Good Morning Friends! It has been a few weeks and I thought I would give a proper blog update on Gracie and how she is settling in. For most of this week, she has been on “free roam” mode with the complete reign of the house. I am slightly sleep deprived because we have yet to learn when sleep time is supposed to happen, and occasionally have fits of activity overnight that wake us up. That said she tends to sleep snuggled between the covers between us, which is perfectly fine with me. In the grand scheme of things, it has been a pretty smooth transition and Mollie/Josie are doing a fair job of adjusting. Yesterday is really when things started to feel like normal again with far less cautious stalking around the house for fear of attracting the attention of the tiny terror.
Gracie herself is also way less likely to spend every moment of every day with a human being. So the negative means that I am not getting this sort of attention right now. It was fun while it lasted, but also extremely detrimental to actually getting anything done. Josie and Gracie appear to be developing a friendship, or at least there is more playing with each other that involves less hissing and puffed tails. Mollie has oddly been more stoic about this, which I thought was weird given that she is naturally the more skittish cat. However, then I realized that she has been through this before and realizes that “mommy and daddy” will still love her even though there is a new addition. Josie was the last new addition a few years ago, and as such, she is not sure what to think about any of this.
We are starting to settle into what feels like the new normal. Josie is back to sleeping on my legs overnight while Gracie sleeps up at the head of the bed between us. Mollie is back to spending almost all of every day with me in my office and requesting periodic pet breaks. Gracie alternates between sleeping downstairs in the hammock and screaming at the top of her lungs for attention because she doesn’t see any human beings around her. She has an exceptional set of lungs for someone so small, and she also seems to be completely fearless which makes any time we have to open the front or back door anxiety-ridden. All of this said though, I think we picked an exceptionally sweet kitten and are now batting two for two from rescuing animals from the local animal welfare. We’ve always gotten animals through third-party rescue organizations in the past, but I have to say our animal welfare seems to do a great job with their animals and socializing them.
Finally, in some gaming news, I have officially entered Act 10 but did not manage to get through it last night before sleep claimed me. I am going to need to spend some effort trying to sort out gearing because I am most definitely feeling much squishier all of a sudden. Additionally I checked my guide and I am no longer using the correct combination of skill gems. Basically, I am once again under some socket pressure and now need I believe an RRGGBB item to socket my preferred skill chain into. Mostly I just am trying to get up to maps because my friend Grace has managed to rocket past me… and finished the main story over lunch yesterday. I think we are ultimately trying to determine if the league start experience in Path of Exile can fully replace our traditional Diablo 3 fun time.
In another quick footnote… I am grinding away on Blaugust stuff and am hoping to make a big announcement soon.
The post Gracie and the New Normal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
So recently I have been on an ARPG kick and quite honestly… while I am most known for being an MMORPG player, I was an ARPG player first. I love Diablo and have loved it since getting my hands on the pre-release test of the first game back in college. When confronted with the decision of which game to buy… because Icewind Dale and Diablo II came out on the same day… I of course bought Diablo II. Years later I was STILL playing Diablo II as my primary reprieve from playing Everquest, and keeping a server running with friends. As such I have always bought and tried out pretty much every new ARPG that comes down the pipe, and Last Epoch was no exception. I did not like this game when I first tried it… but given that I also did not like Path of Exile when I first tried it I figured it might be worth a revisit.
Sometimes when you try out a new game there is one small thing that destroys the experience. If you search google on “Last epoch move and attack” you will find a litany of people who have requested the ability to bind move and attack to the same key, which is admittedly the post-Diablo ARPG standard. For whatever reason be it technical or philosophical… the Last Epoch team seems diametrically opposed to actually doing this. So when I found out that this was not a thing that I could do in this game, and that it did not have Controller support to fall back upon… I uninstalled it and moved on. Then I had a bit of a revelation last week while playing Path of Exile and on the podcast that changed my perspective a bit.
While Click to Move is a concept I am deeply comfortable with and fall back upon… I don’t actually play games in that manner if I can help it. Some years ago my friend Grace got me hooked on another control scheme for Diablo III, where I bind “Force Move” to W and then essentially “steer” my character while moving my mouse cursor around the screen. When I got into Path of Exile recently, this is one of the first things that I did and I am annoyed at that game that I had to give up a functional skill slot in order to make this happen. It turns out that I can in fact do this same sort of mechanic in Last Epoch and after some careful keybind swaps I was able to land on a gameplay structure that more or less maps to what I am familiar with in Diablo III, where I hit Q for the potion, 7/8/9 for some of my abilities because they are comfortable to hit on my g600 mouse, and spacebar for my “charge” ability. Once the mechanical aspect of playing the game was solved… it is actually a pretty solid option.
