looter shooter

Friends Save the Weekend

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Good Morning Folks! Sunday was amazing and helped rejuvenate my batteries quite a bit. Last week was fucking awful… full stop. Saturday was also sort of awful because I woke up and went to go get donuts like I always do… and my truck would not start. I was able to get it jumped but after a bunch of run around trying to get the battery and alternator tested, I wound up dropping it off at the shop next to our neighborhood and walking home. Sunday though… was phenomenal. Because of the generally shit week that I had, I missed out on running the raid fights on Tuesday night, and because Saturday was awful too… it got postponed to Sunday. This means that I got to hang out with Ace, Ash, and Thalen and have a generally amazing time doing all four raid fights… all of which were one-shots… though some of them were a bit on the rough side, and then unlock two expert dungeons for Thalen afterward. We need to do this thing that we did way more often, and maybe Sunday is a day that works for everyone. I was also able to complete all of the left side pieces of 710 normal raid gear, which means I am mostly after a few more pieces of jewelry. This is the first time since Heavensward that I have ever been current with my gear. That should tell you something about how good Dawntrail has been that it has managed to keep my interest and despite largely spending all of my time in Path of Exile, I am still returning at least once or twice a week to hang out with friends in Eorzea. I would love to do the Savage version of the raid fights, but I am not sure that is in the cards for me… since I am not sure I want to do them through Party Finder.
In other news, I watched the Borderlands Movie… in part to see if the wide panning of it by both fans and folks who know nothing about the series was warranted. It was. This is maybe the worst video game adaptation I have ever seen… and retroactively makes the Uwe Boll slop from the 2000s look better. Everything looks like Borderlands but feels way more like one of those high-budget live-action commercials that video games seem to love to film… and less like a cohesive movie experience. I feel like this was probably a film assembled in the editing room because there is a lot of voice-over exposition. In fact the movie opens with a solid ten to fifteen-minute plot vomit of extraneous details that don’t actually matter to the core story of “vault hunters want to find the vault”. Worse than all of that is the fact that everyone save for Jack Black seems to be phoning in their performance. No one seems like they want to be in this film or care at all about their character or what is going on. Tiny Tina is fine, and originally I thought we were just seeing the traditional child actor thing at work… but also this same actress played a perfectly cromulent young Ahsoka Tano…. so I am just guessing it was a bad script and bad direction. Is it a movie that is worth raging about and making the lives of those who created it hell? Absolutely not… and it is never okay to do that. However, you should probably not go out of your way to see this. The abomination that was the Monster Hunter movie was better than this. It was kind of cool to see Kevin Hart in a role where he was not the constant bumbling fool that was the brunt of everyone’s jokes however. Maybe he should do that more often.
Over in Path of Exile land I beat my first T17, and have now unlocked my sixth map device socket. It turns out that T17s are in fact totally reasonable… if you just so happen to spend a bunch of chaos orbs on rerolling them until you land on non-toxic modifiers. Like I can’t say that they are actually fun. I’ve done two now successfully and I did not enjoy fighting either boss at the end of them. I could see maybe running the mapping portion for fun, and skipping the boss… but then again… maybe it is just better to sell them. I can easily get 70 Chaos for a single t17 map… and there is no way in hell I am going to get 70 Chaos worth of loot or enjoyment out of running them myself. I still think T17s are just a “not for me” mechanic because I am all about zooming around and blowing shit up, and for the moment they get in the way of me doing that. I am happy I was able to get my map device slot without buying a carry, but also I doubt I will be doing any more of these.
I spent a good chunk of my available Divines on an Oriath’s End flask. This will be the second league in a row that I have used this item and while it isn’t necessarily revolutionary it does make up for not running maven boots anymore. Basically, I am already all about exploding things with Hinekora, Death’s Fury and this just adds an additional layer of explosions when I charge into packs. Usually, if a map boss spawns in a room with a lot of adds I can charge in and one-shot the boss with all of the subsequent explosions that are triggered. It is a bit of an extravagant expense given I had to pay ten divine orbs for it… but it also feels good when it triggers an entire room full of explosions. Last league was really the first league I invested a ton of effort into my Righteous Fire build after whatever it took to clear t16s and I gotta say this flask was probably my favorite addition. For as lauded as Mageblood is, it is actually sort of a boring option.
There is a challenge that requires you to have cleared 400 Depth in Delve, and for some reason on Saturday afternoon, I decided I was going to do this thing. At that point, I was sitting around 150ish depth and I thought it would be a quick jaunt down to 400. I was wrong. I am currently at around 300ish depth and it has taken me several days and several loads worth of Sulphite to get there. Now that I have set forth on this path… I guess I am going to do it. I’ve never been to 400 depth before and I might go all the way down to 500 while I am doing this thing. Basically, I am in the mode of trying to wrap up some challenges so I can get my totem pole because ultimately that has become my major goal for each league. I doubt I will finish as many challenges as I did last league, but it will be good to at least get another doodad for my hideout. Tomorrow my schedule is going to be fried. I am not even sure I will get a blog post out, or if I do… it will be tomorrow evening. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Mine started out like shit, but it is amazing how much hanging out with some friends can help to improve things. I’m hoping that we can make the whole Sunday raid day thing happen more often. The post Friends Save the Weekend appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Lamentation of Outriders

