Hey Folks! On Friday I talked a little bit about my very early experiences starting a new character in Dragon Age The Veilguard… or I as I seem to keep shortening it to just Veilguard. There was a heap of negative press surrounding this game ahead of its launch and if you spend time on Reddit or YouTube you would be convinced that this is quite possibly the worst game on the planet. Ignore these voices and press forward if you were someone who enjoyed Dragon Age in the past and just want more fun adventures with eventual romance options. It has been wild how every internet pundit seems to be screaming about this game… but all of my actual friends who are playing it seem to be enjoying themselves. If you want to watch a video that is not hyperbolic I recommend this one from my friend Dusty. I’m roughly twenty hours into the game at this point and am going to attempt to give you a low-spoiler discussion about what I like and dislike so far.
Probably my single favorite aspect of the game is that during character creation you are asked to make a choice between six different factions. These factions all play important roles in the story and aligning your character with one of them, also presents a bunch of unique options that play out during a single play-through of the game because of how your character was aligned before the events of Veilguard. I’ve been wanting to play another Grey Warden ever since the second game, and of course, I absolutely chose that path going into Veilguard. I’ve seen so many quest options that only really make sense because I am a Grey Warden, and I am certain that choosing any of the factions will have similar ramifications on your time spent with the story. This means that at a minimum there should be six different really interesting playthroughs of the game before it starts to feel a bit stale. One of my criticisms of Cyberpunk 2077 was how the origins only really made a difference at the very beginning of the game, but this seems to keep pushing forward with the story.
Another thing that I really dig is that as soon as you have completed the first mission in the game and have your base of operations, you have access to the Mirror of Transformation. This allows you to edit your character’s appearance completely at any time. Dusty talked a bit about this in his video, but there have been many times that an option that I chose during the character creator looked cool at the time… but annoyed me after seeing three hundred cutscenes. For example, I had some weird facial tattoos going on with my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 and they annoyed me from that point forward. Similarly in Inquisition my first character just felt off, and I didn’t really get into the game until I completely rerolled from scratch. Veilguard just lets you do this as often as you want without needing to spend any resources.
Similarly, you can undo your talent choices and the choices that you make for your companions at any time. Decide you like running with a specific companion, but you really need some sort of healer? You are in luck because pretty much every companion has some sort of healing line that you can invest in. There are a bunch of options that lock off other branches of the tree, but you can just undo all of those choices and try the other branch if you decide you don’t really like it. With your much larger character tree, there are a bunch of times you might want to shift your optimization because you decide that you want a different sort of ability in your loadout, which invalidates a bunch of other choices you made. The game uses a tagging system similar to ARPG games, so if you are using a bunch of abilities with the “Control” tag then you might want to pick up a bunch of other things in the tree that do things for those abilities.
One of the things that I do not love, however… is the gearing system. Namely, my brain interprets the little green sparkly icon as being that there is an upgrade that I should swap to. It is very rare that you will find items that are complete upgrades to other items. Instead, you are going to find a lot of items that are of different item bases, to borrow another term from ARPGs. I wish they clearly identified what sort of base an item is so that I could be on the lookout for new higher-level versions of that base item instead of having to futz with every single item I find. The other weird thing is that you level up the quality tiers of an item… by finding more copies of it. So for example I have a white quality sword… if I find another copy it will turn into green quality, and if I find another after that blue and so on. There is a crafting system but it only increases the bonuses of the item, not the base quality. There is also an enchanting system, but it essentially determines which of several fixed bonuses on an item are unlocked at any given time.
Something that I wish I had noticed sooner was that I could pop over to the world view of the map and fast-travel to any Eluvian without having to go through the crossroads. At first, I was venturing forth into the crossroads anytime I needed to go anywhere in the game, and while this was mildly interesting… it was a bit maddening. I do however need to spend a bit more time in the Crossroads because there are a ton of things to unlock there. There are also a bunch more mirrors than I currently have access to, so I am curious where the campaign will eventually be sending me. Some of them seem to be specifically used for a single mission, and others like the main faction zones are repeatable content that you can visit at any time and explore fully.
