Good Morning Folks! This weekend I was all over the place when it came to gaming. First up I finished up leveling to 100, which completed the Gear Grinding Goals achievement. Hitting level 100 on a character is a weird place because you suddenly no longer care about taking deaths. Up until this point even when attempting to progress, there was always a subtle tension there in the background because losing experience feels bad in your late 90s. Getting to level 95 is trivial, and honestly it does not feel too terribly bad until level 98. However that level 98-100 stretch is pure tedium with you either needing a relatively immortal build, or a lot of luck to keep from taking a stray death. Weirdly Delve ends up being one of the safer players to level because there is a sweet spot in the 150-200 depth where the incoming damage is not too bad, but the experience gained is pretty stable. Dipping back into maps to fill back up your sulphite however… that is where the danger arrives.
I also completed the achievement for crafting using one of every Settlers of Kalguur rune allowing me to knock out 34 of 40 and matching what I got to last league. This means I have another tall totem pole in my hideout to go along with all of my stubby ones. Essentially I have been earning a Totem every league since Sanctum. I could probably push forward with trying to knock out 40 of 40… but I just have not had that level of drive. It also involves doing a lot of bossing content that I do not necessarily enjoy. I could in theory start running my mappers more often and if they get abducted there might be a chance of knocking out one of those objectives and getting achievement 35 for the league. I am pretty happy with where I am, and honestly… I was happy with 32 of 40 until I came back for the Phrecia event and thrived in it.
With no fear of death I did a few t17 maps, and a few other sundry things that I had been avoiding due to the danger of taking an experience loss. However I feel like I am probably “done” with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. Sure there are a lot of things I could tweak on it… and swap out various gear pieces for even better versions. However I feel like I am pretty happy with where I got and don’t have ton of drive to push it much further. That is the irony with dinging level 100… is that I also lose a lot of my drive to keep going. I am not enough of an “Economy Andy” to really appreciate trading for trades sake. For me it has always a means to an end, that I want to trade items to get currency to be able to do more things. However once I lose the push of levels… I just sort of lose my drive to keep playing that character.
Instead I spent a chunk of my weekend playing other games. On Saturday I dove into Atomfall, which is a Bethesda game by a company other than Bethesda. We saw this with Avowed where they created a perfectly cromulent Elder Scrolls game set in a different universe. However that made a lot of since given that it was from Obsidian, a company with a long history of working with Bethesda on games like Fallout New Vegas. Atomfall however comes from Rebellion games, the folks behind the Zombie Army and Sniper Elite series… and they do a shockingly good job of replicating the feel of a Fallout game. The setup is considerably different… instead of a Nuclear war decimating the planet, you are inside an exclusion zone where things are going haywire. However the trappings are much the same… roaming gangs of very British outlaws and spore infected Ghoul like Ferals both fill the roles of the normal antagonists of a Fallout title.
There are a lot of things that work differently. For example it is not nearly as “If you can see it, you can go there” as the Bethesda titles… but I also don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Everything that exists that you can travel to… exists for a reason, and as a result there are way fewer barren stretches with no reason for existing. There are similar crafting systems, but items break down into raw resources as soon as you loot them, rather than having to dump through the hoops of needing to salvage them as a separate step. Effectively… both Avowed and now Atomfall feel like Bethesda games that have been evolved past some of the busywork that some systems designer thought was really cool. The spirit of the game exists and it is close enough for me to effectively lump them into the broader Bethesda-like genre.
Sunday on a totally different whim I started playing Hero Siege, which feels very much like a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 more than anything else. It is doing some of the same things that Chronicon does, but feels much more polished. I started playing a Viking and have gone all in on this big earthquake smash thingy. So far it seems to be doing a good job of stunning enemies and also whitting down large groups because with a twohander I can hit everything at once. Large packs of purely ranged mobs though seem to be the bane of my existence, and as a result I have had to learn to dance around a bit in order to deal with them. I want to try this with a controller, because it seems like it would be the ideal game for SteamDeck. All in all though I am pretty pleased with what I have played of it.
