Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
We start the show with what has disturbingly become a tradition for us as we talk about what life is like in this weird time we happen to be living. For some of us I believe it is week eleven and for others week nine, but really what exactly is the passage of time anyway. The first topic is a bump from last week as Tam talks about discovering Rampage the Board Game, otherwise known as Terror in Meeple City in its most modern incarnation. This leads down a rabbit hole of talking about classic monster movies and many agreeing that the correct place to start is with the OG Godzilla from 1954. From there Bel dives into a topic from the Aggronaut blog, of if grinding is actually fun. This leads to a whole other discussion of how each of us appear to have a vastly different description of what that even means. For Kodra it means grinding his face off over and over against hard content, but for Grace and Bel it largely means repetition of largely mindless content. Tam on the other hand has to have a purpose and his brain has to be engaged. Finally we talk about the integration of PVP into otherwise PVE games and why developers seem to be stuck on that concept. This leads to some discussion of a recent outing in Sea of Thieves when Tam finally gets people interested enough to try it, but they get griefed over and over by some jerk ruining an otherwise enjoyable experience.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off the show with a special announcement. Cat Context was effectively the podcast that inspired Bel to go out and try and do the same thing with some of his friends. After a three year absence, this week we get a brand new Cat Context episode that can be found hosted on Aggronaut.com. Today Kodra is going to be playing some Hollow Knight randomizer since there are a bunch of new updates and he has been given an entire day for gaming. From there we get into a topic that has been skipped a few times due to the potential length regarding easing into a learning curve and how Infinity is trying this with Code Zero. Bel segues into a discussion about what happens when the servers go offline and a game goes dark and the concern that there will be an entire generation of games that are eternally lost. Finally we wrap things up with some talk about the Mario Maker 2 Final Update and the interesting things that level builders are doing with it.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
We welcome Grace back after a few weeks away and talk a bit about life in pandemia. Bel talks about the introduction of RTX Voice and its nonsense ability to filter out background noise from your microphone. Kodra and Thalen talk a bit about gaming with youngsters focusing on Mario Kart and Katamari or “The Ball Game”. Ash talks a bit about how bad the storytelling is in Phantasy Star Online 2. We shift over to some talk about flying in Eorzea and some general talk about alting in Final Fantasy XIV. Finally we wrap up with Sea of Thieves as Tam has been recently exploring this title and how PVP apparently doesn’t matter as much as it once did.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
This is the first show of our seventh year of AggroChat, because we are apparently bad at tracking time and said nothing about our anniversary last week. We start off with another “Bel was dumb” story as he ventured forth to battle the boxpocalpyse. From there we wind around a bit through a few topics and land on another exploration of levels in video games as a concept being a bad idea. We talk about a bunch of ways that games do this and how some have figured out meaningful horizontal progression. Next up we talk about the effective death of Kotaku with the departure of Jason Schreier and this leads to a larger discussion about the odd place that “video game journalism” finds itself in and the rigors of trying to fill content for the 24 hour news cycle. We go down the rabbit hole that is Star Wars Galaxies crafting system and contrast it against a few other approaches like that of the original Everquest II system. Finally some brief discussion as Tam finds Beat Saber and the shockingly good work out it ends up being.
Topics Discussed
Bel and the Boxpocalypse
We’ve outgrown the concept of levels
WoW’s leveling buff
Marking progression horizontally
The Death of Kotaku
The challenges of gaming content creation
The Brilliant Madness of Star Wars Galaxies crafting
