Featuring: Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that weird time between holidays, and we are down about half of our folks for various reasons. We push forward and record a pretty focused show around a few topics. We start off discussing Q-Up, a game that effectively has a lot of things to say about League of Legends, and also discuss other games like Rabbit and Steel that are themselves commentaries on other games. From there, Kodra takes Bel to task about Path of Exile II, and mostly how the game seemingly has no interest in making sure you can beat Act 1 with any build and player experimentation. Thalen has been back in Warframe and attempts to recruit us all to the fold, and honestly… it is working. Lastly, we wrap the show with some discussion about the genre that evolved out of MMORPGs… where the games are far less massive, but still sort of feel like they are a multiplayer experience in spite of only focusing on a handful of players.
Topics Discussed:
Q-Up
Path of Exile II Still Uninterested in Experimentation
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was Labor Day here in the United States and since both myself and my friend Ace were off we hung out doing some multiplayer of a new rogue-like game. They had discovered this one and were having quite a bit of fun with it, and I opted to pick it up so we could test the multiplayer out. Essentially you are a diver and you are exploring underwater ruins filled with baddies. It is essentially a first person shooter with the ability to collect upgrades while in the ruins to tweak your weapon load-out. By default you start out with an auto cannon with two fire modes, one of which causes your weapon to overheat for short periods of time. You also have an ability slot which starts out by default with a bundle of explosives but can be upgraded over time to be other things. So far we have only unlocked the Turret as an option, but it seems like there are a few more that we have not unlocked yet.
Each level has a sequence of different monsters to fight, before moving through a gate to the next area which locks the door and spawns another set of baddies. As you delve further into the ruins you encounter different biomes. The first are essentially what looks to be an old temple filled with vaguely nautical themed robots. There are these dragonfly camera looking things that dive bomb you when they get low on health, and a fast moving robot that we lovingly refer to as the roomba that shoots towards you dealing damage if it hits you. There are more ape like creatures that jump on top of you and another that creates shock waves that you have to jump over. Essentially there are a bunch of different types of mobs that you have to deal with individually and it can get really hectic when it is all thrown at you at once. Occasionally there are group objectives like “stand on the plate” to fill a bar… which is massively challenging because it often puts you out in the open and you both have to be standing on it at the same time to get any progress.
Every few stages you encounter a mini-boss that has its own arena. This is the second boss that electrifies areas of the floor and also likes to hop directly on top of you. We faced him a few times but only beat him in a run where we both managed to get to the boss room with multiple stimpacks and also a bunch of complimentary power ups. The first boss got to the point where we could down it pretty easily, with the only real frustration being that we had to hide from a beam that shot out from the boss towards both of us at the same time. The only time things got really tricky is when we inadvertently ended up on the same side of the arena because so long as we could split the incoming mobs up between us it was pretty easy to deal with things. You have a double jump attack and a dash, which can be used to air dash… both of which make traversing the arenas interesting and are a godsend for avoiding attacks.
Killing a boss drops these things called Soul Fragments, which can then be spent on upgrades on a talent tree. The first points that I spent were on the ability to have more than one stimpack. After that I started pouring points into my basic weapon attack, because that seems to be the thing that I am using the most. When I got to the second tier of points they began costing two fragments per point. In theory you are building out your character and I do wonder how many points total you get to spend, or if this is just something that you can farm indefinitely. Like could you do runs of the first boss over and over and eventually chip away at improving your character? I essentially only played through the tutorial and then immediately started group play, so I will need to play some more of this solo to test out that theory.
At various places inside the ruins are static spawns for upgrades. For example the Engine Rifle is the default load out that you begin the game with but after beating the first boss you can find a shotgun. After being the second boss we found the turret to replace the grenades. Inside the ruins are various chests, both locked and unlocked, and I found a few weapon component upgrades in these. One of these for example changes my alt fire from a full auto minigun, to a single shot that knocks enemies back away from me… but deals a lot of damage with that single hit. I started using that as my secondary fire because it was super effective at dealing with the roombas, and was great for debuffing targets when you get certain upgrades.
