Good Morning Folks! This weekend I was all over the place when it came to gaming. First up I finished up leveling to 100, which completed the Gear Grinding Goals achievement. Hitting level 100 on a character is a weird place because you suddenly no longer care about taking deaths. Up until this point even when attempting to progress, there was always a subtle tension there in the background because losing experience feels bad in your late 90s. Getting to level 95 is trivial, and honestly it does not feel too terribly bad until level 98. However that level 98-100 stretch is pure tedium with you either needing a relatively immortal build, or a lot of luck to keep from taking a stray death. Weirdly Delve ends up being one of the safer players to level because there is a sweet spot in the 150-200 depth where the incoming damage is not too bad, but the experience gained is pretty stable. Dipping back into maps to fill back up your sulphite however… that is where the danger arrives.
I also completed the achievement for crafting using one of every Settlers of Kalguur rune allowing me to knock out 34 of 40 and matching what I got to last league. This means I have another tall totem pole in my hideout to go along with all of my stubby ones. Essentially I have been earning a Totem every league since Sanctum. I could probably push forward with trying to knock out 40 of 40… but I just have not had that level of drive. It also involves doing a lot of bossing content that I do not necessarily enjoy. I could in theory start running my mappers more often and if they get abducted there might be a chance of knocking out one of those objectives and getting achievement 35 for the league. I am pretty happy with where I am, and honestly… I was happy with 32 of 40 until I came back for the Phrecia event and thrived in it.
With no fear of death I did a few t17 maps, and a few other sundry things that I had been avoiding due to the danger of taking an experience loss. However I feel like I am probably “done” with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. Sure there are a lot of things I could tweak on it… and swap out various gear pieces for even better versions. However I feel like I am pretty happy with where I got and don’t have ton of drive to push it much further. That is the irony with dinging level 100… is that I also lose a lot of my drive to keep going. I am not enough of an “Economy Andy” to really appreciate trading for trades sake. For me it has always a means to an end, that I want to trade items to get currency to be able to do more things. However once I lose the push of levels… I just sort of lose my drive to keep playing that character.
Instead I spent a chunk of my weekend playing other games. On Saturday I dove into Atomfall, which is a Bethesda game by a company other than Bethesda. We saw this with Avowed where they created a perfectly cromulent Elder Scrolls game set in a different universe. However that made a lot of since given that it was from Obsidian, a company with a long history of working with Bethesda on games like Fallout New Vegas. Atomfall however comes from Rebellion games, the folks behind the Zombie Army and Sniper Elite series… and they do a shockingly good job of replicating the feel of a Fallout game. The setup is considerably different… instead of a Nuclear war decimating the planet, you are inside an exclusion zone where things are going haywire. However the trappings are much the same… roaming gangs of very British outlaws and spore infected Ghoul like Ferals both fill the roles of the normal antagonists of a Fallout title.
There are a lot of things that work differently. For example it is not nearly as “If you can see it, you can go there” as the Bethesda titles… but I also don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Everything that exists that you can travel to… exists for a reason, and as a result there are way fewer barren stretches with no reason for existing. There are similar crafting systems, but items break down into raw resources as soon as you loot them, rather than having to dump through the hoops of needing to salvage them as a separate step. Effectively… both Avowed and now Atomfall feel like Bethesda games that have been evolved past some of the busywork that some systems designer thought was really cool. The spirit of the game exists and it is close enough for me to effectively lump them into the broader Bethesda-like genre.
Sunday on a totally different whim I started playing Hero Siege, which feels very much like a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 more than anything else. It is doing some of the same things that Chronicon does, but feels much more polished. I started playing a Viking and have gone all in on this big earthquake smash thingy. So far it seems to be doing a good job of stunning enemies and also whitting down large groups because with a twohander I can hit everything at once. Large packs of purely ranged mobs though seem to be the bane of my existence, and as a result I have had to learn to dance around a bit in order to deal with them. I want to try this with a controller, because it seems like it would be the ideal game for SteamDeck. All in all though I am pretty pleased with what I have played of it.
