Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a bit of an odd show at the end of a painfully long week. We talk about Outriders some more and how odd it is that they are patching the demo and being completely transparent about it. Since more folks have played it there are some fresh impressions to go along with that. This breaks out into a broader discussion of live service games and the looter shooter genre. From here we sorta make a trip down into comfort gaming and revisiting old familiar stories as a way of regulating mood. Tam and Kodra talk about how they are wired a little differently and their version of this is playing some sort of game where they can enter a flow state and find peace and calm in the challenge.
This weekend was the beginning of another Diablo 3 season and once again we are on our bullshit. I was super happy to see that Byx was around and wanting to do nonsense and since we are all sorta stressed to the highest degree we seemingly all chose the easy mode. Demon Hunter is pretty much the default state for me and a Diablo season because I know with a little push I can get in and get the content knocked out in relatively short order. I decided to rebirth an older Demon Hunter which lead to the above state of our party, where we are all desperately in need of clothing and kicking demon butt in high heels.
This was a fairly low gaming weekend, because we spent a lot of our time doing various cleaning activities both for the sake of covid19 and for the fact that it is spring break and we always seem to do big cleaning projects. We went out shopping for awhile on Saturday and managed to get a new pair of outdoor rugs for the backyard, so pending things ever warm up again we will get everything set up back there again. This is mostly for our own mental fortitude because if we are sequestered for very long in the near future we will want access to our peaceful oasis with birbs, squirrels and neighborhood cats. Huge thanks to my friend Kolrath for giving me a lift from 55ish to 70 on Saturday morning fairly early, and Grace and I finally managed to catch up with each other on Sunday night to hang for a bit again.
I am currently stalled out on the seasonal journey and my six piece gear set by a single thing. I cannot for the life of me get a weapon to roll a socket. I’ve completely bankrupted myself on five or six occasions trying to roll a socket on a yellow bow and it just isn’t happening. Ultimately my game time has been spent farming gold and then blowing all of it on a futile attempt to get through chapter four. The worst part is that I don’t even love the gear set that is for this season, but I have been rat-holing other set pieces I come across because I think ultimately for farming purposes I am going to want a Yang’s Multishot build, which is probably my favorite? I am not sure what sort of shenanigans I can get up to this season with the ability to have odd combinations of cube items but I figure bolas and grenades are on the menu for nonsense.
The other thing that I did this weekend was spend the podcast getting reacquainted with Elder Scrolls Online. Effectively patching up right now will replace your current client with a brand new one, and while this is in itself a cumbersome and lengthy process… the end result is amazing. Elder Scrolls Online has always had significant performance issues, namely when it comes to loading into the game initially and loading into new areas. This client seems to completely fix these issues for me at least and has greatly improved general performance across the board. As always I am several content releases behind and am now working my way through the Morrowind content drop. I have no clue where I picked up the bad-ass Khajiit mask but I am absolutely rocking this cat lord vibe right now.
This is Tripod, named such for the fact that she is a three legged cat that comes to visit from time to time. Tripod does not realize we love her yet, and bolts at the sight of us… but we do our best to try and make sure she has food. She is one of a handful of neighborhood cats that occasionally visit our house and we were scared to death that she was no longer with us. We’ve had a cold snap and for a couple of weeks we had not managed to catch any sight of her on the front porch cam where we put out food every day. However several times this week we have seen her lurking around the backyard which was pretty much the highlight of the week. We are hoping she is still around during the spring and summer months and maybe just maybe we can teach her that we are friendly people while we are out and about in the back and front yard more often.
This Friday post is somewhat turning into a “things left on the cutting room floor” post about the week. The other day I talked about restarting Witcher 2 so that I could go down the path that was not taken, and I have now reached the first branch in the road… and more or less determined that I made the correct choice the first time. While I greatly enjoyed the “non-human” path, I gotta say I am not loving the blatant racism and bigotry of the “human” path right now. Additionally it is super weird to have as my companions, characters that I more or less learned to greatly dislike during the other play through. As a result my completion of this play through is pretty much in jeopardy. In many games the various path options are equally good and it is just a matter of taste, but for me at least there seems like a clear correct choice here and I made the wrong one on attempt two.
The other issue from which I am suffering is that I am staying up way the hell too late reading and it is starting to cut into my sleep schedule. It feels thoroughly odd to be saying this because I have not been a person to stay up late reading that often in my life. This is complicated by the fact that I read relatively slowly and that at least until my wife falls asleep she is pretty regularly making random comments while I attempt to follow the text. At this point I am roughly halfway through the second book in the Witcher series and I am looking forward to getting into the novels proper having focused on the two prequel short story collections first. The books have not really done much yet to improve my opinion of Yennefer, which is weird because I thought all of the loyalty fans have must have come from reading the books.
Another weird revelation is that there were a lot of moments in Witcher 3 that I mistook as me not knowing what was going on because I had not played the other games. Now I know I am completely incorrect in that assessment and instead the game is just deep diving into character relationships from the books without giving the player much of a heads up about it. Last night I read for example the story of Dudu Biberveldt, a character that I just assumed had showed up in the games before. However having played the second game and watched several synopsis videos of the first game… I am pretty certain that is not a thing and he just lives in the novels. I have to admit though it is this sort of thing that makes the setting so infectious for me, because the things that are constantly left unanswered make me want to go then dig for the answers. I have a feeling that it might have the opposite effect on some of my friends however.
