Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about.
Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:
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.
Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.
Cyberpunk 2077 – PC
While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.
Diablo III – PC
I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.
Fallout 76 – PC
Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.
New World – PC
If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.
Path of Exile – PC
I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.
Torchlight Infinite – PC and Android
I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.
Tower of Fantasy – PC
I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.
World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC
I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again.
As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.
NDA Game – PC
Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out.
The post Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! It is another day and another time I am posting my login screen to New World as a way of marking progress. I cannot fully put into words how much experience you gain in this game as compared to the way it was at release. I remember clearly that I essentially had to bounce from town to town grinding out objectives on the town boards in order to push my level bar forward. Now instead I am 53 having finished Monarch’s Bluff, Windsward, Everfall, and Brightwood… with over half the zones in the game still out there and loaded up with quests. My intent is to do them all in order to remove the markers from my map, and also soak up all of that “free” gold. The quests are worth a lot more of it than they were in the beginning as well. I’m currently sitting somewhere near close to 10,000 coins and still have so many more zones that I have yet to even visit.
My very short-term goal is to visit Restless Shore and Mourningdale, so that I can open up banks in those territories as well. At the moment I have been in questing mode, but while journeying across the map I am picking up every rare resource I can get my hands on. For the most part, I am just dumping these in the various storage sheds in the territories I have already opened. At some point, I am going to have a grand craft-a-thon to see how far I can push my skills up to using this stockpile. I posted this screenshot largely to show how full the various banks are. At one point last night I crafted up over 1100 Iron ingots for example to compress some of the space. As far as questing goes I am currently working my way through Cutlass Keys, which is chock full of uncontested materials since no one seems to go down there much.
In other news, Themiscyra is open for business once again if any of you were hoping to join us there. There seems to be a bug happening right now with company invites where they are taking a significant amount of time to resolve. They do eventually go through and I have been getting folks invited as I can. If you are looking for an invite to our nonsense throw Belglaive a friend invite as that is my character on the server. Transfers work as well because yesterday we had a few folks do just that. I really should have timed it better so that I could maybe catch someone transferring off of Valhalla and smuggle some gold over to me on Themiscyra. I sincerely doubt I will be returning to my Valhalla character because I am already pretty damned attached to this one.
We are once again Syndicate because purple is a good color, and I would rather be team science/magic than team religion or military. If you are hoping to join up with the company, you will need to make sure you choose Syndicate as your faction when you go through the series of quests in Everfall. That is one point of frustration with the new flow of quests, which is that it takes forever for you to choose your faction. Previously this happened around level 8 and I could speed clear my way through to the faction choice in about 15 minutes. Now, this takes place after you have cleared the first zone and are well into the second zone. I didn’t get my faction as a result until I was well into my 30s. This is a seemingly long time for folks to be hanging out in limbo waiting for a guild invite. In my opinion, guilds/clans are something that you should be able to do immediately in a game.
As far as progression goes, my proudest achievement of late is that I can now officially start harvesting Orichalcum. I even managed to get my first piece of void ore, and I believe I will need five more in order to eventually craft a full set of voidbent armor. This is one of my long-tailed achievements for this re-roll is to get back to my cool-looking armor set. My lumbering is lagging the most, and I probably need to devote some time to catch it up so I can begin doing my full route of orichalcum and ironwood spawns. I am also lagging a bit on harvesting, but I am not terribly far behind there as Cutlass Keys has been terribly lucrative when it comes to silkweed. Though it would be nice to start stockpiling those red weeds as well as I find them.
Another thing of note is that you should probably pop by the in-game shop soon. There are a couple of canopic jars for your house that you can claim, and a set of Roman Vexillarius armor that you can snag for free. There is also a really slick set of armor called Fallen Spirit that can be farmed through 4 hours of watching a participating twitch channel. You might watch the twitch drops space as well because there is another event that will be happening soonish with the drop of the fresh start servers. Essentially teams of streamers are going to be completing specific objectives, and each one unlocks a unique set of drops for their viewers. I will probably give more detail as it is released but it should be even more unique appearances that are available.
I’ve been frustrated with New World and the decision process of Amazon Game Studios… but I wouldn’t keep playing it if I did not also love it deeply. There is just something about this world that lands for me. It nails so many things which is what makes the glaring issues so maddening. Weaver’s Fen may be one of my favorite MMORPG zones ever, and it really exudes this foreboding nature. New World does dark and scary places so well, and when you get up to Shattered Mountain, it is maybe the closest game representation of something like Mordor I have experienced. The entire world feels dangerous and just roaming around out there sets me completely on edge. I am very happy that the experience curve and questing have been improved to maybe hook more players into sticking around a bit longer.