However by the time Sunday evening rolled around… my brain worms had convinced me that rolling a brand new character in the Legacy of Phrecia event was a good idea. There is something about the fleeting nature of this event and having entirely new acendancy classes that we may never see again. As such I decided to roll a Shadow which I then turned into a Surfcaster and am going all in on Storm Brand of Indecision. For now I am largely patterning my build off this character that is sitting at level 99. Given that all of the brand nodes are nowhere near the Shadow starting position… most of my talents have just travelled across the tree to unlock the meat of what I needed. Now that I have all of those brand nodes and a few elemental nodes… I am now going back and fleshing out the build with what I pathed through previously. I have a six link Shavronne’s Wrapping sitting in my bank wanting on my 60s when I can actually equip it. The build I am loosely following uses Melding of the Flesh to achieve 90% elemental resistance to all, which is something I have never played with before and am interested in seeing it work.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down our West Coast contingent this week but carried forth with a relatively short show. Bel talks a bit about the Anti Sanctum Alliance and how it seems to have actually made an impact at least in the pricing of Sanctum Tomes in the Legacy of Phrecia event. From there Thalen shares his experiences with The Roottrees Are Dead, which is a logic puzzle spiritual successor to games like Return of the Obra Dinn. We move on to talking a bit about Monster Hunter Wilds and our early experiences so far. We’ve needed some Palico shenanigans to help us cope with our present dystopia. Last week we got a new feature trailer for the upcoming Last Epoch Cycle 2 coming April 2nd. We spend a bit of time talking about what has been revealed for the new features and how it appears like the long wait has been worth it.
Good Morning Folks! Last week I dipped my toes into Avowed, the new Elder-Scrolls-Like game from Obsidian… the studio that brought you Fallout New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, The Outer Worlds… and probably my favorite of the batch Tyranny which is criminally underrated. I was going to always play this game. Obsidian is a company known for some really big ideas but also quite a bit of jank that comes along with that. So far Avowed feels like a graduation to releasing a polished product on day one, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this game has a fairly limited scope. Essentially it is Elder Scrolls without all of the simulationalist stuff that sometimes gets in the way of playing the game.
It isn’t going to break any boundaries, but instead provides a competent semi-open-world adventure where you explore the setting of the Pillars of Eternity universe in a very familiar Bethesda-like package. The thing is however it sands off the rough edges and provides something a bit more straight forward and to the point. You can send gear to your camp from your inventory at any time as well as being able to break down items for resources in the field. There is an encumbrance system, but the only things that have any weight are your chest armor and your weapons… both of which you can manage pretty easily by the salvage and send to camp systems. Even when you are fully encumbered… you can still fast travel to the nearest camp or way point. Essentially Avowed comes out of the box configured in the manner that I spent hours modding Bethesda games to behave like.
If something exists and is lootable in the world… it is something that is worth looting. There are no cabinets full of empty bottles… that really serve no purpose rather than to potentially get a single coin from lugging them to a vendor. Vendors also do not have limited gold reserves so you do not have to play the game of selling to every vendor in a vicinity trying to empty your pack. Lockpicks exist, but they are simply a resource that is consumed and do not involve dealing with a fiddly mini-game… some of which are are just badly designed. My only real complaint is that lockpicks are rare enough that you will want to probably see if any vendors have them… because while they are super cheap… the bigger boxes consume three at a time to open.
Combat is pretty much what you would expect from an Elder Scrolls game, but I think it feels a bit more fluid and the ability upgrades a bit more enjoyable. I can charge into enemies which will break their ability to block attacks. I’m also a huge fan of when Fantasy games allow me to dual wield pistols which allow for an interesting game play of firing one hand at a time, while the other weapon is reloading. We are not going to talk about how impractical it is for you to be loading a pistol one-handed while you are firing the other pistol… but it is still extremely fun. Boss encounters are smart enough so that if you kill them while roaming the world, and you find a quest later asking you to kill that same thing… you just get to autocomplete the quest and get the rewards. Nacib for example is a spider in a dungeon near the start of the game… that later was a bounty mission allowing me to just get some fast credits when I finally found the bounty board.
I have no clue what the magic system feels like, because I am generally not a “finger wiggler” in these types of games… but I will say that when companions use those abilities it feels solid. Essentially you can let the companion AI do its own thing, or you can also specifically target a monster and pop open the action wheel and send a direct command for them to use one of their attacks. There are a number of environment puzzles in the game that involve freezing, shocking, or setting something on fire… and each of the companions can specifically fill one of these niches. There are also a number of grenades that you can carry around in your inventory allowing you to perform the same action so that you are never in a situation where you brought the wrong companion for the wrong mission.
