Well friends, I find myself in the odd position of having way more things right now that I want to play than I can possibly find hours in the day to play them. To be fair I am notorious for trying to juggle two or three games at a time, but I find myself in truly anxiety ridden territory right now. With the blog in theory behaving properly and me getting back in the swing of daily posting, lets delve into what happens when everything gets pushed off to the end of the year.
Destiny 2
This is the game that has been getting the majority of my attention since the launch of Beyond Light. I wrote the other day about the frustrations that came with the weapon sunset and the removal of content, and those frustrations still exist but have lessened a bit. Firstly with the beginning of the Season of the Hunt we have a new method to target specific drops, which helps to fill out that weapon vault once again. Additionally the content seems to have a longer tail than a traditional D2 expansion and I am still seemingly unlocking content long after finishing the story. Lastly I have found out that I can just kill roaming rares on Europa to get a shot at the entire weapon pool from that destination and as such have picked up several options including a new functional legendary Machinegun.
Now the thing that makes ZERO sense to me… and I wish someone could explain is that each time I have run a strike and a legendary has dropped… it has been this legendary. I have looted so many copies of this weapon, but the original roll that I have been holding onto seems to still be the best. Not saying this isn’t a solid weapon, but I would love to see more of the loot pool than just this one shotgun.
Genshin Impact
Genshin Impact is the game that is suffering the most right now due to my many distractions. There are a few events happening and I am failing to participate in them. The challenge with Genshin Impact is that it feels like this game really wants it to be your ONLY game right now. We went from the challenge of not having enough to do in a day to having WAY MORE to do than you can possibly get done. This is awesome for those who are still mainlining this experience, but for me who has pushed it to the back burner I feel like I am getting further and further behind. Grace and I are now no longer on the same world level which limits what we can do together… which is frustrating.
Diablo 3
Diablo 3 Season 22 starts on Friday, and originally I had contemplated just giving this one a skip. The conquests are not super enjoyable looking, but the book pet is sorta adorable. Grace was planning on doing this one solo even if I decided to skip, and as a result I have decided I am going to do the thing as well. More than anything I think I could just use the chill hang time that a Diablo seasonal grind always represents. In truth it doesn’t really take all that much time, and I plan on going easymode demon hunter in order to complete things quickly. May the luck be in my favor that I get a primal ancient yangs or something like that to help push this along faster. The 4th cube slot is going to provide some really odd builds.
Godfall
I feel like in another world and another time this game and me might have had something. However given its relatively lifeless state and the fact that I have so many other things on my plate right now… I am mostly okay watching it whiz by. To be honest I think the only reason why this game is getting any notice is the fact that it is one of the next gen experiences available for the PlayStation 5 right now. I have it on the PC and it has some significant performance issues on my 1080 ti, which admittedly is part of the reason why I am fine not playing it. I hope it gets some tuning passes, but the bigger problem is that the game as a whole feels like it doesn’t really have a soul to bind you to it. It reminds me of all of the story problems that Destiny 1 had of making you feel like you are dropped in the middle of something that was already happening and giving you zero explanation of what the hell is going on. The problem there however is that Destiny 1 had compelling enough gameplay to make me overlook that but Godfall does not.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands
I was more than happy to largely ignore that World of Warcraft existed for the last few weeks. I spent some time doing the Icecrown rares with my guild and managed to gear up my Paladin and even got the much coveted 34 slot bag. However without realizing it… we are now on the cusp of a new expansion launch. Monday night at 5pm my time I will be venturing forth into the Shadowlands and as a result I am preparing for this to suddenly take all of my focus. I’m even contemplating cooking up something in the crock pot during the day so we have a hot and ready meal waiting on us that I can just fix a plate of whenever I get hungry. That way I can focus all of my attention on being frustrated as the servers burn down around me. Given the state of this year I am expecting anything but a smooth launch, but have a glimmer of hope that I will be pleasantly surprised. Regardless it is leveling in a new expansion time and that is a rare and precious thing that I am going to cherish.
Demon’s Souls
I have no idea why I suddenly find this game so damned compelling. It might be that I Just bought a $500 console and I feel like I need to justify that purchase and this is the only truly next generation game available for it. It might also be that I have always been intrigued by the Souls game genre but never really allow myself to get into it, and there is something oddly compelling about the gameplay. I rerolled last night as a Temple Knight, so that I could start out with a decent twohanded option or at least one that can switch hit between one and two. The two handed no block style is definitely more of my jam, and as a result I made it quite a bit further last night before dinner arrived and I got distracted by the comfy sofa. I realize I live in opposite land where my consoles are all hooked up in my office and my sofa is where I do chill laptop gaming. I still have no clue what I am doing but I am enjoying myself so I guess that is the first step?
