Good Morning Folks. Lately, I have been spending quite a bit of time visiting Living World Season Three and Four zones and cashing in Unbound and Volatile Magic. Essentially I am working towards crafting another Gift of Magic and Gift of Might which requires 250 of each rare trophy. Buying these outright off the market is a pretty extreme expense with Might costing around 165 gold, and Magic around 332 gold. However, I have been buying Trophy Shipments and the less effective Magic-Warped Bundle in an attempt to blunt this cost. I still need to build back up my stockpile of Mystic Clover and I am hoping that by the time I hit 77 of those I will have 250 of most of the needed materials. Similarly, I am going to have to grind out another Gift of Battle which I am likely going to do this weekend while the anniversary buff is still active.
Last night the map gods smiled upon me and landed me in a group on a map that was capable of defeating the new world boss meta in Janthir Syntri. This was my tenth attempt after nine failed attempts with different groups since the launch of this expansion. Essentially it is both a DPS check and a mechanics check with Greer seemingly the harder part of the encounter. He throws out massive amounts of condition damage, which needs cleansing and everyone effectively needs to stack on top of the boss right up in his face in order to really make this work. The problem with Greer though is that there are several intermission phases that slow down the fight significantly. We technically had more DPS on Greer than on Decima and there was a point where we had to do nothing but auto attacks while the other group caught up.
As far as what I did differently this time… I put my faith in the Commander entirely. I stood on top of them no matter what was being dished out and tried my best to have faith that the cleansing and healing would keep me alive. This is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in and I had years of feeling like I needed to dodge out of every mechanic screaming at me. I also shifted things up a bit and brought the Juvenile Brown Bear… aka Daedalus who has the special attack of Shake it Off which removes two conditions from five targets. I have no clue how much this additional cleansing helped but I figured anything was better than nothing. I legitimately need to get better at bringing the right pet to the battle, because 99.9% of the time I run the same few pets over and over. I stayed out of Soulbeast form and just sort of let the pet do its thing, hoping that it was better at targetting cleansings than I would be given how furiously I was mashing buttons otherwise.
So on one hand… I am very happy to have completed this meta. On the other hand… I still think this is a miserable encounter that asks way too damned much out of random folks on a random map. You essentially need at least 50 players on each of the bosses to seemingly make this work, and even in spite of how well it was going… the fight was still really damned tight. We could have lost at the last minute easily, and there was not enough time to swap over to the other boss to help them burn it down if things got dicey. Like that is one of the huge parts of Auric Basin is if things go south folks can get over to the other vines pretty quickly to assist there and help push whichever one was lagging behind. We did send a few folks from our team over to Decima and we had two seasoned Commanders that were directing traffic. Basically, I just lucked out to finally get a group that was prepared for this nonsense.
With the wizard chore points from getting the special achievement from clearing the meta, I picked up my last piece of Ascended gear. It is probably very sad that it has taken me a decade to fully kit out a single character in Ascended items. It was just never really a priority, but I figure since I am doing harder stuff I need to make sure I have the best gear going into the encounters. Granted I have exotic underwater weapons… but really who gives a shit about underwater weapons. It is sad that I had an Ascended Rebreather before I had fully Ascended armor. I need to start figuring out what is required for the Legendary Armor set and begin chipping away at that. I will probably do Heavy first because there are multiple classes that could benefit from that whereas… medium is just Thieves and Engineers… neither of which I am terribly keen on.
I think one of my favorite things about Guild Wars 2 is how active the world feels, and how easy it is for me to set my focus on something… that does not necessarily require a group. Sure I would freaking love a full group to do things like Strikes and Fractals… but there is more than enough meat on the bone for me to enjoy myself doing things that do not require largescale organization.
