Hey Folks! There is a thing that I occasionally do on my blog where I run down what I have been playing lately. There are games that I spend time in that don’t necessarily make it to the level of writing about. Regularly Playing has always served as a time for me to update the good ole sidebar of the blog and talk about the things that I am spending time exploring. It is also a time for me to push aside the games that for whatever reason I am just not that into right now. You have a lot of games that make their way back into the rotation, so when I say goodbye it is very rarely forever.
In theory this is a thing that I intend to do every month… but we are living in this time where it still feels like it SHOULD by all rights be March. I think this is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” because it feels like we are all still very much on pause waiting for things to improve. I expect a significant amount of shake up given that it has been a little over two months since my last update.
To Those Remaining
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Oh Diablo, my sweet Diablo… I can’t ever seem to quit you. This game probably spends the most time on this list, especially now that it exists in switch form. While I am finished with the current PC season, I do still fairly regularly pop it open from bed on the switch and chip away at the achievements there. What can I say that I have not already said a dozen times. I just hope I like Diablo IV even half as much as I love Diablo III.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Oh precious baby, you are hanging by a thread. I’ve been back a bit of late for the Yo-Kai watch event, but even that has mostly just been something to do while watching something on television. I know there is a whole new story arc that I need to play through since the 5.3 patch has landed finally. I will do that at some point but I am just not overly excited about Final Fantasy XIV right now. I wish I was because it truly is a wonderful game, but I am not sure what changed in me that struggles to latch onto the MMORPG gameplay experience for very long. I find myself being a strict soloist in the MMO space right now, and as a result I never quite fully buy into the good aspects of the culture and the gameplay offerings. I wish I could get over my fear of doing content with other human beings that I seem to have developed.
World of Warcraft – Retail and Beta – PC
I am not what you would call actively playing this game, but every so often I decide to poke my head in and work on leveling some of my alts. During this lull in the expansion I have leveled one of everything horde side by the Shaman, Priest and Rogue. I’ve been most recently working on the Shaman who is in Pandaria and I believe a few levels away from 100? This is often times the character that I play while we are podcasting, or if I am watching some show because World of Warcraft requires a bare minimum of interactivity to play it on the level I am playing it. I still get a stupid amount of enjoyment from its simple mechanics and my ability to just turn my brain off and rely entirely upon muscle memory.
To The New and Returning
Avengers – PC
I super did not expect to be playing this game right now. I had a lot of issues early on with it, but it turns out that I was more or less bit in the butt by my own shenanigans. There are still some minor issues of mouse and camera not exactly working in the way that I would prefer but it is extremely playable and the story is really solid. In fact I think at this point I am mostly playing because the story is extremely enjoyable. The game hits a deep uncanny valley at times because I think they are trying to shoot halfway between the more traditional comic appearance of the characters and that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve gotten used to it however and once I did the story being told has become pure joy.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4
I have been on a bit of a single player narrative game kick of late, and I have been playing a significant amount of Ghosts of Tsushima. I’ve not made it past the first part of the game, because I keep roaming around and killing baddies. I am more or less following the Samurai path where I present a challenge and then proceed to whittle down the rest of the masses after taking out their strongest. I love this game a lot, and the only thing that would have made it better is if I were playing on the PC with a Mouse and Keyboard. I’ve been a bit distracted the last week or so, but I am hoping over the extended weekend that I can return to this and keep moving forward.
Hades – PC
I am not entirely certain that this game has ever made the list, but I have had it in my arsenal for awhile now. I have a deep love for the types of games that Supergiant creates. Even when I don’t mechanically enjoy the game like was the case with Pyre, I really appreciate the story that is being told. Hades is effectively a blend of Diablo and a Rogue Lite game and involves escaping from the underworld, and powering yourself along the way to make that possible. It is a game or repetition because you are absolutely going to die over and over and over in your journey, each time starting back at the start and each time carrying some progress along with you. This has been in early access but we are starting to near an official launch, so I have been playing it again in anticipation. Really solid game.
