Minecraft without Mining or Crafting

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Minecraft Dungeons is a new game from Microsoft and Mojang and released on all platforms on May 26th. Considering I am extremely late in writing this, I am figuring you have probably already played the game and already decided if it is for you or not. It is available through Xbox Game Pass, so if you partake of that it is pretty much a no-brainer to at least dip your toes in the water. For the rest of you that have not placed your hands on this game, you might want to pause a bit and listen.
Minecraft Dungeons is a game in the Minecraft universe, but effectively has nothing at all to do with the gameplay of the baseline game. It is instead a top down isometric dungeon crawler that just happens to feature the primitive graphics of Minecraft. You choose from a list of preset characters, which is the first strike against the game given it would be nice if we had some measure of control over our characters features. You equip suitable Minecraft world items like swords and pick axes and use them to bash your way through levels filled with a greatest hits collection of things you will recognize from Minecraft, namely Zombies, Creepers, and Skeletons.
You defeat levels, which unlock additional levels… each of which having a difficulty slider effectively determining the sorts of drops that are available and supposedly the relative difficulty. I am primarily playing this as my before bedtime game, but I have yet to finish unlocking everything available due to lots of short play sessions. I am not sure exactly what the ultimate point of the game is, but it seems to have a storyline woven around a bad group of Villagers called the Illagers. This is apparently a thing in actual Minecraft but I never thought of them as some sort of an enemy faction.
The game seems to sell itself as a sort of Minecraft meets Diablo experience, and based on my play sessions it feels like neither. I would say the core gameplay loop reminds me significantly more of something like Gauntlet Legends or Gauntlet Dark Legacy. The loot is neither plentiful enough or good enough to really feel like a Diablo game. The game also lacks anything close to the build complexity and nuance that is traditionally available in the ARPG genre, so in the end it feels exceptionally shallow.
In theory as you go throughout your travels you collect melee weapons, ranged weapons, armor, and can equip three artifacts at a time. The second significant strike is that all of the gear can be enchanted, but each item acquired has a randomly assigned fixed ability that as far as I can tell you can’t change. This leads to situations where you might find a weapon that is technically stronger than the one you are using, but it has a worthless enchant on it leaving you to hold onto your existing gear for far too long.
Similarly not all artifacts are created equal. Some are going to have useful effects and others are going to largely be pointless. For example the first one you get is an old timey bottle rocket style firework that you can in theory aim at a group of enemies to explode it. The challenge there is an exceptionally long cooldown and that it never seems to go in the direction you actually want it to. The best item I have found is an amulet that collects souls each time an enemy dies and then allows you to effectively have an extra healing potion. Over time this seems to heal less and less of your health pool diminishing its usefulness.
The third strike against the game is that there are a significant number of “cheap” mobs that seem to put you in positions where it is exceptionally hard to avoid taking damage from them. Additionally I have encountered even on lower difficulty settings several mobs that can just straight up one shot you. It isn’t so much a difficulty thing, as most encounters fall over without effort. There is an unpolished nature to the design that makes me question if it got the requisite time to balance the encounter design or even had a significant alpha or beta testing period. The game as a whole has this half baked and unfinished feeling to it.
A significant amount of your time is spent in your camp, which you unlock as a safe base of operations after the prologue. The game operates on collecting emeralds and then you can spend those emeralds at your base with first the Blacksmith for randomly generated weapons, and later the Wandering Trader for randomly generated artifacts. The problem is that in both cases the items created for you are generally several levels worse than whatever you can get as loot from the zones themselves.
The camp itself is also huge, but almost completely devoid of purpose. You have a house that appears to never change as you go through the game levels. You have various ruins scattered around the play area, that again never evolve over time. At first I thought that maybe this was just a side effect of me not having gotten far enough into the game to unlock more things. However one of my friends who has played a ton of this game with his son indicated that I have effectively seen everything that is going to open up. Once again… the game feels like it was meant to be something more, but instead we got an unfinished product that was rushed to market.
I have played the game on Windows and Xbox One through Xbox Game pass and then purchased it for the Nintendo Switch. In all cases they rely upon your Xbox Live account but also in all cases they do not seem to support any manner of cloud saves. This would be strike number four, because even though I have issues with the experience as a whole it might be more enjoyable if I could start the evening on my PC and then finish playing the same character and making the same progress on my Switch. It seems to pull in all of my Xbox Live friends, but while playing on the switch none of them have actually shown up as someone I could play with… making me question if cross platform play is a thing either.
What you have in the end is a game with the primitive graphics of Minecraft but is devoid of any creative outlets. A game that would like to pattern itself off Diablo but lacks any interesting loot and character building options. A game that seems to have a shared account system but is not utilizing it in any meaningful manner. Ultimately Minecraft Dungeons is a confusing mess of a game that feels unfinished and unbalanced, and after experiencing it myself for a few weeks there is no way I would ever suggest this game to someone. If you have Xbox Game Pass, by all means check it out for yourself since you can do so for free… but I would not spend a dime here until things have sufficiently changed. The post Minecraft without Mining or Crafting appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Cypher and the Bail Project