However by the time Sunday evening rolled around… my brain worms had convinced me that rolling a brand new character in the Legacy of Phrecia event was a good idea. There is something about the fleeting nature of this event and having entirely new acendancy classes that we may never see again. As such I decided to roll a Shadow which I then turned into a Surfcaster and am going all in on Storm Brand of Indecision. For now I am largely patterning my build off this character that is sitting at level 99. Given that all of the brand nodes are nowhere near the Shadow starting position… most of my talents have just travelled across the tree to unlock the meat of what I needed. Now that I have all of those brand nodes and a few elemental nodes… I am now going back and fleshing out the build with what I pathed through previously. I have a six link Shavronne’s Wrapping sitting in my bank wanting on my 60s when I can actually equip it. The build I am loosely following uses Melding of the Flesh to achieve 90% elemental resistance to all, which is something I have never played with before and am interested in seeing it work.
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Good Morning Folks! Last week I dipped my toes into Avowed, the new Elder-Scrolls-Like game from Obsidian… the studio that brought you Fallout New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, The Outer Worlds… and probably my favorite of the batch Tyranny which is criminally underrated. I was going to always play this game. Obsidian is a company known for some really big ideas but also quite a bit of jank that comes along with that. So far Avowed feels like a graduation to releasing a polished product on day one, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this game has a fairly limited scope. Essentially it is Elder Scrolls without all of the simulationalist stuff that sometimes gets in the way of playing the game.
It isn’t going to break any boundaries, but instead provides a competent semi-open-world adventure where you explore the setting of the Pillars of Eternity universe in a very familiar Bethesda-like package. The thing is however it sands off the rough edges and provides something a bit more straight forward and to the point. You can send gear to your camp from your inventory at any time as well as being able to break down items for resources in the field. There is an encumbrance system, but the only things that have any weight are your chest armor and your weapons… both of which you can manage pretty easily by the salvage and send to camp systems. Even when you are fully encumbered… you can still fast travel to the nearest camp or way point. Essentially Avowed comes out of the box configured in the manner that I spent hours modding Bethesda games to behave like.
If something exists and is lootable in the world… it is something that is worth looting. There are no cabinets full of empty bottles… that really serve no purpose rather than to potentially get a single coin from lugging them to a vendor. Vendors also do not have limited gold reserves so you do not have to play the game of selling to every vendor in a vicinity trying to empty your pack. Lockpicks exist, but they are simply a resource that is consumed and do not involve dealing with a fiddly mini-game… some of which are are just badly designed. My only real complaint is that lockpicks are rare enough that you will want to probably see if any vendors have them… because while they are super cheap… the bigger boxes consume three at a time to open.
Combat is pretty much what you would expect from an Elder Scrolls game, but I think it feels a bit more fluid and the ability upgrades a bit more enjoyable. I can charge into enemies which will break their ability to block attacks. I’m also a huge fan of when Fantasy games allow me to dual wield pistols which allow for an interesting game play of firing one hand at a time, while the other weapon is reloading. We are not going to talk about how impractical it is for you to be loading a pistol one-handed while you are firing the other pistol… but it is still extremely fun. Boss encounters are smart enough so that if you kill them while roaming the world, and you find a quest later asking you to kill that same thing… you just get to autocomplete the quest and get the rewards. Nacib for example is a spider in a dungeon near the start of the game… that later was a bounty mission allowing me to just get some fast credits when I finally found the bounty board.
I have no clue what the magic system feels like, because I am generally not a “finger wiggler” in these types of games… but I will say that when companions use those abilities it feels solid. Essentially you can let the companion AI do its own thing, or you can also specifically target a monster and pop open the action wheel and send a direct command for them to use one of their attacks. There are a number of environment puzzles in the game that involve freezing, shocking, or setting something on fire… and each of the companions can specifically fill one of these niches. There are also a number of grenades that you can carry around in your inventory allowing you to perform the same action so that you are never in a situation where you brought the wrong companion for the wrong mission.
At this point I have met three companions: Kai, Marius, and Giatta. I’ve met a fourth character that I think will be joining my band of adventurers in the next major story segment. Kai is essentially… what if Garrus was a Shark-man, because it is the same voice actor effectively doing the same sort of vocal treatment. Marius is your traditional non-trusting grump Dwarven character… that is also a wild tracker and scout voiced by the person who did Rathma in Diablo IV. Giatta is an Animancer which is sort of like a Necromancer but can also animate pretty much anything… voiced by the actor who did Ikora Rey in Destiny 2. The last companion Yatzli which I have not collected, is a wizard of some sort voiced by the Symmetra Actress from Overwatch.
