Hey Folks! Sorry that a blog post never actually materialized yesterday. I have had a couple of really hellishly busy week, which means I just did not have time to deal with a blog post yesterday morning. By the time I had finally cleared my schedule enough to bang out a post… apparently my host had some significant issues and the database server associated with my blog had died horribly. When this issue was resolved I was back to being busy as hell, and as a result no post happened. What I was going to talk about actually was better delayed because yesterday the Outriders New Horizon update released and I got my hands on it.
I am going to be honest… this year has been a rough year for me and as a result mentally I assumed this game came out in 2020… and not April of this year. So when I heard there were new updates going into the game my first reaction was “wow that took awhile”. I mean it did take over six months to receive our first meaty and substantial update, which I guess makes sense given that they advertised it from the very beginning as not being a “live service” game. What Outriders New Horizon brings is a bunch of tweaks to the way that the game plays along with a few new expeditions, which are the games end game dungeons. Here is a rundown of the features that I am aware of:
4 New Expeditions
Timers Removed as Reward Qualifier for Expeditions
Improved Relevance of Drops
Crossplay Actually Works as Intended
New Chase Epic Weapons hidden in each Expedition
New Legendary Vendor with “Random” legendary available
Full Transmog/Cosmetic Appearance System
Worldslayer Expansion coming in 2022
Of these the one that I spent the most time playing with last night was of course the Transmog system. Essentially if you bring up your menu, at any point you can hit L to go into the appearance customization system. From here you have total control over the look and feel of your character, and I say feel specifically because you can customize your weapons to sound a specific way if for some reason there is a gun that you like but cannot stand its timbre. It uses an appearance acquisition system, so as you get drops it will automagically collect its appearance for you to begin using. This means for me who has progressed through the story already… I am going to have to farm content in order to see those drops start appearing. For a new player whoever in theory just playing through the game will make sure a large number of these items are filled out, and given that this is cross account… it might make me suddenly care about playing alts.
It is time once again to break out the handy graphic that I recreated showing mission difficulty as it scales with both Expedition Challenge Tier and Story Mode World Tier. I spent most of yesterday running around on World Tier 15, which is completely manageable. However as I start going into expeditions I am realistically going to need to start doing Tier 9 if I want to start seeing improvements. One of my biggest problems with Expeditions was the timer, and with it gone I am suddenly significantly more interested in that content. Additionally now that they have hidden chase weapons in all of the expeditions, it becomes a more interesting proposition for me to take my time and crawl through the dungeon experience. For pure farming last night I returned to good ole Typhon hunt mission and at some point I will do some of my “loot cave” to see what appearances I can collect easily.
I enjoyed Outriders quite a bit, and returning last night has made me realize who much I actually did. The core problem with the game for me was that all of my immediate circle of AggroChat folks bounced heavily for thematic reasons. The story is bleak as fuck, and it is very hard to chew through. I think of us only Tam actually made it all the way through, and he isn’t the sort to repeatedly farm content for loot. However there are other communities that I am a member of that did play a bit longer, and I am hoping through those I might be able to find some groups and actually try multiplayer content. I would like to actually push my gear level up a bit higher and farm some more legendary gear, but in order to do that I think I am going to need to play with a somewhat balanced team.
For those interested in maybe returning, it seems that you can for at least a little while get a free weapon from Tiago. The weapon that he has currently is The Juggler, which is probably my favorite auto rifle in the game. It has this truly broken ability to fire a grenade at your target that does silly amounts of damage each time you reload the weapon. This means that I abuse this by reloading constantly to get another free grenade. The weapon also comes with Minefield II, which causes a bunch of bombs to drop down each time you kill an enemy. On the version I use regularly I replaced Minefield II with Minefield III which changes the grenade condition from “On Kill” to “On Crit” making it much more reliable for burning down elites with. I will need to take some time to dust off the cobwebs and relearn the basics of the game, but I figure before long I will be spending at least some of my week grinding expeditions.
The post Outriders Wants Us Back appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends. Today is my Friday because I took tomorrow off and depending on my mood may be calling it part of the weekend. I am not sure which one of you commented that remembering random things is a sign of a midlife crisis, because lord is it hitting me with a vengeance right now. While getting ready this morning I remembered this one story from my childhood which is dumb but I am still going to share it. My entire life my father had the side hustle of a portrait photographer, this is in part why I tend to take those sort of things for granted because I effectively grew up in the darkroom and one of my first jobs was helping him photograph weddings. My dad gave his business a pretty generic name “Bill’s Photography”, and paid a local calligrapher to create a good clean masthead for him.
