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A Good Death

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Good Morning, Folks. I thought I would talk a bit about a game that I have not talked about in a very long time. I have a deep attachment to Destiny as a platform, and have been playing since the first game on my PS4. I used to raid even in the game with a crew full of people that I met through my friend Liani, and many of them, like Jex, are going to be friends for life. We can talk about all of the various ways that Destiny failed its players, but the one that ultimately caused me to detach is when they vaulted content that we had paid for, for the second time. Like I was willing to accept that Mercury and Mars needed a rework because they did not really live up to the standards of content from Forsaken forward. However, when Forsaken itself was vaulted, it pissed me off enough to uninstall Destiny and move on with my life.

That is not to say that Destiny has not meant a massive amount to me. I wanted Destiny to do better and pull itself out of what seemed to be a concurrent player death spiral. However, that does not appear to be in the cards for the game, because Bungie has announced that the game is ultimately being sunset with a final massive patch. Bungie appears to have put all of its cards now in the Marathon basket, and I am not sure they can turn this around. I fear that we might be witnessing the death of a studio, more than just the death of one individual game. Marathon is so far from a game that I want to play that I am worried that a “PVE” patch won’t go far enough to bring former Destiny players into the fold. The worst part, however, is that other than Warframe, there is no one really in this space anymore. I wish that any of the competitors had succeeded…. Anthem, or Outriders, could have easily taken this place if they had the sort of support that they needed.

More than anything, I don’t want the death of Destiny to be the death of the Looter Shooter genre. While Destiny Rising continues to do a reasonable job of carrying that banner forward, the problem there is that they also seem to be in a content drought and largely recycling patches that have come from before. Is there just no player appetite for this sort of game anymore? Or has everyone just coalesced on Warframe as the one company that seems to be properly supporting these games? I like Warframe for what it is, but it has never felt anywhere near as polished as the Bungie shooter experience. The gear chase never felt as compelling, and while I like what is happening with the Tennos, it’s a wildly different game experience to me personally. Warframe is the Path of Exile of looter shooters, and what I really wanted was the light Diablo fare instead.

One of the big positives of this patch is that they seem to be restoring the game to a functional state. One of the biggest mistakes that they made was to remove the Director, and migrate everything to the Portal… which is effectively a menu system that limited the amount of content you had access to. The director felt like we were moving around the star systems, and made the game feel less shallow than what is effectively a handful of playlists. The director is coming back, however, as are some game modes that had been shelved, like Gambit and the Sparrow Racing League. Each of the game modes, including patrol destinations, is getting its own pinnacle drops and should, in theory, remain evergreen content. So while they are effectively killing the game, they are at least doing something to restore it to a functional state.

Being perfectly honest… I will probably return to the game when this content patch drops. That seems wild that the death of the game is bringing me back, but really…. this content update is most of what players have been asking about for years. Why did they wait this long to bring back the Sparrow Racing League, for example? This has legitimately been a thing that players have begged for since it was first taken away in 2017. Players loved this, and it feels like they have been sitting on it for almost a decade when it could have easily stirred excitement in the community and caused players to come back. I feel like the downfall of Destiny is the tale of a studio that did not respect what they had and thought that they could string players along indefinitely. I would have loved to have seen what Destiny could have been in the hands of Grinding Gear Games or Digital Extremes, because they seem to be the gold standard when it comes to studios respecting their player base.

All of this said, I am happy that we are getting this final patch, because it brings the game up to date and leaves it in a reasonable condition. Do I think Marathon will be able to pick up the Destiny player base? I doubt it unless they completely rework that game into what is effectively Destiny 3. I will give it a shot when the PVE-only modes go into the game. I have zero interest in the extraction shooter genre, and that seems to be the case for most Destiny players. I think what is more likely to happen is a mass migration to Warframe, since that is a game that supports its players and is at least mostly in this same genre. I think some will also pick up Destiny Rising, because while it seems like it is also in maintenance mode, it is at least really fun. I plan on giving the new patch a spin in between playing other games.

Do you miss Destiny? What are your feelings about this final patch? Drop me a line below.

The post A Good Death appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #543 – Helhest Arrives

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, Grace and Bel start off the show talking about how good Destiny Rising has been now that they have arrived at the endgame.  They also talk a bit about Helhest, the new banner character. Grace shares her initial thoughts about He is Coming a roguelike that they have been playing. Bel shares some of the early spoilers for Path of Exile 3.27 Keepers of the Flame, which we are getting a full reveal for on the 23rd and is starting on the 31st.  It seems like we are maybe getting a Breach expansion league, with a bunch of quality of life changes.  From there, we dive into the topic that got bumped from last week about how there are so many good games… that it makes it really hard to play less-than-excellent games anymore. We also talk about how players are seeing through pointless grinds, and how AA games are back with a vengeance, while AAA games are floundering.