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I was not in the best head space yesterday and to be honest I still am not. I don’t think anyone really is right now, but that is okay. Right now I have all sorts of minor issues going on, including the hard drive that I keep a lot of stuff on attempting to die on me. However I decided to make a post this morning because I saw something that actually helped me out a bit.
I am not even sure at what point I tuned in to the stream of @CypherofTyr but I do know that the original intent of the stream was to raise $500 for The Bail Project. When I joined the stream was somewhere between $10k raised and $20k raised, and throughout the afternoon I kept returning from meetings to watch the numbers just keep jumping. This became my afternoon activity of tuning in periodically to see where the stream was at. As afternoon turned into evening, things just started snowballing and over the course of a marathon 10.5 hour long stream she raised $142,781 dollars for The Bail Project.
It didn’t stop there however, as the fuse on Urban Bohemian’s stream was lit with the flamethrower that was everyone piling in after Cypher’s stream concluded. I had popped over ahead of the official end of the stream and was entertained as we watched the numbers start ticking upwards again. I admit that I didn’t stick around until the very end, but I stayed for a few hours and watched the numbers climb past $10k which triggered the inclusion of an amazing Unicorn Kigurumi. All total this stream raised an additional $15,305 for The Bail Project.
It kept going from there with SushieMonster, but by that point I had long been claimed by sleep. I didn’t get to sleep on Monday night until somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 am, and was back up at 5:30 am so I was running on fumes at this point. This third stream however continued again to raise another $6000.69 for The Bail Project. I think the coolest part about all of it, is that it introduced me to Tiltify, which I apparently was completely in the dark about. It seems to make it very easy for you to rally a team of streaming fundraisers around a specific cause, which is something that I will file away in my brain for possible future usage.
The best part however was to watch this one stream team raise a total of $184,654.59 for The Bail Project. This is still going however as there are a number of additional streamers signed up at part of the team and throughout the course of this article I have been linking to the Tiltify Team page which you can still donate on. You might find yourself asking “What is The Bail Project”, because to be honest it is not an organization I had heard of prior to yesterday. I think it is summed up succinctly with their mission statement.
We believe that paying bail for someone in need is an act of resistance against a system that criminalizes race and poverty and an act of solidarity with local communities and movements for decarceration. Over the next five years, The Bail Project will open dozens of sites in high-need jurisdictions with the goal of paying bail for tens of thousands of low-income Americans, all while collecting stories and data that prove money bail is not necessary to ensure people return to court. We won’t stop until meaningful change is achieved and the presumption of innocence is no longer for sale.

I’ve been around the criminal justice system enough to know that those individuals who are incapable of bonding out, don’t have great outcomes. They are robbed of the critical time needed to prepare their case, and god forbid if things don’t go well, get their affairs in order. If someone cannot bond out, they are greatly limited in the amount of time and types of interactions that they can have with not only legal counsel but their own family. It is a broad cause, but one that helps individuals from getting stuck in a system that is so insurmountably stacked against them. As I said before I have been dropping links to Cypher’s Nat 20s stream team on Tiltify throughout this post. I highly suggest that not only do you tune in to some of the streamers participating, but that if you are in a place where you can do it you donate some money to this excellent cause. The post Cypher and the Bail Project appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Cessation

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I can’t folks. I just can’t right now. I’ve been staring at my scrolling twitter feed for a good hour and I can’t come up with a single thing to write worth reading. I joked once that we are living in interesting times, and at the time I was simply referring to the pandemic. It is my hope that twenty twenty will be remembered as a turning point for this country and the rest of the world. Unfortunately in my just shy of forty four years I am not sure if I can muster the hope that that will be the case. It is my ultimate fear that this is but a brief pause as we continue to slide into a dystopian novel like the ones I read as a teen. I’m scared for my friends. I am exceptionally privileged that I can be scared for my friends and that I don’t have to be scared for my own life. I would love to believe that something is going to change, because it needs to change. I’m not going to syndicate this post because there really isn’t much here to read. It will go out automatically to a few places but I won’t go through the process of posting it around. Tales of the Aggronaut is going to be silent for a bit, at least until I can think of something worth saying. Keep your family and your friends close as we experience these times. Until Black Lives Matter, nothing much else matters. The post Cessation appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Fun With Fake Friends