One of the things that is a bit weird about the game, is that every companion has some sort of gimmick that they can do to help unlock areas of content in an almost Metroidvania-style manner. Initially, I thought that this meant that it would just give me strong reasons to take specific companions to specific zones so that I could complete puzzles and unlock different areas of these maps. However, once I collected my full set of seven companions… my magical dagger MacGuffin started allowing me to do all of the abilities that related to whoever I did not currently have in my party. Annoyingly I can also do these abilities much faster… than actually having that companion in my party. So this weirdly actually colors my preferences towards never grouping with anyone other than my favorite two companions. Assan the Griffon… responds SO MUCH faster to me when using the dagger… than to Davrin when he is attempting to give commands.
The World is extremely gorgeous and we are getting to see so many areas that we have never been to before. The Antivaan Crows are just as great as we always thought they would be, and it has been interesting seeing the Mourn Watch… a group of Necromancers that feel plucked straight out of the Locked Tomb Series of books. Probably both the coolest thing… and the most jarring is that the game is littered with characters that have appeared in other Dragon Age titles. It is amazing to see these characters again and interact with them again… but the different art style means that generally speaking, they feel like AI Art versions of those characters because the only thing that is really recognizable is the outfit they are wearing. Morrigan for example looks nothing like Morrigan from the other games… Dorian is only vaguely familiar based on his outfit and his mustache. There is a character that I just met that I swear was one of the Deathwatch Dwarves or whatever they were called guarding the bridge and constantly fighting off the Darkspawn in Origins, but I am not finding any references to him.
The world exploration is also quite a bit of fun. There are puzzles but they are basic enough that you can solve them relatively quickly, and won’t be something that you spend hours trying to figure out. I think some of the things that I am enjoying about the game, are some of the aspects that other players are annoyed by. I like that things are relatively light and fast-moving, and do not get bogged down in too much detail. Then again… honestly I remember the other Dragons Age games being fairly similar. They were fun popcorn games, that had enough interesting choices that would allow you to play them multiple times. As much as players talk fondly about it… I don’t really love the extreme number of fail conditions that were laced in the Mass Effect series because it made me feel like I had to follow a guide to make sure that I did not end up losing half of my party permanently during a single quest chain.
I have been having a blast playing through the game, and honestly… I will probably give it a couple of different playthroughs just to see how the other factions shake out. My friends who are also playing the game seem to be enjoying it as well. Essentially my advice is not to allow the internet negativity surrounding this game to color your opinions. I find internet reviews to be less and less valuable these days when it comes to giving me information that actually makes a difference to my enjoyment of something. This honestly… might be my game of the year pending they manage to stick the landing. I went into the experience with fairly low expectations, given how long it took to turn out this game, and how many seeming restarts it had. I have been pleasantly surprised at just how polished the game experience is and how rich the options for playing the game the way you want to play it have been.
Have you been playing Veilguard? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Veilguard is Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Path of Exile II Three Week Delay Announcement
The community had noticed that recently GGG was curiously radio silent regarding the upcoming early access launch for Path of Exile 2 and the plans for the 3.26 Path of Exile 1 league. Yesterday we found out why when this video dropped informing us that there would be a three-week delay in the start of early access from November 15th to December 6th. There has been a spectrum of reactions from content creators, but I think for the most part the majority have been relatively positive. Sure there is a certain amount of disappointment and a modicum of frustration around changed plans, but clearly it seems like they understand the scope of what is about to be released into the world and how popular it is likely to be. I personally suffer from an abundance of things vying for my time, so I will not lament having a few more weeks before I am pulled in by the sirens song of Path of Exile II.