New World – PC
I’ve not participated in two test events of New World and I am super happy to finally be able to start talking about it. The last long preview event that is wrapping up I believe today had no NDA and as a result I have been able to openly discuss it on the blog. As it stands I am so ready for this game to launch and to start being able to play it in earnest. I am hoping the next event is an Open Beta so that folks who did not pre-order can give it a shot and see if it works for them. This is definitely the type of game that I am going to want to find an active company to play in, and that does not mean that I am sold on the notion of leading one. I’m good at recruiting people, but I don’t seem to be good at keeping people engaged… myself included. So more than likely I will be looking for a company to join that would be open to any friends that I have who are also interested.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch
This is going to be a bit of a generic heading because I have been poking around in a lot of “retro games”. The thing is… I find it weird calling these game retro, because they are from my childhood. It is moments like this that I remember just how damned old I am at this point. Whatever you want to call them I have been back on a kick of trying to get my closet full of older systems and cartridges up and running on modern display technology. I’ve also purchased a Retro Freak console, which allows me to do a bunch of nifty things including dump rom and save games from cartridges and apply translation patches on the fly. The next project is to try and get my Neo Geo CD system up and running again and maybe apply the mod that replaces the very slow CD Rom with an SD Card interface.
To Those Departing
Destiny 2 – PC
I am not sure where we went wrong boo, I’m just not playing you. I have no clue what is up but for whatever reason I just haven’t been interested in playing Destiny 2 in this current season. I am not sure if it is the impending gear sunset or the fact that they are “vaulting” content to remove it from the game, but whatever the case I am just turned off right now. I think games should get larger over time not shrink constantly, and I hate the FOMO aspect of seasonal play. The truth however is just that I have not been interested in playing a shooter lately, and this last few months has been largely marked by me playing more single player and narrative driven content. I am sure I will be back when the expansion launches in November and have a grand ole time.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
You know that mission that AggroChat folks have been on about playing Guild Wars 2 and getting others to play it as well? For whatever reason it never sunk its hooks properly into me. I still don’t fully understand why this game that on paper should be something I am deeply into… never quite seems to work for me. There is just something about the gameplay loop that I don’t find as enjoyable as I should. The story content also never really hooked me, so while I keep trying to revisit this game… it never really does it for me. I am sure I will be back at some point because I am a glutton for punishment with a very short memory.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I can’t fully explain what happened here and why I stopped playing this game, but it happened. I am not even sure what distracted me. I just know that I have not logged in for a long while other than to convert to the Steam client. I am sure I will return because I was having quite a bit of fun with it. I also know that I was only a few levels away from hitting the cap at the time, and that there is a raised cap now that we have entered Chapter 4. I think I mostly got distracted by a string of single player experiences like Death Stranding.
Torchlight III – PC
I really do want to like this game, but I have not been all that into of it late. I think the core problem I have with the third iteration is that there just isn’t really a class that I enjoy. In Torchlight there was the Destroyer that I played a ton of, and in Torchlight II it was the Engineer. Both were big and bashy melee characters and right now in the third game there are two characters that CAN be played that way… but they both sorta feel fiddly. So I have been splitting my time between the Forge and the Railmaster…. and to be truthful neither of them feel the way that I want them to feel. I know Torchlight is a game that tries to cast aside the traditional Mage, Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric blend of classes… but I mostly just wish they had proper representation of those archetypes. My preference is to play something akin to the Diablo Barbarian or Crusader and they just don’t really have that represented.
Ships Passing in the Night
Death Stranding – PC
Death Stranding was a phenomenal experience. I legit get emotional just thinking about it. This is the game that I needed to play at the time in which I played it. It has become this extremely relevant allegory for the time that we are living in. I am not sure this is a game that everyone would enjoy, because the whole courier aspect of it that I found enjoyable could be pure tedium for someone else. The story being told though is really good and if nothing else you should probably watch a play through of it at some point.
Horizon Zero Dawn -PC
I had been anxiously awaiting the release of Horizon Zero Dawn for the PC, and when it came out I burned through it like wildfire. I think I put in a solid 50 hours in a very short period of time and cracking this open and revisiting it all was truly magical. I love Aloy and the world of Horizon, and I am anxiously awaiting the sequel. This is pretty much the reason why I will be buying a PlayStation 5 as soon as the pre-orders open. If you have never played Horizon Zero Dawn, you owe it to yourself to experience the game and the bow combat just works so much better with a Mouse and Keyboard.
