Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was an event from Grinding Gear Games that gave us the complete picture of what the Path of Exile 2 Early Access would look like. Essentially in two weeks, we are going to be able to play the game in a relatively finished state with a fully fleshed-out endgame. As far as ARPGs go… the king up to this point has been Blizzard with the Diablo series. GGG is gunning for that crown however and released a new opening cinematic for Path of Exile 2 that rivals some of the best. What is more, as an avid player of Path of Exile and its lore… I think I more or less know what a good deal of the elements that were introduced in the cinematic were. In fact, I have seen confirmation on at least one point… what the thing in the sphere was. I am not going to go into details on this however because I am hoping the story of the game will answer these questions for any players who are not lore fanatics.
More than that, the footage that we saw yesterday gives me hope that this is not an attempt at a soulslike. The previous footage was VERY slow and plodding… with what seemed to be unoptimized builds. Path of Exile is a game about player power and blasting through content… and this did not feel like that experience. However yesterday they released an updated gameplay trailer with what appears to be some optimized characters and while not nearly as fast as POE1… it felt like player power would not really be a problem. More than anything I was super interested in playing a largely shield-focused character that they showed off via the Warrior. The combat still feels chunky, but fluid, and I think it is going to be fun exploring the maps and finding all the hidden things. There are apparently hidden bosses scattered throughout the content that will unlock permanent upgrades for your character.
The presentation was roughly an hour and a half long and contained ZERO fluff. There are way too many things to talk about in a single post, so I am not even going to try. I highly suggest if you are interested either as an existing Path of Exile player or someone who has a middling interest in ARPGs and was going to give Path of Exile a shot with the second game… to spend the time and watch through the footage. Essentially POE2 is going to be a wildly different sort of game than Path of Exile has been up to this point, and probably that is for the best. There are a lot of mechanics that are going to be returning in one form or another, and even more that seem to be remixed combining multiple leagues worth of content from the first game into a single mechanic in the second.
Probably the single biggest change is how the Atlas of Worlds is going to work in POE2. If you’ve read this blog for a long while as I talk about my adventures in the game, you are probably familiar at least with the concept of Delve. Essentially it is an endless mine that scales both horizontally and vertically allowing you to effectively keep going forever… or at least to the maximum value of an int32. They are taking this endless concept and applying it to the Atlas of Worlds so that instead of collecting specific maps… you can just keep expanding out effectively forever and finding new content to run. Scattered throughout the map will be special nodes for bosses or other events as well as brand-new hideouts for you to find and conquer. This is going to radically change what the endgame is going to look like for players, and what “juicing” strategies are available. Essentially it seems like this is going to favor folks like me who are in team “Alch and Go” as opposed to folks who bought hundreds of copies of the same map and same scarabs and ran the same optimized strategy over and over.
I am pretty sure that my first character is going to be a Warrior and that I am going to go down the path of the Titan ascendancy. They introduced that there is a keystone called Giants Blood that is going to allow you to wield two-handed weapons in a single hand… so you can do the whole Titan Grip thing from World of Warcraft. My favorite version of this has always been the Two-Hander and Shield thing that you could do on the Crusader in Diablo III, and I will be attempting to recreate that feel with my Warrior. I already love Shield Charge and there was this attack that they kept doing during the footage called Stampede that looked amazing. If possible I am going to use something like Volcanic Fissure to mix in fire damage since I also have a deep affinity towards setting things on fire.
Other than the Warrior, I thought the Witch seemed really cool. I like that minions are going to be something that you do in addition to making actual attacks. The Blood Mage seemed really cool because I already love stacking as much health and regen as possible, and that ascendancy seemed like it would reward that significantly. It is going to be a bit weird that minions require spirit aka mana reservation in order to keep up and running, but it seems like Sceptres have been turned into the Minion weapon and will now provide a lot of spirit just for using them. The challenge is going to be balancing permanent minions taking up spirit reservation and defensive auras doing the same. My hope is all the health stacking of Blood Mage is going to offset the lack of defenses from auras.
