Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Guild Wars Reforged, a client refresh for the aging original Guild Wars game. The thing is, this was one of those things where it mostly just happened automatically. if you already had the game installed it patched the client up to Reforged. If you downloaded the client the same downloader worked the same, and since I was on a brand new box… I had to download everything. Side note for anyone who does not know this, you can tag -image into the shortcut properties to force the game to download all of the files instead of just streaming them each time you load into a new area. This took forever because the game servers were getting hit pretty freaking hard, but as of this morning the 139KBs turned into something more akin to 1300KBs, which allowed me to zip through the updates that happened over night. Cool thing is if you ever owned any version of Guild Wars 1, you now own all three parallel content releases. You can also purchase the game on Steam if you so choose, but really you need to stick to the same ecosystem for linking accounts if you also play Guild Wars 2.
Reforged is mostly a facelift, with updated textures and updated graphical settings designed for more modern systems. It has been wild just how active the starter areas of the game are now. I logged in for a bit to play a baby ranger that I had yet to choose a subclass on, and am planning on going elementalist just for the weapon buffs. I figured it had been so long since I had really played through prophecies, the original release that I would make my way through that before venturing forth into either Factions or Nightfall. I still hate that I cannot jump with my characters, but that is probably always going to be a thing with the original Guild Wars. The world is definitely much easier on the eyes, even though the polygon count of the models is still woefully early 2000s. I did not play a ton last night because I was finishing up a book, but plan on diving into it more over the weekend.
In other news we got a new character drop in Destiny Rising this morning, and I managed to get him within 20 pulls that I had saved up. Up until this point we have not really had a good feeling Hand Cannon character, as Attal never really did much for me other than vaguely looking like Princess Leia because her helmet sort of has the Cinnamon Bun thing going on. Jaren is a proper Hand Cannon character with what feels like a much faster reload animation, and a kit of abilities that play nicely with this sort of run and gun gunslinger gameplay. Essentially one ability is a movement similar to Ning Fei’s but instead of cloaking he throws out a blind grenade and targets characters weak points dealing critical damage for a short period of time. Then there is an AOE ability that fires out a burst of six rounds that targets anything in the near vicinity also dealing critical damage. Lastly he has a take on Golden Gun from Destiny, but he fires multiple shots at once allowing for a really powerful burst super.
With him also came The Last Word, which is one of my favorite exotic hand cannons from both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Its big claim to fame is that you benefited from hip firing the weapon and got some bonus body shot damage. So this means you can very rapidly fire it without aiming down sights and still be effective. This all blends in nicely to the style of character that Jaren is, and makes the entire package feel really good. Will he replace Maru, Estela, or Helhest as my favorites? Probably not. However it does give me a character of the Hand Cannon archetype that I actually like playing. That said I am not sure when I would take him over other characters, but he is if nothing else an interesting option for speed running strikes, because he can move every bit as fast as Ning Fei can.
I managed to get him up to 56k light and will push him up a bit higher once I am no longer bottlenecked. Once again I need to farm up a stupid amount of elemental fruit, but am holding off on doing so because Ace and I have plans to do some calamity ops tonight and I don’t want to spend down my pinnacle rewards until we have already done that. I am probably going to spend some of the rare resources I got from the last round of Calamity Ops to push up his levels a bit. I also need to spend some time farming artifacts because right now the load out is less than optimal. I am pretty happy with the character overall and honestly way happier with it than I thought I would be.
Lastly the reason why I really did not play much Guild Wars last night is that I finished up The Shattering Peace. This is maybe my favorite book in this series. I always liked the character of Gretchen Trujillo in the other books, and I especially like the adult that she turned into. The way things wrap up are really freaking interesting, and I am hoping that we get more books in this universe given the world shifting changes at the end of this book. I am probably going to hold off a bit getting into the next book so that I can spend some nights playing Guild Wars 1, which requires me to read. I cannot read text and listen to audiobooks at the same time. It is like the narrative side of my brain can only process on input stream at a time. So for a little bit I am going to be devoting that processing power to questing in GW1.
The post A Legacy Reforged appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
Good Morning Folks. Happy Day After Silksong launched, if you celebrate it. So for those who were confused as to why pretty much every digital storefront died around 9 am CDT… Silksong the sequel to Hollow Knight was released and it was exceptionally anticipated by many. I enjoyed what I played of the first game and as such I had planned on picking up this release if for no reason to support its particular brand of indie development. Also they could have charged way the hell more for the game but are instead charging $20 for the game… $32 if you want to be fancy and also get the soundtrack. Essentially all digital storefronts cratered as the game released. I intermittently tried to complete my purchase and did not succeed until 12:30… and even then it errored out a few times before it finally went through. While I did not see it with my own eyes, I heard from friends that the Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation stores all were struggling as well under the weight of users. Why they did not have this up for pre-order ahead of time… is beyond me.
