Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This is ACTUALLY episode 501 and we have the entire crew. We start off talking about the Settle folks surviving what was effectively a category one hurricane and living without power for around 48 hours. From there Bel talks about finishing Dragon Age Veilguard and how the game has learned lessons from the Mass Effect 3 ending. Grace talks about their experiences with Enshrouded and starting the game from scratch. Thalen talks a bit about I am the Future and Ash shares his revisiting of N++ playing it co-op with friends. Lastly, we dive into the Path of Exile II Reveal Stream and all of the announcements surrounding the upcoming release of POE2 Early Access.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was an event from Grinding Gear Games that gave us the complete picture of what the Path of Exile 2 Early Access would look like. Essentially in two weeks, we are going to be able to play the game in a relatively finished state with a fully fleshed-out endgame. As far as ARPGs go… the king up to this point has been Blizzard with the Diablo series. GGG is gunning for that crown however and released a new opening cinematic for Path of Exile 2 that rivals some of the best. What is more, as an avid player of Path of Exile and its lore… I think I more or less know what a good deal of the elements that were introduced in the cinematic were. In fact, I have seen confirmation on at least one point… what the thing in the sphere was. I am not going to go into details on this however because I am hoping the story of the game will answer these questions for any players who are not lore fanatics.
More than that, the footage that we saw yesterday gives me hope that this is not an attempt at a soulslike. The previous footage was VERY slow and plodding… with what seemed to be unoptimized builds. Path of Exile is a game about player power and blasting through content… and this did not feel like that experience. However yesterday they released an updated gameplay trailer with what appears to be some optimized characters and while not nearly as fast as POE1… it felt like player power would not really be a problem. More than anything I was super interested in playing a largely shield-focused character that they showed off via the Warrior. The combat still feels chunky, but fluid, and I think it is going to be fun exploring the maps and finding all the hidden things. There are apparently hidden bosses scattered throughout the content that will unlock permanent upgrades for your character.
The presentation was roughly an hour and a half long and contained ZERO fluff. There are way too many things to talk about in a single post, so I am not even going to try. I highly suggest if you are interested either as an existing Path of Exile player or someone who has a middling interest in ARPGs and was going to give Path of Exile a shot with the second game… to spend the time and watch through the footage. Essentially POE2 is going to be a wildly different sort of game than Path of Exile has been up to this point, and probably that is for the best. There are a lot of mechanics that are going to be returning in one form or another, and even more that seem to be remixed combining multiple leagues worth of content from the first game into a single mechanic in the second.
Probably the single biggest change is how the Atlas of Worlds is going to work in POE2. If you’ve read this blog for a long while as I talk about my adventures in the game, you are probably familiar at least with the concept of Delve. Essentially it is an endless mine that scales both horizontally and vertically allowing you to effectively keep going forever… or at least to the maximum value of an int32. They are taking this endless concept and applying it to the Atlas of Worlds so that instead of collecting specific maps… you can just keep expanding out effectively forever and finding new content to run. Scattered throughout the map will be special nodes for bosses or other events as well as brand-new hideouts for you to find and conquer. This is going to radically change what the endgame is going to look like for players, and what “juicing” strategies are available. Essentially it seems like this is going to favor folks like me who are in team “Alch and Go” as opposed to folks who bought hundreds of copies of the same map and same scarabs and ran the same optimized strategy over and over.
I am pretty sure that my first character is going to be a Warrior and that I am going to go down the path of the Titan ascendancy. They introduced that there is a keystone called Giants Blood that is going to allow you to wield two-handed weapons in a single hand… so you can do the whole Titan Grip thing from World of Warcraft. My favorite version of this has always been the Two-Hander and Shield thing that you could do on the Crusader in Diablo III, and I will be attempting to recreate that feel with my Warrior. I already love Shield Charge and there was this attack that they kept doing during the footage called Stampede that looked amazing. If possible I am going to use something like Volcanic Fissure to mix in fire damage since I also have a deep affinity towards setting things on fire.
Other than the Warrior, I thought the Witch seemed really cool. I like that minions are going to be something that you do in addition to making actual attacks. The Blood Mage seemed really cool because I already love stacking as much health and regen as possible, and that ascendancy seemed like it would reward that significantly. It is going to be a bit weird that minions require spirit aka mana reservation in order to keep up and running, but it seems like Sceptres have been turned into the Minion weapon and will now provide a lot of spirit just for using them. The challenge is going to be balancing permanent minions taking up spirit reservation and defensive auras doing the same. My hope is all the health stacking of Blood Mage is going to offset the lack of defenses from auras.
