Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We are down a Grace this week, but carry forward with a handful of topics. Bel talks about Diablo IV Season 10 after having sat out for a few seasons. The game is in a pretty good state now. Bel also goes on a tirade about how much he dislikes the builder/spender architecture in ARPGs and how you usually evolve your build to NEVER hit the builder. Tam, Kodra, and Ash offer their own rebuttals. From there, we spend most of the show talking about Hades 2, which has been released this week into its full 1.0 version with some significant changes. We wrap the last few minutes of the show talking about a few other roguelikes that released recently, namely Wander Stars and Aethermancer.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, we have a second opinion of Destiny Rising to offset Bel’s fanaticism… and Grace doubles down on pretty much everything that has been said to this point. From there, Ash talks a bit about Alabaster Dawn, which currently has a demo available. Grace discusses her further adventures in idle gaming, this time with Cast N Chill. Bel talks a bit about what is ultimately a Gibsonian Transhumanism masterpiece in the Pantheon animated series. Ash dives into the Digimon Time Stranger demo and expects it to be his monster collection game of the year when it eventually comes out. Hades 2 finally releases fully this week, and we are looking forward to it greatly. Bel talks a bit about further adventures in Guild Wars 2 fractals, and Tam and Thalen share their thoughts about Tiny Book Shop. Grace discusses briefly that Deeprock Galactic Survivor has released its 1.0 version, and then we dive into a bit of a meatier topic, as Kodra, Tam, and Thalen have all hit 100% in Silksong.
I spent my night like so many gamers did while trying to maintain a connection to the Game Awards stream on both Steam.tv and Twitch.tv so I could earn potential rewards in both locations. I think everyone was out chasing the possibility of winning a Steam Deck, and it seems as though maybe Valve had some technical difficulties with this giveaway because about 20 minutes into the show they finally seemed to start announcing the winners. I did not win a Steam Deck which is probably a good thing because I already have one… but I promise it would have gone to a good home if I did end up with a second one. Here is hoping someone out there that I know actually managed to snag one.
We all know we tune into “The Game Awards” for the cavalcade of trailers because the rewards themselves are largely inconsequential. They will feature some esports people you have never heard of and a bunch of games that you didn’t play… with a single AAA game winning almost every single award. This year I thought it was going to be all about Elden Ring but it seems that God of War Ragnarok was the main character of the evening. What was significantly different this year however is how I commented about what I was seeing. Normally speaking on a game show like this I would have Twitter open and keep a running sequence of commentary going along with all of my other friends doing the same thing. Since I am no longer on Twitter however a few of us opted for something different.
I spent a delightful evening hanging out with Arkenor, Scopique, and Tipa as we attempted to all stay in synch while hanging out on voice chat while watching the show. It did not work as planned. The original goal was to have everyone tune in to discord which would in theory rebroadcast the same stream at the same time to all of us so we would be able to comment on the same things. What ended up happening instead is that the rebroadcast was wigging out for a few people, which lead some of us to be watching YouTube, others on Twitch, and myself trying to keep tabs on the Steam version of the broadcast. This caused some hilariously out-of-sequence comment moments, but in spite of all of that, it was a heck of a lot of fun. This is definitely the most enjoyable way to watch a big corporate games presentation.
There were way too many things covered to talk about in a blog post, so here are some of my rapid-fire comments about the things that really stood out to me on a personal level.
Dead Cells Return to Castlevania
You had me at Castlevania. I enjoy Dead Cells but have not played it anywhere near as much as I should. Once this DLC drops I will do my best to remedy this failure. I have so many fond memories of the Belmonts, and Alucard, and count Symphony of the Night as my one true favorite game of all time. There was no way I was not going t o play this.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
This looks really interesting. It gives me deep Witcher vibes as maybe a more spiritualist/druidic take on that franchise. The trailer definitely piqued my interest enough to wishlist this. My hope is it feels like the big open-world witcher nonsense that I love so much. It definitely seems like the sort of game I would go in for.
Hellboy: Web of Wyrd
Scopique and I were talking about this during the show, but we did not realize that we had apparently not gotten a Hellboy game before now. This is apparently not true and that there were two games previously… one in 2000 and one in 2004 but I remember the existence of neither. What impressed me about this game particularly is how closely it seemed to replicate the unique art stylings of Mike Mignola. I love Hellboy and more particularly I love the Hellboy comics. I will be watching this game closely.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor
I don’t have this problem when I am playing the game but in person… I cannot see Cameron Monaghan as anything other than his character from Shameless which is a hilarious show if you have never watched it. I loved Jedi Fallen Order so this is absolutely going to be a “day one drop everything else” type game for me. I will be picking it up on the PC and I will be ignoring again the warnings against playing with a keyboard and mouse because that control scheme greatly improved my enjoyment of the first title. I will also be playing this on a low difficulty because at that point it no longer feels like a “soulslike”.
