Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning, Folks! This week we had the entire crew and a stacked list of topics, forcing us to bump several to next week. Tam starts out talking about Time Flies, leading into Grace talking about Ball X Pit. Bel shares his thoughts about the Path of Exile 3.27 reveal stream, and Ash discusses the Session Zero for the Critical Role Daggerheart system. Tam has been playing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2… and how it is very much not a sequel to the first game. Bel talks a bit about the CSGO Gambling Crash, where the illicit market lost some 3 Billion dollars of value in a single day. Ash discusses playing Entropy Effect, which is set in the BlazBlue universe, and Bel shares some further bad news about the self-destruction of Xbox, with some new updates and Halo officially being announced for the PlayStation 5. We wrap things up with first impressions of Dispatch and Outer Worlds 2, which we are likely going to be talking about next week.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We had a pretty meandering show where we thought we ran out of topics… and then suddenly remembered a few more at the very end. We start with talking about Grace and Bel’s adventures in All Ikora PVPVE nonsense with Destiny Rising. From there, Grace talks about the full release of Slime Rancher 2, and Ammo some adventures in Mathematics with the Final Fantasy Tactics remake. Xbox seems like it is cooked as they continue their trend of raising the price on everything, this time with Game Pass. Bel talks about revisiting the MySpace 1.0 era with an almost one-for-one clone called SpaceHey. Tam shares some thoughts about why Rise of Ronin did not land for him, but Ghost of Yotei absolutely has. Bel has popped back into New World and was shocked to find some pretty significant updates to the game. Then things go off the rails a bit, and we eventually talk about Hades 2 and the Electronic Arts sale to the Saudi Public Investment Fund.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday we got some great news from Guild Wars 2 that the quick play feature that has been a rousing success during the Fractal Incursion event would be coming for the new combined raid system. Essentially they are taking strikes and raid wings and merging them into a new feature, and then adding quick play functionality for the easier wings and strikes. I am so unbelievably pumped about this, and right now the Guild Wars 2 is on fire with their quality of life improvements. I am just hoping that when the Fractal Incursion event is over in a few days… that we get some version of the quick play feature permanently for Fractals at least. The raid finder tool will not be coming until the first post expansion update, which should land sometime first quarter of 2026 if the pacing of content drops are similar to how they were with Janthir Wilds. I am honestly super pumped about the Visions of Eternity expansion drop in general coming at the end of this month.
In less great news… Microsoft continues down a path of self destruction following their recent massive price hikes on their consoles with a price hike to Gamepass. Ultimate was previously $19.99 and it is bumping up to $29.99 a month…. which at least for me is a bridge too far. I have been a subscriber since Gamepass first came into existence, and have been using it to play various Microsoft stable PC games as they released. However I think I am just going to hard pass on this system even though I did enjoy the Cloud gaming functionality. Immediately following this news I saw reports on social media that the cancellation page was effectively bricked for most of the day as there was a flood of cancellations. It was still a bit wonky last night as I attempted to cancel it.. hanging for over a minute on the final step before finally resolving into a page that allowed me to enter my reasoning. Microsoft has talked at length about them wanting to grow Gamepass, but this is absolutely not the way to do it. With this and many other things… I think we have finally reached the point where we frogs noticed that the water was boiling and are ready to hop out of the pot.
Yesterday I got a message over on Bluesky from my friend Delebrin that the time played in Diablo IV is located on the character profile page at the bottom. This sounds like something that I once knew, but have long since forgotten. I am grateful that they pointed it out however, and my estimate of being around 40 hours into this character was pretty accurate with me having actually played 36. Now I am trying to figure out what I want to do next. This is ultimately the point I end up with in Diablo III and Diablo IV each time I play through a season. None of the content is compelling enough to really keep me diving into it for the sake of doing it… and the gap in RNG drops between Ancestral Uniques and Mythics is so wide that I am just not sure it is worth the effort.
I am close to wrapping up Champion in the season journey, and this honestly has traditionally been my guiding light for when I consider myself done with a season. The final phase is going to be a bit harder as I said in an earlier post, because many of those accomplishments require you to be wearing some piece of chaos gear, and I am not sure what I can actually sacrifice in order to make that happen. I did not get a ton of time to play last night, because I instead hung out with Ace and played Destiny Rising. However today at lunch I should be able to finish up the rest of the stuff on Champion and then begin chipping away at the last rank. I did finish leveling the seasonal event tree and got my mythic shard, and I have a few more steps on the battle pass… so essentially when I wrap all of this up I will probably consider the game “beaten” for the moment.