Topics Discussed

  • Destiny Rising
    • Helhest Banner
    • Master and Grandmaster Mode Content
    • Trikora Happened
  • He Is Coming
  • Path of Exile 3.27 Spoilers
    • Keepers of the Flame
    • Breach League
  • When There Are Too Many Games
    • Players Rebelling Against Grind
    • The Rise of AA Games
    • The Floundering of AAA Games
    • Questionable Business Decisions
The post AggroChat #543 – Helhest Arrives appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Delving Abyssus

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was Labor Day here in the United States and since both myself and my friend Ace were off we hung out doing some multiplayer of a new rogue-like game. They had discovered this one and were having quite a bit of fun with it, and I opted to pick it up so we could test the multiplayer out. Essentially you are a diver and you are exploring underwater ruins filled with baddies. It is essentially a first person shooter with the ability to collect upgrades while in the ruins to tweak your weapon load-out. By default you start out with an auto cannon with two fire modes, one of which causes your weapon to overheat for short periods of time. You also have an ability slot which starts out by default with a bundle of explosives but can be upgraded over time to be other things. So far we have only unlocked the Turret as an option, but it seems like there are a few more that we have not unlocked yet.
Each level has a sequence of different monsters to fight, before moving through a gate to the next area which locks the door and spawns another set of baddies. As you delve further into the ruins you encounter different biomes. The first are essentially what looks to be an old temple filled with vaguely nautical themed robots. There are these dragonfly camera looking things that dive bomb you when they get low on health, and a fast moving robot that we lovingly refer to as the roomba that shoots towards you dealing damage if it hits you. There are more ape like creatures that jump on top of you and another that creates shock waves that you have to jump over. Essentially there are a bunch of different types of mobs that you have to deal with individually and it can get really hectic when it is all thrown at you at once. Occasionally there are group objectives like “stand on the plate” to fill a bar… which is massively challenging because it often puts you out in the open and you both have to be standing on it at the same time to get any progress.
Every few stages you encounter a mini-boss that has its own arena. This is the second boss that electrifies areas of the floor and also likes to hop directly on top of you. We faced him a few times but only beat him in a run where we both managed to get to the boss room with multiple stimpacks and also a bunch of complimentary power ups. The first boss got to the point where we could down it pretty easily, with the only real frustration being that we had to hide from a beam that shot out from the boss towards both of us at the same time. The only time things got really tricky is when we inadvertently ended up on the same side of the arena because so long as we could split the incoming mobs up between us it was pretty easy to deal with things. You have a double jump attack and a dash, which can be used to air dash… both of which make traversing the arenas interesting and are a godsend for avoiding attacks.
Killing a boss drops these things called Soul Fragments, which can then be spent on upgrades on a talent tree. The first points that I spent were on the ability to have more than one stimpack. After that I started pouring points into my basic weapon attack, because that seems to be the thing that I am using the most. When I got to the second tier of points they began costing two fragments per point. In theory you are building out your character and I do wonder how many points total you get to spend, or if this is just something that you can farm indefinitely. Like could you do runs of the first boss over and over and eventually chip away at improving your character? I essentially only played through the tutorial and then immediately started group play, so I will need to play some more of this solo to test out that theory.
At various places inside the ruins are static spawns for upgrades. For example the Engine Rifle is the default load out that you begin the game with but after beating the first boss you can find a shotgun. After being the second boss we found the turret to replace the grenades. Inside the ruins are various chests, both locked and unlocked, and I found a few weapon component upgrades in these. One of these for example changes my alt fire from a full auto minigun, to a single shot that knocks enemies back away from me… but deals a lot of damage with that single hit. I started using that as my secondary fire because it was super effective at dealing with the roombas, and was great for debuffing targets when you get certain upgrades.
One of the things that I really dig is that while there is a listing of all of the achievements that you have unlocked… there is also a physical room where you collect them all. It is like this museum of artifacts that you are bringing up from the depths and each one of them represents some objective that you completed. I figure this is going to look really cool once I have finished more than a handful of these. There were also bonus objectives that we found while completing some of the areas, like not getting hit for a certain number of arenas unlocked a bonus special chest. There are also keys that you can find that can unlock random chests and doors that lead to vendor rooms. Gold is a thing that you collect during your run and when you find a vendor you can buy additional upgrades.
We essentially made it to the second biome… but the bottom fell out at that point. We fought these giant frog like creatures and all of them were super annoying. There were frogs that were floating on a cloud of frog eggs… that flew around the arena healing things. There were grenadiers that would flood the area with bombs that you had to avoid, and others that fired off blow darts in a fan pattern that you essentially had to time a jump over. Given time we will probably get as used to these mechanics as we did the first biome, but it was around this point that Gracie demanded that I hold her… so we called the adventure. I had a heck of a lot of fun and honestly I want to see if I can wrangle two more players and see how the group mechanics feel with a full team. I am hoping that the stand on the plate mechanics are way less onerous when there are more than two players. Also resurrecting players would be easier if the mobs did not immediately swarm the one who was still alive.
The game is $25 on Steam and is a very competent shooter in its own right. If you are looking for something fun to play with friends, I highly suggest giving it a shot. The vibes are immaculate. The post Delving Abyssus appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Boltgun Initial Thoughts