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Hanging out with Pizza Maid and her adorable Hatsune Miku Mag
This weekend I learned about a fun system in Phantasy Star Online, in part thanks to my good friend PizzaMaid. However since I have way more friends showing up through Xbox Live than I do friend avatars available I thought I would take a few moments today to talk about this system. First off at a high level Friend Avatars allow you to run around with up to 3 copies of your friends characters, pending they have gone through the process of registering an avatar. These are going to be weaker versions of their own characters, but nonetheless are a bit of a buff when playing through content as they do a non-zero amount of damage, healing and buffing.

Creating your Own Friend Avatar

Friend Avatar Creation Options
This system like so many begins with the Visiphone, aka the kiosk with the purpleish pink ? inside of a rotating oval. By now you should in theory make yourself familiar with this interface as it is also how you access this games version of the auction house, aka the Personal Shop. I’ve pasted together several of the UI screens showing the process of selecting the Friend Avatar option, choosing to Add and Avatar and then the settings that I currently have filled out for mine. From what I understand the personality means nothing really, but the Attributes and Title impact how your avatar will perform in battle. I’ve not found a good NA guide to the settings, but here is one that I attempted to follow for my settings. I chose Hot and Cold which is known in the Japanese region as Tsundere and makes it so that they get better the more times you use them. Ready for War appears to translate to the “Battle Ready” option which means they have their weapons out and ready in advance which seemed useful. Lastly I checked the “Make Me Visible to Non-Friend Players” because whenever someone runs with your Avatar you earn some “FUN” currency as a result. Real quick side note. You are going to have to go through this menu system every so often to update your Friend Avatar, as it will be snapshot at the moment it was created. Pretty much each day I go through and update mine so that as I gain new levels my friends will have access to those levels as well. The Avatar will in theory scale to the level of your friends, but it will be capped by the actual levels that you as a player have earned.

Running with the Avatars of your Friends

Friend Avatar Kiosk
You can access your friends avatars when you are just about to start a mission and are in this pre-loading area. Head over to the terminal that has an Orange “i” icon which gives you access to choose some characters to take along with you. In theory for most expeditions and such you can take three avatars with you. I have found a few missions that limit you to only having one, and others like Urgent Missions won’t let you take any with you.
Friend Avatar Selection Options
Once again I have pasted together several of the interface screens so that you could see the various options. The first menu allows you to choose one of the NPCs that you have gained some affinity for. Right now I only have two showing up which are Afin and Io. The next tab over shows you all of your friends that are available for running content. I have no clue what the “Support” tab does as I have nothing currently listed there, but the last tab labelled “Free” gives you access to the Avatars of random strangers. The avatars you have not run with that day show up as having “Fun Available” beside them, but in truth I ran a bunch of content yesterday and I believe I hit some sort of internal cap until reset.
Now you too can run around with what feels like your own personal army. I tend to largely pick classes that have a decent chance of healing or buffing me, because they seem to be more efficient than classes that attack things. They are by no means a “pet” and will ultimately have a mind of their own, but thankfully the game doesn’t seem to have a version of “in combat” that actually matters or blocks you from doing anything.

The Symbol Art System

Symbol Art System
Another random system that I learned about this weekend through my friend Ashgar is the Symbol Art system. If you are hanging out in the Gate area and someone throws out a message with a picture in it, then you have experienced Symbol Art. Based on my limited understand, there is an in game editor that allows folks to draw images as well as supposedly a windows based tool that you can import images from. What you end up with is a recipe for lewds and offensive content. So before you get any further into this system consider yourself warned. In fact it took me a bit to find some pages that were relatively safe to show you in order to explain the system. You can access your symbol art collection from the Gear Icon and choosing Symbol Art. By default you won’t actually have anything, but the piece that Ash figured out is that the game seems to keep a rolling history of every piece of symbol art that you have seen. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the Personal Shop and as a result I have seen a TON of symbol art. At the top of the screen there is a drop down that lets you change over and view your history, and then from there you can save any image to your permanent collection.
And there we go, two new systems that I have talked about. The personal avatar system is pretty great and I am enjoying running around with an army of minions. I’ve also figured out where to spend my Memories of Ragol tokens, allowing me to look like a Phantasy Star Online 1 era RACast which pleases me greatly. All in all I am still really enjoying the game, but also still extremely confused about the finer details. I will likely continue to keep posting random observations like this, so hopefully you find them helpful. The post Fun With Fake Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.