Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.
I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.
I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.
This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.
The post Old Men Warring appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Friends… I’ve been struggling with something for the last couple of weeks. For the Trial of the Ancestors league, I decided last minute to make a shift in my normal routine and start the league as a Lightning Arrow Raider. I spent time right before the league launch leveling one as a test, and then ultimately decided I could live with the consequences of playing a much faster… but much squishier build. The truth is… I could not. I almost immediately missed being able to spend my time farming my favorite league mechanic… delve. Before the end of that first week of the new league, I had already started leveling another Righteous Fire Juggernaut and was happy as a clam farming delve. For the most part… I had considered the Lightning Arrow Raider a bit of a failure and that I should have stuck with the tried and true Juggernaut.
On some level, this made a lot of sense. I love the Righteous Fire Juggernaut so much that I have now played it for three leagues, and even went so far as to get my friend Ammo to draw my particular chosen appearance for the blog banner. What makes this even more complicated is how intrinsically attached this character is to my favorite game mode… because I love spending my time bopping from node to node down in Delve. It is super hard for any other build to compete with this… pending it is not also a super tanky build that can survive down there. The thing is… I knew going into the Lightning Arrow Raider that it was going to be a deeply mapping-focused build and as a result, I knew that it would have limitations. While I considered it a failure… it did manage to gather up enough currency to be able to outfit itself in gear, and fund all of the starter gear I needed for the Juggernaut and then still some to spare… as well as unlocking over half of the Atlas of Worlds. That really does not sound like a failed state to me if I view it through a bit more neutral lens.
To some extent… it also isn’t really the problem of the build because I knew there were some glaring holes in my itemization and I was not really willing to invest the time, effort, and more importantly currency to fix them. I can deal without Chaos Damage being capped given that I am mostly zooming around maps. What I could deal with significantly less so… is the fact that I was doing nothing to fix my ailment problems and at the same time invested NONE of my Divine Vessels into actually unlocking a proper pantheon. I treated the character like it was disposable… which as a result produced a feeling that I was playing something impermanent in the way I approached it. For as little effort as I really put forward to fixing its problems, it probably performed even better than it should have.
So last night and this morning I swapped around a bunch of gear, in an effort to try and solve some of those problems. Essentially up til this point, I had been using Wurm’s Molt to solve some of my attribute problems since this build is STARVING for Strength and Intelligence. Essentially most of the gear swaps were an attempt to stop using this damned belt and move over to something more fitting like a well-rolled Prismweave. One of the first steps was a necklace swap because I needed some raw attributes as well as some minus mana cost along with a less-than-ideal anoint that I am using to fix intelligence problems. This led me to look at quivers and I stumbled onto the extremely interesting Shattered Divinity which gives me a pet Harbinger that casts useful buffs on me every 4 seconds. I made the swap from Shadows and Dust which gave me Rampage and Unholy Might over to Tanu Ahi which I had in my vault which gives me Adrenaline and Onslaught.
Lastly, I finally spent a large chunk of currency and picked up Ancestral Vision which makes me officially elemental ailment immune. All of this combined with finally taking the time to get a Cast when Damage Taken/Immortal Call set up in my gloves has led me to a point of dealing noticeably more damage and adding a few more layers of survivability. I am officially off the radar at this point and veering further away from what most of the other Lightning Arrow builds look like, but I am also adapting it to feel more like something I want to play. I have to say all of these changes have breathed new life into the build and made it enjoyable to run around once again. Hopefully, I can stay alive long enough to pour on a few more levels and pick up an additional frenzy charge.
Sometimes a failed build… is really just a build that I gave up on. I think I was simply homesick to be back down in Delve, and cut this off a little too soon. We will see how things go from here because I am just about out of liquid currency and need to spend some more time making it before I dive further into my Storm Brand Inquisitor.
The post Sometimes a Failure Isn’t a Failure appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning folks! I am technically on vacation today… and technically on vacation tomorrow as well but I figured I might as well spend a bit and knock out a blog post. Since my last post about Blaugust, Starfield has come out with a game that brought with it both unrealistic hype and toxic negativity depending upon where your biases against Bethesda Games landed. I am a Bethesda enjoyer, so I knew without a doubt that I would check this game out. I tried my best to go into this experience with as neutral of expectations as possible. I did not expect this game to be the second coming of Skyrim, nor did I expect it to be vaporware as some corners of the internet seemed to. What I expected more or less was Fallout in Space and that is essentially what they have delivered.