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been spending a bit of time over the last few days thinking about a game that could have been, but never really was… Outriders. I reinstalled it recently and it is still an enjoyable looter shooter experience, with its roots in the fundamentals of ARPG build diversity and design. It was the hoped Destiny Slayer that would come along and offer a more interesting gameplay experience. It had some connectivity issues out of the gate as often is the case with most new online games, but it recovered relatively quickly and offered a really enjoyable gameplay loop. Lets talk about some of the high points of the game.
First off it had a pretty freaking long story, at least compared to Destiny or any of its expansions. There was a lot of interesting gameplay wrapped up in that story as well and all of it was repeatable. It became commonplace to grind out your favorite story missions for loot in the endgame. While it told an exceptionally bleak tale that turned off some of my friends, it was a mechanically enjoyable experience from start to finish. It did a good job of easing you into combat and giving you progressively more difficult encounters as you learned the ropes of how to use your new powers. The male voice acting was less than amazing, but the female voice actor was pretty freaking great.
The class design and the powers that came with it were extremely fun. I spent most of my time playing the Devastator which uses Earth powers to “devastate” the enemies. My build of choice was to use Earthquake as an opening salvo, Tremor as a lifetap aura or a sort for everything fighting up against me, and Impale to lock down the biggest enemies while mopping up the weaker ones. The game had a talent point system that allowed you to really accentuate the abilities that you wanted to focus on, letting you lean into a specific gameplay style. For me it was all about being tanky and being able to take a lot of damage while dishing it back out in the form of elemental attacks. Other gameplay styles leaned into stealthy fast killers that flit across the battlefield or maybe being the best sniper you could possibly be. Classes had an identity and this was supported by custom gear sets and such making you feel like you were able to lean into a particular fantasy.
Then there were the weapons that not only looked cool but had some wild unique abilities on them. The craft system allowed you to replace any one node on your weapon with any other node you had unlocked to that point allowing you to craft some wild combinations. What I liked the most about this is that it was pretty easy for me to keep using the same sort of weapon over and over as I leveled through the game because I could keep bringing forward the attributes that I enjoyed the most. I imprint heavily on specific weapons in this sort of game and the fact that I could keep using them was huge for me. This is my big problem with a game like Halo where you end up having to spend most of your time using random trash weapons rather than the really good ones.
With later updates, there was a full cosmetic system that allowed you to swap up what your character looked like. This included weapons appearance swaps so if you had a specific loadout that you needed for your build, but you really liked the look of another weapon you could change that up and run around with whatever you liked. I personally with with a cowboy thing going on with a duster and everything. I think more than anything I appreciated how well the game played and how all of the cosmetics were unlocked through playing the campaign and for completing achievements. That said this is absolutely a game I would have happily paid for microtransactions in similar to how I happily pay for them in Path of Exile.
Now let’s talk about the downfall of Outriders. Prior to the launch of the game, the two biggest talking points were that it would have zero microtransactions and was “Not A Live-Service” which is a weird message for a game that required online connectivity and also was being touted as something that could compete with Destiny. Looter Shooters need content updates to keep bringing players back. You can look at the SteamCharts for Destiny or even The Division and see that there is a pattern. When new content is added to the game, players come back… there is a surge in player numbers and a slow drop off in numbers as players feel like they have gotten their fill and move on to other games. This is how this sort of game survives. Path of Exile has quite possibly the most predictable pattern each time a new league launches, there is a spike, and then after a few months a valley.
