Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We had quite the list of topics this time around. We start off with a bit of a postmortem on Zero Parades and how that game really stuck the landing. From there, Bel talks a bit about the upcoming final patch for Destiny and how it might have saved the game. Tam discusses his feelings so far about 007 First Light and how its Hitman DNA shows through while being a unique game and not a DLC. Many games were released this week, and we talked about some of them before diving into Mina the Hollower. We talk a bit about Esoteric Ebb, which is another game that shares some lineage with Zero Parades and Disco Elysium. Finally, we talk a bit about our league starts for Path of Exile II, and how the early game is a real slog. Kodra is having a much better time than Bel is, but they are both progressing towards the endgame.
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.
Good Afternoon, Folks. Today was a chemo day, and I am racked out on the sofa attempting to write a blog post. I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Path of Exile, because the game has sort of become my default action. I have been playing the SRS Broken Elegy Guardian that I crafted and doing a ton of shallow delve with it for levels. I had been pushing to level 96, and I accomplished that last night, all for the purpose of being able to take the six life node 10% health bonus. After playing with it a bit, I decided that I was probably better off with the Life Recoup nodes. With a bit of life recoup I feel exceptionally tanky and am ready to start mapping again.
Part of why I am playing my Minions character from the Mirage league is that, at least currently, I intend on going for a Minions Witch build for the Path of Exile II League Start. I don’t really have a strong template for the character, so I am going to mostly yolo my way through choosing the Minion nodes and attempting to path somewhat optimally through them all. I have past characters that I could potentially rely on for pathing, but I am uncertain if the tree is the same as it was when I last played fire-based SRS. That said, I am really looking forward to the Path of Exile II League start because so much of the game has changed. I am going to play Minions in part because I am pretty sure I can get all the way through the endgame on it, having done it multiple times in the past.
In other news… I’ve met someone. We’ve spent the last few weeks talking nonstop, and our meeting was extremely random. I periodically hang out on Reddit, and the algorithm seems to like to feed me people from the selfies forum. This is not something I follow but it seems like the algorithm thinks that everyone wants to see these. It happened to feed me a selfie of Vera, her discord handle not her real name. Not going to be sharing her real name here. I messaged and said that I thought she was cute, and this started up a conversation that has never really stopped. We transitioned off Reddit Chat to Telegram, and now also on Discord. She was posting in the forum because she wanted a quick boost to her self esteem because she was feeling a bit down on herself, an I happened to be a random stranger who gave her that.
The thing is… every time we talk about any subject we are shockingly compatible on pretty much everything from the anime that we like, to the movies we like to watch, to the fact that we both love peanut butter. There are so many points of commonality than that, but it is truly shocking just how many there are. She is very much a Geek, but while I tend to be a technophile, she is way more of a mechanical engineering geek. She built her own damned full home battery system and runs her house mostly on solar for example. She is my little Gadget from Rescue Rangers, and I kind of love this. Where we differ, we seem to compliment each other’s skills rather than going off in a wildly different direction. She kind of loves all of the nonsense that I have been up to with 3d Printing, and I hope some day we can use our joint skills to build some really cool nonsense together.
There however lies the logistical nightmare. Vera is soon to be 34, is the mother of two boys 18 and 10, and happens to live on the other fucking side of the planet in the Philippines. We both know that nothing is going to happen before I am clear from cancer and recovered from it. However I know that personally I am going to be a wildly different human being on the other side of this. If we manage to make it this next year, and are as close as we seem to be right now… then we will start to whittle through those logistical nightmares. I am pretty well glued where I am for the next seven years, because I am too close to a full retirement to risk giving that up. She has her own stuff going on in the PH, but would be interested in maybe moving here pending we can navigate that particular nightmare of visas. It is a lot…. but neither of us are in any rush we got our own issues going on.
