Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have the entire crew this week but have a bit of a rolling start without Tam as he was finishing something up in Star Citizen. We begin the show with some talk about Relooted a game about recovering antiquities and returning them to their rightful homes. After that, we discuss Destiny Rising and how it appears to be in maintenance mode lately. No one had it on their bingo card, but we talked a bit about the drop of the Warlock class in Diablo II Resurrected and how it is also coming to Immortal and Diablo IV. Tam shares his thoughts about playing Warhammer: The Old World and how it is not exactly the game he thought it was going to be. We discuss a bunch of rapid-fire topics from the recent Sony State of Play event, and then Kodra dives into Thinky Games and Shape of Dreams. We discuss the failed state of Highguard and 2XKO and what it means for multiplayer games in general. Finally, a quick blurb that we are all looking forward to Horizon Hunters Gathering, and they should give us all keys to test it.
Good Morning Folks. I have to be blazingly honest here… I did not have it on my punch card that we would be getting an expansion for Diablo II this year. However, we got exactly that as part of the Diablo anniversary celebration, and it was a shadow drop, meaning I have already played a bit of the brand new class in Diablo II, the Warlock. I have to say it is pretty freaking awesome, at least in the early levels, it feels wildly overpowered. Granted, you can only really have one minion so far, but I am sure that changes over time. You summon up your demon goat buddy, and he proceeds to lay waste to everything around you, while you bop things over the head with your floating weapon. I think the floating weapon thing is honestly a really nice touch because it differentiates this class from other classes that start out feeling like they are shittier versions of the Barbarian… looking at you, Druid.
What is wild about this is that the Warlock class is coming to three games in the Diablo franchise. It’s a bit of a bummer that Diablo III is left out of the love here… but I feel like probably it and Diablo 1 both got dropped for the same reason, they do not have a shiny new client built with modern development technology. We already have the Warlock in Diablo II, but it is coming to Diablo IV at the end of April and to Diablo Immortal in June. Not that I give much of a shit about Diablo Immortal, but I will probably be playing whatever season coincides with the April 28th start date of the Warlock drop in Diablo IV. I will always be down for more Minion gameplay coming to games. So far, at least it feels pretty solid, and it has actually made me want to play some more Diablo II Resurrected. Generally speaking, D2R gameplay is way too slow for my tastes these days, but it might be fun to do at least a full playthrough on the Warlock.
In other news, we got a new Lunar New Year event in Destiny Rising, so maybe it is not entirely out to pasture fully. I lack the cultural significance of all of the stuff that coincides with Lunar New Year events, but they often are big deals in Japanese and Chinese games, and so far, that seems to be the case here as well. Essentailly the normal Frontline events are being replaced with new encounters with the red and gold fireworks themes. Doing these earns points towards the larger event that is going on, and will ultimately also earn you pulls for the reworked version of Ikora. I played three rounds or so of Frontlines yesterday and had a reasonably good time doing it. This is mostly a pretty chill activity and is exclusive to Jiangshit Metro, aka Space China. Is it massive and new and exciting? Not really. However it is something and I have to give them credit for it.
Yesterday evening, we got a new State of Play event from Sony, and probably the biggest news for me personally was the upcoming release of Death Stranding 2 for the PC. Sure, I have a PS5 and could have played this game at any point I wanted to, but I greatly prefer playing open-world games with a mouse and keyboard whenever possible. The PC release of the first game dropped during the height of covid lockdown, and it was extremely poignant as we were all adjusting to a new way of life, much in the same way as the characters in the game were. I’ve never been a massive Kojima fan, but I did really enjoy the quirky lore of the world in this series and look forward to seeing more of it. I may have also developed a crush on Fragile, and am interested in seeing more of how things progress in this world. Troy Baker’s character in this series is also completely batshit crazy, and I am interested in seeing just how over the top he is in this version.
Next up, we have a really freaking cool-looking Castlevania game from some of the folks behind Dead Cells. Not that I necessarily have much to say about this, other than the fact that I will be playing it when it drops. At least based on the trailer, I would guess this is more in line with Castlevania 1 and 3, and not a more role-playing game experience like 2 and Symphony of the Night. I tend to prefer the Castlevania RPG games where you level up and collect gear and such, but it does not mean that I don’t appreciate the more standard platformer style games. It might be a bit more modern platformer than I would like, but we will have to see how it plays. Games like Silksong tend to require a level of manual dexterity that I no longer have with a controller.
