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AggroChat #181 – How Vanilla Is Classic?

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

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This week we are back recording a traditional show, and as is often the case when we do a game of the month show…  stuff happens that we don’t end up talking about.  In this case BlizzCon happened and the announcement of both a new World of Warcraft expansion and the concept of “Classic” servers.  Now I originally thought we would talk about this just a little bit before moving on to other topics… and instead we recorded damned near an entire show about it.  We also talk a little bit about Wolfenstein 2 New Colossus or at least up to the point where Thalen and Kodra have currently progressed.  From there we talk a bit about Destiny 2 and our experiences in the Leviathan raid.  We discuss the faction rally that is currently going on which leads to a super in the weeds discussion about various weapons.  Finally we wrap things up with Millennium Blades a card game about collectible cards games…  that lampoons every part of the process.

Topics Discussed

  • BlizzCon 2017
    • Diablo 3 – The Forgotten Game
    • Battle For Azeroth
    • World of Warcraft Classic Servers
    • Remembering Vanilla
  • Wolfenstein 2 – New Colossus
  • Destiny 2
    • Leviathan Raid
    • Faction Rally
    • Weapon Discussions
  • Millennium Blades Card Game

 

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Destiny 2 Settling In

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Destiny 2 has been out for a few weeks now, and I’ve been happily playing at least a little bit every day. When I was preparing for the launch, I suspected that either I would be super hooked and play obsessively like my friend Belghast, or I would play hard for a short while and then bounce. What actually happened is much more interesting.

Destiny 2 is pretty great at encouraging moderate daily play. Every day there are goals that move your character forward in small doses. there are also weekly tasks with more substantial rewards, and you can usually find some overlap with the daily goals for efficiency’s sake. Sure, you can keep grinding reputation tokens and grind for the rare exotic engram from any activity at any time, but if you complete your main tasks for the week you’ve gotten most of what you are going to get without extreme luck.

What all this means for me is that I play every day, but usually stop working on my main after I’ve accomplished my daily goals or gotten one of my weekly “powerful engrams”. After that I feel free to play alts, play other games, or just do something else in general. It feels strangely healthy.

That said, I have still been playing a bunch. I even got to see part of the raid last week. I was pretty nervous because I’m not great at shooters and I worried about being able to hold my own, but it seems like I did okay. I never raided at all in the original Destiny, and I had trouble wrapping my head around what a raid in a FPS game would even look like. The encounters were more interesting than I expected, and I had a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to getting back in there this weekend.

So that’s my status with D2 at the moment. I’m enjoying it but I’m not obsessively spending every free moment with it. Hopefully that will continue for a long time.


Destiny 2 Settling In

WoW Announcement Analysis

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Blizzcon has come and gone and now it is time to settle in and think about all the new things that got revealed. Time to look at the things I listed last week and see how they match up with what was announced.

The things I wanted to see:

  1. More Naga. It looks like there might be more naga? Kul Tiras seems like a likely place to run into some. But there’s not the Azshara emphasis I was hoping for with the expansion story.
  2. Better handling of professions. I haven’t heard much one way or the other about professions, so I’ll have to reserve judgement on this one.
  3. Housing/ Guild Halls. This looks like it is still a no.
  4. More Puzzles. Seems likely.

The things I really didn’t want to see:

  1. Sylvanas or Jaina as a raid boss. Based on the expansion theme I am really nervous about this one.
  2. Amped up faction BS. They completely doubled down on this. I was so disappointed it made the rest of Blizzcon way less enjoyable for me.
  3. More endless grinds. Looks like the Heart of Azeroth is the new artifact weapon, but we’ll see how endless of a grind it becomes.
  4. Removed leveling game. This is the only point in this section that I feel good about. Level scaling in brackets for the whole world seems great.

Overall I’d say that the announcement of Battle for Azeroth was a disappointment for me. Of course I’ll end up playing it, I’ve been playing WoW for way too long to think that I’d miss an expansion launch even if I think I won’t like it. The launch cinematic looked amazing, I especially loved seeing the Banshee Queen go all actual banshee. But the amped up faction tension thing is a huge turn off. I want more ways to be able to play with my friends, not more barriers. If they let you play cross faction, join cross faction guilds, etc., then I’d be so much happier. I think the Horde and Alliance going to war at this point in the WoW story is incredibly stupid, but I’d put up with it if the devs said “sure the story is one of war, but mechanically you can still play with whoever you want”. Instead they doubled down. I hate it.

The PvP on every server thing doesn’t help. Some leveling zones are notorious for people trying to draw out world PvP by shutting down quest hubs. Sure, now you can level in a broader range of zones, but you also encourage people to do dumb things to fish for world PvP. I understand why they think they need to do this, but I still don’t like it.

About the only announcement I did get excited over was the Classic server announcement. I hope that they have the resources to move that project forward quickly. At this point I’m much more interested in a trip down memory lane than moving forward with the story they’re telling now.


WoW Announcement Analysis

AggroChat #180 – The Destiny 2 Show

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

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This week we are doing some nonsense.  Originally Divinity Original Sin 2 was the October game of the month, but we largely decided we needed more time with that game.  As a result we swapped what was going to be the November game of the month in…  since we were in most part ready to talk about Destiny 2 and primarily the PC release.  So this week we are doing that and discussing the game that Belghast has devoted almost 200 hours playing already between both the PC and PS4 releases.  He may or may not be a little obsessed about it, and that’s fine because now the other members of AggroChat sorta understand his constant insane ramblings about it.  Join us as we dig into the game and talk about whether or not this really is a worthy sequel.

 

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