Hey Friends! This morning is going to be a bit of a random mix of things because that is sort of where my brain is. There are times when I find myself juggling a number of threads and I appear to be going through one of those right now. Meet my big jade friend! I finished collecting the hero points needed to turn my fresh level 80 Engineer into a Mechanist. I’ve yet to do much of anything with it yet, but I am happy to have my robot friend. I’ve been utilizing a mechanic in World vs World to collect Hero Points for the classes that I am not actively playing.
As a result of my frequent participation, I get Skirmish Chests and one of the items that you can receive from them is Testimonies of Jade Heroics when then can be used to buy Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics allowing me to largely skip the hero points from Heart of Thorns which are all annoying. Granted I can do the same thing for Tyria, Path of Fire, and End of Dragons heroics, but I actually like doing those. This is how I have unlocked Bladesworn, Chronomancer, and now Mechanist so it is actually a fairly quick process if you are doing a good deal of WvW. The next target is probably unlocking DragonHunter on my Guardian.
In other news, I am closing in on having a full stable of professions at level 80 in Guild Wars 2. Here is a mildly modified image showing that I have everything but the Thief up to level 80. Granted I have cheesed some of these and abused the birthday rewards to push them up to level 60 before going the rest of the way. The longer-term battle however is unlocking heroic points on each of them and figuring out a viable build to go for, and then gearing them all. Right now Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer are pretty solid, and Engineer is slowly getting there. Everyone else… I am all over the place but I am starting to click the pieces into place on the Mesmer now that I have Chronomancer unlocked.
In Other Other News… The Housing Lottery system in Final Fantasy XIV should be rolling once again based on this post from 5/13. Granted I still cannot do anything related to it, because I have to wait around until May 26th at 8 am PDT in order for this first round to be finalized. I’ve had my character parked at the plot that I am interested in over in The Mists since this all started, and at that point, I am going to be putting my bid in place and trying for the one I like the best. I am trying not to get my hopes up because housing, in general, has been a giant clusterfuck, to be honest. The lottery will be a better clusterfuck, but it is still going to be one nonetheless. The biggest problem with housing is that I am also going to be chaining myself to logging regularly so I make sure that I keep it. I do need to figure out a reasonable way to weave this game back into my rotation, however.
In my recent dabbling around in New World again, I decided to give Outpost Rush a try. I figured that maybe something flipped in my brain to make me like PVP given that I am doing quite a bit of it in Guild Wars 2. Nope… whatever indoctrination that has taken place does not appear to universally apply to all games and Outpost Rush still feels awful. In spite of all of the improvements made to New World, I have to say that the core problem with the game now resides in the generally awful PVP-focused community. I think it is probably too little too late to ever turn this game around, given that they ran off most of their PVE-focused players last year. Chat on Valhalla is better than it was on Minda, but it is still filled with the same jackasses… just in smaller numbers. It is especially shocking coming from Guild Wars 2 which is pretty great so long as you avoid the Goons.
Another thing that I have noticed in coming back is that many of the rarer resources have plummeted in value. I am not sure if I talked about this the other day but Void Ore used to be the single most valuable chase item and would go for upwards of 10k gold each. Now you can pick them up for 150 gold without much issue, and after opening a few professional aptitude caches I understand why. Essentially every third of a level after maxing a profession, you get awarded a cache of materials… and these are chock full of those orange rarity items. I took a screenshot of an example where I got 3 vials of azoth (used to go for 200g each, now 5g each), 8 of legendary cloth Blisterweave, and 6 of the other legendary cloth Scalecloth. I believe each of those used to go for around 2k gold on my original server, and now I am sure they are peanuts given how much the game is throwing at you.
Like I said before right now it is shaping up that the community is the worst part of the game. While chat is calm most of the time, you are constantly seeing nonsense like this scroll past. The Edgelord energy is strong in this community. It is fine, but it is essentially the sort of thing that I would make sure anyone asking me about the game receives a hefty disclaimer. I have a few things that I want to do… just not sure if I will actually do them. I always wanted a set of Voidbent Armor and I might finish leveling my Armoring up to make that. I also always wanted to make one of the legendary hatchets, and I might spend the time to finish leveling up engineering to make one of those as well. Past that, I am not sure how long I will be back. Harvesting is still fun and moment-to-moment open world gameplay is still fun… but it also largely feels pointless given that you can’t really use it to acquire gear score improvements other than the daily gypsum orbs. I saw someone talking about the Priest farm in Myrkgard last night, so I might need to wade in deep enough to see if those are still viable.
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Good Morning Friends! I am about to take you down a rabbit hole, because yesterday without really meaning to… I absolutely dug one. I am not exactly sure what causes my brain to travel the pathways it does, but like so many things in my life, it started out simple enough.