Summary
I guess this is what happens when I wait almost three months between updates, there is a lot of change. I’ve bounced a few things off the list that I am almost certain I will revisit. Hell to be truthful what usually happens is just writing about them ends up making me want to log back in again. I know we have the launch of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that will be eating some of my time, and I would really like to restart Jedi Fallen Order but this time play it with Mouse and Keyboard. Additionally I really want to play through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has been on my list for awhile. In between those I will be wrapping up Avengers main story and seeing if I like the group content or not, and probably poking my head into New World each time a new test event opens. All the while the backlog continues to grow, but I have gotten fairly used to knowing I will never quite conquer it.
The post Regularly Playing: September 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning we are going to go on an adventure, or at least travel down a rabbit hole. Be warned that today’s post is going to involve a heavy dose of speculation. There are going to be things that I just don’t know and could not find the answers to, but drew my own conclusions. Like so many of these adventures that I occasionally go on, it starts with a random thought that I carelessly posted on twitter.
Color Coding Loot
Color coding loot as a concept is a brilliant one, because it quickly allows players to filter which bundles of stats are worth paying attention to and which should just be sold or broken down immediately. As someone who plays an excessive number of games that throw loot at you constantly, they are invaluable and help me do a first pass before actually sitting down and inspecting whether or not an item is worth keeping.
The thing is… we have ended up in this situation where most games use effectively the same system with a few minor tweaks here or there. This is a random assortment of games that have color coded loot rarity systems. As you can clearly see there is a pattern here and an agreed upon language that we have landed upon as to what each color means. The funny thing is this same logic applies to many other gaming related spaces, for example when I set up a discord my default is going to be to land upon a white > green > blue > purple > gold scale for hierarchy as far as ranks go. The same was true when I was in the business of building forums.
The Popularization
This lead to a search of what game popularized this concept. This was a fairly short search if we are willing to accept Wikipedia as the authoritative source. To keep you from having to click through and read the entire post on loot in video games, here is the relevant bit.
Loot may often be assigned to tiers of rarity, with the rarer items being more powerful and more difficult to obtain. The various tiers of rarity are often indicated by particular colors that allow a player to quickly recognize the quality of their loot. The concept of color-coded loot rarity was popularized with the 1996 game Diablo, whose designer, David Brevik, took the idea from the roguelike video game Angband.Wikipedia – Loot (video games) article
So there we have the most basic answer. The game that popularized this concept was Diablo and this style of loot coding has carried forward in the ARPG genre and can more or less still be seen today in games like Path of Exile or Wolcen. This however is deeply unsatisfying because even when the color coding was expanded by Diablo II and Diablo III you still end up with a vastly different scheme than what we have come to accept as the bog standard loot coloration. I feel like we still don’t really have our true answer yet of how we ended up where we are on what colors mean what things.
The Consider System
Now is the point where we start drifting into wild speculation. There are however a few facts that one should take into account. The game that I most closely tie the “standard” loot scheme to is World of Warcraft. I believe in my heart of hearts that its popularity is what has lead to the wide adoption of a specific meaning for each color. However we don’t really know how they landed upon the specific scale that they did. We do know a few things about the early designers of that game and its itemization. In many cases they were hardcore Everquest players, with Alex Afrasiabi and Jeff Kaplan in particular being the leaders of high end raiding guilds. So we know for a fact there is a specific color scale that they would both be intimately aware of.
Everquest was a game that did not give you clear statistics for the monsters you were encountering. It wasn’t like you could highlight the mob and get a specific level number to indicate how difficult an encounter might be. Instead you had something called the /consider command, that would give you a rough approximation both in text and color coding how difficult an encounter might be. So for example if you typed /con on a mob that was significantly lower than you it would spit back a message in green saying “looks like a reasonably safe opponent”. If you considered a significantly higher encounter it would spit back in bright red “what would you like your tombstone to say?”.
As a long time Everquest player, this scale became so ingrained that we just referred to encounters by the color that they considered. You might brag to your friends that you were able to easily solo yellows, or that you managed to kite a red. You also might complain that you ended up getting swarmed by greens and took a stupid death due to the glitchy aggro of a specific zone. It is within this consider system that I think we start to shape up what is the standard going forward.
The Dark Age of Camelot Consider System
Alex Afrasiabi, better known as Furor to the old timers… was the leader of a rather notorious raid guild called Fires of Heaven. I started my Everquest career playing on Veeshan, the server they were resident on and was quite aware of some of their exploitative tactics for coming up with creative solutions to encounters. During one of these such encounters it earned Furor and practically the entire raiding group a permanent ban from Everquest. I believe it was during this time that a number of Fires of Heaven folk set up shop in Dark Age of Camelot, which was the first true competitor for Everquest and offered a significant number of tweaks to the template. Again we are going into the territory of speculation here as I have no specific knowledge that Furor was among this group, but I believe if my memory serves me that Fires of Heaven had a Midgard guild.