New World
What I want to talk about this morning however is how game delays are generally always a positive thing. Last week I groused about how I struggle to find unbridled joy in gaming anymore, and I’ve come to the realization that in large part this is due to the fact that games keep releasing in an unfinished state. There are so many games that I have played where given an additional year of reworking the game, are actually in a pretty great state. I have my issues with the recent rebranding of New World but had that game been delayed six months to a year… I think it would be a far more successful game than it is currently. The game that I played when they launched Fresh Start servers, was a completely different experience than the buggy mess of a game that I played on launch. It almost hit a million concurrent players at launch and has never managed to attract more than a small fraction of that number after that point. You only get a single chance to make your first impression with players, and it becomes a massive uphill battle to convince them that the game is worth trying again.
Mass Effect Andromeda
Similarly, the poor performance of the game and the weird graphic glitches of Mass Effect Andromeda during press previews and early access effectively turned what was a pretty good offering into a constant meme. Within a week or so of the launch, every major issue with this game was fixed and I had a blast playing through the campaign. However, because of the poor rushed state, it was thrust out the door… it became the laughing stock of the internet and effectively killed the Mass Effect brand. Sure there is some attempt to continue the lineage of the original trilogy, but it will be once more an uphill battle to try and interest players in the franchise again. Had the game been delayed by a few months… we would probably be talking about the sequel or even a third game in the Andromeda series by now.
Diablo IV
More recently we have the tale of Diablo IV, which admittedly is probably a bit different. The core problem with the game was that the developers had a flawed vision of what ARPG players actually wanted in a game like this. “D4 Bad” has become a catchphrase that has been turned into countless AI Slop song parodies… but has legitimately infected at least the Twitch audience. You cannot watch a single YouTube video on the game without someone commenting that. The thing is the game is honestly in a pretty great state right now for core gameplay. I didn’t like the campaign for Vessel of Hatred, but have had a blast playing through the endgame content on the new Spiritborn class. Do I think another year would have helped the game? Potentially… because that is essentially what it has taken to rework all of the bad systems. However, I am not sure it would have made much difference because it was the extremely negative feedback that forced a change in direction.
Baldur’s Gate III
I think there are studios that have managed to balance the need for pushing a game out there and getting some revenue with wanting to make sure the final release of the game is a polished product. The early access incubation period certainly helped Baldur’s Gate III turn into the exceptionally polished product that we all enjoyed, and that broke concurrency records at the time for a single-player experience. I think had something like Diablo IV launched into early access and then later had a 1.0 release once the majority of the system changes were made, it might have been less of a meme. This is essentially the model that Grinding Gear Games is trying to follow with Path of Exile 2, and I am hoping it bears similar fruit. There already seem to be a number of significant shifts in the gameplay from the first game, and I am uncertain how those will shake out. I am hoping an extended early access period will give them time to react to player feedback and solidify the game experience. I know at least mentally I treat an early access game a bit differently than I would a AAA Game launch, and that extra bit of forgiveness gives a game the chance to potentially improve for the better.
Path of Exile II – Returning Uniques
So if Grinding Gear Games has come out and said that they need some more time to make sure the servers are stable, then I am of the mind to give it to them without grumbling. While this is an early access release, there are still going to be a heck of a lot of eyes on the game and expecting something playable. I know the Last Epoch 1.0 release was severely hampered by server problems, which has I think kept them from hitting anywhere near the same concurrent numbers of subsequent releases. Anyways I am good with the delay, and it seems like we have officially entered spoiler season for the upcoming POE2 Early Access. Yesterday they released the above image showing off some uniques that will be returning from POE1 and that have received a bit of a “glow up”. While I cannot think of a single build that would want all of these items, it has been interesting to see just how much better they look in the new client. There is a Reddit thread that compares the graphics of what a character in POE1 looks like wearing all of these versus the above image.
