Morning friends. I have been playing an excessive amount of Outriders over the last few days. I started the game a bit late but have been picking up pace, largely as the story has grabbed me. At this point I am sitting at level 27 of 30 and I believe that I am nearing the end of the main story. The game could of course throw me a monkey wrench at the end but it seems like I have more or less reached the end of the map and also nearing the source of the signal. I would have kept pushing forward last night but I effectively ran out of time and had to be up and around fairly early this morning.
There are a lot of times someone will say a game has “Adult Themes” and what they mean by that is an extreme amount of sexualization. However there is another side of that coin, and that is the side that Outriders lands on. This game deals with the horrors that humanity can enact upon itself and is a slide show of our base instincts. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of The Walking Dead, back when the show still had a point. We have this clear mission… to venture forth into the unknown and find a signal that has been broadcasting since humanity reached planetfall. On this journey a lot of bad things happen and some of them will feel like a sucker punch… and others will feel futile and pointless.
In a game like Diablo 3, each act of the game has a base of operations where all of the infrastructure required to play the game exists. In Outriders this “camp” travels with you as you move across the map. The central conceit is that you have one of the only vehicles that is “analog” enough to withstand the electrical interference brought on by the anomaly. Each time you stop in a new area you set up a base camp until it is time to move the vehicle forward again. This is a bit of weird concept to get used to because, each of these areas ultimately represents a sub-region with its own travel system and then to traverse the larger world map it requires you to pack up camp and move the vehicle again.
Along the way you gather up a group of companions that will end up being more permanent fixtures in the story. I wasn’t sure what I would think about them but I have grown to love them all in their own way. In a lot of ways Outriders feels like an alternate universe versions of Mass Effect Andromeda. Both games have a similar focus on exploring new regions and finding a new home for humanity. In Andromeda a lot of things go wrong… but in Outriders every conceivable thing goes wrong and ends up with humanity mired in an endless war for decades over the few resources that are left. This isn’t high minded exploration… this is slow trench warfare fought in inches not miles.
One of the big things leading up to the launch of the game were all the farming that folks did in order to try and amass a vault full of legendary weapons. I feel like this was largely futile because upgrading legendary and even epic quality weapons is a losing battle. I tried for a bit to keep upgrading the weapon on the far right because it is by far my favorite item I have gotten in the game. The combination of perks was just amazing… and I have held onto it hoping that some day the resources will be plentiful enough to push it all the way to the level cap. The legendaries however… I am mostly holding onto them for deconstruction fodder in order to learn the mods they contain.
These instead are my workhorses that I have carried forward in the game. The sub machinegun I found as a random drop that just happened to have burning bullets… which are extremely powerful. The second is one of the preorder weapons and in both cases I have leveled them forward each time I dinged and was able to push them up one more level. Thankfully I have managed to maintain a good stash of resources and have been able to pull up my gear one level at a time as I progressed through the game. You can effectively do this with blues… but the purples I get I just vault for later deconstruction whenever they cease being useful.
In many ways Outriders is the strange mutant child of Destiny and Diablo 3 and because of that it is directly in my wheelhouse. I really enjoy the gameplay of Devastator with its up close and personal… kill all the things to heal style of interactions. I look forward to seeing what the further gameplay is like once I have finished the main story and capped my character out at thirty. I know at some point I will have to start leveling up my world rank again, but I am largely focused on doing that once I have hit cap. Similarly there are a lot of hunts that I have not partaken in, in part because they seem to reward purple or better items and I wanted to wait until closer to the level cap before doing a lot of these.
It is a really great game, but I still feel like I need to keep warning you… that whatever you think of as a “dark game”, this game is going to keep getting darker. The blend of science fiction and horror reminds me quite a bit of Event Horizon, so that if you were cool with that movie then you might be just fine with this game. Think back through history at some of the greatest atrocities of mankind… and that will also prepare you for the mindset that this game forces you to experience. There are absolutely going to be some folks that just nope out of the game at various points and that is okay. There are moments that make The Division seem cheery. At some point I will do a more holistic overview of the game, but for now I am still engaged and nearing what I think is the end.
The post Slideshow of Atrocities appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Friends! Today is the seventh anniversary of AggroChat the semi-weekly podcast that I record with some of my friends. At this point I have no clue what it was exactly that prompted me to start a podcast. I have fuzzy memories of it being inspired by Cat Context that my friend Liore started, and realizing that pretty much every night we used to get into these long winded discussions on the guild voice chat server. There were times I thought it would have been interesting to just hit record on that and edit it into a podcast form.
Episode 1: Finding the Format – 04/13/2014
The first episode at this point is largely unlistenable, but cobbled together the basic structure of the show that would evolve into what it is today over a large number of episodes and host changes. We started the show with Ashgar, Audrae, Belghast and Kodra. Over time I co-opted more folks to join me along with a cast of occasional guests from our larger community. Rae went her own way but we picked up Tam first and then Grace and Thalen around the same time and our most recent addition Ammo has even been with us for almost three years at this point. At some point I am going to chart out the timeline of guests on AggroChat because I think it might be interest.
Seven hosts is a lot of hosts and I worry sometimes that not everyone is getting their word in every week. There are times I kick around switching back to a format where we go around the table and share what we have been up to that week. The problem with that however is it sorta puts people on the spot, especially if they had a busy week and didn’t really get up to much of anything. This also was part of what extended the length of our shows and lead for us to record some that were upwards of three hours long. Essentially as it stands now we record roughly an hour and a half of show and that condenses down around the neighborhood of an hour.
