjoyable to go find a mine somewhere and harvest cobwebs.
In other news, I have expanded my Bamboo Farm upwards considerably in an effort to try and speed up production. This is in large part thanks to the influx of iron I am getting from the Golem farm, allowing me to do more dumb things with hoppers. It takes a TON of hoppers to direct loot from the top two tiers down to the bottom two tiers. I might expand my Sugarcane farm, but really… I am not even sure I need that much Sugarcane. I am contemplating building a Cocoa Bean farm, but again… I am not even sure I need them, and there does not appear to be a good way to fully automate that. The best option I saw was a design where you have pistons holding back water and then letting the water harvest everything before you replant it. In my hardcore series, I did something like this for harvesting fields of crops and it worked well enough but if I am going to the trouble of building something… I want it to run on its own if possible.
The post Iron From Fear and Lava appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Witchfire is a PVE guns and spells extraction shooter that I remember being somewhat interested in during Summer Games Fest 2022. It apparently has been in early access and available on the Epic Game store since last year, but being perfectly honest… a game might as well not exist for all the good launching on EGS does for me. I am not saying that Epic is a bad storefront, it is just a giant gap in my knowledge because I never go there unless I have some external reason… like someone broadcasting that some big game was being given away for free there. Witchfire released Monday before last on Steam and now it has visualization to the majority of the world. However, It still had not tripped my radar until my friend Ace shared this quote from a review.
Imagine the gunplay of Destiny. But none of the intense shame of playing Destiny.
I have so much love for the gameplay of Destiny, but I have zero love anymore for the way in which that game is released and the grind associated with the light level. I am also still super fucking bitter about losing content that I paid for because it was vaulted. So if a game can bring me the feels of Destiny, with a sweet Hexen with guns vibe I am probably on board with that. So I picked up the early access client on Steam for roughly $36 and gave it a go. This morning I am going to talk a bit about my early impressions.
In the game, you can set up multiple profiles, aka characters that have persistent progress between expeditions into the world. The first step in that process is choosing which “Preyer” you are going to be playing, which acts as your default loadout of weapons, spells, and stats. I am playing Butcher currently which is big life totals and running around with a fully automatic rifle… but nothing much else. Once you progress through gameplay you can I believe essentially unlock everything on a single character, but the Preyer sets your starting point and to some extent dictates how your early gameplay is going to progress.
From there you are dropped onto a foreboding-looking island in search of resources on an expedition, which is what the game calls its general mission map structure. Much of your progression path is focused on the acquisition of gold and a glowing red material known as Witchfire. You can get this by killing monsters or by harvesting it directly from nodes you can find in the world. The maps are all custom-built, but the spawns and objectives vary each time you set foot on it. This means you pretty quickly get a lay of the land and understand how to traverse the area effectively, but won’t actually know what dangers lay along your path.
One of the first things that you want to do upon landing on the Island of the Damned, is pop open your map. This will have various objectives marked as well as the most important items the portals that will return you to the base where you started. Witchfire is an extraction shooter, which means you want to collect as many resources as you feel like you can before making your way to a portal and exiting the level locking in your progress. If you die on the island, you lose ALL of the Witchfire that you have not spent on upgrades, not just the Witchfire that you earned in a single play session. This makes you carefully choose your engagements because it seems like the longer you stay on the map, the more likely monsters are to guard your portal out of the map.
I’ve seen this game compared to a soulslike a few times, but I feel like the depth of this comparison ends with the fact that monsters hit really freaking hard, you have very limited health pool and ability to heal yourself, and that the mobs themselves have deeply predictable attack patterns. If you are taking on a single monster it is pretty easy to avoid all of the attacks. However, if you get swarmed… it becomes MUCH harder to read all of the attacks and move out of the way of various things that can kill you. The bane of my existence is the snipers which will give you a muzzle flash/glint in your radar letting you know that they are about to fire upon you. This is pretty easy to deal with in singletons, but when you get four of them attacking you at once it is very hard to accurately dodge all of them.
Every so often upon killing a monster you will be given access to an Arcana power-up which will last for the course of the current expedition giving the game a bit of a Hades vibe. You can also fine White Raven Feathers scattered through the map in treasure chests which will allow you to unlock additional options during each unlock. I’ve seen a lot of very interesting options, like the ability to gain a random elemental damage type when you reload your weapon. I’ve also seen some boring options like just giving you more health or more stamina. These combined with the random nature of the spawns and objectives give each map a lot of replayability.
Again though your goal is to get a bunch of loot, and then duck out before the heat gets too much for you to handle. While this does not really factor in for the early maps, there is a GTA-style heat meter that shows up as “The Witch” starts to notice your presence. When this bar maxes out, it will summon some cataclysm event that seeks to kill you. I’ve not seen this, but I have heard of it and it sounds like bad news given how hard everything already hits for random goons. In the above exit screen, I killed 24 monsters and looted 10k Witchfire… which admittedly is only that high because I retrieved a pile of Witchfire off my corpse after I failed the run before. When you fail completely, you end up creating a pile on the map that represents some of what you dropped on death.
Pending you exit the level successfully you can spend your stockpile of Witchfire on upgrading your core stats at the Ascension shrine, craft additional healing potions, or unlock perks on the weapons you currently have. I did not have a screenshot of this because apparently, you cannot access the weapon upgrade UI unless you have a pending upgrade. However the game has something akin to the Masterwork weapon system from Destiny, which is probably why it draws that comparison. Weapons each have three tiers of “masterworking, ” each giving the weapon some sort of intrinsic perk. You unlock the next one by defeating a certain number of baddies or performing other actions while on the expeditions.
Starting at level seven, you get access to the research system which will unlock new gear for you to equip on your character. Instead of being tied to Witchfire, this one is tied to gold which largely comes from looting treasure chests or very rarely dropping from tougher enemies. I was hoping this would allow me to research specifically named weapons, but apparently, it gives you a random unlock from a broad family of equipment. To start out I am researching a Close Ranged Weapon and a Medium Ranged Weapon, and I believe this progresses as you complete a number of expeditions because it does not appear to be tied to real-world time.
All in all the game is pretty fun. I dig the hunt for treasure and kill the baddies aspect while slowly powering up your character over time. I am starting to get better about looking for plants to harvest and witchfire clusters to gather while in the map, while also keeping an eye out for individual treasure chests. I’ve not made it very far into the game and I am assuming there are other maps that will unlock as I progress my character. If you are interested in Destiny-style movement and gunplay combined with magic powers, interesting gun design, and Hades-style rogue-lite powerups it might be worth a gander. I will warn you… the game can be punishingly hard at times which seems to reward a careful gameplay style rather than running into a nest of monsters guns blazing. There is a lot of cover that you can use to bait enemies out into the open for you to kill them more safely.
Anyways! Thought I would talk about it this morning in case anyone else out there would be interested. They released a few more updated trailers when the game went into Steam early access. The game world is gorgeous so I can see myself playing this on the side when I am in the mood for its blend if tropes.
The post Witchfire Steam Early Access appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