The post Themiscyra is Open appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week we had a full house with everyone on the podcast. With the way, life has been lately this has been a rare treasure. We start off with some talk about Grace’s experiences in Torchlight Infinite and Kaichu. Ash talks a bit about Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom and how the entire Wonder Boy series is nonsense. Thalen shares his thoughts about the launch of Marvel Snap. Kodra talks a bit about Mario and Rabbids Spark of Hope and how wrong it is that the Rabbids can now talk. From there we dive into the New World Re-Roll and how in spite of our best intentions we still could not get everyone on the same damned server. Finally, we wrap up with a little talk about the not-MyLittlePony fighting game called Them’s Fightin Herds.
Good Morning Friends! I thought I would give a bit of a progress update on my adventures on Themiscyra and the re-roll in New World. The server is still very much on lockdown from new players which is unfortunate, but it does mean that there appear to be zero problems actually getting in and playing. I crashed to the desktop around 9 pm last night and made it back into the server without any queue. Given that our peak last night was only around 2000 players, I fully expect the gates to open up at some point soon. I am accidentally level 36… and by that I mean I have mostly been focused on gathering and crafting and the levels have just sorta happened without me really intending them.
I did focus a bit on questing last night because I wanted to go ahead and choose a faction. Previously you could sort of rush the faction choice and get there by around level 8. That is no longer the case and you will not encounter factions at all until you are in the second zone which is Everfall. Since we went with Greysky Expedition previously, I chose the tried and true Greysky Armada for our re-roll adventures and once again went with Syndicate. Firstly team Science is better than team Religion or team Military as far as themes go, and purple is a pretty damned solid color. The huge benefit is that pretty much everything you get from Twitch drops… matches the faction theme. While green is my favorite color… in my experience since launch Marauder players tend to be the crudest of the New World community.
All of my efforts have been on pushing Armoring and Weaponsmithing up. I hit level 100 yesterday on Armoring and should be able to easily hit 100 on Weaponsmithing today. Similarly, I have reached the 100s on all of my gathering professions except Lumbering… which just means I need to grind that one out as it seems to take longer due to the resources being more plentiful. Nothing is better honestly than chopping down trees while watching a movie, series, or even a YouTube video. Gathering in this game is legitimately the best feeling version in any game, and I think that might be part of why I am so attached to the game.
The worst part about starting in Monarch’s Bluff is that it is weirdly horrible for all gathering professions. While there exist some harvest routes… none of them are terribly good and the zone is especially awful for hemp. It is at this point that I share my secret with you all, and the side benefit of having memorized so many resource spawns. Since the routes are in general awful… I suggest camping out at a location that has what you need. Outside Prydwen is a hut shown on the map above, and this one location has basically everything you are going to need just in small quantities. Along the ridge, there are three Iron nodes, surrounding the hut on either side are a half dozen hemp nodes, some herbs, and some carrots for harvesting, and then pathing around the hut in and out of the trees are low-level wolves. Essentially while I was working up my trades I lived here and would alternate between grabbing the resource spawns and hunting wolves for leather.
Eventually, as you need larger quantities of materials you will need to roam the world to find better spots. The area between Monarch’s Bluff and Windsward is notoriously good for hemp and has Bison that each harvest for a huge amount of leather. Similarly, there are better places for farming Iron and other resources that you might need, but that Hut will get you started on your tradeskill journey. I stumbled across a great sacrilege though yesterday, where someone was killing all of the Bison but not skinning a single body. So of course I followed along in their wake and raked in the benefit of all of that free leather. I guess there are folks out there who simply do not engage in trades at all… or else did not get the message the town board quests were no longer lucrative.
Things are about to slow down for me significantly now that I am fighting for heavily contested resource spawns. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fat stack of cash in order to bankroll my tradeskill leveling, so instead, I am going to have to rely on my knowledge of resource spawn locations to get what I need. This means that I need to migrate out of the starter zones and up into the higher areas to start farming nodes as they spawn. I have my trade secret and ideas about where I am heading next. I do know that I am going to still need so much iron in order to progress but that is at least something I can get trivially. Starmetal, Wyrdwood, and Silkweed are my next major targets, and while I know a ton of spawn locations… I figure the longer I wait the more contention there will be.
My long-term goal for this adventure is to get Armoring to 200 and Weaponsmithing to 200. If I can do that and then craft myself a new set of Voidbent armor, I will have felt like I have replaced the progress that I made on my original character. I am having a heck of a lot more fun on this adventure than I did tooling around on my “main” over on Valhalla. It feels good knowing I have so much of the game ahead of me and can do things right this time… as opposed to a lot of the mistakes I made the first time. It feels like everything is so much easier to do as well, and while I know I have a grind ahead of me… it is so much less of a grind than I have already been through getting armoring to 200 the first time. That said other professions seem much worse to level like Cooking and Arcana because the easy “hacks” which involved gathering a ton of very cheap materials no longer seem to make a dent.
I get that it probably seems like nonsense that I am sitting at 36 already, given that the patch dropped late Tuesday afternoon. I think instead it is just a testament to how much faster the early game goes than it did previously. If you are interested in joining in this nonsense, you might watch my twitter as I will be announcing when the server opens again.
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