I had seen some news scroll across my feed about Ashes of Creation and I logged into Kickstarter to try and remember during what phase of testing I would be getting access. For those who are curious, we are in Alpha 1 still and have Alpha 2 and two phases of closed beta before I get access. Granted I knew I was backing a slow-moving horse when I chipped money in to fund this project, but what I did not remember is that every single project has an estimated delivery date associated with it. These are wildly inaccurate, but it planted a seed in my brain as to exactly HOW wildly inaccurate they were.
This of course led to me pulling a google sheet, logging the projected dates for all twenty-five software projects that I have backed since the launch of Kickstarter. After that, I spent the next hour googling to find release dates that map up to each product giving me the above table. I guess I should talk a bit about my methodology because I was trying to keep things simple I logged the month and year for each project and then did some “datediff” math to figure out how many months late a given project was when it released. There were a few projects that have never been released, and for those, I have currently plugged in June 2022 even though I know it is equally wildly inaccurate. Of those projects, one had an updated release date so I used that instead. I get that my methodology is not perfect but this is just to create some general trends that we can talk about.
Abandonware
Riding the way of “pretty Minecraft” games was TUG, an open-world survival builder MMORPG by Nerd Kingdom. TUG stood for The Untitled Game, and honestly, it looked really interesting to me because at the time it was trying to do something that nobody had really pulled off. In the years to follow the launch of this project, however, it has been done over and over again and pulled off successfully. To date, this project is 89 months late based on the original estimate, and the last update to the Kickstarter was in March of 2017. We know this is a dead project but no one has been willing likely for legal reasons to actually just come out and say it. In the comments, you can even see someone going as far as trying to start a class action lawsuit against the company. I gambled some money and I lost, and I am largely okay with that.
Best In Class
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mages of Mystralia from Borealys Games that not only met the original Kickstarter delivery estimate but beat it by one month. Granted this is maybe not the fairest example because before the Kickstarter launched, I had already played a very polished demo of the game at Pax South. However, I feel like they need to get credit here for beating the Kickstarter estimation game and actually being able to deliver on a project ahead of time. I also feel like we need to give credit to the mobile game Cockatilt and The Wonderful 101 Remastered which were both released within a month of the original estimate which would simply account for the natural shift in a schedule.
The Worst Offenders
Of the games that have actually been released, the worst offender in the delay is Crowfall. This is not shocking given that MMORPGs notoriously take about twice as long to produce as the original estimates. By the time Crowfall was officially released in 2021 it was 55 months later than the first estimate, so just over 4 and a half years late. Granted there is part of me that would prefer that the game still is in testing so that maybe it could turn into a game that I was actually interested in playing. It was a game with some interesting concepts that coalesced into something that I was wholly uninterested in and I am not sure I have logged into the final released version. That is part of the risk of backing a project that is only funded on some pretty prose and a few bits of concept art.
The Full List
I realize that I posted an image of a spreadsheet, but for sake of those with “old eyes” like myself, I am going to actually share the information in text form. Here is the full list of the twenty-five projects I have backed throughout the years sorted ascending based on “months late”. If you are so inclined I have shared the raw spreadsheet here.
Mages of Mystralia – 1 Month Early
Cockatilt – 1 Month Late
The Wonderful 101: Remastered – 1 Month Late
Ravaged – 3 Months Late
Warmachine Tactics – 3 Months Late
Hamsterdam – 5 Months Late
Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance – 5 Months Late – Projected Release Date
TemTem – 6 Months Late
Sunless Skies – 8 Months Late
Wasteland 2 – 9 Months Late
Divinity: Original Sin 2 – 9 Months Late
Amplitude – 10 Months Late
Battle Chasers: Nightwar – 10 Months Late
Battletech – 11 Months Late
Dead State – 12 Months Late
Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey – 19 Months Late
InSomnia the Ark – 22 Months Late
Boyfriend Dungeon – 25 Months Late
Torment: Tides of Numenera – 26 Months Late
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 27 Months Late
HEX TCG MMO – 30 Months Late – Now Defunct but did release
Ashes of Creation – 42 Months Late so far – No Release Date
Crowfall – 55 Months Late
Curse of the Deadwood – 66 Months Late – No Release Date
TUG – 89 Months Late – No Release Date – No Updates since 2017
The Kickstarter Gamble
I think one of the challenges with Kickstarter is the interface and the way that the project pages are designed to make it seem like you are purchasing a product. In actuality, you are gambling on an idea that someone out there has, and hoping that maybe just maybe it comes to fruition. You are investing in the future of a product, and like with all investments… sometimes things go off the rails completely and you lose all of your money. For the most part, I have done pretty well thus far with my video game Kickstarter, though the long-tailed nature of them has led me to plunk my money on the line far less often than I did in those heady early days.
The first project I ever funded was Wasteland 2 in 2012, and the last project that I funded was Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance in 2022. The last one I am not even sure I am that interested in the game, but wanting to help support more Fallen London nonsense to exist in the world because it is a phenomenal setting. Granted my sample size is small with only twenty-five games backed over a ten-year span, but there is definitely a trend toward games coming in late. Given that the average on my list was just shy of twenty months late, and the median was ten months late… you really need to take that estimated delivery date as the complete nonsense that it really is. If you are backing a Kickstarter you are gambling on the future of a franchise and the hope that maybe just maybe someday you will get to play it.