One of the things that I find particularly cool is that essentially you can upgrade every weapon you find all the way to the maximum stats it can possibly have for its base item type. This means that as you start to find Unique weapons, it does not matter if you find it at the start of the game… it can be upgraded indefinitely and made useful all the way through the game. I found a flaming sword called the Last Light of Day and have now taken it up to Exceptional/Purple quality and will keep upgrading it all the way to Legendary as I find materials. Similarly unique armors often have specific stats on them that make them more useful than other pieces of gear, and you can keep upgrading those as well. Boots, Gloves, Rings, and Amulets are just stat sticks and are as useful at level 1 as they are at whatever the maximum level of the game happens to be. Essentially like I said before… a lot what I like about Avowed is it is the Bethesda model but with all of the bullshit removed from it.
At this point I am roughly half of the way through the game and have no clue what my played stats look like, because I am not playing it through Steam. This was available on Gamepass and I was able to install it through the Battle.net client, which I hope is a sign of similar functionality to come. According to the save game I am playing I am a little over 12 hours in… but save game playtime counts are somewhat squishy. This is probably going to end up being around a 30 hour game for me personally, which seems like a good size for this sort of adventure. Maybe not every game needs to be a 400 hour epic. My favorite Obsidian game is Tyranny which is maybe 8 hours for a single play-through? The world is rich and feels larger than it technically is… but that is mostly due to conscious design choices rather than just putting a bunch of empty space in the game and hoping you will be impressed by the sheer scale.
I’m off today, so pretty much my plan is to go hang out on the couch after I finish writing this post and continue my adventures in this weird world. I have to say… this is making me want to go back and play the Pillars of Eternity games so that I can have some context on a few of the elements that the characters are talking about. There is a lot of proper noun salad happening at the beginning of the game, but after awhile this lessons. There is clearly some fan service for those who do know this setting… but unfortunately I am not one of them. So far I have enjoyed the writing quite a bit, and have enjoyed hanging out with Not-Garrus who went from sexy-almost-birdman to sexy-sharkman. I think my favorite character is Giatta, but a lot of that is because she is a healer.
So far I would say that Avowed is a solid 8 out of 10 game experience for me. I think lowering the scope of the game helped it out quite a bit. There are going to be folks who consider this to be a bit basic, but I am having fun with it. Given how much has improved between this and when they released Outer Worlds, it makes me really look forward to Outer Worlds II. If they can keep knocking out games of this quality I will be exceptionally happy to keep playing them. I’ve always been a fan of Obsidian games and I think this is really the sort of thing they excel at. At least I have not seen any plot threads that sort of crash directly into a brick wall like they did in games like KOTOR II so if nothing else I think they have gotten better at controlling the scope of effort.
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Good Morning Folks! The weekend before last I had put up most of the Christmas decorations, but on Saturday I finally got our little tree up. Essentially we have a very small tree on top of the entertainment center because the cats have yet to figure out how to get up there. Prior to that I just had the tree skirt and runner with my two goofy little snowpeople. It is especially sad that the Christmas season is shorter this year because I do love hanging out downstairs with a laptop and seeing the cycling lights out of the corner of my eye. For years we did not do any sort of a tree and then at some point, I got tired of this, and for the last decade or so we have done a small tree on top of the entertainment center to feel festive without the cats attempting to climb it.
The box to the left of the tree in the above picture is the only gadget that I bought in the Black Friday nonsense. I hate airing up tires. I’ve always been annoyed that the process was not as simple as dialing in an air pressure and then having the tire inflated to that pressure and it shutting off. In my brief roaming around I found this doodad, and have now used it and it works beautifully. Essentially it is roughly the size of a double-thick battery bank and you set the pressure on the readout, hook it up to your tire’s valve stem, and then start it, and it will shut off whenever it reaches the desired pressure. Yesterday afternoon I used it and it really was as simple as it sounded, It used about 1/3rd of its battery capacity to air up four tires that were low due to the temperature drop.
