Good Morning Folks. I have to be blazingly honest here… I did not have it on my punch card that we would be getting an expansion for Diablo II this year. However, we got exactly that as part of the Diablo anniversary celebration, and it was a shadow drop, meaning I have already played a bit of the brand new class in Diablo II, the Warlock. I have to say it is pretty freaking awesome, at least in the early levels, it feels wildly overpowered. Granted, you can only really have one minion so far, but I am sure that changes over time. You summon up your demon goat buddy, and he proceeds to lay waste to everything around you, while you bop things over the head with your floating weapon. I think the floating weapon thing is honestly a really nice touch because it differentiates this class from other classes that start out feeling like they are shittier versions of the Barbarian… looking at you, Druid.
What is wild about this is that the Warlock class is coming to three games in the Diablo franchise. It’s a bit of a bummer that Diablo III is left out of the love here… but I feel like probably it and Diablo 1 both got dropped for the same reason, they do not have a shiny new client built with modern development technology. We already have the Warlock in Diablo II, but it is coming to Diablo IV at the end of April and to Diablo Immortal in June. Not that I give much of a shit about Diablo Immortal, but I will probably be playing whatever season coincides with the April 28th start date of the Warlock drop in Diablo IV. I will always be down for more Minion gameplay coming to games. So far, at least it feels pretty solid, and it has actually made me want to play some more Diablo II Resurrected. Generally speaking, D2R gameplay is way too slow for my tastes these days, but it might be fun to do at least a full playthrough on the Warlock.
In other news, we got a new Lunar New Year event in Destiny Rising, so maybe it is not entirely out to pasture fully. I lack the cultural significance of all of the stuff that coincides with Lunar New Year events, but they often are big deals in Japanese and Chinese games, and so far, that seems to be the case here as well. Essentailly the normal Frontline events are being replaced with new encounters with the red and gold fireworks themes. Doing these earns points towards the larger event that is going on, and will ultimately also earn you pulls for the reworked version of Ikora. I played three rounds or so of Frontlines yesterday and had a reasonably good time doing it. This is mostly a pretty chill activity and is exclusive to Jiangshit Metro, aka Space China. Is it massive and new and exciting? Not really. However it is something and I have to give them credit for it.
Yesterday evening, we got a new State of Play event from Sony, and probably the biggest news for me personally was the upcoming release of Death Stranding 2 for the PC. Sure, I have a PS5 and could have played this game at any point I wanted to, but I greatly prefer playing open-world games with a mouse and keyboard whenever possible. The PC release of the first game dropped during the height of covid lockdown, and it was extremely poignant as we were all adjusting to a new way of life, much in the same way as the characters in the game were. I’ve never been a massive Kojima fan, but I did really enjoy the quirky lore of the world in this series and look forward to seeing more of it. I may have also developed a crush on Fragile, and am interested in seeing more of how things progress in this world. Troy Baker’s character in this series is also completely batshit crazy, and I am interested in seeing just how over the top he is in this version.
Next up, we have a really freaking cool-looking Castlevania game from some of the folks behind Dead Cells. Not that I necessarily have much to say about this, other than the fact that I will be playing it when it drops. At least based on the trailer, I would guess this is more in line with Castlevania 1 and 3, and not a more role-playing game experience like 2 and Symphony of the Night. I tend to prefer the Castlevania RPG games where you level up and collect gear and such, but it does not mean that I don’t appreciate the more standard platformer style games. It might be a bit more modern platformer than I would like, but we will have to see how it plays. Games like Silksong tend to require a level of manual dexterity that I no longer have with a controller.
We also got more gameplay of Control Resonant, and while I still mourn the fact that we are not playing as Jesse… I love this weird shared universe and will be here on day one regardless. I am really looking forward to just how kooky the world is going to be, given that we are apparently playing with gravity and surfaces. It seems like the corruption of the Oldest House has spilled out into the real world, and I guess New York is suffering as a result. I love the visuals, so this should be a heck of a lot of fun.
Lastly, we got another video update on Tokon Fighting Souls, and while I am not as big a fighting game player as I once was, this game looks like a lot of fun. I am all on board with playing Magik in a fighting game. I am super pumped that Steve Blum is doing the voice for Wolverine as well. I hope that means he will be doing the voice of Wolverine in the game that Insomniac has been working on as well. Anyways, it should be a lot of fun, and will likely look beautiful in blazing 4k on the 65-inch television that I picked up not too long ago. At some point, I really need to hang up a curtain rod so I can put up some blackout curtains over the awkward round window in the livingroom.