It is a new month and with that comes a reset on some of the currency exchange shops, allowing me to pick up some more normal banner pulls, and I managed to finally pull Ning Fei, the last of the champions that I did not have. I am still only a few pulls away from getting the Mythic Choice champion so I am not sure if I hold onto this for future use if that is even allowed, or if I pick up a second copy of Jolder. She is by far my favorite of the normal banner mythic champions, though from everything I have heard Ning Fei seems to be pretty awesome. I did pick up two copies of Xuan Wei while spending down my normal banner pulls, but I am just not really playing him that often.
I did pull a really sweet exotic ghost shell called the Cryptex, so that was pretty fun. Most of the night was spent running Morgran’s Hunt because that event ends I believe today. We also did a few rounds of our all Ikora PvPvE nonsense… and honestly… we are getting better at this. We had one match where we took out six or seven players, along with a few clutch kills… but didn’t really score terribly well in general. Ace and I were talking last night about how much better of a Destiny experience this game is, and how they had never really gotten into baseline Destiny as much as this version. I think in some aspect it is the multiple characters, because you can do a bunch of different things, rather than feeling like you are forced to play one of three characters. Grinding up light in Destiny feels like it was way harder than grinding up gear in Destiny Rising, so I think that is at least part of it for me.
I am a bit stalled in my progression, because I essentially need to complete all of the silver achievements on three characters so I can remove the logjam that is my ascension score. Right now in most cases I am gated by my total light score for the characters and not having an easy way to bump that up, and also needing to run 7 minute legendary events, which are single player versions of missions in the game. I do not really enjoy these, so it is something I am going to have to force myself to get good at. The current one sort of sucks because it is all sniper based, and while I have leveled Umeko and Tan-2 a bit… neither feels like they are good enough to rip through this mission quickly. I thought I had gotten it last night but seemingly there is a lag between when you finish the final boss and when it shuts off the timer. I took a death in the middle, and if I had not done that I would have probably been able to finish that one without much issue. However I am going to have to wait for another week because I do not think there is any way I am getting non-snipers through this one.
Anyways! I think that is all of the assorted nonsense I have in my head this morning. I hope your week is going well. I am still fighting this general respiratory crud, but like I said before I think it is just ragweed trying to kill me.
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Good Morning Folks! Last week I dipped my toes into Avowed, the new Elder-Scrolls-Like game from Obsidian… the studio that brought you Fallout New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, The Outer Worlds… and probably my favorite of the batch Tyranny which is criminally underrated. I was going to always play this game. Obsidian is a company known for some really big ideas but also quite a bit of jank that comes along with that. So far Avowed feels like a graduation to releasing a polished product on day one, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this game has a fairly limited scope. Essentially it is Elder Scrolls without all of the simulationalist stuff that sometimes gets in the way of playing the game.
It isn’t going to break any boundaries, but instead provides a competent semi-open-world adventure where you explore the setting of the Pillars of Eternity universe in a very familiar Bethesda-like package. The thing is however it sands off the rough edges and provides something a bit more straight forward and to the point. You can send gear to your camp from your inventory at any time as well as being able to break down items for resources in the field. There is an encumbrance system, but the only things that have any weight are your chest armor and your weapons… both of which you can manage pretty easily by the salvage and send to camp systems. Even when you are fully encumbered… you can still fast travel to the nearest camp or way point. Essentially Avowed comes out of the box configured in the manner that I spent hours modding Bethesda games to behave like.
If something exists and is lootable in the world… it is something that is worth looting. There are no cabinets full of empty bottles… that really serve no purpose rather than to potentially get a single coin from lugging them to a vendor. Vendors also do not have limited gold reserves so you do not have to play the game of selling to every vendor in a vicinity trying to empty your pack. Lockpicks exist, but they are simply a resource that is consumed and do not involve dealing with a fiddly mini-game… some of which are are just badly designed. My only real complaint is that lockpicks are rare enough that you will want to probably see if any vendors have them… because while they are super cheap… the bigger boxes consume three at a time to open.