I think it is safe to assume that they sold several million copies when you factor in all of the platforms it is available on. We have zero data from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, or GOG… but at least on Steam it held the top seller slot for most of yesterday. This is pretty freaking impressive for a $20 title, because the Steam sales charts are based on dollar amount of sales not volume of purchases which is why the Steam Deck is habitually listed near the top, and this morning Borderlands 4 reclaimed that spot with its $70 base version and $120 super deluxe version. Additionally it hit a peak concurrency of over a half million players. There are a couple of dozen folks on my Steams friends list who have purchased the game and quite a few spent most of yesterday playing it. Basically this is an instant hit, and will probably be the game of the year for many people.
I played a tiny bit yesterday just because I could, but I did not make it terribly far. I failed the first boss I encountered and will have to dedicate some time to get used to the diagonal slash instead of the down slash. I have to admit, this is not my favorite style of Metroidvania. I greatly prefer the games that are way more about exploration and gear acquisition, than the ones that are purely about mechanical aptitude. This is why I greatly preferred Bloodstained to Hollow Knight, but most of my friends are the exact opposite. My old man reflexes struggle anymore with some of the movement in these games. I love the artwork and the vibes though, so at some point I want to finish Hollow Knight and then play my way through Silksong. I think both are exceptionally cool, but also are not necessarily the thing I was dying to play like so many were. I did however want to join the zeitgeist at least partially, so threw them my $20. I also thought it was an interesting cultural moment because I cannot remember a time when a single game brought multiple storefronts to their knees.
I spent most of last night playing Path of Exile II, but I have also been noodling around with a mobile game. I am not sure when Destiny Rising officially launched, but I was briefly an alpha tester for it some time ago. Playing it on the phone was perfect cromulet, but also not really my jam. With the full release of the game comes a lightweight emulator option that offers some pretty good mouse and keyboard PC performance, as well as the option to play it with a controller if that is more of your jam. If you have not been around this blog for very long… you would potentially not know just how much of these pages I devoted to both Destiny and Destiny 2 until Bungie pissed me off with all of their content vaulting. When I saw that some of the more diehard Destiny streamers were picking up this game, I had to give it another shot, and honestly I am pretty surprised by just how good it plays.
There are significant differences in the way that this game works. Namely from a story perspective this is essentially an alternate universe version of the tried and true tale of the Traveler. More importantly however this is a hero shooter, and that means instead of playing a character that you create for yourself.. you are playing the character of wolf, a newly resurrected character where you can choose the gender and appearance for similar to many other Gacha main characters. The key difference here however is that this is a fully fleshed out character and seems exceptionally well rounded and not something you will immediately toss aside the first time you succumb to the lure of chasing a 5 star banner. Every character has a loadout with a specific set of super abilities, and a weapon pairing. This means that there are going to be characters that you might like the weapons for but hate the super and vice versa. The combo of hunter double jump, auto rifle, grenade launcher, and this big damned anime robot sword slash attack seem like a solid combo for a base character.
Because it is a mobile gacha game there are of course reward tracks and banners, but I have not made it far enough into the game to unlock the latter. In fact it has not really asked me for any money so far. I’ve essentially only been through the first few missions, but it seems like there is a challenge track that will unlock one of two premium characters. There is a training room that lets you test all of the characters and I am pretty much going to choose Xuan Wei because he is essentially what we would refer to as a Striker Titan. It is heavily Chinese influenced as are pretty much all Gacha games, and it also has chase Waifu characters that everyone seems to want. There is a Hot Goth girl with a Scythe attack that everyone seems to be talking about chasing in the online discourse.
What is impressive however is just how good the performance is for what is essentially an emulated android game. It feels like Destiny. They have nailed the gunplay and you can also pet the cats, which is the most important bit. Actually the whole cat thing seems to be a mini game in that each one you encounter wants some sort of food. I have no clue what you get for collecting the food and correctly delivering them to the right cats, but I am sure I will evetually do this thing. If you loved Destiny at any point and faded away from the mainline game for various reasons, I highly suggest you check out this particular brand of nonsense. It is pretty solid. I need to get used to the phone client though so I can add this to my late night daily chores gaming while waiting on falling to sleep. Right now I play a minimal amount of Pokemon, and AFK Journey… and could at least pick up the daily login rewards for this game if I did not play any of it on the computer.
Anyways. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will see you again on Sunday when I post the new AggroChat show.