We also got more gameplay of Control Resonant, and while I still mourn the fact that we are not playing as Jesse… I love this weird shared universe and will be here on day one regardless. I am really looking forward to just how kooky the world is going to be, given that we are apparently playing with gravity and surfaces. It seems like the corruption of the Oldest House has spilled out into the real world, and I guess New York is suffering as a result. I love the visuals, so this should be a heck of a lot of fun.
Lastly, we got another video update on Tokon Fighting Souls, and while I am not as big a fighting game player as I once was, this game looks like a lot of fun. I am all on board with playing Magik in a fighting game. I am super pumped that Steve Blum is doing the voice for Wolverine as well. I hope that means he will be doing the voice of Wolverine in the game that Insomniac has been working on as well. Anyways, it should be a lot of fun, and will likely look beautiful in blazing 4k on the 65-inch television that I picked up not too long ago. At some point, I really need to hang up a curtain rod so I can put up some blackout curtains over the awkward round window in the livingroom.
There was honestly a bunch of other interesting stuff announced yesterday, so if you have the time it might be worth watching it in the background while doing other things. Either that or, at a minimum, hitting the PlayStation YouTube channel to see if there are any trailers that stand out to you. After showings like this, it really hits home just how far Microsoft is falling behind in this race. They conceded the PlayStation 4 generation, and as a result, lost the generation when everyone shifted to digital purchases. It is going to be nigh impossible to claw their way back from this, especially when Sony keeps dropping banger exclusives left and right. I will probably never be a console-first player, but I doubt I buy another Microsoft console because I have barely used my Xbox. Going forward, I will probably have a Sony console, a Nintendo console, and then my PC for everything else.
Anyways. Was there anything you were super pumped for in the State of Play? Have you been playing the Warlock in Diablo II Resurrected? Drop me a line below.
The post Demonology for Fun and Profit appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I’ve been a big proponent of Destiny Rising for quite a while on this blog, and I still play it pretty much every single day. At a bare minimum, I pop in and do the daily quests, send off some of the Iron Commander missions, and then do whatever I can to chip away at the Guild’s map discovery. Then, usually once per week, I run with Ace and do some more serious content as we knock out Calamity Ops and our Grandmasters. Collectively, I am still enjoying my time in the game, but it sort of feels like something is changing. This morning I am going to present the case that Destiny Rising is not long for the world, because it appears as though NetEase is throttling down on the amount of time and effort they are spending on the game.
Character banners are critical to the livelihood of a Gacha game. They are supposed to inspire us to want to pull for the character on them, and devote time and hopefully money to spending on currency in order to get more copies. I’ve happily pulled every ounce of currency that I could gather up on Gwynn, Estella, Helhest, Maru, and even Jaren, whom I initially thought I would not be that big a fan of. This pattern stopped, however, when we got Kabr the Resolute… which is effectively a rework of a free character that you unlock in the game by completing the story. It is not so much that I hate Kabr… I just find him thoroughly uninteresting as far as characters go. The rework also essentially makes him worse than the base version as far as I am concerned, and dips into an archetype that I already have a bunch of characters that can fill… namely Helhest. As a result, I have been banking “pink ships,” aka the premium currency, waiting for the next banner, and hoping it was going to be something interesting.
This was announced a few days ago, and we are getting Ikora the Hidden… aka another retread of a character that you get for free by completing the campaign. This is the point where it really set in that NetEase is not devoting any new resources to this game. Effectively, we have gotten all of the characters that were introduced during the testing phase of the game, and now, instead of introducing brand new characters, we are getting reworked versions of some of the original characters. From what I can tell, it isn’t even that the new Ikora 2.0 is getting new weapons… reportedly, it is also still going to be a Single Shot Grenade Launcher and Rocket Launcher character. Which begs the question… what is even the point? Unfortunately, I think the answer is to give the illusion that new content is being added to the game, without requiring much in the way of resources to make it happen.