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Good Morning Friends! It was in June of 2022 that I first saw the teaser trailer for a new Warhammer game called Boltgun, and I could already tell that I was probably on board with its particular brand of nonsense. Very rarely is a video game so directly targeted at my soul. In the mid-90s when I was obsessing over making levels for Doom 2, I was also obsessed with assembling plastic “beakie” Space Marines with my friend Jason and waging epic battles on his ping pong table semi-permanently converted into a battleground full of scratch-built terrain. That Proto-Bel would have been all over this game… in fact I kept trying to pretend that the EA-released Space Hulk PC game was actually a Doom clone at the time.
About a week ago the Boltgun trailers started to make their way into my feed and I remembered how much I wanted to play this game. Yesterday it officially released and I picked it up over on Steam, but it appears to pretty much be available for all platforms. Having spent part of my evening playing through the first half dozen levels or so… it very much feels like more of an actual spiritual successor to Doom and Doom 2 than the extremely excellent 2016 Doom release. As someone who cut my teeth on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, and of course Duke Nukem 3D… this FEELS like you remember those games feeling. Modern audiences probably won’t really appreciate this fact, but even the sprite work in this game FEELS like it is 2.5D in the way that the transition of the model animations is ever so slightly abrupt.
You start off with just your chain sword and a little way into the first level you pick up your holy Bolter seated on top of an altar… with the reverence one would expect a holy instrument of imperial might. The chain sword takes some getting used to because effectively it throws you into a sort of bullet time as you line up your attack. You charge your sword, which pauses the game and then your character leaps forward and attacks with the blade. Essentially low-level minions will be finished off in a single hit… for higher-level minions, you will need to wait until they only have a sliver of life before it becomes a really effective attack. Essentially it can also be used as a movement ability of a sort where you charge forward and can sort of do a mid-air charge if you time it just right.
While the game lovingly replicates the feel of “random doodads all over the place for you to pick up” that was common for this era of shooter, it also has a lot of modern messaging. For example, the Chaos Cultists have lovingly painted platforms with yellow paint so you can know where you should be leaping to in order to kill them more efficiently. The game also features a “ledge pull-up” parkour system so if you leap across a gap, you can catch on the lip and pull yourself over onto the next platform. This isn’t over the top but feels pretty natural even within the framework of a “retro-inspired” shooter. There will be no blinking arrow telling you where to go… but I feel like a game like this doesn’t really need it. In some of the larger maps, there will be a bit of fumbling around and looking for the exit, but that also comes with this era of the genre.
What is so pure about this game is the fact that you get an endgame summary screen just like you did in Doom. The only thing that I feel a little iffy about is what it seems to count as secrets are not what I would have called secrets back in the day. Generally speaking, so far it is finding your way to a hidden powerup or something that is just off the beaten path… and less opening up new chambers and finding new areas of the map. I guess gone are the days of “humping” the wall while spamming your open key looking for a hidden door… and instead, it is just efficiently clearing every corner of every level. I admittedly missed several secrets on each level so maybe there were hidden doors that I just didn’t find.
The story is a bit on the light side, but really… did we care about the story in Doom? The story was largely an excuse for us to kill more demons, and the story in Boltgun is the story of EVERY Space Marine game… PURGE! There is a lovingly crafted number of chaos mobs that you will end up fighting along the way from mere cultists to Chaos Marines… to Chaos Terminators… to even Chaos Daemons like the Great Unclean One. Basically don’t expect high art here… this is a game with just enough story to keep it from falling on its face… as it should be for any 90s-era shooter. If you are also of this era then you will probably love it. If you were NOT from this era… I have no clue what you will think about this game. It’s a relatively fast-paced retro shooter with weapons that feel powerful and combat that feels visceral. For me personally… it really hit the spot. The post Boltgun Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.