During the 90s when direct mail started to computerize some weirdness began happening. Always in the past he would get mail addressed to himself and mail addressed to his business, because a human being was effectively interpreting that business name correctly. However at some point this shifted and he started receiving mail for the mythical being known as “Bill S. Photography” which at the time I thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened on the face of the planet. On very rare occasions it would come through as “Bill S. Photograph” which was even better. So here I am this morning giggling like a madman as I am remembering this, and I am sure my wife thought I had completely lost it.
I think I might be done with Outriders. Recently I started leveling a Technomancer in part so that I could see how the narration and story worked with the female voice actor. I’ve now been through the entire story and I have to say if you are wanting to start the game fresh… absolutely go with the female character because the line delivery just works better. There are so many times when you are playing as the male character, that the line delivery makes it sound like he doesn’t actually understand what he is saying. I was never certain if this was a problem with the audio editing, or the line delivery itself… but after playing through with the female voice actor it seems like maybe it was the later.
Essentially I have reached this place where I don’t feel like going through the world tier grind once again with a second character. I think this is the general problem with the way levels and gearing works in Outriders is that there is zero “catch up” benefit to your alts. Sure I have a vault full of level 42 gear from my main character, but my alts can’t use a single bit of it because they have not “leveled” to the point of being able to use it. In theory this should have worked in a manner like Champion Levels in Elder Scrolls Online, where the World Tier and Challenge Tier are associated with your account and not your character, and once you finished the main story you would zoom forward to whatever your “Account Level” was at that point.
Outriders was an enjoyable but flawed game experience, which I guess is pretty par for the course with outings from companies who are not already seasoned in the looter shooter genre. Then again… I guess I could say the same about most of the other games in the genre as well, they are all sorta flawed experiences. I am hoping that Outriders sold well enough that we might see an Outriders 2 that makes good on the promise of this title, fixes some of the tonal issues of the story, and actually has a proper plan for what to do with players upon completing the final bit of story. They told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a “live service” title and I guess we should have believed them. There are a lot of things that need tweaking but I get the general impression that they are moving on to other game titles and not really that interested in anything that is not strictly a bug fix.
In other news… Fallout 76 is unabashedly a “live service” game and has seemingly found its stride. I have been enjoying myself greatly as I roam around Appalachia, which I really wish was easier to spell. At least with the Commonwealth it was two easy to spell terms jammed together, but maybe over time I will get used to it. That said it took me years to be able to spell shenanigans on the first try… and I LOVE that word. As of last night I am level 8 which means I am rapidly catching up to where I left off with the game the first time. The quests and the NPCs make the entire experience feel more enjoyable. The responder area is more or less intact with it being largely told through audio diaries, but what makes all of that feel more alive is that there are random human NPCs wandering the wastes adding flavor here and there and making it feel less dead.
I’ve built a somewhat nonsense house that cantilevers off the side of the main structure. Given that there is no actual gravity in this game… I didn’t have to do anything to make this more logical but I nonetheless added some support struts because visually it bothered me. Sometimes in a game like this I just keep building in a very “weasley house” manner until I run out of materials. Ultimately what I really need to do is pick up my camp and move it somewhere that works slightly better. For now it has been handy to be next to the Wayward while doing quests, but eventually I can see logic in uprooting it. I wish there was a way to do some terraforming, but you are pretty much stuck with way things are which is what lead me to have the second story wider than the first.
What I really need to do is sort out a more stable method of healing myself and a better source of water and food that don’t irradiate the hell out of me. I mean I have radaway, but I also know that is a fairly limited resource right now. I do pretty well in a stand up fight, but end up needing to heal pretty regularly afterwards. I did find an interesting option for grinding… up at the lighthouse on top of the mountain which seems to have a nigh unlimited number of rad toads. If I hang out in the house I can pretty safely kill those at range. There is also a quest up there for filling up the lighthouse with bioluminescent fluid that I should probably do as well. I wish there was a way to upgrade a piece of gear to the next level range rather than needing to craft a brand new item, but the game is what it is.
All in all however I am having a blast in Fallout 76, so I apparently was away from it the optimal amount of time for it to feel fresh and for the game to have evolved while I was away. Maybe at some point I can return to Outriders and have that same feeling.
The post Unsupported Alts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. I normally put an exclamation point at the end of a sentence like that, but forgive me but I am not feeling terribly exuberant. I am not sure if I just slept poorly, or uncomfortably… or simply am generally sleep deprived but all I really want at this very moment is to crawl back into a warm bed and forget the world exists. Mondays being devoted to the Mixtape project… because alliteration… means that now Tuesdays are effectively my first real post of a given week. It is normally in that first post that I catch you up on whatever mischief was managed over the weekend. Probably the highlight is that I managed to ding World Tier 15 now allowing me to run all of the Hunts and Wanted quests at maximum level for theoretically maximum reward.
