If you have not been following the saga of Glorbo, you might be confused when I posted a random comment last night like “Praise Glorbo”. Essentially fans have been trying to trip up AI-generated content on less-than-reputable websites… and likewise trying to see who will just run with it. The first instance I am aware of, and the one that made gaming press news… is a Reddit post about the introduction of Glorbo to World of Warcraft. This spawned a number of AI-generated articles including the one above that is archived here. A few days ago the Destiny 2 Community got in on the fun and spawned their own AI-Generated article about how tough the new Glorbo fight is to beat and even a post featuring tips and tricks.
So with the FFXIV Fanfest and ExileCon both taking place this weekend… I thought it was fertile ground to fuck with the AI a bit more. Yesterday I contemplated writing up a blog post talking about how Glorbo had leaked just ahead of Fanfest or ExileCon and then trying to spread it on Reddit. So far various fandoms have been more than willing to play along, and it would have been very believable for something to leak just ahead of a presentation. However, at the end of the day, I decided against it. Firstly I was not certain that I wanted the spotlight shone on my blog, or the server load. Secondly, I was not sure I wanted to be involved in the spread of disinformation… even if it is just to fuck with some AI scrapers.
This morning I realized that I could join in with the nonsense in a relatively harmless manner. A while back I went through the process of getting Stable Diffusion models up and running on the tensor cores of my graphics card. This has provided me with some weird hours of fun from time to time, feeding prompts and going down rabbit holes trying to produce something interesting from the madness. This morning I decided that I would ask the mechanical hivemind what Glorbo looked like. So we start off with probably my favorite… and easily the most whimsical that was generated off the prompt “Introducing Glorbo”.
Next up I decided to vary that prompt a bit and feed it “Glorbo the Movie”. My favorite part about this one is how confidently the digital toddler produced something that looks like properly formed words but is complete gibberish. It definitely feels like we are going in a “Pokemon” direction with this one. I am not sure what is more troubling… the fact that his hand just disappears in the fur of whatever is going on with the left creature… or the very human hand on the shoulder potentially emanating from the large-toothed beachball thingy.
Next up I decided to go down a rabbit hole of trying to ask the art mangling machine what Glorbo would look like when he arrived in Path of Exile. This one specifically is off the prompt “Glorbo The New Uber Boss from Path of Exile”. Any combination of Glorbo and Path of Exile seemed to produce this wizard-like dude with very chunky man-nips. This is the most work-appropriate version of the various images that it generated. There were a handful that looked like Vladimir Putin with very aggressive nipples, and I will spare you the damage to your sanity. That said… other than the inexplicably blue beard… I could see passing this image off as something coming to Path of Exile.
The little engine that could completely derails however whenever I started trying to get it to show me Glorbo from FFXIV. This monstrosity is from the prompt “Glorbo Riding a Chocobo”. Like I have no clue what is going on…. with this Horse/Chocobo hydra being ridden by another Chocobo chicken thing.
Even after trying to do a few generations of steering it away from the void… it just kept getting worse. This was honestly the “best” version of what I was able to get from the nonsense machine. This is some kid riding the Human-Centipede version of a Chocobo… while inexplicably wearing what looks like stilts that have a pair of shoes on them. So I am deciding my friends… This is Glorbo. This is Glorbo in all his glory when it lands in Eorzea.
Anyways thanks for indulging me in this madness. I hope you all have a great weekend. Next week starts Blaugust and I figure we will also have plenty to talk about coming out of both Fanfest and ExileCon.
The post It’s Glorbin Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
So yesterday my good friend Ammo decided to take up residence on Gamepad.Club with so many of us that have moved there. This is particularly relevant to me because I have so many different profiles spread throughout so many different platforms that I have given her credit for the Avatar that I use most often. The thing is over the course of the last decade, Ammo has crafted for me a plethora of hand-drawn versions of “Belghast” from different games. There are so many of these that we have finally come to the point where I am retiring one. Above is the “Destiny Bel” that she crafted in 2017, prior to the launch of the game officially. It was assembled out of a set of armor that was at my time the favorite from what was available in the alpha and beta tests. Given that I mostly played a Bubble Titan in Destiny 1… I assumed that I would spend all of my time playing the sexy new Captain-America-style shield-throwing Void Titan. So I had her create a version of that with a simulacrum of my head… charging in motion.