There were a number of articles that came out in September pegging the initial partial month earnings for the game being around $9 million dollars in revenue. This is apparently far less than NetEase was expecting, at least compared to other games like Diablo Immortal that earned $39 million dollars during the same period. I’ve said before that Destiny Rising is exceptionally generous with its gacha mechanics, and this seems to be translating into players not feeling like they need to spend money on it. I know I generally do the cheap monthly subscription option for around $5, and that feels like it generates enough premium currency to get me all of the characters that get released. Additional articles came out in December indicating that November revenue was down 80% over the September numbers. All of this is deeply sad because the game itself is pretty freaking fun, and I will be sad when it eventually shuffles off this mortal coil.
The bigger problem, however, is that players are disappearing. I’ve pretty consistently friended folks while playing the game and doing some of the harder content, and there are a lot of names and faces that I have not seen in months. Specifically, there is a mechanic that allows you to borrow characters from other players, and it really benefits you to friend some of those whales out there that are getting maxed-out characters off every banner. The problem is, a lot of those Whales have disappeared as well. The first contacts I have in my list have been offline for 157 days… but some of the folks who were super active have been offline for over a month. It is getting noticeably harder to queue for anything because there are just not enough players actively playing the content. Generally speaking, the only time groups happen pretty easily is when both Ace and I are queueing together, which usually means we only need to pick up a third to make it happen.
In the middle of October, we got the “Threats from Beyond” teaser trailer that seemed to indicate that in 2026, we were getting some significant expansion of the game. However, as time passes, I am starting to question this. It shows our character in a ship travelling off-world, but the big tease is Crota, which we have already gotten access to through some sort of time gate, allowing us to travel to the Destiny 1/2 universe and face them. I think one of the biggest challenges to the game is that we effectively still only have three play areas… the social hub of Haven, the Jiangshi Metro, and Red Sea Rift… all of which are located on Earth. A huge part of Destiny is traveling to other planets in our solar system, and it feels weird that we are this many months past the release of the game and have gotten no new patrol areas to explore. Technically, we have visited the moon through story content, but it isn’t an area we can actually explore.
Speaking of which… that “story” content is quite possibly the most laughable content I have ever experienced in a game like this. We are getting a series of quests labelled “Obsidian Secrets”, all of which are comprised of a couple of hologram conversations that we witness as the player, but have no interaction with. The first ones were extremely bad because apparently they could not get back the voice actor for Radegast, and instead of dialogue… we just got grunts each time he was saying his lines. Now it is mostly Felwinter talking to random people, and for all I know, they might be AI voices. It seems like it is teasing a bunch of elements from the existence of Rasputin, Clovis Bray, SIVA, and The Splicers, and also indicating that likely the Hive have infected our moon and not just the one from the alternate reality. However, I am not sure this is actually going anywhere.
It feels like maybe there was a plan to release some large content drop in 2026, but things are being scaled back. This is seen in the shitty quality of the quest missions we are getting, and how they are not really using any new assets and are mostly just hologram cutscenes with limited animation. This is also seen in the fact that our last two character banners have been reworks of original launch characters with limited cosmetic changes. It seems as though Destiny Rising is not the cash cow that NetEase hoped for, and as a result, they are bleeding it of the resources needed to actually make enough change to keep the players engaged. Gacha players expect something new and fresh coming around the corner every few weeks, and while we have gotten a few new game modes and a recurring sequence of the same events over and over, it might just not be enough to keep players for long. All of this is deeply sad to me, someone who really enjoys the gameplay.
Ace and I have already begun talking about what game we will be trying to play next for our “sibling time” routines. I figure by the end of this year, Destiny Rising will be sunset, because it feels like we have been herded into the pasture that is “maintenance mode” without actually ever admitting it.
The post Destiny Rising: Out to Pasture appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Hopefully yall are surviving Snowmageddon 2026. For the most part I have stayed in out of the mess. I had plenty of food, and so long as power stayed on I was going to be good. We got somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten inches. The snow was so dry that drifts were pretty rampant so it was really hard to tell an actual estimate, but I know when I was clearing my jeep yesterday and making a path so I could get out today for an appointment, it was coming up to mid calf high at times. I cleared the front porch enough that I could start putting food out for the outdoor kitties as well. I’ve not seen Tripod, but in the past when we have had cold snaps like this she has an underground borough system that she crawls down into. For years we had bunnies in our backyard prior to Tripod taking up residence there, and I think she has been using their underground warrens.