I’ve never really shown our planning system, but here is a carefully chosen snapshot of the Trello that we use to maintain our show notes. One of the columns that we have running that rarely bears fruit is the “Media We Should Talk About” list… because we don’t really want to do a full spoiler discussion unless everyone is ready to have a full spoiler discussion. You might notice there are checklists in a few of those topics and folks have gone in and indicated that they are good to talk about it. We still sorta talk about the media we just do it spoiler free until everyone is ready… which largely means we just put those topics off indefinitely. There is actually another card not shown called “Tabled Indefinitely” with things that we never really got around to talking about and are now no longer viable discussions.
Essentially we have a rolling batch of topics and Trello allows us to easily roll them forward if we don’t get around to it. The only problem with this is that occasionally there are orphaned cards that just keep getting moved forward. The “Freeform vs Guided Gameplay” card for example has been floating in this zone since November of last year and I could not for the life of me remember what the hell actually spurred that thought. When we ACTUALLY dug down to it last week I just sorta winged it and turned it into something that was valid at this point, which happens on occasion.
In November of 2017 our Podcast hosting provider switched the statistics program and since that point the most listened show is “Bribed to Be Content” where we talk about Battle for Azeroth. This is a pretty common thread in that when we do a World of Warcraft show (or a Pokemon show) they get just a silly amount of listens over time. I can still access the legacy statistics and looking at those numbers tell me that nothing has actually surpassed the show recorded that was part of the 10 Years 10 Questions initiative for the 10th Anniversary of World of Warcraft. I also apparently did a blog post around the same time for the same initiative.
An awful lot has changed since we first started recording. Back then we were on voice chat together all the time and that isn’t quite the case for me anymore. Life has conspired to push me out of the general time band that Ash, Kodra, Tam and Thalen all operate in. Ammo, Grace and I all share a general time space but we are also all sorta introverts and only on voice chat these days if there is actually an activity that we are participating in. I worry that this might have changed the show because we just aren’t interacting nearly as often as we once were. It still floors me that we have been doing this for seven years and have recorded just over 340 episodes. Probably what shocks me even more is that we still have a regular group of listeners each week.
To all of you out there that consume our nonsense I salute you!
The post Seven Years of AggroChat appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends! Like all weekends this one went way the heck too fast. I ended up taking off Friday but a good chunk of that was spent taking my dad to the doctor and running errands. As far as activities this weekend they fall into three distinct buckets. Firstly I managed to finish leveling my Bow Nightblade which is the last of the characters that I was planning on leveling while the buff was active. I am contemplating maybe putting a few of the easily levels on the new Sorcerer Tank experiment, but I am absolutely not going to do the grind all the way to level 50. What I really need to spend the next few weeks doing is burning through all of the treasure maps that I have clogging my inventory and bank from doing the Dark Anchor grind.
I need to spend some time evaluating pricing on the guild store so that I can maybe move some of this stuff more quickly. Right now I have my 30 slots filled and I wish there was a way to be able to sell more items without joining additional trade guilds. I guess it makes sense why folks have more trade guilds than pretty much anything else. On the radar is a return to running content on my main because I still would love to be caught up to the point of being able to start the new expansion fresh in June when it lands. I don’t think there is a shot in hell of that happening however, which again is a me thing… because anyone can start the new content day one. I just have this hang up about wanting to complete content in the order it was released.
Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was working on my nonsense playlist. At the time of writing this I am up to 894 songs for a grand total of 59 hours and 47 minutes of play time. Considering that I am using shuffle and spotify doesn’t seem to play through everything once before repeating… it is highly likely I will actually listen to everything on it but it makes a good radio that brings me joy. I am still periodically adding things to it as I think about them, but I am probably going to start creating some focused “mixtape” playlists and sharing them with you as well. I am not sure if this brand of nonsense is down anyone’s alley, but I am enjoying it.
Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was catching up on Outriders. I attempted to play a bit when it launched but have been otherwise occupied, first with the Diablo 3 Season 23 and later with grinding my Nightblade in Elder Scrolls. The first thing that I did was turn off the thing that keeps increasing your world level because this felt a little weird. My power gained from dropped items was just not keeping up with the difficulty increase and it sorta felt like being dropped into Torment 1 in Diablo 3 before being fully geared. I’ve now set the world level to 3 aka what they call “Normal” and am back to enjoying myself.
I am sure at some point I will write a general review of the game, but one of the bigger takeaways is just how bleak it is. Like I have played some bleak games… but this one is on a whole new level. It seems like so often you meet a character that seems interesting, and then in a very Walking Dead fashion… they callously kill them off with a stray bullet or something else that feels meaningless. I think this is absolutely on purpose to illustrate just how bad of shape the world is, but it does grate on you a bit as you continue to play. I hope that as I keep moving forward I will eventually start to see a glimmer of hope, because right now the straights are much dire.
That is all folks. I hope you have a great week. I seem to have jacked up my sleep patterns and am personally hoping that settles out.
The post Twelve Bleaks out of Ten appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Tonight we start off with a brief reprise of last week’s Diablo 3 Season 23 topic. Because of the changes to followers this is pretty much the easiest season yet to complete in full. We talk briefly about the Diablo 2 technical alpha going on and how it is mostly just D2 but prettier. Grace talks about her experiences with Cozy Grove which is effectively Animal Crossing but Ghost Bears. Tam and Thalen talk about their experiences with Super Adventure Box in Guild Was 2. Bel talks a bit about Games Preservation and more specifically the release of a demo copy of the long rumored Castlevania Resurrection. Finally we go down a topic path that has been sitting on our list for awhile and talk about directed gameplay versus guided gameplay.