For me… I am hoping to be able to wrap up Final Fantasy XVI either tonight or tomorrow night and then likely start on Dragon Age Veilguard after that. I might take a break from all of this to play through the new Alan Wake II DLC on Halloween night in honor of the “spooposicty”. I also still want to return to Wayfinder at some point with Ace, but our schedules have not just lined up recently. Mostly the point of this morning’s post is to say… Delays are generally a good idea if a studio thinks it needs one. I am almost always going to be in support of this.
The post Delays are Good appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Wayfinder is an interesting game. Back in March of 2023, I got into beta testing, which was under a strict NDA, so as a result I never talked about it publicly. I played the game quite a bit at the time and even managed to get into some multiplayer testing with my friend Ace and I think maybe even Ashgar. It was a perfectly cromulent experience, but also a deeply flawed and buggy one. I thought given enough time this might turn into a really great game. However, when August rolled around it was suddenly launching with a premium “Founders” pack price tag associated with it… I noped the hell out. I had just done beta testing prior to this launch announcement and the game was still in what felt like a relatively sorry state. Early Access is launching your game, regardless of what you think about that process or how much you claim it is still “in testing”. Launching a broken game is launching a broken game.
Wayfinder was an interesting combination of being developed by Airship Syndicate (Battle Chasers, Darksiders Genesis, Ruined King) and being published and hosted by Digital Extremes (Warframe). However in November Digital Extremes cut their publishing wing, and with it Airship Syndicate was suddenly floating in the wind. What was not necessarily expected was that the game was pulled from Steam, and effectively retooled to change it from being a lobby-based MMORPG, to a peer to peer based Co-Optional and largely single-player experience. It returned to Steam early access earlier this year and started the uphill process of attempting to earn back players. On Monday the game launched its 1.0 version and I started playing it some over the weekend on Sunday, just ahead of this rework.
There is a lot to like about the game, just like I felt when I beta-tested it… but this time it is extremely polished and ready for players. Essentially the best comparisons I can give it are what if you took Monster Hunter but made it a Dropped-Loot-Based Dungeon Crawler, or what if you took a Hero-Shooter… but made it an Action-Combat-RPG. It also very much lives in a space adjacent to something like Genshin Impact but instead of being cash shop-based Gacha nonsense, everything unlocks over time while playing through the campaign. You start the game by choosing one of three heroes and then pretty quickly after that point you unlock the ability to play as the other two. Then over the course of the main story quest the remaining five “Wayfinders” are then unlocked when you reach specific milestones.
Honestly switching from Lobby based to Peer to Peer has been a pretty seamless swap. The only time you encountered players organically in the previous incarnation was in town, so having to manually party up before going on adventures does not really feel that different. I’ve not done much testing but it appears that you can invite people through an invite code system, through posting a public party listing in an in-game party finder, through your Steam/PlayStation friends, or through a discord integration. The 1.0 version also adds cross-play so that console and PC players can both group up together. Right now the only console that the game is available on is the PlayStation 5, but there is apparently an Xbox Series X/S version and an Epic Game Store version in the works.
There is no cash shop and currently, the game is the low low price of $23 on Steam, or $25 on the PlayStation store. They have a single DLC pack available for the game right now which is a collaboration with Critical Role which gives you some themed skins for various Wayfinder characters. I am fully on board with selling additional skins as a way of expanding the purchase of the game and doing this through one-time purchase packs instead of an in-game microtransaction shop with a contorted third currency system. Founders apparently got a bunch of exclusive stuff when the business model changed, which I don’t love… but they had to do something to make it right for the folks who plunked down $100 to play their early access game.
I am only around seven hours into the gameplay, but am having quite a bit of fun. Essentially it is a blend of open-world exploration in the Genshin/BOTW style with respawning mobs and treasures to find, combined with dungeon instances that have semi-randomized objectives. So far I have ventured forth into the Gloom and fought void monsters and also explored these weird frozen-in-time “lost sectors” of how the world was before whatever calamity befell it. In both cases, there are a bunch of hidden objectives to find and loot to be gained, while fighting a bunch of baddy archetypes with differing attack patterns.
