Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.
I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.
I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.
This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.
I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.
In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.
Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.
Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.
The post Goodbye Anthem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I am sort of all over the place when it comes to gaming right now. The primary game that I am playing… is spending time obsessively chatting with “Erasure” and pretty much everything else is falling by the wayside. I have been remembering to log into FFXIV however to collect my weekly cactpot so that is at least something. At some point I want to return to the game and catch up, but nothing has really prompted me to do so. I would also like to play my secondary set of characters over on Dynamis, but I doubt I actually do that until Ace is also in the mood to play the game… which may be never. They were a matched set and we pretty much only played them as sibling time, which was a heck of a lot of fun for awhile until we both wandered off like bored toddlers. I figure my mains on Cactuar I might actually play whenever the next expansion is announced because I tend to have a bump in my desire to play whenever that happens.
I am still playing some Path of Exile II, but I also sort of feel like I have “beaten” that league. I had a lot of fun being a demon bear hopping all around the place blowing things up, but I’ve been kind of getting the itch to finish things up in Path of Exile 1. As a result I spent a chunk of yesterday working on some of the achievements that I left dangling. I respecced away from Incursion and just picked up more Heist stuff on the atlas tree to speed up the total time it takes to run each map. I was working on the meta achievement for running a bunch of super serious mode league content, and have almost finished the step where you have to run 20 Rituals with blood filled containers. I think I have one more of those left, and then I need to figure out one more thing to do in order to finish up that challenge. I set a bunch of mappers running last night, but I have a feeling that I will not be lucky enough to have gotten enough 100% completions in order to knock that meta out. I did just pop in to check and I got 9 completed at 100% so… honestly 15/30 is not too shabby.
I am still playing Destiny Rising, but mostly as a daily maintenance mode game. Essentially I have been focused on trying to uncover a lot of stuff for the guild so that we can keep paying upkeep. I am not playing all three accounts, but I am at very least playing one quite a bit each week. I got my Jaren up to 70k which should be useful so long as we have Fire Damage on the meta for this season. I sort of miss my girl Helhest a bit, and really enjoy when her exotic bow procs and blows a ton of shit up. I also miss Estella being the god empress of all content, but I get that they are wanting to convince people to build new characters. I still absolutely consider this to have been my Game of the Year for 2025 not counting the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2. It is so damned much fun, I just wish I could convince more of my friends to play it so we could keep upgrading the base without going broke every week.
Something that I have honestly played a lot of this past weekend is Minecraft. I have this dumb habit of making seeds based off my friends and then seeing what they offer. I made a seed based on “Erasure” and it was pretty wild. There was a shipwreck beside where I spawned into the world, tons of sea turtles everywhere, some surface lava, and forests as far as the eyes can see. While I once did a Hardcore Minecraft series, I mostly just play casually. In fact I tend to go tweak a bunch of the world settings so that I don’t have to care about getting sleep every night to prevent phantoms from spawning, and also make it so that creepers cannot blow up my hard work. So in truth these days I plan on pretty fucking softcore mode, and I am fine with that. I like milling around in the world and building dumb things.
Of course the biggest challenge of a new spawn is finding that initial coal. The last world that I created was so forested and so devoid of coal, that I had to start burning logs to get my initial start. This world however, within a few blocks of the side of that initial hill I struck the motherlode of coal deposits and was able to make two full stacks of torches. This was more than enough to fuel most of my further explorations. I am a weirdo in that I mostly stay inside cave systems in Minecraft, and go full on Dwarf mode as I hollow out the earth looking for riches. So the first thing I did was start to hollow out a base in the side of the hill, while being very careful not to break back out into the world. I put a piece of dirt in the entrance to wall off my little safe chamber and then began structuring something reasonable to work in, slowly adding pieces of equipment as needed.
This of course led me to do what I always do… and start a shaft down to bedrock. I am not entirely certain how deep I am at this point but I have broken into the layers of deep stone. Essentially the central shaft has a winding staircase around the outside of what is effectively a series of eight by eight rooms, with three block tall ceilings. The amount of Iron, Copper, and Coal that I have come across in my “spelunk” has fueled my further expansion. The only real challenge with this world so far is that I have yet to find a single sheep. I should probably go off on a mission to find a breeding pair of those so that I can farm them for wool. I do have enough steel to make shears, so I should probably do that rather than killing them. Essentially more than anything right now I need some wool so that I can make a bed and then reset my spawn point inside; my catacombs.
The next big project however is deforesting the hill that I dug into. My intent is to start building up and make a bit of a tower, so that I can see it clearly from above ground. Right now it is just a hovel in the side of a hill with a bunch of torches, and that is hard to see when I am off exploring the world. Sure I have my mini-map mod, and sure I could set waypoints…. but I would far rather give myself a nice big visual landmark to see from the surrounding area. So effectively I am going to harvest all of the birch trees up on top of my hill and then begin to build similar eight by eight chambers upwards into the sky. I will have to figure out what I want for the design for these to be as I build up. I most certainly have MORE than enough materials from my downwards expansion to fuel some above ground mega structures.
I guess as far as things go with “Erasure” I should probably give an update. It was a dramatic couple of days for various reasons. We had the first thing that really checked our relationship, and a lot of it was me being in my head about things. However I think we exited on better ground than we started, so that is pretty good. The harsh reality is that I do not know how to go slow. The relationship that I had with my wife of thirty years… was one that pretty much transitioned from being “just friends” to being a “couple” that was inseparable in over the course of a single weekend. I am really not good at casually seeing someone, and I am working on that. It probably seems like the most counter-intuitive thing to anyone who has dated around at length… but it is just the way my brain and heart works. I am having to learn how to pump the brakes a bit, but will ultimately be better for it. Luckily she did not run away, and luckily is willing to work with me through it.
Anyways. That is my weekend. A bunch of random games, that took a backseat to my continued getting to know someone that I’ve cared about for twenty years… but am starting to care about in new ways.
The post Dig a Hole, Find some Coal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