The game as a whole was reviewed reasonably well considering there were active campaigns attempting to review bomb the game during the first few weeks of connectivity issues. There were a lot of publications that reviewed this as an overwhelmingly positive game. The biggest concern that kept being raised however was whether or not the game was going to be supported in the long term. The constant drum beak of “Not A Live-Service” set up a bit of a paradox. Players engage in these sorts of games now as live services, as experiences to be revisited every few months each time a new drip of content is released… but as this game is reportedly a “finished product” it was setting up a scenario where it just could not sustain the players necessary to make things like matchmaking function.
Ultimately that is what we saw when it came to concurrent player numbers. There was an impressive peak of just over 125k players, and then by month three a constant fall off down to around 1000 players just before the first major patch, and a bump back to around 10k shortly after that. Then again a a bleed of players down to 1000 players again before some pre-expansions patches that introduced new things to the game and another bump of around 12k players with the release of Worldslayer dropping down to under 1000 players starting in November 2022 and continuing in that state to this point where at the time of pulling these numbers there was a 24 peak of just over 300 players. Without the rhythm of a live service game, there just wasn’t anything to glue the players to this game.
I will always be wistful of what might have been with this game. This game is my new Hellgate London, a game that I greatly enjoyed… felt was far better than the other offerings that were available… but just was not supported and died an early death as a result. The main difference is that I can still revisit Outriders and enjoy it, and at least so far its corpse has not been crudely reanimated by a KMMO company. Outriders is still a damned fun game, but it would be a better game if people actually played it. I go through periods where I reinstall it, and play a bit of it… get my fill… and then wander off again because there is literally no reason to keep playing it after that point. The devs announced to the community/influencer groups in March 2023 that they were not releasing any more content for the game. So it is effectively a “dead” game at this point.
This is a case where you can get all of the fundamentals of this sort of game right, and release a technically proficient and at times phenomenal game experience but if you don’t have the follow-through support the game will flounder. The looter shooter and ARPG genres are all about nailing a release cadence and by publically announcing from the start that there was no “Live-Service” they sort of shot themselves in the foot. There are just certain genres that NEED to be a Live-Service with releases after the sale in order to survive. We’ve seen this backlash against that sort of game, but mostly in genres that did not need to have a cosmetic shop or carefully timed content drops. We are currently dealing with one of those games right now with the Suicide Squad, which everyone seems to wish was just another Arkham game… but instead attempted to be something akin to the Avengers.
Outriders though had everything aligned to be a great game that would grow over time… it had all of the hooks that could have supported a reasonable microtransaction shop in order to fund the development. Instead, it gets added to the list of games that should have worked… but never quite did. I will always lament the death of Anthem in a similar vein, but Outriders was way more technically competent than Anthem ever was and still could not quite make it. All of this said, if People Can Fly came out tomorrow and said that they were making an Outriders 2, and this time it would be given all the support that the first game deserved… I would be there and ready to go. That however is never going to happen because I think Square Enix has a bad taste in its mouth over how Outriders performed, and the IP lives in that murky territory of having too many cooks in the kitchen that would need to sign off on a sequel. Anyways! I will always have a special place in my heart for this game. If you’ve never played it, it is probably super cheap on every platform it was released on. It is worth a gander because it is doing a lot of interesting things. The post Lamentation of Outriders appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Molten Zoomy Lad