One of the things that I really dig is that while there is a listing of all of the achievements that you have unlocked… there is also a physical room where you collect them all. It is like this museum of artifacts that you are bringing up from the depths and each one of them represents some objective that you completed. I figure this is going to look really cool once I have finished more than a handful of these. There were also bonus objectives that we found while completing some of the areas, like not getting hit for a certain number of arenas unlocked a bonus special chest. There are also keys that you can find that can unlock random chests and doors that lead to vendor rooms. Gold is a thing that you collect during your run and when you find a vendor you can buy additional upgrades.
We essentially made it to the second biome… but the bottom fell out at that point. We fought these giant frog like creatures and all of them were super annoying. There were frogs that were floating on a cloud of frog eggs… that flew around the arena healing things. There were grenadiers that would flood the area with bombs that you had to avoid, and others that fired off blow darts in a fan pattern that you essentially had to time a jump over. Given time we will probably get as used to these mechanics as we did the first biome, but it was around this point that Gracie demanded that I hold her… so we called the adventure. I had a heck of a lot of fun and honestly I want to see if I can wrangle two more players and see how the group mechanics feel with a full team. I am hoping that the stand on the plate mechanics are way less onerous when there are more than two players. Also resurrecting players would be easier if the mobs did not immediately swarm the one who was still alive.
The game is $25 on Steam and is a very competent shooter in its own right. If you are looking for something fun to play with friends, I highly suggest giving it a shot. The vibes are immaculate.
The post Delving Abyssus appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we have a sick Bel that is trying to hold on during the show and a very long-distance Kodra, but it all works out in the end. We start off with some discussion about Marvel reprinting the Godzilla comic run that has been out of print for decades. From there Bel and Grace talk a bit about some recent experiences with Enshrouded and playing it multiplayer. Bel also talks a bit about the endgame and its strengths and weaknesses. From there we talk quite a bit about Last Epoch and the reveal of the Falconer and the upcoming 1.0 release. We discuss our plans for the first “cycle” and how we seem to all be favoring the magic find faction. Lastly, we get into a discussion about how the spoiler-averse culture that we find ourselves in makes it very hard to discuss narrative games.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Last Epoch Multiplayer patch 0.9 and it was most certainly interesting. Shocking to no one that has ever experienced an MMO launch… there were problems. I attempted to create a character around noon when the servers first went online and encountered a litany of errors and gave up. Last night around 4 pm when I was attempting to log in, I kept encountering the above situation where it would try and load the character and then fail out with an error of “[LE-61] Failed to Matchmake” but have to hit some sort of time out before it returned me to the character select screen to try again. Around 5:30 my time, things had calmed down enough that I was actually able to log into the game as was my good friend Ace. From there we experienced a pretty hilarious night of weird bugs until I reached a point where I could no longer interact with NPCs… and we had to call it a night.
The above video is one that I snagged from this post on Reddit and uploaded to YouTube so that I could embed it. Unfortunately, it was uploaded directly to Reddit so please know I am not attempting to take credit for it. I absolutely encountered this same bug several times yesterday, and in truth, it seemed to be happening quite a bit for various skills. For example, if I used Lunge without a target, it would lock me in the movement animation while seemingly it waited for the command to time out. When I got shield charge, I was able to charge through walls and skip sections of the map…. because I am guessing my client, Ace’s client, and the server all had a disagreement on where exactly I was heading and where I successfully managed to go. The funniest thing though was when I would shield charge… and it would go super slow for a few seconds and then rapidly warp me to the final destination of the ability. When things got really bad towards the end of my session I started rubberbanding back to near Ace’s location because it was as though the server lost track of me.