Ghost of Tsushima
I finally have my PS5 and you are so damned gorgeous and play so incredibly smoothly. Now I just need to figure out a way to duplicate myself so I can enjoy all of these experiences at once without feeling like I am leaving anything on the table. Hold tight my sweet… we will have our time eventually once I stop being so damned distracted.
Bugsnax
In another time and another place we could have been friends weird muppet pokemon skyrim. You just aren’t compelling enough when compared against all of the other things on my plate. I am glad you were given to me freely by the good folks that set up the PlayStation Now games, because I would have felt awkward ignoring you. I know Tam is your friend, and I am sure I am going to feel pangs of regret this weekend as he tells me how wonderful you are. Seriously though… just can’t right now.
Watch Dogs Legion
Legion is a really interesting game, but there is just something about it that never really grabbed me. I love how rich the world is… but it also feels like there isn’t a lot to do in it other than walk around. I feel like this is a game that Grand Theft Auto players would really be into, given that it is mostly a cycle of steal a car, drive to the mission, do the mission and then try and escape and lay low until the heat has dissipated. That has never really been a super enjoyable format for me, because firstly I don’t love driving cars in these sort of games. Secondly I found myself wanting something to do in the points in between the missions. At least in a game like Division where society has fallen… there are random combat encounters as I wind my way across a painfully detailed landscape. Here you just have a bunch of civilians and occasionally one of them might be interesting enough to want to recruit, but mostly you are traversing large spaces to get to small bits of micro content. I want to return to it someday but I am very glad that I chose to go the Ubisoft subscription route rather than plunk down a large wad of cash on this given how distracted I am right now.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
This one I feel real sad about because I have it installed… but have not even booted it up. Too many other things pulling my attention in too many other directions. I also know that since the way I play this game is in a purely single player fashion, that I will get just as much enjoyment from playing it in 2022 as I will in 2020. Someday I will visit it and roam around in its Norse goodness. This is also another situation where I am real glad I opted for the monthly sub rather than buying it outright.
There we have it friends… my very first world problem that I am lucky to have. On the other side of the coin I am still regularly playing caretaker for my parents, and more of my family has contracted covid so there are stressors there as well. I am thankful that I am so lucky as to be constantly distracted by my hobbies, because this is a year where I am clung to them like a safety blanket. They have been what has allowed me to stay sane through all of this, and while I am in sort of overload mode right now it will give me plenty to focus on as we go into 2021 and realize that things are not going to be magically better. I fully expect that 2021 will feel an awful lot like 2020, minus one major factor… that we will have a change in the oval office. The plague will still be out there and even though vaccines are on the cusp of release it is going to take a significant amount of time to distribute them far and wide enough to make a dent in the numbers. I am very thankful to have many other worlds that I can escape into when this one is just too much to handle.
The post Overwhelmed by Possibility appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Due to some technical difficulties, we are getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning. Things appear to be functioning as normal right now so we are going to hope it holds together long enough to make a post. For the uninitiated the above image comes from Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it is an amazing show. However after this weekend the lore drops in Destiny 2… I have decided that this is legitimately what I seem like to my non-Destiny friends that I keep trying to engage in conversations. I am convinced that Destiny is one of the greatest science fiction stories to ever be told… but it is thoroughly inaccessible to all but the most diehard of fanatics.
Imaging writing an epic piece of fiction and instead of publishing it in books… you instead tore each page in half and then shoved the halves into bottles. You then threw those bottles out into the ocean hoping that someday people from all around the world would start to piece together your magnum opus. This is ultimately what being in the Destiny Lore Community feels like. We are given scraps of digital text and then expected to fit the pieces together to make sense of the greater cosmology of the setting. There are times you wonder if you are really going mad… and then something gets released that causes all of these assorted scraps of paper to align in just the right way as to present the clear path through it all. It is when these moments happen that you start to question if this is all part of some greater plan that started over a decade ago… or if this is just convenient use of dangling plot threads in order to make something that was spur of the moment feel destined.