The post Steam Go Boom appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
One of the things that has largely been absent from this blog for the last few years is mobile gaming. It is not necessarily that I lacked the desire to have stupid fun sleepytime nonsense gaming, but more that my hardware could no longer really support it. In 2018 I bought the Razer Phone 2, in large part because it had a ton of features and was being discounted significantly. That phone has been a trooper for me all through the peak pandemic years and finally started to show its significant age starting around 2022. I hate the entire process of upgrading devices and should have taken things like the fingerprint sensor failing on me as a sign that I should go ahead and do it. Instead, I suffered through all of 2023 and most of 2024 with a phone that would crash any time I attempted to launch a game. Recently I upgraded to a OnePlus 12R seen above, and I am pretty happy with that decision.
More importantly though it meant that I could actually indulge in various games that I had heard about for awhile, but did not have the hardware to really enjoy. AFK Journey is one of those “it” games that burned through the AggroChat crew starting in April and continuing on a bit into the summer months. Various Fedifriends have also been into the game so it was enough to make me want to download it as one of my first forays into another round of modern mobile gaming. Generally speaking, these games have a steady burn rate for me where I enjoy the first few weeks of playing… up until the point where I need to spend money to progress. At that point, I uninstalled it and moved on to the next one. What I am mostly looking for is some dumb fun busywork before sleep claims me and so far AFK Journey has excelled at that notion.
I’ve mostly been playing this on my mobile device, where I largely record fancy pulls when I think to press the awkward screenshot key combination of power and volume down. However recently I have installed the desktop client where it is so much more enjoyable to just roam around the world. Essentially the game is a combination of the usual busywork of a gacha game where you have various vents that you are expected to participate in every day in order to move the needle forward. You are rationed enough cash shop equivalent and hero pull currency in order to keep you hanging on to see if the next ten pulls get you something truly interesting.
Then there is this weirdly sprawling open world filled with optional content that you will absolutely miss if you are just clicking the auto movement button to progress you to the next quest item. This is the point where I always think what I think in these situations… that a game like this would be really freaking fun on a proper gaming device like the Nintendo Switch. I am sure I could probably figure out how to shoehorn this onto the Steam Deck… were it not for the fact that it does not appear to have controller support. Sure I could probably install something like ReWASD and map WASD and the assorted keyboard shortcuts to a controller… but that is an awful lot of work for a game that I probably won’t be playing two months from now.
I am running a full party of Graveborn, in part because those were some of the coolest champions that I pulled early on. My inner metalhead edge lord loves the trappings of darkness and death, and these all vibed with that heavily. I mean I am after all a dedicated Golgari player in Magic the Gathering, so this all seems like the right call. There was no team of Dwarves, so it was an easy pick over the assorted cute woodland furries and elves. Unfortunately, I have reached the point in the story where I find out that the Graveborn are kind of the dicks of the story… but MINE aren’t like that. They are mobile and misunderstood anti-heroes dammit!
For a game called “AFK Journey” it is shockingly interactive. Sure there is an autobattle system, and I have autobattled my way through several hundred levels of it because this ultimately gates how much you can progress your characters. This is in large part why I installed it on the PC, so that I could have it autobattling in the background without draining my phone battery. This feels like more of an upkeep chore than anything else, and I had neglected it for far too long allowing my cast of heroes to languish a bit. The actual combat is all non-interactive so I guess maybe that is where the bulk of the AFK nature comes from. You gear and choose your team comp, but after that, it just sort of plays out on its own. I am fine with this because quite honestly controlling anything on a phone is a bit fiddly for my giant sausage fingers.
I did spend $7 on the game, to unlock a cosmetic battlepass track. I figured I needed a costume with an overabundance of belts to match the edge lord nature of my undead team. I am not sure what I think about the whole open-chested nature of the outfit, but sometimes you just sort of have to accept that these things are built for folks who lust after such things. It was an improvement over the general fancy nature of the wizard outfits I had been given up to this point. Since I am effectively playing Merlin… I don’t think the game is ever going to give me proper armor to wear and I just have to accept that.
So far I am having quite a bit of fun with the game and actually enjoy roaming around the world looking for secrets to loot. I’ve yet to hit the upper ceiling where progression is ridiculously slow. I basically get to progress one character each day and they have this whole system where every 10th level up costs way more than the preceding 9 levels. So basically I zoom everyone up to a multiple of 10s, then that next level up I can do one of those each day for a week until I can zoom them again up 9 more levels. I’ve been given a shocking amount of pull currency and have had enough banked to comfortably do a ten-pull every single day on the normal banner since I started playing. The premium pulls also seem to add up and I have a 10 pull banked against the rate-up banner, but given that I have already pulled Nara I am going to hold onto that until the next banner rolls around.
It is a gacha game, and you sort of have to go into it expecting a specific set of trappings for that experience. That said… it seems to be one of the more enjoyable mobile gacha games that I have played in a while. I will forever mourn the loss of Dragalia, but for the moment this seems to be taking its place as my stable focus for the time being as I wait for sleep to claim me.
The post Not Exactly AFK Journey appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