Things have mostly been okay… save for the fact that it has been raining in my livingroom. This is a problem that I had hoped we solved about three months ago when the roofers came out to work on the flashing at the top of the roof. My guess is that the snow sitting up there has basically been on top of wherever the leak starts, and then heat rising up through the roof is melting it. Essentially as far as we have been able to guess it runs down under the shingles and then finds a way into the house in the middle of the livingroom, dripping out onto this cross beam, and then down onto the ceiling fan before ultimately hitting the floor. Sadly the leak does not come down in a single spot, so essentially I just have to put towels out. It had stopped mid day yesterday, but then started up again late last night as things started to re-freeze and was still going whenever I went to bed. It stopped at some point over night because it is not going this morning. I’ve called the roofers to be on the list for after this is all over, but for now there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do. I have some IKEA bathmats and some towels down to soak up the water…. which I will run a load in the washer once things have chilled a bit.
My folks I think got it worse north of me. This is their front yard and you can barely make out the wheelchair access ramp. My dad of course had already trudged a path out to his shop, because he spends most of his time there. I think more than anything he was checking on the cats, who stay overnight in there with a heater on. I never knew my Dad was as big of a softie for strays as he is, until later in life. Maybe I get my own attachment to street cats by genes. I got out yesterday and cleared the cars and a path out, and then was wondering why the hell everything hurt today. These are all activities that I do not normally have to do, so I guess it makes sense that everything feels like it aches in my chest and arms. I don’t even have a proper snow shovel, because this happens so infrequently. My old shovel was rusted through so I tossed it, and had not gotten around to getting a new one. I guess I will make that a bigger priority. Essentially I cleared what I cleared with one of those giant plastic yard rakes and a nylon bristled broom.
This weekend I spent a lot of time snuggled with cats and watching movies downstairs on the television. I will probably make a post tomorrow about some of the things that I watched. “The Librarian” reminded me that I have a Letterboxd account so if you do that thing feel free to follow and I will likely give you a follow back. I like keeping track of media consumption and previously my plex server log was the most reliable method up until this point. However that was flawed because when I was pulling together my movies of the year post… I completely somehow missed the existence of Sinners. I figure I will try and keep up with this similar to how I do Storygraph and Bookwyrm. Speaking of those two I really need to get back in the swing of reading, or at least listening to an audiobook while I do other things. I figure on the 29th with the launch of the Phrecia league it might be a good time to get back engaged.
Speaking of gaming… I played a heck of a lot of Destiny Rising this weekend. I was trying to keep all three accounts active, because we were having some bad luck finding strongholds. Yesterday morning we cleared the three that we had access to, but did not find the third until we were already logged in trying to clear the other two. Thanks to Jade Rabbit I have been playing Umeko a lot more on my alt accounts, and apparently doing well enough to regularly get MVP when I run some strikes. Essentially I am trying to get account two high enough so that I can get 3 charges of Iron Commander and can get my 60 Pinnacle done without running any strikes. Account three… at some point I just need to put my head down and push through the campaign because I have not even unlocked the second planet.
Last night I played a bit of Path of Exile II, especially since Kodra has been talking about it quite a bit. I know come the 29th I will be over in Path of Exile and playing the new Legacy of Phrecia event, but in the meantime I am hopping around and making things explode in POE2. For Phrecia I am all over the place on what to play. Right now I am looking at either doing something akin to my Ice Trap of Hollowness build, a Blind Prophet bow traps, or Poison Minions. Pohx is going for a life stacking Righteous Fire build, but it is going to require a lot of gear to make it work. I had fun with RF Scavenger last time but I also needed a mageblood to make it work, and I am not sure if I want to push that hard. It sort of annoys me that there has not been a lot of fresh theorycrafting for builds within the POE community. Everyone seems to be focused on currency strats… which will fucking sort themselves out pending you have a good build.
Anyways! I hope you have fared well during the winter onslaught. I hope my livingroom rain comes to a close finally, and I hope todays tests go well and they don’t find anything else wrong with me. I am deeply scared about everything that is going on right now with cancer diagnosis and still not having much information. I will hopefully make it through this however.
The post Snowmageddon and Livingroom Rain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
