Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk about a bunch of things starting off with the interesting and also sort of weird experience of watching a movie, and having a live orchestra play the soundtrack. Ash talks about his experiences with the new Spyro the dragon and the practice of modernizing games without really changing the original gameplay. From there we talk about the insanely charming Pokemon Let’s Go game and how it is seemingly way more sticky for a few of us than core Pokemon games. Tam and Kodra talk about how with Diablo 3 on the Switch they finally understand what Grace and Bel see in this game. Grace talks a bit about the new Netflix She-Ra. Bel talks about his disappointment in the newest Hellgate: London steam release. Finally we end up in a lengthy conversation about Fallout 76 multiplayer and how this game does not deserve the grief reviewers have been heaping on it.
Yesterday it turns out that I was not crazy, and that Fallout 76 was in fact active and fully launched for most of the day. When I popped in to get a screenshot for the blog post, I noticed that it was allowing me to hit play… and sure enough I got in with a half dozen people roaming around the map. The funny thing about this is I remember doing something similar during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and getting into that game several hours early. I guess it pays to be patched up and ready to go when Bethesda launches a new game. The funny thing is though, since I knew the game was available it caused me to approach launch day with a lot more chill than I normally have. This is also helped out by the fact that I had a character with progress that carried over from the beta, and I didn’t exactly feel a rush to get to a point of sustainability quickly. Now that said I am always seeming to need a source of food and a source of water and weirdly enough a source of wood… to keep boiling said water.
For most of the beta I spent my time around the Flatwoods area, which is one of the first towns you encounter… if you actually follow the quest directions. However it is an area rich in resources and quests so in theory it is a pretty good idea to go there first. We did a jaunt to the far south at one point and captured the Poseidon power plant as a Trio, but I never managed to make it to Morgantown which was where the next major quest objective was directing me towards. So I set forth on a journey that would take me up Interstate 59 to Route 64 and on into the basic vicinity of Morgantown. I largely followed the highway system in part because I figured if I were doing this for real… I would wind up doing that as a way of keeping track of where I was going. Sure I could have set a waypoint off in the distance and made my way across the open terrain, but I was curious what attractions I might be able to find from the highway.
Roughly halfway down Interstate 59 I encountered a Slocum’s Joe which for the uninitiated is the Fallout Universe version of a coffee/donut shop. On the road beside it however was something magical… I am guessing this player spent every last minute of the beta hoarding resources to build this really awesome base, giving him one hell of a start for when the game launched proper. What was creepy however is that the mutated hounds were flopping stuck in the side of his fortifications. They were one of the random encounters I ran into along the road so I am guessing they attacked the base… and then got gunned down but the two turrets up above. My previous camp location had the problem of constantly being attacked by feral ghouls, and in one case they managed to damage the turrets and make their way into the base… and I logged in just as they were taking out my generator. So as such I started thinking more defensible fortifications… and this guy here seems to have a great design… minus the fact that the steps are wide open. Maybe the NPCs can’t walk up steps so good?
When I got to Morgantown I found this bridge with an eyebot moving back and forth across it playing its patriotic theme… and behind it was leading a trail of rat pups pied piper style. I watched the bridge for quite a bit and nothing else seemed to be pathing across it due to the fact that this neutral/peaceful event was programmed to take place there. This gave me a bit of an idea…
As such I opted to move my camp and reconstruct it underneath the bridge… thinking that this map feature might make for a slightly more defensible outpost. This was well and good until I realized that the ground was just uneven enough to make erecting a barrier of fences nigh impossible. I’ve built as much as I realistically can at this moment because I have run out of resources. However the area surrounding my camp is full of logs, so my hope is they will have re-spawned each time I visit the camp and can keep harvesting a decent amount of lumber that way. Additionally I am on the outskirts of Morgantown, which should serve as fertile scavenging grounds for parts to make more stuff. The camp being nearby will let me shuffle loads of things over to it and dump them in the machinery there to free up my inventory. I need to learn to pair down my weapons and carry only the things that I know I will be immediately using. The truth is I have largely settled on my serrated machette and my trusty 10 mm pistol… but in both cases I need to build the level 10 version of each I think. Unfortunately my building spree has run me out of other resources as well.
The biggest takeaway from last night is that this is in fact a Fallout game. My wife got home super late and as a result I largely played things other than fallout until around 7:30. By 8 pm however I was deeply engaged in the game and did not really look up or pay attention to the time until a little before 11 pm when I hurriedly scrambled off to bed. Another friend managed to play until 4 am without realizing it. When you are focused on this objecting or that while exploring this deceptively large and densely populated map… all other things in the world sort of fade away. I still have not really encountered any players in a negative fashion, and while they are out there… once I left the Fallout 76 proper area and Flatwoods especially… I stopped encountering them. That is not to say that there are not players out there… the above screenshot I took to show off where my camp is located and you can see a number of dots sprinkled around the map representing other players. That seems like a large number for the roughly 6 am when I took it. More than that however I learned a few key pieces of information about why the world is the way it is… and what happened to most of the people that were remaining. That however is a tale that I am going to save for another time, given that it factors on some serious spoilers.