Starfield above all else is a Bethesda game, and that comes with certain parameters. You will have your accompaniment of weird dead-eyed NPCs and bizarre glitches but also a lot of freedom in how you go about approaching the game. It was announced before this game came out that it was going to be one of the most bug-free Bethesda games, and quite honestly… I believe that. However, I have still seen my share of weird bugs that are often fixed by either resting or zoning out of an area and back into it. Yesterday I had a quest NPC randomly float up into the ceiling while I was trying to turn in… and essentially zoning in and out resolved the problem allowing me to continue with my gameplay session. So far I have only had one crash to desktop, which is quite honestly pretty good for a Bethesda game.
What you gain for your slight moments of “Bethesda Jank”, are some really gorgeous examples of level design. On the podcast this weekend we referred to this as “NASApunk” and it seems to be the best description. Everything is big, chunky, analog, and inspired by the space age. This is how I dreamed space would look like as a kid, and I am thrilled to be roaming around the world in my space suit. The game even gives us some really cool moments where we are learning how to fight in Zero-G, with my ballistic weapon kick causing me to go flying backward. The thing is… Starfield has a lot of really cool ideas… some of which are not exactly implemented perfectly, but there are enough hooks there to allow modders to come in later and perfect them.
For example, the Character creation system is beautiful in its simplicity and has the model, the rigging, and gender choices being handled by a very simple pronoun selector… rather than the awkward genitalia simulation systems in some other games of late. Does it go far enough? Probably not for everyone, but there is enough separation there that I would imagine someone is going to be able to come in after the fact and create body and rigging packs similar to how they have in something like Second Life, allowing folks to exist in space in exactly the body and gender identity that they want to have. I wasn’t super happy with the beard options, but I know given time someone will release a mod pack that will resolve this for me. I think a lot of the way I approach a Bethesda game is knowing that eventually, I am going to have fifty-some mods installed at some point to completely tailor the game experience to my tastes.
Let’s talk about some of the places where the game fails. Space combat I believe is probably one of these areas, mainly because for someone who does not want anything to do with simulated space flight… this game is a bit too fiddly for my tastes. However, it is way too simplistic and hamfisted to work for a Star Citizen enjoyer like my friend Tam. So by shooting for this awkward middleground… it is essentially disappointing both ends of the spectrum. Most of my interaction with spaceflight is that I don’t interact… I try my best to always rely on fast travel options for which there are many. You can jump from system to system without having to spend a lot of time actually piloting your ship. There are a few missions however where you will be forced to fumble through space combat. For example, in the above screenshot, I was trying to sneak up and repair a satellite without drawing the attention of some baddies. I did it… but it felt like one of the most cumbersome things I had done in recent memory and have no real interest in doing this again.
Another place where the game fails miserably… is with the talent system. Personally I prefer the old school days of just having a list of talents as compared to this whole talent tree system with pretty pictograms representing each talent. In past Bethesda games, you could TRY and do things… albeit badly without having any talent points assigned to a skill. In Starfield you are not even given the option to try something. This leads to some weird happenings like… it took me 10 hours before I realized there was a talent tree that dictated whether or not I could use a boost pack aka this game’s version of a jet pack. Similarly in my first pass through the talents I completely missed that Security was what this game called “Lockpicking” because I assumed this would be in the social tree not in the tech tree and just assumed I had not uncovered it yet. The game forces you to spend a certain number of points in the first tier of abilities before it allows you to proceed to the second, third, or fourth tiers so I just assumed it was something I had not earned access to yet.
Had I realized this… I might not have gone all in on Ballistics like I have. I do sort of love the octopus with “many guns” icon though. Essentially the skills feel kludgy and I am hoping someone will come in after the fact and mod these to work a bit better. I think that outlines my feelings in general… that Starfield in many ways feels like a good first draft of a game and that I know modders will come along and perfect each of the individual niches. Like for example I hate carrying weight as a concept in video games. I want to be able to loot everything and carry it around forever. Inventory maintenance is never an interesting gameplay loop for me personally. I know that someone out there will release a simple mod that I can install to just remove this gameplay loop entirely so I don’t have to care about it. For the moment I have done this myself with console commands, and it was one of the first things I did upon playing the game. The Bethesda experience for me personally is tailoring the game to fit me, rather than trying to play it the way they intended.