Does this impact my likelihood to back a game on Kickstarter? Somewhat to be honest, but I had already reached that conclusion before looking at the data. The types of Kickstarters that I now back are less about me wanting the product and more about me wanting to help support and fund the product. For example, I thought Boyfriend Dungeon was a worthy cause and was a game that should exist in the world, and even though I have yet to play it… I was more than happy to plunk some money on the line knowing at some point I would walk away with a discount copy of the game. Other games like Crowfall or Ashes of Creation were essentially just me getting a cheap copy of the game and a space in line for the alpha/beta process if they turned out to be phenomenal. There are folks who have an ax to grind with how inaccurate these estimates end up being, but I am not one of them. I just abused it for a blog post.
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Good Morning Friends. I regret to inform you that there is no Mixtape Monday this week because I have not felt like fiddling with them over the weekend. I have two that are in progress but neither of them is really ready for primetime. I am playing the “is it allergies or is it covid” game right now as I had to attend high school graduation on Friday and just based on the statistics, more than one person in that crowd was a carrier. However, at the same time, the cottonwood is in full bloom which I am deathly allergic to, so more than likely… it is just allergies given a “general awful feeling” and “lethargy” are my only real symptoms so far. Aligning to my already strange mental state, I apparently booted up New World over the weekend and spent a little bit of time roaming around it.
My Character now apparently lives on Valhalla and I am not sure how many merges have taken place between our origins on Minda and the first merge with Frislandia. Whatever the case it appears that team purple is outgunned, though last night they did manage to take Everfall. In truth, a sequence of changes has more or less made it that I no longer give a shit about the faction balance. At some point the costs of teleports were reduced significantly, and also no longer take your inventory into account so if you are so inclined you can bop around the map at will. The other significant quality of life improvement that I noticed was the fact that there is now “peaceful regeneration” which turns on quick life recovery any time you are out of combat. I would say MOST of the food that I went through was trying to regenerate my health so I could get back into the action, and now there is just a buff that does that for me.
As far as combat in general, as heavy armor, sword, and shield tank… I feel much sturdier than I was previously. I need to do some more tests here but I spent a bit of time running around in Edengrove and fared far better than previously against everything there. I was also able to easily take single pull elites in Shattered Mountain and even managed a few two pulls. Like I said I need to get out into the world and try a few of my haunts that I was clearing regularly when the hatchet bug was in place, to determine just how viable open-world farming is again. If nothing else it was fun to do a good number of the lower level towers in Edengrove for materials.
I made a quick visit to Adjorjan and he still appears to be dropping decent stuff, though I am not sure what level of watermark he is capable of dropping. I only stuck around for a single kill but I got a purple bow around 550, but also did not get a watermark upgrade from him because there is now an animation that plays when that happens. As far as watermarking there seem to be a few reasonable ways to get daily progress namely in the way of bags that drop containing diamond gypsum. The other big change I noticed is that the bottom has fallen out in some of the rare materials. When I last played Void Ore which is a rare drop from Orichalcum, was selling in the neighborhood of 10k gold each. I just bought five of them on buy orders for 150 gold each. Unfortunately, I am nowhere near the skill level required to make a full set of Voidbent armor, but I had contemplated trying to convert my cash stockpiles into armoring levels.
The community seems to be hopping in spite of being MUCH smaller than it was and seemingly gone is the era of the “2k buy in” for a group. I am not entirely certain what quality of life changes lead to this but so far the game seems to be much more playable than it was when I last left. I doubt I will be spending a ton of time in the game, and the crafting system in its current state still feels awful… but maybe just maybe it has found its niche and can slowly start moving the needle in the positive direction. New World was a really fun game up until the point it abruptly stopped being fun, so a few tweaks here or there might be enough to save it. I will of course let you know if I continue to play from time to time and how that process is going.
The post Revisiting New World appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Last week was mothers day and travel and such led to us not being able to record a show. As is often the case we ended up with a long list of topics and not enough time to address them all. First, we talk about the curious intersection of Pachinko and Roguelikes and more specifically Peglin and Roundgaurd… and its pinball-focused cousin Yoku’s Island Express. Thalen shares with us the joy of the Squirrelgirl Podcast. We talk a bit about the odd but obvious cross-over event between EVE Online and Microsoft Excel. We dive a bit into Guild Wars 2 and talk about how apparently Bel is actually doing PVP now, not just WvW. We also congratulate Kodra on getting his Skyscale mount and talk a bit about the long grinds. From there Thalen discusses the DIE Pen and Paper system. From there we talk a bit about the recent streamer bans for running addons and the whole debacle causing rifts in the community. Lastly, we talk a bit about bringing back the AggroChat Game of the Month… sorta… because we are going to all play Citizen Sleeper and then record a show about it.