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So yesterday my good friend Ammo decided to take up residence on Gamepad.Club with so many of us that have moved there. This is particularly relevant to me because I have so many different profiles spread throughout so many different platforms that I have given her credit for the Avatar that I use most often. The thing is over the course of the last decade, Ammo has crafted for me a plethora of hand-drawn versions of “Belghast” from different games. There are so many of these that we have finally come to the point where I am retiring one. Above is the “Destiny Bel” that she crafted in 2017, prior to the launch of the game officially. It was assembled out of a set of armor that was at my time the favorite from what was available in the alpha and beta tests. Given that I mostly played a Bubble Titan in Destiny 1… I assumed that I would spend all of my time playing the sexy new Captain-America-style shield-throwing Void Titan. So I had her create a version of that with a simulacrum of my head… charging in motion.
Issue number one… I never spent any significant amount of time playing Void Titan. Mostly I never really liked the way the grenade options felt and the super was really bad for burn phases. Given that I never really did much in the way of proper group play in Destiny 2 apart from being carried through exactly one raid… I didn’t have much reason to run Void for Weapons of Light. Sunbreaker had both my favorite grenade and favorite super… so I largely spent most of my time playing that subclass. Then there was also the problem that after they started sunsetting content… and removing some of my favorite places from the game… I stopped playing Destiny altogether. It has felt weird to me that the character occupied such a prominent place in my blog banner, while I had zero plans to return to Destiny at any point in the future. Now watch that actually TALKING about it… will manifest a desire to start playing it again.
The thing is… I really still liked the motion of that character and how it rounded out the end of my string of characters. So it got me thinking about what I could use to replace it. For anyone who has not been around for all of the commissions, what you see in my masthead is my Lalafell from Final Fantasy XIV, my Hunter from Monster Hunter, and more importantly my Palico that is based on Kenzie… a cat that is sadly no longer with us but will always remain close to my heart. Then you have a version of my character from New World wearing the level 40-ish set of faction armor followed by my Necromancer in Reaper form from Guild Wars 2. Next up you have the only commission that I did not make… a version of my World of Warcraft warrior meets Twitter persona that my friend Tam Commissioned, with my PSO2 RaCAST looming behind. Lastly, before you get to Destiny, you have my Elder Scroll Online Imperial character wearing the armor set I almost always have on transmog. Then there are moogles sprinkled in throughout who stole my stuff.
It was around this time that I realized two things. Firstly… none of the characters that Ammo has drawn represent my constant addition to the ARPG genre. That part of my love for games is completely missing from my banner. Part of this is due to the fact that MOST ARPGs don’t exactly have a robust character creation system. A Diablo III Barbarian for example… looks like an old man with a diaper or a young woman with a diaper, and not much past that. Path of Exile while not giving you any control over your character model, does offer a bunch of cosmetic options that allow you to decorate them how you like. In that game, I also have a “zoomy” character in the form of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut I have now played for the last two leagues as my main. I spend most of my time ignited and shield charging through packs of mobs, and quite honestly… I feel like I love that design so much that I will probably create a version of it in every league from this point forward.
So I did what I always do and gathered up a bunch of screenshots and thrust them in Ammo’s direction and said “Here make this!”. This was a weird case because so much of this appearance is tied to one specific microtransaction pack in Path of Exile. Thankfully there is still a video showing off this pack in detail that I was able to supply to her as well. As she always does… she takes my inane ramblings and turns them into something functional. Over the last few weeks, she has been supplying me with sketches and updates… but honestly, she was on the right track with this one from the start. The only regret I have is that the scaled-down version that now resides as part of the masthead of the website does not necessarily do justice to all of the detail she put into this one.
So last night officially, I replaced “Destiny Bel” with “RF Bel” in the masthead. I think the placement works nicely. The only thing I wish I had now were some more small characters like the Moogles to patch over the transition of the left foot. At some point, I know for certain that I want her to draw me a Choya Pinata on a similar scale to the Moogles and maybe a Quaggan… but more specifically the one with a Turtle Shell for a hat. Huge thanks to Ammo for continuing to translate my madness into picture form. I think what I dig so much is that while there are stylistic differences throughout the years, they all feel like they belong together because they were all crafted by the same person. While I absolutely love my new Molten Lad, I do sorta think that the best of these will always be Necro Bel from GW2. It is the feathers that really go above and beyond with that one. I absolutely have the best-looking blog on the internet that very few people actually care about. The post Molten Zoomy Lad appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Anthem Demo Impressions