The labyrinth appears to be gone, at least they did not show it in relation to unlocking ascendancies. Instead, you will have a choice between running the spiritual successor to Sanctum, or the spiritual successor to Ultimatum. For me, that choice is a no-brainer… I don’t particularly enjoy either mechanic but I would far rather deal with the Trial Master than never get hit. Every build that I create is designed to be tanky as hell, and able to soak damage… which is counter-intuitive to how Sanctum has worked where if you get hit… you lose a permanent stat that you cannot easily get back and when that stat goes to zero you fail. Ultimatum on the other hand is about being stupidly tanky and being able to deal with lots of incoming damage and souped-up monsters. Unfortunately, I think this will also mean that I might need to ascend later if I want to skip the “pseudo-sanctum”. I will give it a shot, but it is not my kind of gameplay.
All in all though… I am way more hyped about Path of Exile 2 than I have been at any other point. I had a lot of trepidation that they were going to take this too far toward the souls-like gameplay. It seems like that will not be the case. It seems like you can still revel in power fantasy and create super murder-y characters. I’m also really interested now to see where the story goes. Twenty years have passed since the previous game and I am wondering if our “exile” will play a role at all in the new story. I honestly wonder if the Ghost from the trailer is us since we unwittingly became the guardians of our world. The Elder, Shaper, and Sirius were all normal folks who transcended to godhood through external influences and I wonder if that is ultimately what happened to us as well after meddling in things we should not have meddled in.
If you are someone who has not played a lot of Path of Exile or someone who has not paid attention to the lore, then I highly suggest you check out KittenCatNoodle who have created a ton of lore deep dive videos.
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Good Morning Folks. After wrapping up Veilguard I have now uninstalled the game to free up space for whatever comes next and am back futzing around with Path of Exile. I wrapped up my second voidstone and I gotta say… I am somewhat impressed at how much better I am now at doing these first two. It gives me hope that maybe at some point in the future the last two will be a similar cakewalk. I managed to take both down without taking any deaths which I think is a first for me. Searing Exarch is way more dangerous to my specific build, but I find that I hate Eater of Worlds way more. It is the charging the spheres phase that annoys me because inevitably one of the spheres overlaps some of the other nonsense that happens in the arena. I also hate being on a timer… it causes me to freak out mentally. I have some baggage surrounding being timed that I have never quite gotten over.
I am struggling a bit to complete my Atlas of Worlds. At this point, I am at 99 of 115 and am completely out of maps to run. This means I need to chain run maps that I have already completed in the hope of getting something that I can actually run. I have a lighthouse that I do not have credit for, but when I corrupted the map it ended up shifting to include no-regen which my build cannot run. I’ve contemplated trying to run it without Righteous Fire turned on… but that is still always risky as hell. Admittedly there are some times I just fail to brain and realize I am halfway through a map and never actually turned on RF… but that is the exception rather than the rule. I am not sure what is up with Kirac but it seems like his inventory is not generating new maps nearly as often as I would expect him to. I’m also the only one playing in this league from our guild and as a result, there is no map sharing happening in the guild bank. Generally speaking, there are always one or two maps that Kodra gets for example that I had not seen, which helps these dry spells.
I have enough currency that I could just buy my way out of the hole, but the trade market is already pretty dead at this point during the event. There were a lot of folks who only played that first weekend, never to return again. Thankfully the Currency Exchange is still hopping and I can move items pretty easily. I’ve learned that Goddess fragments are a great way to make some gold since they are selling for around 25 chaos each right now. I have zero interest in running lab, and even if I do to quality up my gems I am going to breeze my way through one of the free ones instead of tackling uber lab. Though I have to admit after years of repetition… I don’t mind lab anywhere near as much as I used to. I can pretty much predict instinctively where the doors are going to be and can zip through them pretty quickly these days.
This morning the venerable Sir Gog released a video and in it is the above screenshot from GGG on Twitter. It seems that the minimum buy-in for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is going to be the $30 supporter pack that is likely to be released during the Twitch stream on Thursday. This is going to happen at 2 pm CST and will have Twitch drops enabled which is usually wings or a cloak or something similar. There was some talk about lifetime spenders getting in automatically but I have not seen any specifics surrounding that yet. Honestly, I was probably going to buy something from the upcoming yearly supporter pack anyways so this really isn’t too heinous as far as I am concerned. Path of Exile has earned every dime I have spent on it in a way that most games have not.