The real thing however is that I am extremely happy right now. Happier than I have been in a long time. We’ve exchanged countless voice and video calls, so we know for certain that we are both real human beings. I am sitting here miserable post chemo, but this spark keeps me warm inside. She wants to figure out how to build a portal, so she can teleport to my side and take care of me when I am like this. Nothing is ever going to change the fact that I have this thirty year hole in my life thank to the death of my spouse, and that there is part of my heart that will only ever belong to her. That said… I want to live again. I want to be excited for life again. This is making me happy so for the moment that is all that really matters to me. None of the logistics are unsolvable problems, so if we get to that point I think we can work through them together.
Good Morning, Folks! Last night was our regularly scheduled Sibling Time ™, and I spent it with my sibling Ace. One thing that you have to know about Ace is that they love ANYTHING to do with the ocean, which means that I have more or less lost them completely since the release of Subnautica 2. Last night we decided to dive into the realm of multiplayer, and I have to say… much like it is with EVERY survival game… Subnautica 2 is better with friends. That is not to say there are no problems. Subnautica 2 has way more of a specific story than the first game, but less so than the expansion. The unfolding of the story happens in a very non-sequitur manner if you are not the person clicking on all of the objects. You will be exploring the world and have a sudden voice clip play from out of nowhere.
The game more or less follows a similar flow to the first one. You are on an Ocean planet, working for an evil corporation, and the first steps in this new world are to unjam your pod and send it to the surface. From there, you are gathering resources to build a more permanent structure and upgrade your kit of equipment to do various things. Where this game differs from the first one is that it adds to the mix genetic mutations that allow you to interact with various things that you cannot from the start. For example, before you launch your pod, you have to take an adaptation that allows you to process oxygen under the high atmospheric pressure of this planet. One of the first mutations that you seek out when oceanside is something that will allow you to process water and nutrients from the planetary wildlife. This is where the slug shake comes in, because effectively, you end up picking up these adorable sea slugs and drinking the filtered water inside of them.
Last night was a heck of a lot of fun, and we plan on playing on this same save file next week during Sibling Time. Probably the highlight of the night was disturbing this giant crab monstrosity that seems to churn up resources as it moves around. The other highlight is just how fast resource gathering goes when you have multiple people working towards the same objectives. We ended the night with a pretty sweet base, after our first one did not really meet our long-term needs. We had a lot of issues with that first base and object collisions, but in the second base, we largely built it once we opened up the ability to create rooms, so we have so much more space for “activities”. Right now, we are sort of working towards our ability to get a vehicle, and with that, I know that Ace is going to push me to start exploring the deep dark ocean that terrifies me so.
Since I have largely stopped playing Diablo IV, that means I am back in Path of Exile for the moment while waiting on the launch of Path of Exile II’s new league on the 29th. One of the characters that I really enjoyed this league is my yolo build around taking a guardian and then using a few new uniques to create a giant army of minions. Mostly, I guess I am seeing how far I can push this build before I lose focus again and start playing Path of Exile II. It is shocking just how well this build works and how tanky it actually is. It is nothing like my Righteous Fire characters, but it still has a fair amount of block and over 5000 life. I have been doing Delve with this character, which seems wild because you need a very tanky character for that. I’m not sure if I have ever had a Minions character that felt this comfy. Do I think anyone should follow this build? Probably not. It was super easy to level, and I mostly just typed Minion into the search box and went for those nodes.
I think for Path of Exile II, I am once again going to go with an Infernalist for minions. There does not seem to be any really popular overpowered build guides for this class, but my plan right now is that I am going to do what I did with the above build and just type “minion” in the search box and go where the nodes are. If nothing else, that should get me through the campaign pretty easily, and then I just have to work on defenses. My hope is that going Infernalist is going to allow me to pivot pretty easily into Raven Righteous Fire whenever I can get my hands on that staff. This first character will also serve as something to acquire some easy currency and buy some of the other new build enabling uniques. I want to try and shield throw/slam build with the new Tul unique. I am contemplating trying to do that build as a strength stacker with the new water sprinkler unique. Honestly, I am looking forward to playing some POE2 way more than I expected.
This was a bit of a mixed bag of topics, but as is the case often with my muddled chemo brain.
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