The post Frickin Finally appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks. There has been a lot of discussion over the last week about the release of Concord and how poorly it is doing. Right now it has a 24-hour peak user count on Steam Charts of around 260 players with an all-time peak since the launch of 660. Granted this only represents numbers on Steam, but can be used as a way of extrapolating how well a game is doing in general. If it is performing poorly on PC, it is likely performing poorly on Playstation 5 where it is a console exclusive. Across the board, this seemed like a game that no one really wanted that was released into an already packed hero shooter genre, put up against games that were free to play as opposed to its $40 buy-in price. I remember briefly getting excited about the trailer only to lose all interest when I found out it was “yet another live service game” and more than that… focused on PVP combat. The trailer was this really cool science fiction heist thing and I felt like it could have been a really interesting game along the lines of the Guardians of the Galaxy game that came out a few years ago. Unfortunately, it was not and was part of the larger forced march that Sony seems to be on towards trying to mint a live service goldmine.
Why do we find ourselves on this path? The answer is simple… FIFA Ultimate Team exists and it was enough to make the financial types stand up and take notice and believe that live service games were an infinite money glitch. This feature went into FIFA soccer in 2009 and has been the prime revenue earner for Electronic Arts almost since that point. Just like World of Warcraft levels of success poisoned the waters for future MMORPGs, every game now is seemingly expected to produce “FUT” numbers. Just so you understand what this means… in 2020 during peak pandemic spending FIFA Ultimate Team brought Electronic Arts 1.62 Billion Dollars. That is from selling what are effectively digital trading cards that come along with a stat package for your game.
It was not until yesterday that I realized just how much money Sony has seemingly poured into trying to make Concord a thing. Secret Level is an Amazon Prime Streaming project from Blur Studios… aka the people who created pretty much every big-budget game trailer you have ever loved as well as the popular “Love, Death & Robots” anthology series. In the teaser trailer the text flashes by “15 Stories Inspired By Your Favorite Games”. So let’s take a look at the list of games that are going to be included.
● Armored Core ● Concord ● Crossfire ● Dungeons & Dragons ● Exodus ● Honor of Kings ● Mega Man ● New World: Aeternum ● PAC-MAN ● PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities) ● Sifu ● Spelunky ● The Outer Worlds ● Unreal Tournament ● Warhammer 40,000
There are a few of these that don’t really fit, that “your favorite games” bit. Firstly you have New World: Aeternum which I am guessing was included because Amazon is at least in part bankrolling the project and that they really want their console rebrand to work. Honor of Kings was new to me, but apparently, it is a really popular MOBA in mainland China from Tencent. Similarly, Crossfire is wildly popular in the South Korean market. Then you have Concord, which I am assuming was included in the list as part of the Sony marketing push behind this project or potentially part of a larger deal to allow for other properties to be included. This feels like an awful lot of money to put behind a product that had not been released and that is an IP that is unproven.
There has been a spate of large-budget flops lately. Suicide Squad for example looks like a massive winner compared to Redfall and Concord and reportedly it was an over 200 Million Dollar loss for Warner Brothers. Redfall cratered hard enough to effectively destroy the studio because Arkane Austin is no more. Concord will likely destroy Firewalk Studios as that seems to be the stakes that are on the line currently when a large game fails to find its market. 2023 was a brutal year for Video Game Studio layoffs and closures, and this year has reportedly already surpassed it. I don’t exactly revel in the death of these studios, but I do think that we have been on an untenable trajectory for a while. Video Games have been financed through the cult of green candles, and the belief that the line will always go up.
Even games that were large successes are beginning to flounder. Helldivers 2 was a massive success, but then as Sony pushed some unpopular practices like required use of the PlayStation Network…. it began to shed players. Recently they have been shedding players due to balance decisions, proving once again that a live service game is only one bad patch away from failure. Similarly, the title that Sony bought to herald its new Live Service push was Destiny 2, and it has been bleeding players for years. I know I used to be a massive supporter of the game but left more or less permanently after they removed the Forsaken content from the game. Now that the game has entered what is effectively maintenance mode after the release of the Final Shape and what is reportedly the last major expansion for the game, it is similarly shedding players.