Yesterday was a big reveal of the next expansion for Elder Scrolls Online, and we are going back to Skyrim. The expansion seems like it is going to center on the Solitude area and more importantly Blackreach, one of the coolest areas in Elder Scrolls V. I am all about Dwemer ruins, and supposedly Blackreach is going to make up roughly half of the playable content area in this expansion. They are once again doing a year long story that unfolds over the course of several updates, and considering that I didn’t play any of the “Year of the Dragon” content, I am wondering if this is time for me to update the client and go back into the game. I have most of Morrowind and all of the newer content to experience.
I realize this in some ways goes directly in the face of my whole desire to stop chasing the forever game, but for Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars the Old Republic I play them more or less in a single player manner. I come back to the game after a large bundle of content has built up and then can happily binge the new story in an almost Netflix manner before leaving once again and going off and playing other things. I wish I could play World of Warcraft in the same sort of manner, but the way their patch content is released makes it a struggle to try and figure out what the hell is going on at any time if you were not around to see it doled out in small chunks. I am realizing that I find I greatly prefer content that is gated behind completing the previous content just for sake of making it easier to follow.
This evening I am going to go see Star Wars Rise of Skywalker, and I am sure tomorrow I will be posting my thoughts about it. However this morning I am going to continue our journey down memory lane as I talk about the games that were important to me over the last decade. Each time I think I am walking into a slow year… I sift through the titles that released and keep finding things that were extremely important to me. Let’s get started.
Elder Scrolls Online
Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I am not sure if there are words to express how important this title is to me. I could have in theory included this game on 2013, because it also played heavily into that year for me as I began testing it in February. I’m a member of the Psijic Order, the original team of testers that stayed with the game as it progressed through various phases and I am super proud to have stomped a bunch of bugs… or at least reported them prolifically. This game mattered me to not only because it is Elder Scrolls a setting that I adore, but also that one of my good friends worked on it. While this didn’t turn out to be the “WoW Killer” like I had hoped, it is a game that I keep revisiting to spend time wandering through its amazing storyline. In fact it seems like it might be time to dust off my characters and pay another visit over the holidays.
Transistor
Transistor – PC
This game was the game that more or less inspired the AggroChat game club concept. It was a title that spontaneously we all happened to be playing at exactly the same time, and then as a result we recorded what felt like three full shows worth of discussion as we dug deep into the title and our feelings about it. We tried to make this function artificially as we constructed the concept of the Game Club, but it never felt quite as fresh or in the moment because there was always a time when more than one of us were never really that into the chosen title. Supergiant Games is a phenomenal studio and I am willing to play pretty much everything they put out. Transistor was this fluid fusion of music, story and interesting ARPG gameplay that created a total package that we all kept returning to over and over. Collectively we deemed this to be the game of 2014, and it still holds up. I would have loved to have played this on the Switch as it is now my modern platform for this type of game.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein: The New Order – PC
I love Wolfenstein as a franchise and I have been a huge fan since I first got my hands on the original Apogee title from a shareware disk sold by the local bookstore. I obsessed with the game and editing new levels for it, and then as each new game has released I have spent time playing it. After Return to Castle Wolfenstein the quality of the games fell off significantly, so I was completely excited to see a brand new game being worked on by Machine Games a Zenimax studio. This game is both a sequel and a re-imagining of the entire experience and I loved every moment of it. The screenshot is from one of my favorite sequences where you are scaling the side of the eponymous Castle Wolfenstein, but the images never quite do it justice. There were so many really cool big set pieces in the game, and it wove with it a really interesting storyline that provided the action I craved and the character development that Kodra craved. It is a magical time when a game is planted firmly in both of our wheelhouses.
Divinity: Original Sin
Divinity: Original Sin – PC
This game is going on the list for a few reasons, but not because I necessarily played it over and over and managed to find deep revelations in it. The first reason why it is on the list is because it presents something that has never really existed in my memory before this game, a two player classic PC role-playing game experience. You can start the game as either one character with a swappable NPC, or you can have two different players controlling each character that is on screen and as a result end up having competing goals and objectives. The other reason why it deserves to be on the list is the sheer depth that this game has. You will go insane trying to track down every single thread and quite honestly this paralysis lead me to not get terribly far in the game as a whole. When I encountered the first town I effectively spent all of my time doing what seemed to be a near endless number of side quests and completely tilting my way out of the main story. I want to revisit this game but set some guidelines about what sorts of quests I am willing to partake in.
Destiny
Destiny – PS4
Destiny is the reason why I bought a Playstation 4. It was the single game that was willing to sell me on purchasing a console and I did so more or less to play in the Alpha that was exclusive to that platform. I saw in this game so much promise that I absolutely wanted to be in. However the initial game-play experience was a little lacking for me and I bounced out of it only to return when Taken King released. From that point forward however there has never been a time when I have not at least been playing Destiny a little bit, and I never quite realized just how much this franchise would come to dominate my game time. I love everything about this world and its rich lore… and the subtle mechanical differences between each weapon that make them all feel so unique to me. I view Destiny and Destiny 2 as a continuum and together they are probably my favorite game of this decade.
Where Bel Was Mentally in 2014
It was a really interesting year because it marked the birth of our weekly podcast AggroChat. It also marks the year that I officially transitioned into management or at least was an official supervisor. Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls also dominated my play time, but since I had already talked about it in 2012 I figured that was probably enough of that. It was a pretty good year and considering we record AggroChat 280 this weekend, we set up a firm foundation that seems to still be working.