Yesterday I had the day off and I am sorta thankful for that. It means that I missed driving in the first snow of the season. It isn’t that the roads would have been slick or anything… it is just more a case of folks acting crazy in inclement weather. As a result I stayed home and dealt with the air conditioning folks doing our winter maintenance checkup on the system. I also spent a good deal of time playing various video games and also making a batch of Chicken Tikka Masala. My wife unfortunately did not get the day off and as such I wanted something to warm up her belly when she got home.
While waiting on the folks to get here, and while they were doing their thing… I played a lot of Diablo 3 on the Switch and have moved on into Act 2. I like this port of the game quite a bit, but as I have talked about… mobile gaming just doesn’t fit that cleanly into my life. If I have access to my other machines I would probably rather play them… and the switch is just heavy enough to be awkward to play while laying in bed. However I heard last night that apparently the Switch version is what Tamrielo needed to really get into the game as he now has a Necromancer in its 60s… which is significantly higher than I think he has ever gotten a character before? The controls feel good, but for someone who is super used to how things work on the PC… it is taking a lot of adjustment. I equate it to someone reciting a poem you know in a foreign language… you understand what they are saying but there is a lot of translation happening.
As far as most of the day… I spent a good deal of time playing Path of Exile… and I really need to figure out how to leave public channels. I also decided to spend a little money with the game and bought one of the supporter packs that they are just about to phase out when the new expansion releases. I figure at this point I have gotten enough joy out of the game that I really should pay something for it. This gave me a bit of cash shop currency which I then used to get a better looking weapon and shield… though I am wishing I had gone with something else for the shield because it does not match the outfit at all. Basically my gameplay tends to revolve around Molten Strike, Blade Vortex and Leap… everything else is largely superfluous and as such I am completely cool losing W as a keybind to give me back the move forward functionality I am used to in Diablo 3. I flirted briefly with binding leap to spacebar, but ran into issues with the game needing a close all windows keybind to replace the spacebar I took. Once I figure out a decent option for that I might go back to spacebar for leap since I prefer having a movement key bound there.
As far as Monster Hunter World goes… I am in an odd place where I need some Kirin+ items… but for whatever reason do not have access to High Rank Kirin. I spent a good chunk of the night trying various quests to try and whittle down whatever it takes to unlock the High Rank version of the fight, but failing miserably. Essentially I need a couple materials to get the last of my layered armor pieces from the Kulve Taroth event… and I am not sure if I will still be able to do the turn-ins after the event or not. I know that I can craft Kulve Armor without issue, and have gathered up more than enough mats to make a full set of that once I farm up the Elder Dragon gems. I’ve been sitting at Hunter Rank 49 for awhile now, which means that I have to take down a Tempered Kirin. Last night I made several attempts and while one came super close… there is always the problem of someone fainting. In this particular run it was me that failed… but in others I managed to stay alive 100% of the time and someone else got the carts. Ultimately I will get through this… but in reality I just want the parts from it and could care less about moving my Hunter Rank higher at this very moment. Time to research what exactly I need to have already completed to unlock the needed High Rank hunt.
There are so many games right now out that I’ve not had a chance to really devote much time to. On the 16th another one gets added to that stack in the form of Let’s Go Eevee… because Eevee is way cooler than Pikachu. I need to figure out a better way to spend time with the switch because I have quite the backlog right now… because I have not devoted anywhere near enough time to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate or Starlink Battle for Atlas. The only problem with Switch games is that they look like crap on my 4K setup upstairs, and they are not quite comfortable to play in bed. So I need to figure out a happy middle ground where I feel comfortable playing the games and will also be willing to give up playing something on the PC. Yes I realize these are the first worldiest of problems.
Also in the extreme stack of games that need attention… Fallout 76 launches I believe tonight? Look when someone says Midnight I never quite know if they mean which specific night/morning. I believe it launches tonight at Midnight EST, but when I popped in a moment ago to take screenshots the servers were up. I am wondering if this was by accident, or if they are just going to let people trickle in that happen to try it. Sadly I have work, but I can in fact verify that everything from my B.E.T.A. character is there and functional… minus one turret that I placed on my base. I am not sure if it got blown up, or if something glitched and it fell below the world or something. Regardless Fallout 76 is either launching tonight… or has already launched and it will be tonight before I get to give it any attention. I had a lot of fun with Kodra and Tam running amok, and now I am left with the decision of… do I play my already level 10 character from beta or do I roll something fresh.
I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.
Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.
Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.
I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.
I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.
Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.
Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.
As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.