At this point I have met three companions: Kai, Marius, and Giatta. I’ve met a fourth character that I think will be joining my band of adventurers in the next major story segment. Kai is essentially… what if Garrus was a Shark-man, because it is the same voice actor effectively doing the same sort of vocal treatment. Marius is your traditional non-trusting grump Dwarven character… that is also a wild tracker and scout voiced by the person who did Rathma in Diablo IV. Giatta is an Animancer which is sort of like a Necromancer but can also animate pretty much anything… voiced by the actor who did Ikora Rey in Destiny 2. The last companion Yatzli which I have not collected, is a wizard of some sort voiced by the Symmetra Actress from Overwatch.
One of the things that I find particularly cool is that essentially you can upgrade every weapon you find all the way to the maximum stats it can possibly have for its base item type. This means that as you start to find Unique weapons, it does not matter if you find it at the start of the game… it can be upgraded indefinitely and made useful all the way through the game. I found a flaming sword called the Last Light of Day and have now taken it up to Exceptional/Purple quality and will keep upgrading it all the way to Legendary as I find materials. Similarly unique armors often have specific stats on them that make them more useful than other pieces of gear, and you can keep upgrading those as well. Boots, Gloves, Rings, and Amulets are just stat sticks and are as useful at level 1 as they are at whatever the maximum level of the game happens to be. Essentially like I said before… a lot what I like about Avowed is it is the Bethesda model but with all of the bullshit removed from it.
At this point I am roughly half of the way through the game and have no clue what my played stats look like, because I am not playing it through Steam. This was available on Gamepass and I was able to install it through the Battle.net client, which I hope is a sign of similar functionality to come. According to the save game I am playing I am a little over 12 hours in… but save game playtime counts are somewhat squishy. This is probably going to end up being around a 30 hour game for me personally, which seems like a good size for this sort of adventure. Maybe not every game needs to be a 400 hour epic. My favorite Obsidian game is Tyranny which is maybe 8 hours for a single play-through? The world is rich and feels larger than it technically is… but that is mostly due to conscious design choices rather than just putting a bunch of empty space in the game and hoping you will be impressed by the sheer scale.
I’m off today, so pretty much my plan is to go hang out on the couch after I finish writing this post and continue my adventures in this weird world. I have to say… this is making me want to go back and play the Pillars of Eternity games so that I can have some context on a few of the elements that the characters are talking about. There is a lot of proper noun salad happening at the beginning of the game, but after awhile this lessons. There is clearly some fan service for those who do know this setting… but unfortunately I am not one of them. So far I have enjoyed the writing quite a bit, and have enjoyed hanging out with Not-Garrus who went from sexy-almost-birdman to sexy-sharkman. I think my favorite character is Giatta, but a lot of that is because she is a healer.
So far I would say that Avowed is a solid 8 out of 10 game experience for me. I think lowering the scope of the game helped it out quite a bit. There are going to be folks who consider this to be a bit basic, but I am having fun with it. Given how much has improved between this and when they released Outer Worlds, it makes me really look forward to Outer Worlds II. If they can keep knocking out games of this quality I will be exceptionally happy to keep playing them. I’ve always been a fan of Obsidian games and I think this is really the sort of thing they excel at. At least I have not seen any plot threads that sort of crash directly into a brick wall like they did in games like KOTOR II so if nothing else I think they have gotten better at controlling the scope of effort.
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Yesterday I decided to give Microsoft $25 to access Avowed early. Essentially I noticed that Battle.Net was showing it as available through Gamepass but only the Deluxe edition could start playing early. I would honestly love to see Microsoft migrate all of the Gamepass PC games over to the Battle.net launcher, because really it feels like a better interface than essentially going through the Microsoft store via the Xbox app. Essentially Avowed is what if Obsidian made their own Elder Scrolls Game, this time set in the same universe as Pillars of Eternity. So far it feels very Morrowind to me, in that you are arriving on the docks of a far flung destination… filled with all sorts of creepy fungus growing everywhere. I am playing a melee character so far and the combat feels pretty enjoyable.