That however is NOT what we are going to talk about, because quite frankly even the paraphrased version seems like nonsense. We are going to talk about Beyond Light as a whole and more importantly the experiment Bungie has foisted in front of us of “archiving” content in a vault and removing the first few years of the game the players. With Beyond Light came the sunsetting of weapons, because I admit that it has to be hard to find a way to balance hundreds of weapons at the same time and make sure the “sandbox” is performing as expected. I was largely in support of the notion of this needing to happen, and I did some prep-work during the Season of Arrivals to best figure out some of my favorite weapons that would be with me for the long run.
This sunset however has caused some significant issues like the fact that right now there is one singular Legendary Machine Gun that was spared… and to the best of my knowledge it is no longer dropping. Currently if you can get far enough into the content, we also have access to Thermal Erosion, which thankfully I managed to get over the weekend. I have no clue about the validity of the roll I received, but for now I am using it because it gives me a functional machine gun when I had none. The answer that most folks have leaned on is to use an exotic machine gun, but right now I only have thunderlord as I never got access to xenophage or heir apparent.
The challenge with removing multiple hundreds of weapons in a single pass… is that you also need to introduce a lot of fresh weapons to prime the pump. The dropping of these new weapons seems to be few and far between and most of what I am getting are what I considered vault trash back in year one. So the end result is that I am mostly still using things that I picked up during the Season of Arrivals because nothing terribly compelling has come along to replace any of it. It just feels bad because there have been so many times I thought “I need to do X element kills, I will just grab my trusty… ” and then realize that the thing I was about to reach for is now permanently stuck in the past.
The biggest challenge that Beyond Light has is that we are sitting here whether we want to or not… and making a valuation. Is what I just got worth the four planets, multiple raids and hundreds of weapons that I lost? The short answer is no… not yet. The Season of the Hunt has yet to officially start and I am hoping that the activities associated with it will add the lubrication needed to make it feel like the new drops are flowing once again. Right now we are in this awkward space at the beginning of something new and not entirely certain how it is going to shake out, but we also lost our own familiar stomping grounds in the process. I was probably one of the few players that legitimately loved Titan. I’ve likely spent more time on that destination than any others in Destiny 2.
Admittedly this was also the problem with the launch of Destiny 2 initially. It felt like we had just lost so much well tuned and polished content that we were familiar with in Destiny 1, as well as the vast arsenal of options we had stockpiled. Essentially Beyond Light is the launch of Destiny 3, without really intending to be. It has put us back in a position where we are having to deal with the loss of the familiar and comfortable with the promise of something great on the horizon. I am still enjoying myself but I am throwing out some significant questions on if this sacrifice was worth it yet.
Don’t get me wrong. Were I to judge Beyond Light simply on the merits of that expansion alone, it clearly goes down as one of the best designed expansions to date. There are a lot of really cool systems and we also managed to get an entirely new type of character class. While I am not in love with Behemoth for Titans, the concepts are really cool. I think the equivalent might be an expansion like The Burning Crusade where not only did you get new races and new starter zones, but the two factions also got access to the class they were missing so it felt like there were so many possibilities. Unfortunately no matter how good the new content is, it will always be judged against the content that is no longer available. I will never play another round of escalation protocol for example, which was legitimately something I greatly enjoyed.
I am not grinding hard in the manner that I used to with Destiny. Ultimately I don’t want to reach a point where I have burned myself out again. I am trying to figure out a way to play Destiny as one of many games that I am interested in rather than as a second vocation. I’m also trying to learn to live with the fact that there are just things that I will likely never get to see in the game. I don’t have the hours or the dedication to be able to get all of the things available in a single season before the next season rolls out. That is a really bitter fucking pill to swallow, because I hate the concept of disappearing content. I firmly believe that games as a service offerings should continue to grow over time rather than constantly keep shrinking back as more content is released.
So I find myself in this position where I am enjoying the present I am in, but I am still a little flummoxed about the past that we lost. I tend to be a packrat in MMORPGs and if nothing else this has given me reason to destroy a ton of gear because it is effectively useless now. I’ve held on to a lot of armor because I am not entirely certain how this supposed transmog system is going to work and I don’t want to lose out on some of my favorite appearances. If you are playing Destiny drop me a line with some of your thoughts. How are you faring after the sunset?