Please note this is not me complaining, this is me regaling you with the experience we had last night. Ace and I were on discord laughing the entire time like we were drunk with joy. The folks I feel bad about though are the team over at Eleventh Hour Games. I am certain they did not get any sleep last night… most specifically MoxJet aka Judd (Mox) on Discord. He was in the chat when I disappeared last night and was back up this morning around 6 am, still answering questions… still being chill, responsive, and helpful. I remember when we were attempting to log in yesterday I was watching the chat for any signs of updates, and the chat was thrown into slow mode allowing one new message from each user every 5 minutes. Even then being throttled like it was… it was scrolling by faster than I could read it. I mean all multiplayer launches are at least somewhat traumatic, but I feel for the late nights the team is going to have over the coming days.
Last Epoch is legitimately overwhelmed by new players at the moment. If you look at the steam charts, as of writing this post Last Epoch is sitting in the 8th spot for top-selling games in the US and 12th Globally. Notice that Steam indicates that it is new to the list, which I believe means it has not appeared before on the top 100 list at all. This game went from a very niche title to being thrust into the mainstream literally overnight. I bought into the game in 2018 when it was a wildly different experience, and over time it has shifted from something I honestly did not enjoy much to being a legitimate contender for the Diablo/Path Of Exile throne. This is absolutely benefitting from the hype surrounding Path of Exile having a phenomenal Sanctum league, and Diablo IV waiting in the wings… but not quite ready for launch. It is probably even widely benefitted from Diablo II getting a remastered edition that has had its own traction among classic ARPG players. So while this is awesome for the future of Eleventh Hour Games as a company… it is going to be a bit of a rocky ride in the interim for that team.
For the moment since I spent so much time playing Necromancer in testing, I decided to try out a Sentinel build. This looked to be the sort of Righteous Fire gameplay I enjoy where you are nigh unkillable and just AOE everything around you to death. You can see the .85 build here on Last Epoch Tools, which I am adapting to fit .9, and for the most part, there are not significant enough differences to really cause challenges. I also plan on playing around with a Ritualist and Acolyte like I did in testing and Rogue is just stupid fun and arrives at a point of power way earlier than the other classes. I ran a bunch of things up on the test realm and I plan on doing the same over the coming weeks in online play. The game keeps your offline and online characters separate similar to how Wolcen did, so you have to make a choice of playing with friends or not ever playing with friends. I wish we could have at least played characters offline and then shifted to online play, but I get why they wanted to keep online play somewhat sacred.
Sadly I have no screenshots of me playing with Ace last night because quite honestly we were laughing too hard for me to think to take screenshots. We managed to run a few characters up to around level 17, and I plan on more or less holding my Sentinel where it is currently and resuming play together tonight. At first, we thought maybe there was some catch-up experience going on, but I think they just buffed the XP rates across the board whether or not you were grouped. The main thing we noticed is it felt like we were getting way more “Blue” and “Yellow” monsters than we would in a non-multiplayer map. The chat message indicates that the monster’s health is buffed but I think the changes maybe go deeper than that. It felt good to play with friends and did not feel like we were just stomping things without any challenge. I even died last night because I just did not get out of the bad fast enough. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I am hoping the servers calm down or stabilize as the team adds more resources.
I did not get anything that was necessarily set defining, and I probably traded more good items to Ace than I kept because I ended up getting a lot of +minion items on a build that does not care in the least about that. I did get Snowblind which is a somewhat universally good leveling item. Sadly I am not really going into elemental attacks at all, but maybe I will find some +cold weapons to make this do some work for me. I am also using Avarice Gloves which have synergy with elemental attacks. If I can lean in that direction a bit, those items should help me out a little bit. I had fun though and that is ultimately the real judge of a game launch. I think the Eleventh Hour Games team has a great product on their hands, and hopefully, they have the capital required to ramp up enough to stem the bleeding. They definitely have some work ahead of them because the testing did not hammer the servers anywhere near what happened last night. However, I think they are in a good place to move forward because it was at least playable.
Did you play Last Epoch last night? What were your experiences? Drop me a line below.
The post Hugged to Death appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