The weird thing about “Live Service” games is that while the big budget money grabs are failing to gain purchase… a lot of the existing games are trucking along and doing just fine. If you search for “best live service games” you will find a ton of listicles and the vast majority of the games listed are all around ten years old. Warframe for example is potentially the best looter shooter on the market, and it has pioneered a business model that seems to have worked for them. Sure they do not generate FIFA Ultimate Team money, but they have reached a place where it is sustainable for the studio. Similarly, Path of Exile is doing amazingly well hitting brand new peak concurrency numbers for the Settlers of Kalguur league. Similarly, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and hell even the often-panned Fallout 76 seem to be hitting their strides. This leads me to believe that “big business” has been bad for games as a whole because they do not care about the sustainability of platforms… only about extracting the maximum amount of value out of the players.
I am sure this is terribly naive of me, but I would love to see more “Indie Darlings” like Last Epoch which is financed in large part through supporter packs similar to the model that Path of Exile pioneered. They are not massive successes necessarily, at least not in the billions in the sales department… but they are functional and enough to keep the studio churning out new content. Games have been a bubble and I am sure it will continue to burst, but my hope is that what is left in its place is something that makes more sense. The zero-sum game that we have been playing over the last few decades clearly is not working as intended.
Unfortunately, we are probably going to lose a few more studios before this tale is finished. Bungie recently laid off a massive number of employees due to “underperformance”. In this, they canned several projects leaving themselves with only Destiny 2 which is on life support, and placing all of their eggs in the Marathon basket which is an IP reboot turned extraction shooter. The thing is… it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of hype surrounding Marathon, in part because just like Concord it is attempting to launch itself into an already packed genre. The only people who really remember Marathon were Macintosh gamers from the 90s who subsisted on playing it when everyone was playing Doom. You know what a bunch of 40 and 50-somethings are probably not big on… extraction shooters. Those who are into that genre are already probably Tarkov stans. I feel like this is maybe not the right play for the already stratified ecosystem that the game is launching into.
Maybe I am being overly hyperbolic, but I feel like a lot of these games would have made really fun single-player and co-op PVE experiences. Suicide Squad, for example, seemed like it was itching to be the next game in the Arkham series, with similar gameplay. Concord, the game that started this post… at least based on the trailer felt like it really wanted to be a PVE game where you built up a team and planned and pulled off successively larger heists until you uncovered some plot where you had to save the world. Redfall similarly felt like given a bit more time baking and a story-driven focus… it could have leaned on the best parts of that Arkane DNA to create a memorable experience similar to Dishonored. It feels like these games are failing because they are being pushed into a mold that relies on massive player engagement to succeed.
Anyways… I am done rambling and yelling at the clouds. Maybe I am off my base, but Concord feels like a gauge of customer sentiment more than some of these other games. We went from “low interest” to what feels like “no interest”. All of this said… what the hell do I know? I will very likely be over here in my corner playing the same damned games that have been out for the last decade or longer, and enjoying myself doing that.
The post Live Service Gold Farm Over? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I would love to give you all the customary “Good Morning Folks” greeting, but today has been straight in the shitter since I got up to my office. As a result, I am getting started on this post significantly later than normal. I’ve finally hit a lull and I am going to take this opportunity to talk about the nonsense I got up to this weekend. I spent a bit of time on my Warrior because that was my original main character in Guild Wars 2, and also the character that I was closest to finishing old world completion on. Basically with the new “season” aka the release of Janthir Wilds came a new Legendary Weapon Starter Kit, and more specifically this one includes Twilight a weapon I have been chasing for years. For the uninitiated, these give you basically 60% of the materials required to complete a Legendary weapon and cost 1000 Astral Acclaim aka the daily Wizard Chores currency that went in with Secrets of the Obscure.
However, I used the two gifts of exploration that I got from doing world completion on my Necromancer, which means that I needed to do another World Completion and get another two gifts as a result. I think when I started down this path I was sitting around 98% which essentially accounted for doing three zones, both of which I had partial completion on already. It was a pretty chill way to spend an evening and I came to a whole new appreciation of how good it is to use a gunblade underwater instead of the otherwise awful weapons. I also have a new appreciation of just how weird of a zone Mount Maelstrom is, because I totally forgot just how many different biomes there were given that I mostly only see the volcano during the world boss.