The post Destiny’s Cataclysm appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off the show with a brief discussion of the console releases this week and how none of us actually managed to get one yet. Bel has one that is still shipping and Tam has had zero luck even getting to that point in the process. Bel talks a bit about Destiny 2 Beyond Light and how it is a solid expansion but cannot make up for three years of content that was removed from the game. The “sunset” has had some pretty negative impact on the game and even Bungie agrees that they maybe went too far. We talk a bit about the first major Genshin Impact patch and how it added way more content than we were expecting. Finally we dive into a discussion about games and hobbies and seeking out a place for creative expression. We also talk about the differences between creating something that is physical and tangible that you can hold in your hand versus something that takes place solely online.
I am not sure how to fully explain how happy I am to be in this location again. For those who did not play Destiny 1, this was the location where we spent our first moments in the game. If you do the New Light experience you go through a somewhat condensed version of that intro as well. This is where our ghost first found us among the wreckage of rusted out cars, and now some six years later we are able to once again roam freely around the outskirts of the Cosmodrome. In Destiny each location has a story that you have to dig hard to find… and while this turns off most players there is something magical about uncovering the past that has kept me at connected to this setting.
Last night I finished the main storyline of Beyond Light and as a result got my hands on No Time to Explain once again. This also is a reference back to Destiny 1, as it was the legendary rifle you were given then by the Exo Stranger for completing the Black Garden mission. It came back later in the life cycle of the first game as an Exotic, and it is a variant of this that we are now able to wield once more in Destiny 2. The weapon is pretty nice, though I have to admit I do miss the full auto variant that we first took away from the Black Garden. This one summoning a little echo of a sort that fires bullets at your enemies though is rather tasty… and it seems to be a way better shot than I am.
While the main story is relatively short, it does provide a lot of answers… specifically about the relationship between the Eliksni and the Traveler or as they refer to it the Great Machine. Much like Humanity, they were once the chosen of the Traveler and for them the Traveler fled the darkness leading to the downfall of their civilization. This is well trodden canon, but the final moments of this expansion give us a very brief glimpse into what Eliksni life and their planet might have been like. I am now working my way through the follow up sequence of quests now that I have mastered Stasis for my own. I think the jury is out right now on what I actually think of Behemoth spec and the Stasis powers. It seems terribly useful for the Crucible but significantly less so for PVE encounters.
Another game that I spent some time with yesterday was Godfall. Unfortunately I do not have my PS5 as of yet, but at 2 am I did get a shipping notice telling me it was on the way. However Godfall was a game I had always intended to play on the PC so that I could use my control scheme of choice the keyboard and mouse. That said everything about this game seems to have been designed for a controller, so if you have been considering getting it… you might want to hook one up and save yourself some control scheme frustrations. I am not entirely certain what I think of the game yet. I enjoy some aspects of it, but avoiding attacks seems to be a fiddly and weak aspect of the moment to moment gameplay. I don’t feel terribly effective dodging out of the way of incoming blows. Maybe this changes with time and the way you spec your warframes.
Lets be honest… this game is Warframe with melee weapons and more MMORPG loot. From what I can tell your brother is Evil and he is attempting to ascend to godhood and you are trying to stop him from doing this. This means you have to traverse the various realms of the Monolith… which appears to be an equivalent to the World Tree. The intro mission is just getting through this large temple to enter the Monolith, but after that you begin traversing various realms… the first of which being the Earth realm. I believe it means Earth in the elemental sense and not literally Terra. This area is more open and allows you to freely roam around completing objectives, which admittedly already places this higher up on my scale than Warframe since it doesn’t really have an equivalent of a Destiny Patrol zone.
Your mission into the temple is to recruit this creepy machine face lady thing, which allows you to unlock the various systems of the game. Your first action is to forge a new Warframe or as they call them Valorplates. You can equip them with different build outs and then swap things up to change the way you are playing. Unfortunately they are all melee which is going to rule out a lot of my friends who are not melee friendly. What it is doing is not really tricksy enough to entice Tam, and the lack of proper magic is going to rule out a lot of the AggroChat folks. So I am not really sure this is the sort of thing that would take off very much within my immediate friend group. I am enjoying myself, but not enough that after a few hours of playing it I didn’t immediately return right back to Destiny 2.
Are you exploring Beyond Light in Destiny 2? Did you try out Godfall? Drop me your thoughts in the comments. I am curious especially if Godfall is clicking for anyone else, or if it is destined to be yet another game in this lobby game/looter genre. I fear that much like Avengers… this one is not going to gain traction as we have reached maximum saturation in yet another gaming trend.
The post NTTE and Godfall appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