The labyrinth appears to be gone, at least they did not show it in relation to unlocking ascendancies. Instead, you will have a choice between running the spiritual successor to Sanctum, or the spiritual successor to Ultimatum. For me, that choice is a no-brainer… I don’t particularly enjoy either mechanic but I would far rather deal with the Trial Master than never get hit. Every build that I create is designed to be tanky as hell, and able to soak damage… which is counter-intuitive to how Sanctum has worked where if you get hit… you lose a permanent stat that you cannot easily get back and when that stat goes to zero you fail. Ultimatum on the other hand is about being stupidly tanky and being able to deal with lots of incoming damage and souped-up monsters. Unfortunately, I think this will also mean that I might need to ascend later if I want to skip the “pseudo-sanctum”. I will give it a shot, but it is not my kind of gameplay.
All in all though… I am way more hyped about Path of Exile 2 than I have been at any other point. I had a lot of trepidation that they were going to take this too far toward the souls-like gameplay. It seems like that will not be the case. It seems like you can still revel in power fantasy and create super murder-y characters. I’m also really interested now to see where the story goes. Twenty years have passed since the previous game and I am wondering if our “exile” will play a role at all in the new story. I honestly wonder if the Ghost from the trailer is us since we unwittingly became the guardians of our world. The Elder, Shaper, and Sirius were all normal folks who transcended to godhood through external influences and I wonder if that is ultimately what happened to us as well after meddling in things we should not have meddled in.
If you are someone who has not played a lot of Path of Exile or someone who has not paid attention to the lore, then I highly suggest you check out KittenCatNoodle who have created a ton of lore deep dive videos.
The post Path of Exile 2 Early Access Hype appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I’m getting a bit of a late start this morning on putting up a daily blog post, which is probably bad considering I hard skipped writing anything yesterday. I’ve been continuing to roam around in Path of Exile while I figure out what I want to tackle next, and made some significant progress on chipping away at my final atlas unlocks. One of the big things about this league is that I have to explore other options for obtaining unique maps. We are in a heavy inflation league economy and as a result, I just don’t have the raw resources to buy my way out of holes in quite the same manner that I normally do. Traditionally I would get down to the last 10 maps or so and just buy them from the trade market. This time around I am using Kirac, Scouting Reports, and Beastcrafting in an effort to find my last few maps.
As of this morning, I am sitting at 112 of 115 maps completed which leaves me with three unique maps. I still need to find The Coward’s Trial, Oba’s Cursed Trove, and weirdly enough the Vault of Atziri which normally is something I find pretty early on. The title of this blog post is somewhat misleading because I am heavily engaged with the Currency Exchange, but largely making the decision to avoid buying most things that are not currency outright. So while I will purchase scouting reports, I am trying my best not to purchase maps. Largely because in my experience so far, it is hard to get anyone to respond to requests right now. The league is fairly dead and the prices that are posted, and not that great. My goal for the league I think is to complete the Atlas and it has been interesting trying to solo my way through that.
I got my first upgrade in quite a long while, and it was picking up an Omen of Connections for 2 Divine Orbs. Essentially I had posted a buy request hoping that someone would eventually decide to sell it to me. Buying one immediately would have taken 4 Divines, and I really did not want to pay that price for it. Before resorting to that I did burn through 600+ fusings in a Yolo attempt to link it that ultimately failed. I had not had much luck either finding the Omen through Ritual or the Black Morrigan through Einhar on my own in this league. I fully expect that after going through and buying it… I will probably get one to drop within the next few play sessions. I wish the Omen of Connections worked on Taited Fusings… but alas it does not. Bumping up to a Six Link is a pretty massive improvement in clear speed, and in theory, at some point, I probably need to run a bunch of labs to get some quality on my gems.
Today is the Early Access/Supporter Pack reveal stream at 2 pm CST and with it comes a very questionable Twitch drop. I will of course be farming it just to have it… but I cannot see a case in the future where I would want to wear these Breach hands as a cloak. The community is excited and thinks this cosmetic means that Breach is effectively confirmed for POE2. I am hoping that during this stream they talk a bit about what the endgame for the early access is going to look like. We know that we are only going to have three acts to play through, and in theory a limited set of classes and only one ascendency per class. I am hoping that most of this information will be confirmed during the show. I am still kind of on the fence about how much I feel like POE2 is going to be my sort of game, but I am hopeful because of how much I enjoy Path of Exile in its current state.
Are you going to be tuning into the reveal stream? What league mechanic are you hoping will return in Path of Exile 2? For me it is Delve, but I also feel like Delve, Heist, and Sanctum since they are not mapping mechanics… are going to be a bit before they are introduced.