This also meant that I had to grind out another Gift of Battle, which I set my mind to doing on Saturday. From around 10 am until around 3 pm I spent my time grinding away in the Eternal Battlegrounds for my realm. If I were somewhere else and spending that time doing nothing but chain-capturing objectives, the WvW track experience probably would have gone faster. Instead large swaths of that time were spent fending off attackers trying to take Stonemist Castle. Even after we lost our commander we still managed to trudge along and be productive. During one of my breaks, we lost Stonemist Castle but then proceeded to get it back over and over. The green team seemed to be able to zerg just about anything down, but could not hold objectives to save their life. We did not have the numbers but appeared to have more skilled players.
So after a lot of grinding this weekend, I am now the proud owner of Twilight my third legendary weapon. I gotta say that if these starter kits were intended as a way of pushing players into the process of crafting legendaries it has worked. In addition to Twilight, I also have Bolt and Frostfang. I have an unfinished weapon kit for Juggernaut that I am going to shift my focus to trying to complete. This is going to require me to work on building back up a stockpile of Mystic Clovers which will take a bit. I am hoping in that time I will be able to grind out most of the trophies needed for Gift of Might and Gift of Magic through the Volatile Magic Trophy Deliveries.
Twilight really was the weapon that started my interest in Legendaries in the first place. Now that I have it… I feel like I have to at some point complete Sunrise its counterpoint. Eternity is a greatsword that requires you to have sacrificed both a Twilight and a Sunrise in order to craft it. All of this time I thought it meant basically burning through like 10,000 gold worth of crap in order to get it. However, when I crafted my Twilight and bound it to my account I got an interesting item called the Memory of Twilight. It seems like these can be used in lieu of the actual weapon for the purpose of crafting Eternity… which means now that I have one… I want the other… so I can get the third. Damn you Guild Wars 2… this is how you slip down the slope of having every Legendary.
Speaking of working as intended… ANet got a big chunk of gems from me this weekend when I noticed that there was this Mothra-adjascent Skyscale skin. I am a huge fan of Mothra and honestly most of the classical Toho Monsters, but Mothra has a special place in my heart. What is best about this is while it is doing the idle animations… it makes Mothra noises instead of the traditional Skyscale noises. I am so freaking sold on this skin and it even worked pretty well with the default them that I was using on my Branded Skyscale. I might tweak it at some point but I ma mostly good with dark purple with glowy pink eyes.
Lastly to paraphrase the immortal Jay Z… the Meta World Boss in Janthir Syntri “can kiss my whole asshole”. This fight is awful… largely because Greer is fucking awful. No one wants to do it… hell, I don’t want to fight Greer, but I keep going there because no one is ever willing to do that side of the two-part fight. I’ve attempted this Meta seven times and the groups have failed seven times. Last night was the most heartbreaking because we had a 2% wipe… but just could not push through the last little bit before they consumed the bloodstone and wiped the raids. Legitimately screw this fight and screw the designers who thought it was a good idea. I will be happy once the tryhards have extracted their pound of flesh from this encounter and the anet nerf it to be a little less fail-prone. So I love Janthir Wilds so far but this meta can fuck off.
The post The Sword of Midnight appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We actually finally get around to having the Age of Sigmar discussion, and more specifically talk at length about Warhammer Fantasy and the new Spearhead game mode which feels a bit like a Magic the Gathering Format. From there Kodra talks about his recent experience attending the Dragonflight Convention in the Seattle Area for the first time. Related to that he talks about his experiences playing Starfinder 2.0. Tam has made it further into Fallout London and shares some more thoughts about it, and Bel dives into his non-spoiler thoughts about the Janthir Wilds expansion for Guild Wars 2. Lastly, Kodra talks a bit more about Mice and Mystics.