I got my first companion, which is essentially a Shark dude straight out of the Tigersharks Cartoon. Essentially we are adventuring together out of convenience at the moment, but I assume some events are going to happen that bind us together going forward. I know there are other companions but right now I am digging Kai because he gives me the ability to burn things down, since I am not going down the magical route. I believe I can make my own firebombs eventually out if this plant that I occasionally find laying around. One of the objectives of the tutorial area was to shoot one of those plants down so it fell onto some vines and burned it to open up a new area, which makes me think at some point I can use the same plant to do the same thing in other areas.
I’ve not made it super far but I am enjoying it. There are these adorable Aye Aye meets Lemur meets Cat things all over the island that sort of purr when you get close to them. Unfortunately this particular one meets a grim fate in the opening cinematic. I’ve heard this is around a 40 hour campaign start to finish, which seems fairly reasonable. It is open world, but open world within the confines of a fixed map level so there are is a lot of exploration, but it doesn’t really let you stray too far off the beaten path. I am hoping at some point I find a companion with some healing spells because right now I am having to chug a lot of healing potions to keep topped off after combat. I specced into this thing that heals back 50% of the damage that was dealt after combat, but that still makes a lot of the fights a battle of attrition.
Over in Pohx League I did a safehouse and got one of the crafting benches that allow you to swap one Divination Card for another random one. The first one I turned in was nothing special, but the second one landed me a Brother’s Gift card which I immediately turned in for 5 Divine Orbs. I’ve not been terribly wealthy during Pohx league, but then again I have not really focused on trying to make currency. Given that it is a private league, everything costs way more than it would during a normal league economy. This is especially noticeable on the currency exchange, because buying relatively simple things… like a Tainted Fusing for example costs around 50 Chaos each. Gemcutter’s Prisms similarly are really expensive so I figure at some point I am just going to chain run a lot of Labyrinth to get gems upgraded. I purchased every single Ice Trap of Hollowness in the entire league and have been leveling them all to 20 so that I can attempt to corrupt a 21/20% gem.
Immediately after turning in the Brother’s Gift card, I took four of those Divine Orbs and converted them into an Omen of Connections. Now that these exist in the game, this is more often than not who I end up getting my six-linked chest. I was running a Ritual/Einhar Atlas quite a bit trying to get either this or a Black Morrigan so I could use beast crafting to do the same thing. The new Gem that I have mixed in is Cold Penetration and lord does it make a massive difference. I also added Bonechill to my Skitterbots and together I am dishing out a ton more damage. I bought this chestpiece ages ago and I had been throwing fusings at it in vain thinking that either I would six-link it the old fashioned way or I would earn enough currency to do it the easy way. I’ve since corrupted my old one and got a white socket on it, so I will probably throw the first tainted fusings at it trying to six-link it so I can sell it for a decent profit.
I am pretty happy with my progress in Pohx league and honestly… would be fine if I don’t make it any further. I’ve completed 110 out of 115 maps, with the remaining 5 maps all being uniques. I will probably start using Singular Scouting Reports when I get Kirac missions to try for the remaining maps since I can’t really afford to buy any of them off the market right now. I’ve finished two of my voidstones, and I might make a run at Uber Elder and Maven, but I am in no rush to do either. If they happen organically it is cool, but I am not necessarily going to push my way through it. I still do not love bossing and I also feel way too squishy to reasonable deal with the damage output from those encounters. I would essentially have to perform both of them perfectly… and I can’t say I have ever done that. I did however do a no-death Eater of Worlds which made me happy. Searing Exarch though was a complete and total mess, which is funny because as Righteous Fire that fight is a cakewalk.
I say I am happy with my progress in Pohx League in large part because I know come the 20th I will not be playing it anymore. Yesterday GGG released the full trailer for the Legacy of Phrecia Event and with it came the start date of February 20th. Which gives me eight days of undivided attention before Monster Hunter Wilds comes out and I tag out to play that with friends. I have no clue at all what I am going to play. Right now I am leaning towards either doing Poison Summon Raging Spirits on Servant of Arakali Shadow or try and build something Righteous Fire themed on either Ancestral Commander Marauder or maybe Polytheist Templar. The problem with that last one is I do not think there are four ascendancies that will help me out… Scavenger Scion could probably also work. If I do go RF, I will probably wait to see what ideas Pohx has before going down that path. I am also somewhat interested in 100% melee with Behemoth Marauder.
Have you played any of Avowed yet? Are you going to be joining the nonsense of the Legacy of Phrecia Event in Path of Exile? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.
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