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Good Morning Folks. After wrapping up Veilguard I have now uninstalled the game to free up space for whatever comes next and am back futzing around with Path of Exile. I wrapped up my second voidstone and I gotta say… I am somewhat impressed at how much better I am now at doing these first two. It gives me hope that maybe at some point in the future the last two will be a similar cakewalk. I managed to take both down without taking any deaths which I think is a first for me. Searing Exarch is way more dangerous to my specific build, but I find that I hate Eater of Worlds way more. It is the charging the spheres phase that annoys me because inevitably one of the spheres overlaps some of the other nonsense that happens in the arena. I also hate being on a timer… it causes me to freak out mentally. I have some baggage surrounding being timed that I have never quite gotten over.
I am struggling a bit to complete my Atlas of Worlds. At this point, I am at 99 of 115 and am completely out of maps to run. This means I need to chain run maps that I have already completed in the hope of getting something that I can actually run. I have a lighthouse that I do not have credit for, but when I corrupted the map it ended up shifting to include no-regen which my build cannot run. I’ve contemplated trying to run it without Righteous Fire turned on… but that is still always risky as hell. Admittedly there are some times I just fail to brain and realize I am halfway through a map and never actually turned on RF… but that is the exception rather than the rule. I am not sure what is up with Kirac but it seems like his inventory is not generating new maps nearly as often as I would expect him to. I’m also the only one playing in this league from our guild and as a result, there is no map sharing happening in the guild bank. Generally speaking, there are always one or two maps that Kodra gets for example that I had not seen, which helps these dry spells.
I have enough currency that I could just buy my way out of the hole, but the trade market is already pretty dead at this point during the event. There were a lot of folks who only played that first weekend, never to return again. Thankfully the Currency Exchange is still hopping and I can move items pretty easily. I’ve learned that Goddess fragments are a great way to make some gold since they are selling for around 25 chaos each right now. I have zero interest in running lab, and even if I do to quality up my gems I am going to breeze my way through one of the free ones instead of tackling uber lab. Though I have to admit after years of repetition… I don’t mind lab anywhere near as much as I used to. I can pretty much predict instinctively where the doors are going to be and can zip through them pretty quickly these days.
This morning the venerable Sir Gog released a video and in it is the above screenshot from GGG on Twitter. It seems that the minimum buy-in for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is going to be the $30 supporter pack that is likely to be released during the Twitch stream on Thursday. This is going to happen at 2 pm CST and will have Twitch drops enabled which is usually wings or a cloak or something similar. There was some talk about lifetime spenders getting in automatically but I have not seen any specifics surrounding that yet. Honestly, I was probably going to buy something from the upcoming yearly supporter pack anyways so this really isn’t too heinous as far as I am concerned. Path of Exile has earned every dime I have spent on it in a way that most games have not.
In another randomness, I watched the first episode of the HBO Dune Prophecy series last night and I have mixed opinions. I have basically come to accept that this current Dune franchise is going to have to be taken as its own thing. The first movie was mostly a good adaptation of the original source material, but that second movie veered off into left field at the last moments becoming its own unique universe. As such I am mostly assuming that this pre-history series is going to do its own thing. Admittedly while I read the Brian Herbert Houses Trilogy, I never went back and read any of the Machine Crusade stuff. Maybe this is drawing directly from that and I just do not realize it. Whatever the case there was a “superpower” shown at the end of this episode that I do not remember existing previously in the canon. So yeah… I will be watching this but also taking everything with a shaker of salt, because the current vision for this franchise is a bit different than the novels.
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Good Morning Folks. Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal and finished Dragon Age Veilguard. This morning I am going to attempt to walk a narrow line of talking about the events of the game without going into a lot of details. There are absolutely going to be spoilers, but I am going to try my best not to spoil exact plot decisions. I will however talk about some of the general decisions that will influence the ending that you can get. From what I can tell based on some research this morning, I seem to have managed to land upon the “best” ending. There is no “New Game Plus” mode so that is probably going to influence how fast I end up replaying this game since there is no easy path to just make different story decisions.
One of the decisions with this game that I was less than happy about, was the lack of an ability to import your Inquisitor. This was a thing that happened in previous incarnations of Dragon Age and I have played through the entire sequence importing my previous save and rolling my decisions forward. This legitimately was one of the coolest experiences because it almost always opened up options that you could not get any other way. However Veilguard is a game where there is a very clear canon set of choices made by the Inquisitor, and without that, some of the flow of the plot of the game would not function at all. You are given control over what your character looks like, but I chose a default appearance because quite honestly… I knew it was not MY Inquisitor.