In another randomness, I watched the first episode of the HBO Dune Prophecy series last night and I have mixed opinions. I have basically come to accept that this current Dune franchise is going to have to be taken as its own thing. The first movie was mostly a good adaptation of the original source material, but that second movie veered off into left field at the last moments becoming its own unique universe. As such I am mostly assuming that this pre-history series is going to do its own thing. Admittedly while I read the Brian Herbert Houses Trilogy, I never went back and read any of the Machine Crusade stuff. Maybe this is drawing directly from that and I just do not realize it. Whatever the case there was a “superpower” shown at the end of this episode that I do not remember existing previously in the canon. So yeah… I will be watching this but also taking everything with a shaker of salt, because the current vision for this franchise is a bit different than the novels.
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Good Morning Folks. We had one of those weird early morning deliveries before I woke up, and I was too slow removing the box from the bar after unpacking it. As a result… Josie now lives here. I spent most of last night snuggling with this goober while Gracie was on my legs. Especially now that it is getting colder, as soon as I sit still for more than a few minutes I end up with a cat. I am perfectly okay with this reality because truth be told I could use snuggles. Mollie pretty much lives in my office and when I got upstairs this morning she was ready for attention and is now sitting beside me. I feel like there is a periodic cat tax that must be paid on this blog and you can never say I did not provide.
I had every intent to spend my evening continuing the process of unlocking maps and progressing my way through the atlas in Path of Exile. That did not happen, because we had an extended maintenance as they attempted to roll out their new account system. This did not go smoothly. Essentially the QA process did not notice that once they expanded the length of accounts… by adding a numerical bit on the end of them for differentiation purposes… it would then jam up the login process that was strictly limited to 27 characters. I greatly appreciate the level of transparency they gave us in this post, and apparently, they are going to make another run at it on Sunday/Monday. These are all requirements for the eventual start of the Path of Exile 2 Early Access next month.
Instead of playing Path of Exile, I fell back into Veilguard and thankfully quickly sorted out what I was doing the last time I played. I did a round of cleaning up companion missions and then played through the Arlathan Forest main story quest that I had been avoiding. This produced the cutscene that I was expecting where essentially I got prior notice that we were just about to reach the point of no return. I’ve always been thankful when a Bioware game gives me one of these not-subtle reminders that I better do anything I might want to do before going into a big world-state-changing sequence. Of course… immediately following this a whole new round of companion quests opened up which will keep me busy for another night or two.
In other news, Guild Wars 2 released this banger of a trailer coinciding with its release on the Epic Game Store. It feels weird that they are specifically launching on the EGS after having already launched on Steam, but hopefully, they are getting some of that sweet sweet Tim Sweeny payola for going through the effort. Regardless of how I feel about the EGS… this is a fucking amazing trailer. This is how they should have sold the game years ago. It really nails the high points of the game as it is today and if I was not already a player… this would have been the sort of thing that would have inspired me to give it a shot.
They also released the trailer for the next content drop called Godspawn. The big part of this that I need to start prepping for is doing dailies in order to build back up my Wizard Chore currency so that I can hopefully buy another legendary weapon box when the store refreshes on the 19th. I had fallen out of the habit of doing dailies, but I really should get back into that habit in the coming week. The currency builds up really freaking fast so I should be able to buy that box pretty quickly after its release. At this point, I have crafted four legendary weapons, and this content drop releases a new Legendary Spear which I am interested to see what that requires.
Other than that… I might be backpedaling on nuking my Twitter account. My friend Ashgar raised a valid point yesterday, and I have until the end of the month to decide one way or the other. Essentially over most of the last decade, I have used Twitter as my defacto home on the internet. As a result, my blog is littered with references to my Twitter account. This means that I need to sift through 3700 blog posts and their duplicates on AggroChat and replace all of those links… or just turn back on my account and lock it down in a state of dormancy. I am not sure which option I will go with yet. My twitter profile has enough search engine traction that it is not unlikely for someone to snag it and put annoying bullshit on it. Apparently, this happened to a bunch of artists when they left twitter and their accounts got snagged by crypto-scammers. This is not a thing I want associated with my name, even on a platform I have moved past.
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