Last night I created a fresh Sentinel because I had no clue what I was doing the last time I had attempted to play this game. Essentially you choose a base class and then that can morph over time into one of three masteries. For Sentinel, I get the choice of Paladin, Forge Guard, and Void Knight currently I am leaning heavily towards Forge Guard.
This is the class wheel from the wiki, and gives a pretty good representation of your options. The only traditional “Diablo” archetype that seems to be missing is that of the Barbarian/Brawler type character. While Sentinel looks like a Paladin/Crusader it does have a lot of the same tropes that you might find from a Barbarian including the very spin-to-win playstyle of “Whirlwind”. I noticed last night that a few of these mastery classes exist in the interface, but are not something you can choose. I am guessing since this game is still in active development that there just has not been time to complete them.
I think the thing that honestly impresses me the most so far is the fact that at level 7, I feel like I have a pretty complete package of abilities. I have a big single target attack, my default attack has been replaced by a three-hit combo, I have a ranged throw ability, I can charge at packs of mobs, and I can whirlwind down large packs of enemies. This is something that I would have expected to arrive at far later in the game, and quite honestly… reminds me a bit of how good Diablo Immortal felt at low levels. It seems like I am going to continue to get more abilities than I have room for, and as a result, will have to tailor my build looking for more direct synergies.
Please note that I have only the most shallow of understanding this game right now. However once I have arrived at a place where the controls felt playable, it is something I want to explore further. Essentially as far as I can tell character progression goes down two lines at the start. The first is a series of passive talent choices, with additional trees for the three master class choices. I greatly appreciate that it seems like I can just come in here and respec at will. That is deeply refreshing coming from Path of Exile where I am scared to death I am going to screw up and choose the wrong thing.
The next progression system seems to allow you to specialize in five different class abilities, with additional slots unlocking as you level. Right now I have spent some points specializing in my three-hit combo primary attack, and my lunging charge attack. I feel like no matter where I go skill-wise I am probably going to keep using these because they feel great. All in all the structure of this game feels something more closely related to Diablo III than the Diablo II roots that games like Path of Exile or Grimdawn have. I honestly appreciate the more hand-holding given in the talent trees and the ability to just respec everything at will. I always hated the need to roll a new character if you wanted to try something different in ARPGs and consider the freeform nature of Diablo III to be a benefit to the genre.
While I was able to get past the control scheme boss, many of my past complaints still exist. Classes are gender locked and there appears to be no manner of character customization. Mage is always going to be an old man with a book, which admittedly is better than the old man in a diaper look that Diablo III gives the male Barbarian. So depending upon your personal preferences here, you might end up having to play a character that does not suit your representation choices. Admittedly this is a problem in general with ARPGs, but one that I keep hoping someone realizes IS a problem. I cannot tell you just how refreshing the character creation system was in Diablo Immortal. Too bad that game is a dumpster fire for other reasons.
I’ve not spent much time honestly in Last Epoch but it is already something that I want to explore a bit further. The lack of multiplayer play was always a bit of a bummer as well with Last Epoch, but more of an “in development” thing than a willful omission. It seems that Multiplayer is currently in closed testing and planned to be opened up to all players “soon”. I think ultimately more than anything that is going to determine how engaged I become with this game, is whether or not it can scratch the same multiplayer fun itches that Diablo III has for many seasons. The design of the end game is extremely important for long-term replayability. In the meantime, however, I am preparing myself for the launch of the new Path of Exile league and getting in truly on the ground floor of that experience. It launches on a Friday night, which hopefully can give the same sort of vibes as a Diablo III seasonal launch.
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Good Morning Folks! Last week we got some news that E3 would be returning fully in 2023 and that it would be handed off to ReedPOP. If you are not familiar with that name, then you have likely never been to a PAX show. Essentially this is the management company that brings you all of the various PAX shows, New York Comic-Con, MCM Comic-Con, and the Star Wars Celebration among others. They do an extremely good job of running these shows and as a result, I think this is probably a great call to add E3 to the bounty of their responsibility. As a company, they have a unique understanding of how to navigate the communities of pop culture fandom.
Pax South 2015 – Heart of Thorns Announcement
The only problem that I see with this, is that ReedPOP is extremely focused on Fan experiences, and E3 has traditionally not been a fan-based show. Sure over the years, they have flirted with having fan-specific events happening around the show with public access hours to the floor. However, the crux of what E3 was designed to be… was to be a business event where game companies could mingle with both gaming press and distributors to show off what was coming in the next calendar year. E3 came into existence when the video game industry effectively outgrew the Consumer Electronics Show and needed its own vehicle. As such this became the show to announce anything, but most specifically new hardware generations.
As fans what this also gave us was a single week where an entire year’s worth of news coalesced into major presentations by large games companies. If there is anything that I miss from E3… it is this aspect where during a single week I would have back-to-back shows to watch and write about. Some of these were phenomenal and others like the ill-fated 2013 Xbox presentation linked in supercut form above, were not so great. Regardless you knew that over the course of a few extremely condensed days, you would reap the whirlwind of gaming news and have new things to daydream about. Sure most E3 demos were utter fabrications rushed to market to have something shiny to show off, but it represented a fulcrum on which games media turned and as a result something that the fans could bank on.