The DAoC consider system is pretty close to that of Everquest, with a few tweaks. For starters there is no specific “even” consider within the system. Things that are Yellow are either on level or above your level. One of the problems with the Everquest system is that Red was a really obtuse consider ranking, especially at low levels. There were times that reds were absolutely something that was reasonably to do with a full group, but it was impossible to tell without the use of Allakhazam whether those mobs were 20 or 40 levels higher than you. In Dark Age of Camelot they fixed this problem by introducing purple as being extremely higher than you, meaning that no really… you were absolutely going to die if you tried this thing.
Another really interesting thing that Dark Age of Camelot did was set usability ranges on your gear. if you used an item significantly higher than your current level, it would wear down more quickly given that you “lacked the skill” to use the item. As a result the items in the game used this same consider color system to indicate how far or above an item was to you, giving you some indication of whether or not you should be using a weapon and when you should probably start upgrading it. As far as I am aware this is the first case this specific color palette was applied to specific loot items.
World of Warcraft Viral Spread
As I said at the beginning of this nonsense, I am absolutely certain that games like Borderlands use this color scale because World of Warcraft popularized it. World of Warcraft is the very first example I could find of using purple as the rarity immediately following blue for example. My theory is that Diablo had already popularized and codified the concept that loot should have colors denoting rarity, and since very seasoned Everquest and potentially DAoC veterans were over the itemization… that we ended up using that very familiar color scale as their gauge. I feel like I am bolstered in this notion by looking at the original launch color rarity scale. Red in the Everquest consider system was used to indicate the end of the scale, and this was also the original color of artifact gear. Yellow at some point became gold, maybe because in later revisions of the DAoC con system Orange was introduced to wedge between Yellow and Red.
Today we have a slightly different looking color scale with Artifact and Heirloom meaning very specific things and as such being outside of the actual rarity scale. Once World of Warcraft became a cultural event, this same loot scale spread from game to game until now it is just effectively the standard language for quickly indicating how special an item might be. Do I know for certain that anything I just said is the truth? No… not really. Like I said at the beginning of this, today’s was a journey of speculation. Do I think that my theory is likely? Yeah I really do think that Diablo popularized the concept of loot color coding and that the World of Warcraft Standard was deeply influenced by the Consider system from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.
The post Origins of Color Coded Loot appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Saturday afternoon I finished up Season 21 in Diablo 3 and I have to say… I am a bit listless now when it comes to what I should be doing with my time. I have plenty of other options, and I have been more or less falling back on playing Destiny 2, but it feels a little weird. During the course of a season I pour so much of my time and thought process into it that when it is over it feels a little strange. Games can be that way, and often times I find myself stalling finishing one just because I don’t want the experience to be over. There are a slew of games that I am one to two hours away from beating… and then just stopped playing rather than pushing across the finish line for one reason or another.
With Season 21 I had gotten into this familiar and comfortable pattern of farming bounties to get caches. I’ve written about this at length in other posts but the “easy” way to get the Avarice conquest is to save up enough caches and then open them all at once so that when you move you gather up over the 50 million gold needed. For me this represented 36 bounty caches that I managed to farm up, when I in theory only needed 31. However the amount of time that goes into the farming… always makes me want to over farm just to make sure I don’t screw things up somehow.
The most stressful moment is when I have to reach back into the bank to grab more caches knowing that if I move now it will be over and all of my farming will be for nothing. This is quickly followed by the frustration of having to clear out the mass if items that drop as a result. It takes so many trips do and from the pile of loot in order to clean everything up. This time around I spend most of the time cubing legendaries to finish out the last 20 or so that I needed for that final step in the seasonal journey. Unfortunately I didn’t get anything of note and am still at a single Primal Ancient for the season.
Why did I go through all of this effort? Well for the pet of course. This time it was some sort of a skink in a tube on top of a robotic crab body. The last time I did this seriously was for a Goblin that looked like Tyrael. Why do we do anything in games? For me at least it is more than likely for either a gear upgrade or cosmetic reasons. I could in theory do a bunch more things this season, but in reality once the final goal has been accomplished it feels like it is time to put this character to bed for a few months. I do at some point really need to clean up all of my alts in Diablo 3. There isn’t much of a reason to keep anything more than one of every class, so that might be another side project over the coming weeks.