This is going to be one of the longest weeks in history, as I anxiously await the beginning of Path of Exile 2 Early Access. I’ve been trying to distract myself with POE1, but I am uncertain that it is really working. I did however get a wild drop of div cards. Not that any of these are terribly valuable, but I came across a Diviners Lockbox and had the bit where I can open it an additional time… proc five times in a row. I would like to hit level 100, but I still have like five pips worth of experience left to go and it is coming so slowly either through maps or delve. I thought about starting a brand new character, but I am not sure it is worth the effort given that I am going to abandon it rapidly.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Starfield, but that is way more of a janky mess than I remember it being. I have no clue WHY I stopped playing it. My guess is a POE League or something similar. Whatever the case it has been on my radar to start back up at some point. I’ve played about 40 hours on this current playthrough and am starting to get into territory that I no longer remember in the main story. As is always the case with any Bethesda game, the side content feels way more engaging than the main story. I talked about this on the podcast over the weekend, but there is a mental disconnect between how good this game looks… and how dated the systems and interactions feel. This is very much Skyrim in outer space, and if you had told me this was a total conversion mod I would probably believe you. It feels like there is about a Skyrim’s worth of content, but it is spread out across many planets that are devoid of any interesting spots save for one or two highlighted ones.
I’ve also encountered a number of frustratingly glitched-out quests. For example, I was trying to join the Freestar Rangers and did one of those janky follow-the-NPC missions. Upon getting into the room… the escort seemed to have forgotten why she brought me to the room because the Marshall that I was supposed to be talking to was busy in the corner reading a book. The NPCs won’t interrupt each other so we sit in this eternal dance of a quest being completely stalled out without a way to get past it other than using a console command. There are also weird interactions with your companions. For example, the companion that I married… will say things like “I saw this and thought of you” and then proceed to hand you 603 Credits. Why that specific 603 credits reminded her of me… no fucking clue.
Then there are things that are cool but also superfluous. For example, at some point, they added dune buggies to the game, so that every time I land my ship it is outside waiting on me. The thing is… every quest lands me a few feet from the entrance to the POI, so there is never much reason to use the vehicle. I could of course wander off and go explore the planet, but also I know that there is nothing of any interest other than the fixed POIs that have already been labelled on my map. It is a game with epic amounts of fast travel so that nothing actually feels like you are really exploring space or the planet’s surfaces. I feel like I want to finish the MSQ at least once, and I enjoy some of the moment-to-moment side quests… but this is very much not a great game. It does not deserve a lot of the ire that it has been given, because everything is hyperbole in online discourse, but it also doesn’t really work.
The post The Waiting Game appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! Like I said the other day… watching the Fallout Amazon Series has summoned forth a bunch of nostalgia for the series. As a result, I have found myself back in Fallout 76, which honestly is a better game than anyone gives it credit for. It was kinda janky at launch, but I remember having a heck of a lot of fun with the AggroChat crew. If you have Amazon Prime, you can get the game for free right now. As a promotion along with the Fallout series, you can snag a copy for either the Windows Store or Xbox. While there is no cross-platform play, the PC accounts on Steam and on the Windows Store both connect to Bethesda.net and can play together. So it is the perfect time to check the game out if you have never played it before.
Coming back to the game after a long absence, I have picked up a number of things that I figure I will share with you. First off… there is now a “Pacifist Mode” in the game which entirely disables PVP functionality. This can be found in the game section of the menu just below the look sensitivity and vibration settings. While the populace of Fallout 76 seems to largely be positive and non-toxic… there are occasionally bad apples that will come along attempting to trick you into PVP combat so that they can curb stomp you and get their jollies. If you are not PVP-minded… as is usually the case with most of my readership… then I suggest you pop into the settings and just set yourself to pacifist mode and never have to deal with it again. Similarly, you will want to make sure you set yourself to push to talk because by default the game is open mic which gets super annoying. I’ve just disabled voice chat in its entirety because it takes away from my enjoyment of most games.