The character that I am mostly playing is Wargrave, which starts the game out as a Sword-and-Board style tank with an almost paladin kit. I heal myself by completing automatic swing combos and have a battery of abilities to deal damage and also shield the party. I can also seemingly swap what type of weapon I am using to change up this playstyle. I’ve gotten Shotguns, Rifles, and Daggers so far as drops but know there is also some big Two-Handed options from my limited-time beta testing. The only thing that annoys me a bit is that the loot seems totally randomized and can be for any of the Wayfinders you have unlocked. This means I am a bit starved for items that I can actually use for the tanky gameplay style that I have focused on. There is a gear vendor in town that appears to upgrade every time you ding a level, so I have mostly been having to buy a new sword/shield combo there to keep pushing up my power.
A lot of the expeditions that you go on center around taking out specific boss monsters. These often unlock crafting abilities, but I have not dabbled heavily into any of those systems. Mostly the main story quest will occasionally tell you to go kill X boss and then walk you through the process of crafting your next upgrade that is required to progress forward. I know in beta crafting played a much bigger role in the upgrade of gear, but so far this does not seem to be the case. Gear appears to mostly be acquired through loot drops, which is both good and bad. However, so long as I can keep buying reasonable upgrades from the NPC vendors I won’t complain much about it.
On top of ALL of this… there is a fairly robust housing system in the game. Exploring the world is constantly giving me items to put in my house. For example, I found this adorable little Hermit Crab pet that I now have roaming around my house. I can stop and pet it… which will cause it to pinch me… which I find both adorable and hilarious. There are a whole slew of items that I appear to be able to craft as well, but I do not think I have made it far enough into the game to fully unlock the crafting system. I have however picked up a bunch of random items in my journey, and the Housing system itself unlocked right before I went to the first big boss dungeon, so plenty early enough for you to keep unburdening yourself of items you found by dumping them in your rather large mansion.
All in all, it grew into the really cool game that I thought it could be when I first beta-tested it. The business model has shifted entirely to a buy-the-box, no cash-shop thing… which is honestly always welcome. However, that means folks need to buy in… and I really want this game to succeed. I was honestly shocked it was as cheap as it was, so if anything I have talked about this morning has interested you… maybe head over to Steam or the PlayStation store and pick it up. This is not a sponsored post in any way, I just genuinely want the games that I think are cool and a good value proposition to succeed. If you end up checking it out, drop me a line and tell me what your thoughts are.
The post Wayfinder 1.0 Launched appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! It has taken a while for Diablo IV to reach the point of feeling amazing, but it truly is there. I should take a step back… it feels amazing if you are playing the new class Spiritborn. My Barbarian that I power leveled through Whispers Caches feels like complete ass comparatively. It is slower and clunkier, and mobs just don’t die anywhere near as fast as they should. Diablo IV feels amazing because Blizzard has done the thing that they do time and time again… release a wildly overpowered class. They did this in World of Warcraft with both the Deathknight and Demon Hunter, where playing literally anything else during that patch cycle felt awful compared to the new hotness. I was a Warrior tank in Wrath of the Lich King and eventually switched over to Deathknight just because it felt so much better and honestly had more tools to play with. I did this again during Legion where I started out on tried and true Warrior but eventually swapped to Demon Hunter tanking because it just felt so much better.
Maxroll just updated their Endgame Tier list and had to create a new ranking called “S+” to isolate how much different the good Spiritborn builds are as compared to the other available builds in the game. There are Spiritborn builds right now capable of doing legitimate quadrillions of damage. Even when you drop down to “S” rank, there are two Necromancer builds and one Warrior build… and at least in the case of the Warrior build I know it is mostly exploiting a bugged mechanic to be able to place that high. Essentially if you are playing Diablo IV and not playing the shiny new hotness… you are playing a different game than I am playing. The game I am playing feels amazing… the clunky mess when I drop down to playing my Dual Swing Twisters Barbarian… does not feel amazing. I lack the unique required to swap over to the broken Mighty Throw build so I cannot judge how that feels.