The first blocks to fall from the E3 fort, came when major publishers broke away from the core convention and started hosting their own elaborate pre-E3 reveal shows. These were still in person and still at venues surrounding the main E3 event, so it seemed “fine”. However, it was a sign that publishers were all too happy to abandon E3 as a concept and do their own thing if it seemed to be a better deal for them in the long run. Then came the digital-only shows like Nintendo Direct, which effectively replaced the pomp of the larger venue-driven events. They were not something that people who were already attending E3 could walk over to, but instead something that was more focused on the fanbase.
This trend was already starting when we all had to shift and deal with a global pandemic, which ultimately canceled pretty much every in-person show. The thing is… life finds a way and effectively EVERY game publisher shifted to doing their own version of Nintendo Direct. Geoff Keighly did what he does and organized a replacement for E3 in the form of the Summer Games Fest, and I legitimately assumed that E3 as we knew it was a figment of the past. The thing that I mourned the most however is how spaced out the entire process has become. Essentially the “Not-E3” shows started sometime in late May and are continuing still with upcoming events still planned to take place in July. The end result is… that I personally just don’t have the focus to follow a long schedule of events that spans the course of three months. I could tune in and be focused for four or five days max… and this year I think I watched TWO of the dozens of shows that were available.
Don’t get me wrong I think that ReedPOP is going to do a phenomenal job with organizing this show and making it run smoothly. However, E3 only has any gravitas if it can somehow convince the major publishers to play along. PAX already exists and does a much better job of supporting the smaller publishers and indie developers that get lost in the mix of a large show. Without PlayStation, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Square, and Nintendo on board with the notion of a return to “in-person” shows and events… then E3 is just a brand that serves no purpose anymore. The problem there is I am not sure if the math adds up to E3 making sense for them to make a large deal about. During the time of the pandemic, they have all built their own direct marketing brands and with them their own shows. The eyeballs that used to be on E3 have how shifted to being focused on publisher-specific shows and whatever amalgam Keighly happens to be promoting at the time.
I have to admit that Microsoft did a phenomenal job this year with its Xbox, Bethesda, and soon-to-be Blizzard showcase. This is the only show this past year that I watched in real-time because it summoned forth enough interest to make me anxious over what I might see. As much as I might want to return to a time when we had a tight block of news updates all landing within the same week… I think that era is gone. We will continue to see the shows spread out more so that they are not in direct competition with other publishers. The way the E3 system worked the shows all happened within mere hours of each other, and as a result, it encouraged direct comparison. Fans talked about who “Won E3” and presented the best showcase… hint… it was never EA. Now in the post-E3 reality that we have been living in for the last two years, the individual publishers can give their shows a bit of breathing room… and plausible deniability.
Like I said before E3 was always a working convention, and one centered around the business of making, selling, and writing about games. I do have to wonder if the addition of ReedPOP to the mix signals a shift in the show to being more fan-focused. I do not think that E3 is likely going to get the major publishers back in the fold, and the best they can possibly hope for is some E3 adjacent events. Instead, the show itself is going to have to change into something different. Essentially I think going forward E3 is going to be PAX Anaheim for lack of a better term. The Keighly machine will keep rolling and keep courting publishers into his larger-reaching digital productions.
The above chart is from The Video Game Awards website and shows the significant growth that little venture has seen. In 2021 not listed on the chart there were a reported 85 Million viewers across the various global live streams. No matter what you think about E3… it never reached those sorts of heights. I think publishers have realized that they do not need a physical presence in order to reach fans and that the money spent on the small number of people who can actually physically go to a venue is better spent on digital outreach. I think the zombie of E3 will continue to linger for a few more years, but ultimately at some point, the decision will have to be made if it just ends… or pivots into becoming another PAX-style show. I think the last few years have shown that fans care way less about bespoke venues and instead just want some cool video game trailers.
The post ReedPOP and E3 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we have a show where we are mostly discovering games that have been out for a very long time. We start off with Rimworld and Tam’s adventures in this story generation engine. From there we talk about Wolfstride and how it is a very 90s anime representation of a video game. From there Tam talks a bit about the Star Citizen Guide program that links someone needing help with a live person to help them, and how recent changes have made that system work strangely. Finally, we dive into Path of Exile and how the rabbit hole has widened and captured most of us. We talk about confronting the passive tree and the weird edge case builds it can support along with some early multiplayer experiences. We also talk a bit about how important it is for games to support a controller and a mouse and keyboard to meet the players where they are most comfortable. Finally, we dive a bit into the microtransactions within Path of Exile and their general acceptance.
Belghast 