This next piece of advice is going to seem entirely counterintuitive especially considering I just told you to disable voice chat. There is an odd culture that has spawned around this game of ALWAYS being grouped with other players when possible. The game gives you a pretty hefty experience bonus, so there are no downsides to grouping up. There are multiple types of teams available with specific ones that are focused on individual game modes. Casual teams however are largely thought of by the populace as “experience sharing” groups and whenever I play I hit Ctl+Tab to pop open the teams interface and see if there are any casual groups currently running. If they are all full you can just create your own Casual team which will likely fill quickly. One of the side benefits of being in a team aside from experience bonuses is the ability to teleport to the camps of your team mates to get around the map. You can also check to see if they have any vendors and are selling things that you might need cheaply.
Another thing that has been added to the game since I last played is Donation Boxes. These appear at hubs like the train station and outside the first vault allowing players to leave items for each other and to give players a good start in the wasteland. There always seems to be something in them especially ammunition and needed resources like bobby pins. I need to clean out my ammunition stores and drop some goodies in these to share with others myself. I’ve yet to find anything in them that I really needed so I have left them alone, but it is cool that it is a cultural tenant of the game now. Apparently, players used to leave goods in a specific box on the map, and it became an unofficial swap hub. The Fallout 76 devs noticed this and decided to make it an official system.
Another thing that was either not like this previously… or that I simply did not remember is that breaking down multiple copies of the same weapon teaches you mods for that weapon type. I believe when the game first launched this only worked if you happened to find a weapon with said mod already in place. Now just salvaging multiple copies of the same item seems to reward you a new mod each time, allowing you to build up your stockpile of recipes and resources. As someone who grew up playing Doom… I am of course using the pump shotgun quite a bit and slowly over time I have unlocked additional mods for it. I really need to find a higher level one however because as of writing this post I just noticed that it is level 5.
Another thing that I once knew but had forgotten… is that you want to use Photo Mode any time you are in an area that you might want to remember. Photos you have taken in-game in this manner will from that point forward be used as loading screens for the game. If nothing else it is pretty cool to see your character in various locations as you pop around the game incurring loading screens. I am trying to remember to do this more often because I think I only have five pictures currently in my rotation.
One of the things that Amazon Prime is giving away right now is a trial membership to Fallout 1st. This is essentially a subscription model to the game and gives you a number of limited-time cosmetics for playing and a fairly generous “allowance” of currency for the Atom shop. The big feature that you get with 1st however is the ability to create private worlds. The nice thing about this is that the same character progresses in both Adventure mode aka with other players, and Private Adventure which is your own private snapshot of the world. Sometimes in spite of all of the bonuses for playing with other players… you just want to be off in your own world doing your own thing. You can also spin up entirely custom worlds that let you fiddle with the ruleset. These however do not carry over progress to the “Adventure” worlds, and generally speaking, there is always some special limited-time event going on.
There is a battlepass-like seasonal model in the game, and the last time I played it was essentially a game board where you unlocked one slot at a time. This seems to have changed to something more akin to a storefront where ranking up gives you golden tickets and then those can be spent on various cosmetic stuff. Each page is gated by a specific rank and doing various Daily Quests and Weekly Quests earns you currency. If you have experienced the modern Guild Wars 2 dailies system it works fairly similarly to this, but the Fallout 76 goes much deeper in the various things you can unlock. Right now the season is focused around one of the in-world radio drama characters “Rip Daring” and some sort of cryptid-based theme. This current season began on March 26th and will run through June. If I can get into the swing of things and get used to running dailies then I might actually have enough time to unlock some of the cooler stuff.
I’ve been having quite a bit of fun just roaming around the West Virginia Wasteland. In a few days I have leveled up a bunch of times and unlocked several battlepass levels. From what I understand the first real breakpoint in the game comes at level 50, and any levels after that are just sort of gravy. You can start a fresh character at level 20 now, but I think I am pretty happy just slowly leveling my way up from where I am currently. That is one thing that changed that I think is really slick. So the world originally was tiered allowing you to accidentally wander into some really high level areas. Then they made some changes which had the group leader set the level of the world, making it awkward for low levels grouping with higher levels. Now it seems that they have done something similar to the Elder Scrolls Online level scaling tech where the world around you is set based on your own level allowing a level 1 player and a level 100 player to be effectively fighting the same monster.
Anyways, I am having quite a bit of fun poking around with this lately. If you make it into the game my Bethesda account is Belghast so feel free to friend me up and say hi.
The post Return to Fallout 76 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