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Anthem Demo Impressions

This morning I am going to talk for a bit about the Anthem Demo that a good number of us participated in this weekend.  If you did not have access to the demo or one of the many friend codes that were floating around…  the truth is what you missed more than anything is a lot of frustration.  However the game that was buried under that layer of frustration was apparently good enough to keep us engaged and trying to log in over and over.  I want to talk a bit about my expectations for the game before going into it.  First off this comes from the pedigree of Bioware, so I expected a great world  with good character development above pretty much everything else.  Mass Effect was not a series known for its amazing gun-play, but instead the interesting things you encountered along the way.  My ultimate hope was that Anthem could be a game that was fun to the Destiny players, The Division players and the Warframe players and act as a unifying vehicle that was “a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll” and create an experience that felt familiar and enjoyable to all of them.  Essentially my hope was that it could be the game that folks rallied around in my community rather than having a group of us split loving Destiny and another group split loving Warframe.

Connection Issues

Anthem Demo Impressions

So lets get the bad stuff out of the way first.  This is a screen a saw a lot of this weekend… otherwise known as the 95% freeze.  The game would load fine into Fort Tarsus the social lobby, but as soon as I picked a mission and attempted to start it the screen would freeze with 5% of the loading bar to go and stay there indefinitely while consuming near 100% cpu and gpu.  Now the weird thing about this is…  I am used to these sorts of bugs happening on the PC version of games…  but it was apparently fairly ubiquitous across all three platforms the game is appearing on which leads me to think this is infrastructure related.  There are individuals however that seemed to be completely un-phased by it… so I am also wondering if there is a connection/location based component.  Whatever the case the only way to get past it was to go into Windows Task Manager and kill the Anthem process, and then upon loading back into the game you would be prompted to join the expedition already in progress…  at which point you could load into the mission.

Experience and Loot Issues

Anthem Demo Impressions

Last night I started being hit by a different bug, where I could not return to base from a Free Play mission.  This was remedied by killing with Task Manager and then when prompted to rejoin the mission…  saying no.  The only problem with this however is that in doing so I sacrificed all of the experience that I had gained while doing the mission.  This is the second major problem with Anthem…  everything in the game is considered to be a “match” and nothing is rewarded until you successfully complete said match.  That means if you get disconnected and for some reason cannot rejoin that session… you are going to loose out on all of the achievements and experience that you gained from that mission.  The only consolation prize here is that loot that you picked up seems to be independent of this annoying cycle, that said…  it isn’t ACTUAL loot until you have been through the exiting a mission screen to turn those generic loot indicators into physical items.  So I knew I had a few blue items in my inventory but had no clue what they were until I had joined another freeplay session…  which again required me to kill the game, relaunch and join the abandoned session…  before finally exiting out of a free play session successfully so I could acquire the stuff that I had looted in the previous rather length session.  This is some horrible nonsense…  loot should not live in this transitory state until you have successfully jumped through the right hoops… and also the exp you have gained should not be held hostage by buggy connection code.