Issue number one… I never spent any significant amount of time playing Void Titan. Mostly I never really liked the way the grenade options felt and the super was really bad for burn phases. Given that I never really did much in the way of proper group play in Destiny 2 apart from being carried through exactly one raid… I didn’t have much reason to run Void for Weapons of Light. Sunbreaker had both my favorite grenade and favorite super… so I largely spent most of my time playing that subclass. Then there was also the problem that after they started sunsetting content… and removing some of my favorite places from the game… I stopped playing Destiny altogether. It has felt weird to me that the character occupied such a prominent place in my blog banner, while I had zero plans to return to Destiny at any point in the future. Now watch that actually TALKING about it… will manifest a desire to start playing it again.
The thing is… I really still liked the motion of that character and how it rounded out the end of my string of characters. So it got me thinking about what I could use to replace it. For anyone who has not been around for all of the commissions, what you see in my masthead is my Lalafell from Final Fantasy XIV, my Hunter from Monster Hunter, and more importantly my Palico that is based on Kenzie… a cat that is sadly no longer with us but will always remain close to my heart. Then you have a version of my character from New World wearing the level 40-ish set of faction armor followed by my Necromancer in Reaper form from Guild Wars 2. Next up you have the only commission that I did not make… a version of my World of Warcraft warrior meets Twitter persona that my friend Tam Commissioned, with my PSO2 RaCAST looming behind. Lastly, before you get to Destiny, you have my Elder Scroll Online Imperial character wearing the armor set I almost always have on transmog. Then there are moogles sprinkled in throughout who stole my stuff.
It was around this time that I realized two things. Firstly… none of the characters that Ammo has drawn represent my constant addition to the ARPG genre. That part of my love for games is completely missing from my banner. Part of this is due to the fact that MOST ARPGs don’t exactly have a robust character creation system. A Diablo III Barbarian for example… looks like an old man with a diaper or a young woman with a diaper, and not much past that. Path of Exile while not giving you any control over your character model, does offer a bunch of cosmetic options that allow you to decorate them how you like. In that game, I also have a “zoomy” character in the form of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut I have now played for the last two leagues as my main. I spend most of my time ignited and shield charging through packs of mobs, and quite honestly… I feel like I love that design so much that I will probably create a version of it in every league from this point forward.
So I did what I always do and gathered up a bunch of screenshots and thrust them in Ammo’s direction and said “Here make this!”. This was a weird case because so much of this appearance is tied to one specific microtransaction pack in Path of Exile. Thankfully there is still a video showing off this pack in detail that I was able to supply to her as well. As she always does… she takes my inane ramblings and turns them into something functional. Over the last few weeks, she has been supplying me with sketches and updates… but honestly, she was on the right track with this one from the start. The only regret I have is that the scaled-down version that now resides as part of the masthead of the website does not necessarily do justice to all of the detail she put into this one.
So last night officially, I replaced “Destiny Bel” with “RF Bel” in the masthead. I think the placement works nicely. The only thing I wish I had now were some more small characters like the Moogles to patch over the transition of the left foot. At some point, I know for certain that I want her to draw me a Choya Pinata on a similar scale to the Moogles and maybe a Quaggan… but more specifically the one with a Turtle Shell for a hat. Huge thanks to Ammo for continuing to translate my madness into picture form. I think what I dig so much is that while there are stylistic differences throughout the years, they all feel like they belong together because they were all crafted by the same person. While I absolutely love my new Molten Lad, I do sorta think that the best of these will always be Necro Bel from GW2. It is the feathers that really go above and beyond with that one. I absolutely have the best-looking blog on the internet that very few people actually care about.