There is of course my Switch character that I will continue working on. As of last night I hit level 66 and have started trying to pre-emptively knock out as much of the seasonal journey stuff as I can so that when I ding 70 I should have some packages of loot waiting on me. Since I did not do Crusader for the PC season, I decided that Thorns would be a highly playable build for console. So over the next few days I should be dinging 70 and will begin knocking out those seasonal journey accomplishments there. The only real challenge is that I don’t have much in the way of a peer group to knock out things like curses. I know Carth managed to solo it with a well leveled Boon of the Hoarder gem, so I might go after that route.
The post Season 21 Complete appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday morning was a bit rough due to the hosting issues, and as a result I got my normal post out significantly later in the day. If you are on a cycle of only reading my blog in the morning then I would greatly appreciate you giving that mid day post a read as well, because I am curious about folks thoughts. In other business I still need about 11 bloggers to volunteer for Blaugust Promptapalooza so please check that post out as well if you are so inclined. Now that the business is out of the way I have been spending most of my time working on the Season 21 journey in Diablo 3. Here is a rundown of the progress made since I last wrote about it.
I tweaked my “No Set” build quite a bit, switching it from an earthquake based build to one that uses Hammer of the Ancients or “HOTA” in D3 parlance. I started with this build as a template and then tweaked it with the items that I actually had access to, namely I still have not gotten fart pants or illusionary boots. I also swapped the Esoteric Alteration gem for a Legacy of Dreams which makes the whole no-set thing significantly easier. I managed to do the 45 with plenty of time to spare and quite honestly Legacy of Dreams just made it a cake walk considering I went in with a 55 gem. The one gotcha is that I took this conquest to mean “no set bonuses active” but what it actually means is no set pieces at all equipped. I ran it once with a pair of ancient legendary set pants and didn’t get the conquest until I went back in and ran with a random legendary pants equipped.
The other conquest that I have knocked out is curses. The easiest way to make this one happen is to keep recreating your adventure mode game until you see the “Cursed Peat” bounty up in Act V Paths of the Drowned. This guarantees that the cursed chest is up, and that particular event spawns a ton of little boglings which help you add up the numbers needed. Two nights ago I was on fairly late and I saw it was up and tried to solo it… and I only hit 311, so just a bit shy of the 350 needed. Last night however Grace and I popped in and out of games until we found the right bounty and managed to beat the 350 needed by about 20. I wish we could have connected with Thalen, because I am certain he will need the conquest as well at some point this season.
That leaves me with only the very time consuming conquest left… Avarice. I’ve written about this before but effectively on T16 I am going to need to run 7 rounds of bounties or a total of 31 bounty caches. I realize I just linked to the post that has all of this information but for the sake of anyone with fresh eyes I am going to repost the cache related information here.
A T13 bounty cache contains 1,190,000 gold. 43 T13 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T14 bounty cache contains 1,440,000 gold. 35 T14 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T15 bounty cache contains 1,540,000 gold. 33 T15 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T16 bounty cache contains 1,640,000 gold. 31 T16 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
I could in theory do them on T13 and effectively knock the bounties out quicker… but I am not sure if the difference in speed would be worth two full more rounds of bounties. I always do more than the strict amount because I am constantly afraid of having to repeat the entire process again. So in theory were I doing T13 I would collect at least 45 chests (9 rounds), and on T16 I would collect at least 35 chests (7 rounds). I am limited in part due to my movement speed and less on the actual killing speed… so in theory there isn’t that big of a difference in the time it takes me to clear T13 as to T16.
Once I have finished my 3rd conquest I will have one last thing to finish, and I have been collecting a vault full of legendaries to knock it out. Essentially I have to use the cube to extract 40 powers, and doing all of these bounties are going to give me plenty of materials to be able to complete this easily. I will be swimming in them, and hopefully can use the excess to begin rerolling the various items I have equipped and hopefully get everything to ancient, and maybe a few to primal. The weirdest part about the season for me is that the roles have been reversed. I am the one carrying others and not the one being carried, which is kind fun for a change. If you need help knocking out any seasonal stuff let me know and I can hopefully arrange a time to assist.
The post Curses, Thrill, and Bounty Farming appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