Flight and Movement

Anthem Demo Impressions

Now we move to something that is both one of the biggest strengths of the game… and one of the biggest weaknesses if you happen to be playing with a Mouse and Keyboard.  Freedom of movement is a massive part of this game and it feels awesome to be running along and simply lift off into the skies flying towards your next objective.  I think the overheating mechanic does a good job of giving you a reason why you can’t simply fly around in GM mode like you effectively can as soon as you get a flying mount in an MMO.  It is cool that you can dive quickly down to cool yourself back off or fly through a waterfall to get the cooled buff to extend your flight time.  Those are all really great mechanics…  but the mouse and keyboard controls feel awful without a significant amount of tweaking.  Huge credit goes to my friend @_KateyLee for providing me a link to a post on the Mouse Sensitivity forums where they worked through a bunch of different configurations.  Ultimately just zeroing out all of the sliders related to flight and swim movement seemed to provide me a good baseline…  from there I will tweak things up when the real game launches until I reach the most comfortable setting for me personally.  However if you also felt like flying and swimming was a horrible experience…  you might just try dropping the sliders down to zero and seeing if that works for you too.

Gunplay

Anthem Demo Impressions

Another big part of a game like this is how the moment to moment gun-play feels…  and to this I can give the game a resounding “okay”.  It feels passable and quite honestly this game as a whole feels like they took the Multiplayer components of Mass Effect 3/Andromeda and built a brand new game around them.  I never really thought that any of the weapons in a Mass Effect game were terribly inspired feeling, but they got the job done and I guess that same admonition carries forward to Anthem.  I liked Assault Rifles and Shotguns in Mass Effect, so it is zero shock that my default loadout so far for Anthem is an Assault Rifle and a Shotgun.  I am hoping as we get into the wider game that we will start to see a greater breakout of weapons… because right now we have a couple of different variants of the weapon types but there is a general sameness to the way they feel.  The bar that I hold a game up to is Destiny, and the gun-play in Anthem is nowhere near as fluid or tight as that.  It however feels better than I remember Mass Effect Andromeda feeling…  which in itself felt a lot better than Mass Effect 3…  so baby steps?

Exploration

Anthem Demo Impressions

Where the game excels is in exploration…  the world while relatively small in the part we have actually seen…  feels massive because every inch of it seems to be peppered with things to explore.  While out in free play mode which is this games version of “patrol mode” I got a tip from my handler about activity happening in a certain area… that there was a shaper relic that needed silenced.  So I moved over to that area of the map and went through a sequence of fighting things and collecting orbs until I finally silenced the relic.  This awarded me a chest and a bunch of experience points, but also had the unexpected side effect of now opening up a new area of the world map which lead to the ruins that I am exploring in the above screenshot.  This eventually lead me to a boss fight where I took down an elemental titan, which again counted as a world event with its own rewards.  This is the sort of thing that happens in game is that one thing chains into another thing and another and means that the world feels extremely fluid and rewarding to explore.  Since I tend to spend most of my time in these games solo… this means I will have a rich experience that is unfettered by walling up anything interesting in the game behind group content.  Just in my short time playing I have encountered a ton of areas that would be thought of as Lost Sectors in Destiny terms, that are hidden behind a waterfall or at the bottom of a lake or quite honestly in plain sight as you happen to be zooming past it.  This game is exploration porn and the suit gives you enough tools to be able to get pretty much anywhere.