Combat is pretty much what you would expect from an Elder Scrolls game, but I think it feels a bit more fluid and the ability upgrades a bit more enjoyable. I can charge into enemies which will break their ability to block attacks. I’m also a huge fan of when Fantasy games allow me to dual wield pistols which allow for an interesting game play of firing one hand at a time, while the other weapon is reloading. We are not going to talk about how impractical it is for you to be loading a pistol one-handed while you are firing the other pistol… but it is still extremely fun. Boss encounters are smart enough so that if you kill them while roaming the world, and you find a quest later asking you to kill that same thing… you just get to autocomplete the quest and get the rewards. Nacib for example is a spider in a dungeon near the start of the game… that later was a bounty mission allowing me to just get some fast credits when I finally found the bounty board.
I have no clue what the magic system feels like, because I am generally not a “finger wiggler” in these types of games… but I will say that when companions use those abilities it feels solid. Essentially you can let the companion AI do its own thing, or you can also specifically target a monster and pop open the action wheel and send a direct command for them to use one of their attacks. There are a number of environment puzzles in the game that involve freezing, shocking, or setting something on fire… and each of the companions can specifically fill one of these niches. There are also a number of grenades that you can carry around in your inventory allowing you to perform the same action so that you are never in a situation where you brought the wrong companion for the wrong mission.
At this point I have met three companions: Kai, Marius, and Giatta. I’ve met a fourth character that I think will be joining my band of adventurers in the next major story segment. Kai is essentially… what if Garrus was a Shark-man, because it is the same voice actor effectively doing the same sort of vocal treatment. Marius is your traditional non-trusting grump Dwarven character… that is also a wild tracker and scout voiced by the person who did Rathma in Diablo IV. Giatta is an Animancer which is sort of like a Necromancer but can also animate pretty much anything… voiced by the actor who did Ikora Rey in Destiny 2. The last companion Yatzli which I have not collected, is a wizard of some sort voiced by the Symmetra Actress from Overwatch.
One of the things that I find particularly cool is that essentially you can upgrade every weapon you find all the way to the maximum stats it can possibly have for its base item type. This means that as you start to find Unique weapons, it does not matter if you find it at the start of the game… it can be upgraded indefinitely and made useful all the way through the game. I found a flaming sword called the Last Light of Day and have now taken it up to Exceptional/Purple quality and will keep upgrading it all the way to Legendary as I find materials. Similarly unique armors often have specific stats on them that make them more useful than other pieces of gear, and you can keep upgrading those as well. Boots, Gloves, Rings, and Amulets are just stat sticks and are as useful at level 1 as they are at whatever the maximum level of the game happens to be. Essentially like I said before… a lot what I like about Avowed is it is the Bethesda model but with all of the bullshit removed from it.
At this point I am roughly half of the way through the game and have no clue what my played stats look like, because I am not playing it through Steam. This was available on Gamepass and I was able to install it through the Battle.net client, which I hope is a sign of similar functionality to come. According to the save game I am playing I am a little over 12 hours in… but save game playtime counts are somewhat squishy. This is probably going to end up being around a 30 hour game for me personally, which seems like a good size for this sort of adventure. Maybe not every game needs to be a 400 hour epic. My favorite Obsidian game is Tyranny which is maybe 8 hours for a single play-through? The world is rich and feels larger than it technically is… but that is mostly due to conscious design choices rather than just putting a bunch of empty space in the game and hoping you will be impressed by the sheer scale.
I’m off today, so pretty much my plan is to go hang out on the couch after I finish writing this post and continue my adventures in this weird world. I have to say… this is making me want to go back and play the Pillars of Eternity games so that I can have some context on a few of the elements that the characters are talking about. There is a lot of proper noun salad happening at the beginning of the game, but after awhile this lessons. There is clearly some fan service for those who do know this setting… but unfortunately I am not one of them. So far I have enjoyed the writing quite a bit, and have enjoyed hanging out with Not-Garrus who went from sexy-almost-birdman to sexy-sharkman. I think my favorite character is Giatta, but a lot of that is because she is a healer.
So far I would say that Avowed is a solid 8 out of 10 game experience for me. I think lowering the scope of the game helped it out quite a bit. There are going to be folks who consider this to be a bit basic, but I am having fun with it. Given how much has improved between this and when they released Outer Worlds, it makes me really look forward to Outer Worlds II. If they can keep knocking out games of this quality I will be exceptionally happy to keep playing them. I’ve always been a fan of Obsidian games and I think this is really the sort of thing they excel at. At least I have not seen any plot threads that sort of crash directly into a brick wall like they did in games like KOTOR II so if nothing else I think they have gotten better at controlling the scope of effort.
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