Or if you just want a more blown up transparent version I have that as well…
I’ve seen multiple versions of this scale, but they have all been exceptionally blurry representations so I decided to just go ahead and make my own version. There is an intentionality of overlap between World Tier and Challenge Tier which are effectively two competing end game systems. World tier will take you up through item level 42 and Challenge tier moves that onwards to 50 which is the current level cap for gear. When I first started attempting the expedition I steam rolled the first one and then got my butt handed to me in the second one I attempted, because it bumped me up to having to deal with level 34 encounters after completing that first one. I was not prepared and as a result I started walking up the World Tier system in an effort to gain gear and prepare for the stark difference in difficulty.
Since capping the World Tier, I have managed to get up to Challenge Tier 9 in the Expedition system. The problem that I have encountered as I go up in tier, the fights become significantly more frenetic. Additionally I have found out that not all expeditions are created equally. Chem Plant for example seems to be pretty easy, and Timeworn Spire on the other hand was 22 minutes of non-stop fighting to stay alive madness. There is a working theory that certain legendary gear is tied to completion of certain expeditions so I am trying to run them all just to make sure I have access to everything. There are reports of folks completing an expedition and then suddenly starting to see legendary weapons they have never encountered before in their loot pool. No clue if this is a real thing or not, because randomizers absolutely seem to get “stuck” on specific items sometimes.
Another thing that I have done is start the campaign over on my Technomancer. I’ve heard really good things about the infection tree for that class. I also wanted to experience what the game is like with a female voice actor, and I have to say if you have the option you might want to go down that route. The game seems significantly less bleak playing as the female character. Her delivery of lines is just more reasonable to what I would be expected in that situation. The male character seems pretty much aloof to the entire situation, and so far the female character seems to be more progressively perturbed by what they are experiencing around them. One massive negative about a replay however is that you don’t get to keep the mods that you have unlocked. Thankfully I had a few trash blues with decent mods on them in the stash allowing me to get a bit of a jump. I might start dumping trash in the bank so that I can deconstruct on my alt and get a boost in resources.
I am still enjoying myself, but I am finding it likely that I really need to try and pull together a group night since we all seem to be coming up against the same expeditions wall. They just end up so freaking stressful as a solo player, especially given that my build is about survival and not killing things quickly. I’ve seen several of us making similar comments and I think it might be fun to do a group play night, but timing is always the challenge. I realistically need to operation on either Central or East Coast times and a lot of the people that I interact with regularly are on West Coast time. Hopefully we can make something happen because I am really enjoying the game, but think it would be even more enjoyable with friends.
The post Outriders World and Challenge Tier Chart appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hai Friends! Today is my Friday and I am apparently all over the place when it comes to my gaming. After not having played Outriders for a few days I returned and worked on some monster hunts. I had only really been focused on the Wanted quests since I was seeking legendary weapons. That said I should probably also start acquiring some legendary armor pieces, which are guaranteed for completing a full round of Monster Hunts. Thing I noticed immediately is that it seems Monster Hunts end up scaling more severely than the humanoid based Wanted quests. I struggled a bit at trying to take out the Monsters given their already more bullet sponge nature.
If you are so inclined I recorded another Outriders thing where I track down Bigjaw one of those aforementioned Monster Hunts. Last night I continued this process however and am now two hunts away from my free legendary. While doing this I also leveled the world up to tier 13… and noticed another significant jump in difficulty. I might have to grind for a bit in order to level my gear up to ilvl 40 before making much in the way of forward momentum. I might also swap over and start working on expeditions now that I’ve made some progress from the very raw starting location that I began with previously. World tier activities will take your ilevel up to 42 and expeditions will go all the way up to 50.
After several hunts I needed something a bit more relaxing so I headed downstairs and wrapped myself up in a cocoon of blankets and snuggling cats and finally played some Elder Scrolls Online. After the nonsense of grinding up alts and doing dailies for the anniversary quest, I have now returned to Murkmire and continued trying to help shy awkward Argonians hook up. It is a weird zone with an equally weird main story quest, but I am enjoying it because I am always down with strange lizard people stuff. I needed the super chill nature of ESO last night, and I really would like to keep moving forward that mission of catching up on the story before the impending expansion.
Lastly a reminder that if you are on Windows 10, you can apply for the PSO2 New Genesis Closed Beta but Microsoft had to make it weird. Firstly you have to install the Xbox Insider app… and you can find some directions on how to do this thing here. Next you will find one of the offers being the New Genesis closed beta and it is on a first come first serve basis… but seemingly right now everyone is getting in? The Closed Beta will run from May 14th at 6 pm PDT to May 16th at 7 pm PDT. Not a very long test but should allow us to pop in and kick the tires a bit on this new rendition of the PSO2 game setting. I plan on doing the thing and likely writing about it but you should also do the thing.
The post Helping Shy Lizards Hook Up appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