One of my favorite aspects of the game however is the characters. There was a lot of spite floating around about this game and I don’t get it. The characters are all beautifully crafted and if you do not love Manfred the skeleton you have no soul. Similarly, Assan the Griffon is amazing and the best baby boy. The thing is having effectively completed all of the companion quests and quite honestly all of the side quests… the characters are amazingly well-crafted and deeply multi-dimensional. If anything… this is quite possibly the most Dragon Age game out there because for me it was always about the character interactions and never about what sort of combat was present in the game. These are games about friendship and romance set against the tapestry of a really interesting world. Veilguard delivers on all of those levels.
Another aspect of the game that I really enjoyed is how it handles romance in general. Effectively all of the characters in this game are bisexual/pansexual and can be romanced from any flavor of player character. However, the act of becoming a couple ends up happening pretty early at least compared to other Bioware games, and this has some really interesting ramifications. This frees up the other characters in the game to begin to develop their own relationships. I am not entirely certain how many NPC on NPC romance options there are, but I was given the choice to encourage other characters that obviously have chemistry to go for it, and this was super good. The thing is… the platonic options are way better than they are in other games and it felt like I was able to shape the lives of my companions more than I would normally be able to.
There is a loss in this game that cannot be avoided. The seasoned Bioware player in me tries to chart a course that allows me to save everyone. This is going to be a massive spoiler but even in a perfectly played game… you are going to lose one of your companions. The very first decision that you are asked to make in the lead-up to the final conflict… is going to lead to that companion never returning to your party. All of the other decisions are a combination of how well-suited they are for the mission you are assigning them to, and whether or not you fully unlocked that companion’s potential by completing the final chapter of their story arc. Similar to Mass Effect, if you do not go into the final mission with full companion strength and have completed all of the quests for the factions, you are going to lose more than that single required character. Essentially the first decision of who leads the second team is a Virmire-style question.
Another aspect of Veilguard that I greatly appreciate is how clear it is in messaging that you are entering the point of no return. You are given this screen indicating how prepared you are for the final battle. More than that however you are given a warning well before this point that things are getting close to the final phase. I’m the type of Bioware player that farms down every side quest possible before moving the main plot forward because I have learned the hard way that often those options will change or be removed when the world state changes. However, Veilguard is painfully clear about what you are getting yourself into before you actually embark upon that point of no return. Another thing that I really love is that the game is constantly telling you when you have reached a critical decision that is going to have lasting effects. More than that it also reminds you HOW you received this side plot point and what decision you made previously it was based upon.
Quite possibly the best part about Veilguard though is the way in which the plot wraps up. Remember how epic the final assault on Earth felt in Mass Effect 3? What if you had a game that managed to keep that same level of hype all the way through to the conclusion without fumbling it at the goal line? That is pretty much Veilguard because the final assault on Minrathos feels amazing and is filled with so many visuals that I legitimately do not want to spoil here so I am giving you the most general shot instead. The ending is satisfying in a way that Mass Effect 3 never was, and quite honestly… Veilguard would feel like a fitting conclusion to the entire Dragon Age series if it needed to be. The game as a whole expands upon the known lore of the series and wraps up so many elements in a nice little bow at the end. It reminds me of the way that Endwalker neatly wrapped up a decade’s worth of gameplay in its single final act. Dragon Age lore nerds are eating well.
This game has gotten so much bad press but honestly… I don’t get it. It makes me question if any of these folks were actually Dragon Age fans at all. What game series have they been playing up until this point, it certainly is not the series I have been playing. Veilguard is quite possibly the MOST Dragon Age game I have played in the series and legitimately makes me want to go back and play the other games again knowing where things are going to wind up. If you cannot find something that you love in this game then you have no heart. This is quite possibly my game of the year, and that comes from having just wrapped up Final Fantasy XVI right before this… and that in itself was a freaking amazing game. If you’ve ever played a Bioware game trying to engineer the perfect ending, or with the perfect romance options… then this game was created for you.
I know this post is riddled with spoilers, but I tried my best to talk about the conclusion of the game without going into a bunch of details. I have no clue if that was successful.
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