The Suits

Anthem Demo Impressions

Another huge positive of the game is that the Javelins all feel different.  In Destiny for the most part it is all about gun-play with your supers and abilities adding flavor to the experience…  which quite honestly the jumps being the biggest differentiation between the classes.  In Anthem the Ranger is effectively your Destiny style class with grenades and a super and a weird weapon ability…  mixed in with a wide range of weapons.  As a result I really really love the Ranger because it is what I was looking for in a game.  However the other classes are playing totally different games…  with the Colossus being sort of a Reinhardt shield tank that happens to have the heaviest weapons but pays a penalty in movement because of it and completely loses the over-shield in favor of a physical barricade.  The storm is legitimately a caster and will spend most of its time in the air casting elemental attacks down on opponents rather than spending a ton of time shooting the weapons.  The interceptor feels like Zero from Borderlands… and is a literal Ninja and moves and has attacks that feel completely appropriate for that sort of game style…  but has a massive penalty to the amount of harm it can soak up.  When you are running with a balanced party the game feels extremely cool as each of the abilities feed off of each other, and in turn they all feel completely reasonable when moving around solo as well…  but also sort of dictate a different way of approaching problems.

Fort Tarsus

Anthem Demo Impressions

Now we are going to loop back around to another negative.  While gorgeous as evidenced by this painting like screenshot from in game…  Fort Tarsus does not feel great to explore.  Now I realize a lot of the functionality was turned off completely during the demo… as we were constantly reminded any time we tried to interact with anything.  However shifting from third person suit mode to very slow first person human mode feels awkward and weird.  I mean I get what they were going for… they were trying to create a clear delineation between “mech mode” and “operator” mode.  The biggest problem that I tend to have is how freaking slow I move while running around without my suit.  The layout means that I am going to be traversing this location over and over as I do the functional things that are required to play the game…  which also means I am going to hear that same partial Bhangra synth loop over and over and over… side note if you stand there it doesn’t actually go anywhere and just keeps looping over the same little sample.  At a minimum I would like to see them give me a sprint option.

Characters and Story

Anthem Demo Impressions

The demo does not really give you a lot to go on.  You are essentially sent on what feels like a side mission to recover a relic and then deal with the ramifications of using this weird tech.  However the brief amount of time that we got to spend with characters, makes me extremely hopeful for how this game is going to feel as a whole.  I already care about Zoe the mechanic who keeps my Javelin running and has a casual back and forth about how we are ALL her favorites.  Matthias my Arcanist also seems like someone I am going to be perfectly fine getting to know better through the course of the missions.  The dialog itself seems to be a simple A or B set of answers…  or in Mass Effect terms… Paragon or Renegade.  However so far in the most simple of interactions…  Zoe at the forge for example seems to remember what I have said before and use it in later dialog so there is some manner of branching already in place for the few instances it has come up.  NPCs that seem to remember our past interactions is going to go a long ways to making me feel more engaged with the game world as a whole.  This was something that would have helped Destiny quite a bit… if the NPCs remembered our past adventures.

In Summary

Anthem Demo Impressions

As a whole I am really looking forward to playing Anthem legitimately, and I am booned that each of the AggroChat crew seemed to find some element or specific javelin that they really enjoyed.  I am hoping this very rough weekend helps them make the necessary tweaks for a successful launch.  Next weekend there is going to be another demo, but I think this time the floodgates are going to open a bit further.  I am going to hope that the various connection issues have been ironed out and that my tweaks to mouse settings continue to provide me a better than default experience.  If so…  I think Anthem is going to be a great experience.  That said I am preparing myself to weather the storm of a rough launch, and I have to give Bioware a lot of credit for taking to social media and Reddit early this weekend and trying to stay in constant communication as they were working through the issues.  This scores me a lot of points that they were being open about the struggles, and in the grand scheme the fact that they are listening is going to win them points with the community as a whole.  Ultimately this isn’t going to be the game for everyone… and if you already bounced off this style of game then it probably isn’t going to be the one that causes you to see the light.  However it does already appear to be welding the breach between the Destiny and Warframe factions of AggroChat, so I have hope that maybe it will be something we can all play together.

So if you took the time to play it this weekend, what were your thoughts?  I would love to hear them.