The post Molten Zoomy Lad appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
So this mornings post is not going to be an enjoyable one for most people. Yesterday Bungie released a TWAB (This Week at Bungie) about the new transmogrification system aka Armor Synthesis in their language. For those who are unaware “Transmog” or “Transmogrification” has become the universal name for systems that allow you to change the appearance of your gear in a game. This term was popularized by World of Warcraft when it was released during the Hour of Twilight patch at the end of Cataclysm. It is not the best example of this system, and in fact when it first went in it was fairly horrible… however over the years it has improved to contain most of the same features as better systems. Given the critical mass of players that play World of Warcraft, their specific naming convention stuck to identify ALL wardrobe appearance systems.
Some other details that you should probably know going into this post, and why it took every fiber of my being not to call it “Fuck You Bungie”. Destiny is a pretty important game to me. When it first was announced I used it as the reason to buy a PlayStation 4 just so I could play the Alpha. Granted there were other games I wanted to play, but it was absolutely the catalyst for me wanting to buy into that console generation. I loved the first game and by the time we got Destiny 2 it was in a really amazing place. Even from that first outing however the one system I wanted more than any others was the ability to change my armor appearance. Nothing makes a game feel bad like running around looking like an Fury Warrior from Burning Crusade. Wearing matched gear makes me feel better about playing a character and in relation makes the entire game feel better as a result.
How Transmog in Destiny Should Work
Shortly after the release of Forsaken, a new system went into the game called Collections. If you picked up an item it ended up recording that fact in your collections tab and for a small cost you could retrieve a version of that old item at any time. This gave us some long term goals of completing collections because it was around this time that they began talking about possibly putting in a transmogrification system. In my mind it made sense that we were getting out accounts flagged for having owned a specific item, because the best Transmog systems in general work off item flagging. When you pick up an item you earn the ability to use its appearance. Some systems put additional rules that make this process worse, for example World of Warcraft and not being able to collect appearances of armor types other than the one your class uses but the basics of account flagging have been around for awhile.
In my mental picture of how this system would work, it would rely on everything that you have bound to your account. In a perfect world we would have an additional paper doll that allowed us to place any appearance we had collected on any armor slot. There would of course need to be a carve out for Exotics, given that those give functional information to the players about what sort of abilities they can expect from you as a result. So in theory equipping an exotic would ignore whatever appearance was assigned in the transmog system. This is clean and would build upon a system they already have had in place since 2018. If they really felt them needed to, changing an appearance template could cost a nominal amount of glimmer and/or legendary shards.
A Slightly Worse Way to Implement It
At the tail end of “Year One” they implemented a system called Armor Ornaments, that allowed you to change the appearance of a single piece of armor. It isn’t a great system but until now it has been the only cosmetic system we had in Destiny. In “Year Two” they modified this system to open it up to all cash shop armors leading me to actively start collecting these because it gave me some access to modify my appearance. It was not a great system but again it was better than nothing, and Bungie also began talking about creating some sort of more holistic transmog system. I was willing to accept it because it would tide me over until they had time to build the better system.
Again a reasonable way to implement a cosmetic system would have been to combine the collections tab with the armor ornaments system. This would in theory allow us to swap the appearance of any single piece of gear with any other piece of gear that we have already collected. Again you would have a carve out to Exotics because they have their own appearance system but it would be manageable. Again there would be a nominal glimmer and/or legendary shard fee for swapping an appearance out but it would just be adding in the missing items from the existing ornament system. When they started talking about turning armor sets into ornaments, I honestly thought there would be some sort of nominal conversion fee to make an armor set show up in your ornament menu. I was fine with this and this is ultimately what I had resigned myself that we were going to get instead of the better option.
