For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!
To Those Remaining
I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.
Magic the Gathering Arena – PC
While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.
To The New and Returning
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC
I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.
Destiny 2 – PC
With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.
The Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.
To Those Departing
Grim Dawn
I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.
Marvel Future Fight
I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.
Mortal Kombat 11
Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.
Outward
This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.
Star Wars the Old Republic
I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.
Honorable Mentions
Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.
Crowfall – PC
While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.
Dragon’s Dogma – PC
I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.
Rage 2 – PC
I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.
World of Warcraft Classic – PC
And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.
Featuring: Â Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Last week we failed to announce the 5th anniversary of our show so we start off talking a bit about that. Â From there Bel goes into a discussion about the BlizzCon Spirit and how he seemingly has caught the Star Wars version and returned to SWTOR after the Star Wars Celebration announcements. Â We talk about the game quite a bit and then get into a discussion of Jedi Fallen Order which we missed from last week. From there we talk Magic the Gathering Arena and how Kodra is finally playing Standard. Â We also talk about doing some direct Duels and the current Magnificent Momir format. Finally a discussion about Pagan Online that devolves into a discussion about upcoming ARPGs in general.
If you have been reading this blog over the last few days you will know that I have been delving into Grim Dawn. At this point I believe I am 43 and after some advice that I received checked the Veteran box. I am not entirely sure what this does apart from seemingly increase the rate of named mobs spawning, and as a result increase your chance for good loot in the process. More or less it reminds me of the difference between Normal and Hard in Diablo 3, where you can pretty much instantly bump up to Hard and just go on with your life without much stress. It appears the other difficulty ranks do not unlock until later… I am assuming either associated with you hitting level cap or you finishing the main story.
I have officially been playing long enough that I have started trying to venture out and see what sort of community surrounds this game. For a largely single player focused experience… I was not expecting much. The steam forums were not exactly a great resource, but then again they never. However exploring further it appears that there is a fairly active scene supporting this game, so I thought I would spend some time this morning going into some of the resources I have found. The at a glance takeaway seems to be that a lot of the same sort of folks that supported Diablo 2 and Diablo 3… are supporting this game.
GrimCalc
This is the very first Grim Dawn resource that I stumbled across, because several build guides were linking to specs designed using it. Ultimately it is at its core a spec generation tool that allows you to fiddle with your talent points and devotions… and then links to a bunch of other resources not necessarily hosted on the same site. I thought it was pretty great and exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for. Unfortunately when you dip down into the build compendium, instead of having something more programmatic and searchable it links you to a forum post with a bunch of popular builds.
This was linked to off of GrimCalc and appears to be a site that maintains checklists that you can create for your various characters to make sure you have hit certain objectives. At this point I don’t really know enough about the game to understand this, and as such I have not spent much time exploring it but I thought it was worth noting.
Then in my journeys I stumbled across Grim Tools which appears to be the WoWHead of Grim Dawn websites. Effectively it does everything that the previously two links do… but adds a bunch more functionality as well. It of course has a robust build calculator that you can see above that not only manages Talents and Devotions but also drills into possible item builds. On top of that it has a database for all of the Items, Monsters and Pets… their own version of the Checklist Functionality and a World Map.
This later functionality was ultimately what drew me to the site. I was searching to try and find a good map that shows all of the world and stumbled across this application instead. Now given the limited area that I have cleared I had already thought that Grim Dawn was a really big game. However based on this map it seems that I have not come close to seeing the full scope of it. What is weird also is that as I go up through new areas… it appears like the areas themselves are getting much bigger in scale. What I find really impressive about this game is that legitimately you can walk from one end to another and the zones actually connect and synchronize without having to do any hand waving teleportation magic. This is something that Diablo 3 completely fails at with each act representing a disconnected island from the whole.
Another interesting throwback with this game is the fact that it has official forums… and they really are a hub of information about the game. So many modern games have all but completely abandoned this concept, pushing all of the moderation duty to fan managed Reddits and the like. However Grim Dawn has what appears to be a very thriving forum culture where folks congregate to talk about the finer points of gameplay. All in all it does not appear to be super flamey either.
Normally I am super leery of anything that advertises specifically that it is “Not a Political Correct Reddit”. This usually means that a given reddit has very specific political leanings of its own. However with that caveat it does not appear to be a bad place to find information. Overall the threads I’ve read up to this point have been largely positive, and quite frankly I have not really seen much that made me cringe. That said I purposefully sorted it towards the bottom of the list because Reddit is not always going to be the most useful place in the world… and I have seen subs turn on a dime when something shifts in the game. Still worth knowing about, and I suggest that you use the “Old” reddit for this one given that they have done nothing to update it for the modern interface.
Are you a Grim Dawn player, and is there a major resource that I completely missed in this list? Let me know about it. I purposefully excluded Graceful Dusk because it wasn’t nearly as good of an interface as GrimTools and didn’t appear to be as updated. If you want to try custom versions of Grim Dawn, the game supports modding and this thread on the forums appears to be the best resource for grabbing those. Finally there is a Discord server community if you are so included for that sort of thing.
The only negative is that I found out this morning that running in Windows Borderless mode causes you to get some really fucked up screenshots. The above image is an example of this where it appears to be capturing only the tiniest square of the upper left hand corner of the screen where I would assume the 0/0 coordinators are located. This means that pretty much all of the cool screenshots that I thought I was getting over the weekend wound up to be duds, and I had to scramble around this morning to take a handful of relevant shots for the purpose of this blog post.
The big problem with Grim Dawn is it never seems to give you a firm boundary between acts, so it is very hard to track exactly where you are in the progression of the main story. As far as I can tell I am firmly in the middle of Act 3 and have managed to get my way to another large town called Homestead which appears to have everything that Devil’s Crossing has except maybe the Illusionist. I am now questing for a group of Inquisitors called the Black Legion that is now sending me out into the wastes to kill stuff. I like the look of Homestead a lot, but it is somewhat of a pain to navigate given its multiple levels and the fact that this game sometimes has trouble with ramps. Ultimately you have to take any sort of a subtle ramp or rise very slowly or you just keep hopping right back of it.
The only real negative take away from the weekend is the fact that Multiplayer is not as easy as Diablo 3. Even then there doesn’t really appear to be any multiplayer activity to do like Adventure mode and it would simply be either me joining someone elses game in progress or them joining mine. The deal breaker however is the fact that both players theoretically have to own the same set of expansions in order for it to work. I slowly picked up expansion content for this game as it was released and ultimately went on sale… and as such I have everything available. So it would take someone paying the $24.99 for the base game, and then an additional $39.97 for all of the DLC content to catch up to the level my client is so we could play games together.
As a result this is largely going to be a single player game for me, but I still feel like this is the real heir to the Diablo 2 crown. It is a happy medium between Diablo 3 and Path of Exile and feels just about right to actually go out and experience. What is most interesting about it is how well the story line plays out and who it is way more intelligible than that of Diablo 3. It actually has actions that make a difference on the world because in most of the quests you are given multiple paths to reach resolution. I am currently paying for my actions because the town I am visiting is apparently missing one NPC because I chose to enact my vengeance during the events of Act 2. Of all of the various NPCs I have chosen to take the combat route…. I am wondering which other ones will wind up making me miss something as a result.
Still a great game, still very much worth picking up. However given that this is a single player experience you can probably bide your time and pick it up when it hits a sale point favorable to you.