As a result, I view this game as a work in progress, and when I encounter something that annoys me… my first reaction is not to throw up my arms in frustration… it is to go search NexusMods to see if there is a way to mod that frustration out of existence. It is because of this mindset though that I have a really hard time reviewing a Bethesda game. I’ve been playing these for so long at this point, and I know that given enough desire… You can pretty much make the game do anything you want it to do. You have to understand that when I first played Skyrim, I had no clue that you could choose Thief, Warrior, or Mage statues to direct your gameplay… because the second I got out of that first town I was leaving the main questline behind. That said… I am spending a lot more time in this game following the main quest because it is way more cumbersome to travel off the grid.
One of the challenges for me personally is that with Starfield, it is much harder to just wander off into the distance looking for something interesting. Most planets are fairly empty in the grand scheme of things. There are far fewer POIs and way more barren fields of assorted minerals and resources. When you land on a planet, you are dropped into a region surrounding some fixed points of interest, and a bit of procedurally generated area around them. In Skyrim, almost everything in the game existed for a reason… and going there ahead of time allowed you to essentially brute force your way through a side quest that would take you there eventually. In Starfield… there are a lot of areas that only serve as a way to refill your ammunition and med packs… and places for you to farm randomly generated space mercenaries, pirates, and cultists. Knowing that a lot of the world is pointless… gives me less desire to explore it.
That is not to say that you will not have a bazillion conversations that you overhear while roaming around the world and notes that you pick up that will lead you to “pointful” areas. The Starfield experience though sorta waters down the effectiveness of my chosen way of playing a Bethesda game. So as a result I am mostly just following the golden path, or have for the first thirteen hours of playing it. I am not necessarily mainlining this game as my only entertainment, as I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile. I am however enjoying the time I am spending with it, and I don’t want me pointing out its flaws to make it come across like I am not enjoying it greatly. In fact, Starfield is honestly the sort of game that I kinda of wish Destiny would have been. If I could take the world of Starfield, and transplant the Destiny-style gunplay… then I think I would be in heaven. The gunplay is so much better than any other Bethesda title out there, but it is still eons behind anything I would call “good” gunplay.
At this point I am really bought into the story, even though it is sort of riddled with tropes we have all experienced before in other games. I like the world quite a bit and I like experiencing it… albeit with a bit more direction than I am used to in a Bethesda title. Is this game-of-the-year material? Honestly, I am not sure. There are so many great narrative experiences this year, and this is more of a sandbox experience where you need to bring with it your own expectations that shape it. Do I regret buying Starfield? Hell no. I am having a blast honestly, but I still feel like it is important to talk about the flaws of that experience. More or less Stafield is a higher fidelity and much larger version of The Outer Worlds, without that game’s particular sense of humor. It will be interesting how we feel about it in ten years, and if we honor this new franchise in all the same ways that we do Fallout or Skyrim. So far… it doesn’t have nearly as much personality as either of those games does but I am only 13 hours in instead of 1300 hours over multiple playthroughs.
It is also somewhat unfair to expect a new IP to have near the punching weight as Fallout, a game that I have been playing for a quarter of a century at this point. I’ve enjoyed this enough though to give it time to grow and come into its own. I am hoping with time something like Galacticat will make me even halfway as happy as Vault Boy does. For now, I am enjoying the journey, and I definitely think Starfield is worth your time especially if you were already a big fan of these sorts of games. Admittedly my perspective is exclusive to PC gameplay where you can mod anything until your heart is content. I have no clue what a Bethesda game experience feels like on a console because I never play Bethesda games in their vanilla launch state without at least a bit of tweaking. I figure this is probably going to feel similar to all other Bethesda games you have ever played. If you go into the game expecting that sort of gameplay experience… then you are probably going to be very happy with it.
The post Starfield First Impressions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start this week with the fact that Bel cannot distinguish a 6 from an 8 when looking at it from the corner of his eye. We dive into a discussion of Goodbye Volcano High that Kodra has been playing. From there we talk a bit about what is happening at PAX West this year and this leads into a discussion of all of the games. We talk a bit about some of our first impressions of Starfield in as spoiler-free a manner as we can. Finally, Tam talks about rolling the credits on Armored Core 6 and his final thoughts.