How Bungie Completely Fucked It Up
At face value this screen looks awesome. It allows you to swap out the appearance and shader for a complete set of gear at a time. This is precisely that additional paper doll that I was hoping they would give us. However they found a way to completely ruin this system. Instead of making it a simple process to turn those items you have collected into transmog appearances they added a needless grind into the system. Here are the basics:
ADA-1 is coming back into the tower and will offer you access to the Armor Synthesis System
Killing Enemies in the world has a chance of dropping a currency called Synthstrand which I am sure will take up another damned inventory slot
You can spend Synthstrand to get bounties from ADA-1 which reward another currency that will also likely take up inventory space called Synthcord
When you collect enough of bullshit currency number two, you can turn these in to convert them into Synthweave
You can spend Synthweave in your collections tab in order to unlock something as an armor appearance
You can earn 10 of these per season for each of your characters
The thing is… they took the system and made it arguably worse than the system I was envisioning but I was largely on board with the whole nonsense until that final bullet point. You can only earn 10 of these tokens per season, or in real world terms you can earn 10 of them every three months. The first season they are being “generous” and allowing players to earn 20 of them per character, which again Bungie fuck you for deciding that was generosity. It sounds like the tokens won’t transfer between characters so you can unlock two full armor sets every three months for each of your characters… when there is a mountain of gear that has been accumulating in our collection since the day we started playing this game.
The Blatant Money Grab
So why did they put the stupid limitations on the system? The short answer is they want to milk silver out of us for a system we have been waiting on years to be implemented. Like I have given Bungie a lot of credit in the past for the way the Eververse store has worked, and I have been more than happy to spend additional funds because I felt like I was more or less supporting a fair game. The items that they were selling me felt like they were worth the money I was spending for them. However this crosses the line. Instead of being limited to 10 pieces of armor per season, you are going to be able to purchase universal synthweave items from the Eververse store and “priced to own” prices to borrow a bullshit phase from the Disney Vault era. The prices they announced are as follows:
1 Synthweave Token – 300 Silver aka roughly $3
5 Synthweave Tokens – 1000 Silver aka oughly $10
So we can “earn” as many appearance sets as we like, pending we are willing to break out the credit card and pay $10 a pop for the right to look cool in Destiny wearing gear we collected years ago. This is a really bad look Bungie and I am feeling like it might be time you and I officially parted ways.
Making things even worse… and me even more salty is that I am not even certain that I am going to be able to transmog to my favorite set of armor in the first place. I loved the year one Iron Banner armor set and I still have it sitting in my vault for the day that we FINALLY got a proper transmog system. However there is also a bit of a note about certain year one armor sets not being supported due to technical difficulties. One of those listed is the Iron Banner set and I am uncertain if they are talking about the entire set as a whole or only if you converted them to Armor Ornaments back in the day… which honestly I didn’t love the look of the ornamented set.
I am frustrated and all of my goodwill for Bungie as a company is gone. I thought we lost too damned much in the move between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. I hated the fact that they decided to blow up half of the world with the Beyond Light expansion and took a number of my favorite places in game away from me. I kept a wait and see attitude but the Weapon Sunset was a horrible idea and served to only put another nail in this coffin for me. That solution was the equivalent of bringing down the hammer or entire group of people because one or two them were fucking up, and it was the chickenshit move because they didn’t want to nerf the few weapons that were out of line for fear of the backlash. When they reversed the sunset they did so on a half assed manner that still locked away some of my favorite items.
Finally delivering on Transmogrification and then making it a complete fucking dumpster fire… I think it is the final straw for me. Fuck You Bungie.
The post Bungie Fails at Transmog appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a show that is pretty much dominated by a discussion about Outriders. Tam and Bel both attempt to avoid any outright spoilers but I feel like I still need to issue a warning. This game has some deeply disturbing themes and we talk about these. While we attempt to do so as gingerly as possible, I feel like I still need to provide a content warning to our listeners. From there we talk about Stellaris and the third release of the game and how apparently it changes everything. We also talk about Paradox and the history of long tailed support for games.