There was honestly a bunch of other interesting stuff announced yesterday, so if you have the time it might be worth watching it in the background while doing other things. Either that or, at a minimum, hitting the PlayStation YouTube channel to see if there are any trailers that stand out to you. After showings like this, it really hits home just how far Microsoft is falling behind in this race. They conceded the PlayStation 4 generation, and as a result, lost the generation when everyone shifted to digital purchases. It is going to be nigh impossible to claw their way back from this, especially when Sony keeps dropping banger exclusives left and right. I will probably never be a console-first player, but I doubt I buy another Microsoft console because I have barely used my Xbox. Going forward, I will probably have a Sony console, a Nintendo console, and then my PC for everything else.
Anyways. Was there anything you were super pumped for in the State of Play? Have you been playing the Warlock in Diablo II Resurrected? Drop me a line below.
The post Demonology for Fun and Profit appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased has launched and I am still in the process of leveling my character through the campaign. Just like I thought I was going to do… I rolled a Sentinel and specialized into Paladin going for something similar to what I have built previously. The thing is… right now this BelStillBurns is not a one for one copy of the previous characters I have built as ignite warpath, and I am sort of adjusting my ideas on the fly while I level. I am not going to write a super long blog post this morning so that I can get back to playing. I could have probably pushed into maps yesterday but I generally prefer a more relaxed trip through the campaign than trying to do the hyper optimal gameplay thing. Truth be told I generally like the campaign in ARPGs. Path of Exile II’s campaign was a bit of an exception for me… where I enjoyed it the first time but would absolutely skip it instantly if given half the choice.
Yesterday was unfortunately not a launch without some growing pains. The servers came up right around 11 am CDT and it took me a bit longer than that to get the 7.3 gb patch applied. However once I attempted to login I was met with good ole error LE-52 indicating that the login server was overloaded. This lasted until around 12 pm CDT, but once you beat the login boss the game was pretty smooth. I did have some minor issues trying to create my character, which has created the weird situation where I have two characters named the same thing. Once we are in the clear I will probably open a support ticket for that, because I am afraid to delete my second BelStillBurns for fear that it also deletes the primary character I am leveling.
For concurrent players Last Epoch blew last July’s patch launch out of the water and has consistently had more players than Path of Exile II. It was a Thursday launch which is not ideal timing for a lot of players, so I figure come this evening and over the weekend we will probably hit new peak numbers for the game as a whole. At one point last night Raxxanterax, a streamer that I have followed since his Diablo III days had 21,000+ viewers which was the highest number any ARPG streamer at that time. Someone referred to him as the Bob Ross of ARPG streamers… which is a title that I feel like he has to fight Pohx for because they both have that sort of energy. If you look at the Last Epoch category though, pretty much all of the Path of Exile streamers are playing it.
I have continued my tradition of Josie causing my first death. Last night I was on the couch and near the end of Act Five when she decided that she absolutely had to stand in front of me. Unlike with Path of Exile II… there is no pause and some random trash mob wandered over and killed me. The cats keep me real, and make sure I know that I have to take breaks in order to give them attention. Quite honestly I appreciate them playing this vital role. There was a bit where I stopped playing for thirty minutes because Josie also decided to lay on top of my keyboard hand, so it makes me think it was absolutely purposeful that she wanted me to stop paying attention to the screen. The furthest I have ever gotten Deathless was into the monolith, because I always die to Rahyeh on my first attempt for the second monolith.
I’ve not had the lucky run that I did the last two times I have played ignite warpath, and have yet to find a Firestarter’s Torch. I really miss the spreading flames ignite proliferation, but since I don’t have this… I am having to pivot into another drop. I got Taste of Blood with a good health on hit role and since both warpath and lunge are currently converting chance to bleed into chance to ignite… it still works as an amazing item for me. I am paring that with whatever rare sword I can pick up that has decent stats, and then have also grabbed a lucky Quicksilver Coil from a nemesis egg, which is not 100% ideal but has high regen, haste, and attack speed. Sadly the stats that I got from the egg are useless form my build but I will take a well rolled Quicksilver Coil regardless of how I got it.
I said this was going to be a short post… but in truth it ended up being just about as long as my normal fare. One thing that I completely missed yesterday is that apparently it was the 16th Anniversary of my blog. The literal Hello World post for this blog was posted on April 17th of 2009. I thought it would be fun to look up the original theme of the blog again and use that for today’s post. This blog started it’s life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking and Raid Leading Blog. Super freaking niche and that did not last for terribly long… I essentially painted myself into a corner and when I stopped having fun raiding… it also meant that I stopped having fun blogging. Those early years are full of posts where I am apologizing for the massive lapses in time between posts. Once I shifted in 2013 to this just being a blog about me and my misadventures things got considerably more easy.
I know I have a pretty regular reader-base… but I am curious. Do I still have any readers that were with me way back in the beginning or at least after my initial viral moment of being featured on WoW Insider? If so drop me a line below because I am legitimately curious. I think a lot more folks know me for Blaugust than pretty much anything else.