It is reaching the point where some of the player base is demanding nerfs… and I get it honestly. Were I playing the wrong class during this patch I would probably feel the same. However, the gameplay that Spiritborn has should be the benchmark for how the rest of the game should feel. This is an ARPG… a game about blasting your way through thousands of demons while chasing loot. The game I am playing is what Diablo IV should have been from the very start. These games are entirely centered around the joy of building up a character to the point where they can crush everything in seconds. That is the end goal of every good build regardless of which ARPG you happen to be playing. Season Six feels amazing… and I fear that as a result, Season Seven is going to feel awful. It is going to be the hangover we are left with after the bender this season has been.
Blizzard is stuck in this position where they cannot really nerf the Spiritborn because it is this class that they have defended time and time again to the players. It is the new hotness and the entire reason for buying the expansion for many. What I fear for next season is that they are going to hammer down the nail that is sticking up, when instead they really should be buffing all of the other classes to where they feel as good as Spiritborn does currently. Even the gaming pundits that have called for more challenging content, seem to be having a blast on the Spiritborn and zipping through things at record speed. The truth is… ARPGs are a power fantasy and if you cannot get powerful… it is not fun. If I cannot clear the highest level content quickly… then I am playing a bad build.
There have been a lot of really fun and broken builds that have arisen during the course of Diablo IV’s short history and all of them have been beat back down into submission. I question when Blizzard is going to realize that this is the game that the player base actually wants. There would not be this constant chase for the most bugged and aggressively rewarding build if it were not so damned fun to play in that way. The Spiritborn family of builds is just the latest in a long line of “god builds” that have come along and captured the attention of the player base. What feels worse though is the fact that in order to have fun playing this game you have to play one of like three or four builds any given season. I would love to see them buffing the underperforming builds so that they are within the range of the highest-performing builds. As it stands currently, half of the classes in the game do not have a high-performing build.
Blizzard has created a scenario that is much like it is in other more hardcore ARPGs like Path of Exile, where if you are not following a guide strictly… you are playing the game incorrectly. Sure you can limp through the campaign on pretty much anything, in either game… but you will never be able to reach the heights of farming efficiency if you are not playing whatever broken mechanic is in vogue that season. I suffered through this for a bit when I switched over to my Quill Volley build that I am playing now, where a SINGLE talent point… made the difference between struggling to run T3 content to being able to dominate T4 content. What I really want is for the same feel of playing a current well-built Spiritborn build to trickle out into all of the content in the game and all of the classes and builds. I prefer playing Upheaval Barbarian because I like the mechanics of firing a bit of sweeping attack in front of me and nuking the entire screen… but that build has not been terribly viable ever. So instead playing what I wanted to play is needlessly tedious to get through when I could just play the “IWIN” build of the season.
I am still winding down from this season. I finished out the reputation in Nahantu, am about halfway through the last level of the seasonal reputation grind, and then have to do all of the remaining Tenets of Akarat. I feel pressure to get all of this done so that I don’t have to deal with it in a future season when I am playing a less fun character. I’ve been thinking a lot about how bad Season Seven is going to feel when Blizzard inevitably does what they always seem to do and nerf the fun out of the game. Diablo IV has had a few shining moments when it was really fun to play… this season, season two… but inevitably they keep trying to bring the game into line with some vision that they have for what the experience is supposed to be. I hope I am wrong. I hope we see a line of massive buffs to bring the other classes in line with the power levels of Spiritborn… but I don’t think that will happen.
Anyways if you have ever played Diablo IV in the past, you might want to pop in and give Spiritborn a spin before it is nerfed into oblivion. It is one of those magic moments when everything is just right, and I am afraid will be a fond memory we talk about around the campfire in the future as the “good ole days”.
The post Fears for Next Season appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