Judas
Bioshock in Outer Space? Yes please, sign me the fuck up. Like if you had told me nothing else about this game but that elevator pitch you would have had me on board with it. I loved the Bioshock games and played the first two multiple times. There was something about Infinite that made me less interested in the replay. Regardless I am extremely interested in this game.
Dune Awakening
Okay, I love the Dune franchise and have been wanting to have a Dune-based MMORPG since I first started playing these games in the 2000s. There were a few rumored projects that went nowhere and now we have Funcom carrying this banner forward. Funcom is both the company behind Secret World that I loved and Conan that I had no interest in. I am hoping this does not end up being a forced PVP murder box and has a way in which I can play it in a purely PVE-focused nature. I am not super optimistic however because I am almost certain that faction lines will be drawn crossed the Great Houses of the Landsraad.
Hades II
I have to be honest, this reveals somewhat shocked me. When I saw Supergiant scroll across the screen I remember commenting to my friends that I wondered what genre they would be tackling this time. Basically, up until this point, each time Supergiant released a game it would dive into a new style of gameplay. Bastion was mostly a Zelda-like beat-em-up, Transistor was a strategic dungeon crawler, Pyre was a story-driven “sportsball” game, and Hades was maybe the purest version of the rogue-lite I had seen in a while. I guess Hades was just too popular not to warrant a direct sequel. I am on board for more Hades world from a different perspective, but also I am kinda hoping that the studio has gotten big enough to have folks also be working on another quirky venture into a new genre.
Death Stranding 2
This was my highlight of the evening without a doubt. I loved Death Stranding and I played it at a very specific moment in life, during the lockdowns of the pandemic… and as a result, the storyline felt deeply poignant. I want to know more about this world and it seems like we are going to get that. I became way the heck too attached to BB, which I know is a bit weird. I am just hoping we get a simultaneous release on PC and Console because I have no interest in trying to play this with a controller. It was excellent with a mouse and keyboard and I want more of that.
Reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton
The highlight of the night however was at the very end of the show, when a kid seemingly snuck up on stage along with the confused developers of FROM Software. This gave The Game Awards their “Soy Bomb” moment, so I guess they have officially arrived on the world’s stage. Essentially after the devs gave their comments, the kid sneaks up to the microphone and in a faux broken English accent he dedicates the award to his “reformed orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton”. According to Geoff Keighley, he was arrested… which I guess is a bit sad because it added a moment of true levity to an otherwise stuffy occasion. There is another twitter thread indicating he did something similar on Info Wars with a Free Taiwan message, but I have not been able to find a clip of whatever that was. The same thread also indicates that he had planned this ahead of time.
Did you watch The Game Awards? What were your highlights? Drop me a line below.
The post The Game Awards 2022 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I was realizing this morning just how completely out of date my blog side bar is when it comes to the games that I have been playing regularly. In theory I claim that this is my semi-monthly process of trueing up the sidebar so it represents the sorts of games that I am playing. What actually happens is that I go for large blocks of time without updating this and when that happens massive swings occur. For example the last one of these that I did was in October of 2020 and some stuff has changed. So here goes an attempt at maybe doing these regularly again for a bit. For those not already indoctrinated into the process I divide things up into a few categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
To Those Remaining
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
My sweet sweet Diablo 3, you are rarely ever gone from this list. There is even a new season starting this Friday and I am looking forward to going through the routine of the seasonal grind. This season has a bunch of changes to the game and as a result they sorta gave us a greatest hits collection of sets available through Haedrigs Gift. As a result I am looking at probably starting a Whirlrend Barbarian for this season because those are so stinking fun to play.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS5
I am going to be honest, I am leaving this one on the list more as an aspirational placement than a game I am truly actively playing. I boot it up from time to time and play through a few encounters and then put it to bed for a longer period of time. I hope to get back in and play it more intently because also while we have been spilling truth… I feel a little guilty that I am not really doing much with my PlayStation 5.
Hades – PC and Switch
This one retains its spot because it is still probably my go to “playing switch from bed” game. The pattern of play just fits spending a few minutes before falling asleep. I am not terribly good at it but I enjoy it mechanically and thematically. This is the only game I have played where I enjoy losing, because it means I am going to get some more story beats.
New World – PC
I am leaving this on the list for reasons of which I am contractually not at liberty to talk about. It comes out in August officially and I am looking forward to that release. I’ve never seen a game that has gone through quite so many changes during its late development cycle as this one. It is going to be interesting to see the state of this game at launch. I have quite a bit of faith in it.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, RG350, Retroid, Raspberry Pi 4
Still very much spending a chunk of my time playing games that I grew up with… that are now referred to as Retro games. Still feels really weird to be calling them Retro to be honest. Actually yesterday I literally just got an 8 gb Raspberry Pi 4 model in that I am going to be playing with. That is probably going to become my main emulation device for the short term for anything other than higher end stuff like Cemu that absolutely requires the power of my gaming PC.
To The New and Returning
Destiny 2 – PC
Putting this one back on the list because I am technically playing it again. I am nowhere near as engaged with it as I would like to be and I am not exactly certain why that is the case. From all accounts this is a really good season but I find myself just unable to get stuck into it very deeply. Since we are trueing things up it is in somewhat regular rotation so it is going to get a spot on the list.
The Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I am experiencing a massive renaissance of Elder Scrolls Online and it has rapidly become my primary game over the past month. While I am mostly leveling alts right now, I am going to return to the normal course of trying to quest my way through all of the content in the game and maybe just maybe be ready for the launch of the next expansion in June. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing because I have to make it through large blocks of content and I know I will become distracted by other games that spring up along the way.
Minecraft – PC Java Client
Another thing that happened since my previous update is that I have returned to Minecraft in a huge way. I spent a lot of time playing solo and even recorded a semi-daily YouTube series on my adventures. Now however I spend my time either popping between my own private Realms world or a closed server run by my friend Zeli. Not playing near as much as I was but I am still popping in and wandering around. There is a stronghold in the nether that I am clearing and trying to set up a dual blaze farm right now so I still have projects that I am plugging away at. Right now I am likely going to wait to re-engage heavily until the new caves update comes out and create a brand new world.
Outriders – PC
Outriders is the new looter shooter hotness that is shipping tomorrow officially. I played the hell out of the demo and now am looking forward to consuming this game peacefully. I am not really planning on playing it as my primary game because I am super engaged with Elder Scrolls right now, but I am absolutely going to slow grind it. The launch time is just really bad because it overlaps with a bunch of other things going on like the launch of a new Diablo 3 season.
Valheim – PC
Valheim is freaking great. If you do not already own this game you should pick it up because it is dirt cheap and one hell of a lot of fun. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium with this game at least until new content ships. I had been playing regularly on a server but I have mostly been playing lately on my solo world. When the hearth and home update ships, I might start a new world depending on how deep the changes go. I will likely always keep Beltopia around given that it is set up nicely for crafting and such.
To Those Departing
Genshin Impact – Android/PC
I have no real idea why I bounced the way that I have from this game. I think partially it might just be that I don’t love “maintenance gaming” where all I am really doing is dailies. However in this game that isn’t even true because they have released a ton of story content since I last played and I never can quite bring myself to come back and play it. There are a lot of things about this game that work so well and then a lot of things that just frustrate me. For example the fact that I feel like I don’t have a reasonable manner in which to level new characters and catch them up to my core party… means that I largely feel like I am stuck always using my core party. Maybe at some point I will return when it ships on the Switch but for now it is a distant memory.
World of Warcraft – PC
Shadowlands is a bad expansion filled with systems that I am not interested in engaging with. In fact I would probably say that Shadowlands is going to be up there with the worst expansions of all time. I talked about how frustrated I was with Battle for Azeroth, but at least that is an expansion that I actively enjoyed the leveling process. Shadowlands I barely made it to the level cap with one of my characters and couldn’t even manage to stomach a single zone on my alts. I am not exactly sure how things went off the rails in the manner that they did but for now at least I am done with the game. Like I have not talked about it a lot because in truth I am not even sure it is worth talking about it. I miss hanging out with my friends who play the game but I miss nothing about Shadowlands.
Ships Passing in the Night
Cyberpunk 2077 – PC
Unlike most of the internet I have nothing but love for this game. I apparently had a sufficient system to play it and lucked out on not encountering many bugs during my play through. As such I am actively craving more content for it, but throwing it on the “ships” list because I have more or less put the game aside for the moment. When DLC releases I will either play through the DLC on my current play through or start a brand new campaign. I hope the issues surrounding this game do not kill this franchise because I loved it deeply on so many different levels.
Dragon Age Inquisition – PC
Dragon Age Inquisition was one of those games that I had bounced off of so many times in the past and then suddenly was able to play happily. I have found with the hustle and bustle of the end of the year… I crave deep single player experiences. This is one of those games that I played during that period and had a blast. Looking forward to this story continuing.
Jedi Fallen Order – PC
When this game first released I tried playing it with a controller because it seemed like that was the proper way to play it. I bounced because the game is not terribly good at explaining when you should leave a planet. However over the holiday break I returned to the game and had a blast, this time playing with my more native control scheme of keyboard and mouse. Truly great game and great experience. If you have not played this game you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you like Star Wars even in the least bit.
Knights of the Old Republic 2 – PC
Another game that I have bounced off numerous times is Knights of the Old Republic 2 and for some reason over this break I managed to make my way through it. Like the game is a mess… there is no getting around that but it is a mess that I am happy to have experienced. There is a lot of interesting things going on in this game and knowing now that this released before Fallout New Vegas I can see some of the things that they expanded upon later and made work better in that game. Would I recommend it to someone else? Probably not, but I am still very happy to have experienced it myself.
Summary
The funny thing about this is that I just realized upon writing out this post… that my sidebar was never actually updated from the October edition meaning it was even more out of date than I realized. Now I will hopefully remember to do the thing and actually make the updates once I finish with this post. Here is to also maybe doing this at least once a quarter going forward… if not monthly.
The post Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