The post Froggy and Capy Are Best Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! On April 13th of 2014, we recorded the very first episode of AggroChat so last night the stars aligned just perfectly for us to be recording on our ten-year anniversary. We start the show by discussing a few different AFK games, namely Gnorp Apologue and AFK Journey. From there Bel talks a bit about the new Fallout TV Series and how it nails the setting and tone of the game. Kodra and Thalen talk a bit about the latest Bluey episode Ghostbasket. Kodra and Tam discuss their experiences playing together in Helldivers 2 and then Kodra and Bel talk some more about the Path of Exile Necropolis League.
Good Morning Folks! Today is the very first day of Blaugust 2023. I had some concerns going into this year, to be honest, because so much of this event spread through the use of Twitter as a platform. This year represents the first Blaugust when I am actively avoiding that platform, so I was a bit concerned if things would coalesce in the same manner as they have in past years. That said I was also excited to see what a Mastodon/Fediverse Blaugust would end up looking like. I know when I stopped syndicating to Twitter, I didn’t really see much drop in readership and in fact, I saw way more engagement from the Fediverse community as a whole. Just to add more things into the mix, this is the tenth year of Blaugust so I wanted this year to feel vibrant and alive.
At the time of writing this post, we have over eighty participant blogs. Knowing that there will be folks that sign up during the process, I think this year might be our most active yet. What has been super interesting is how many of the usual suspects have returned, while also the Fediverse has served as a hotbed for drawing new folks into the fold. I have been so proud of how this event has spread into new corners of the internet. It doesn’t necessarily shock me, because while I am following a bunch of folks that I knew on Twitter as they have moved to the Fediverse, I have also branched out and met a ton of awesome people that for some reason our paths never really crossed before now. So I think the thing I am most proud of is how many first-time Blaugustans we have:
At the time of writing this post, we have THIRTY-FIVE folks who have never participated with their blog in a Blaugust event before. That feels massive. I am legitimately uncertain if we have ever had that many first-timers before apart from of course the very first year. Many of these folks are not necessarily first-time bloggers mind you, but again for whatever reason our paths never crossed before the break up of Twitter. I thought decoupling ourselves from Twitter might have harmed the event, but everyone spreading out to different platforms of choice… seems to have actually spread the concept considerably.
The last decade of Blaugust has been littered with many “why didn’t I do that sooner” moments. This year’s version of this is the fact that never in the past have I ever created a dedicated account for Blaugust. The timing is purely selfish because I am now helping to Admin Gamepad.club, it was very easy for me to just set up an account there. The theory being I could use it to boost all of the posts that use the hashtag, and then keep my own account as something a bit less spammy. I should have done this years ago on Twitter because it is really nice to have a single account that is focused on the event rather than having things get lost in the mix of my random posts. While not everyone uses Mastodon or the Fediverse in general, it does give me a relatively nice way to keep an easily consumable thread that is entirely focused on Blaugust content.
It has had the unintended consequence of prompting a number of folks to either set up brand new accounts on Gamepad or migrate there. Which admittedly is cool and only serves to make our local feed a bit richer, but is more a side benefit rather than the goal. For the folks that call BlueSky their home, I have also created a Blaugust Posts feed that is published through Skyfeed and should allow you to keep tabs on any posts that are made over there. Since accounts are at a premium on that network, I figured it was probably a bit wasteful to set up what is effectively a Blaugust bot over there. The folks who are still syndicating to Twitter can always be found at the #Blaugust2023 hashtag as well. Threads is unfortunately a bit wonky and does not appear to have functional hashtags so I have no clue how any of the stuff on that platform functions, though I am sure folks will be syndicating there as well.
The Blaugust Discord has also seen a flurry of activity as new folks sign up and join in the conversation. This was still one of the best decisions made in the past, to branch out and start a Discord to support the event. What it has done more than anything is kept the spirit of the event alive all year round. While I often struggle to keep up with Discord, I view it as an invaluable part of this process because it allows for some side discussions to take place that maybe don’t quite elevate to the level of actually writing a proper blog post. It also serves as a platform to ask questions and address concerns. Legitimately when I started this madness a decade ago, I never thought it would turn into this thriving community. I want to thank everyone who has ever participated in this event in the past because you have become part of this great tapestry.
Lastly… August 1st is a pretty special date for me independent of Blaugust. Twenty-Five years ago today I married my spouse, who has hosted her own version of Blaugust for many years in the Math Blogosphere. It floors me that we’ve been together Twenty-Seven years and married Twenty-Five of those. As a result of the anniversary, I may not be paying super attention to Blaugust happenings today, but thankfully I have built this machine that sort of runs itself. Huge thanks to all of the Mentors who have always been more than happy enough to step in when I am not paying attention. Thanks to everyone for keeping this event alive, and I wish you all a happy and productive Blaugust!
The post Blaugust is Thriving appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
