Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.
What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.
I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.
I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.
I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.
I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.
The post First Apothecary appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a handful of folks but continue pushing forward. We start off with talking about a world where Arcades did not die out… aka Japan and what the 2020 Covid crisis did to them. This leads to a discussion about playing DDR and similar rhythm games at home. From there Bel talks about the upcoming update to Last Epoch where they are doing a mid-cycle reset and some of the reasons why this is happening. Ammo talks about her experiences returning to Guild Wars 2 and Bel shares his frustrations about how obtuse the achievement system is when it comes to trying to find the major unlocks and legendary crafts. Bel also questions whether or not Twitch Drops work, which Kodra refutes with his personal experience. Lastly, we talk a bit about Visions of Mana the fifth official game in the Mana Series.
Hey Folks. There has been a lot of discussion over the last week about the release of Concord and how poorly it is doing. Right now it has a 24-hour peak user count on Steam Charts of around 260 players with an all-time peak since the launch of 660. Granted this only represents numbers on Steam, but can be used as a way of extrapolating how well a game is doing in general. If it is performing poorly on PC, it is likely performing poorly on Playstation 5 where it is a console exclusive. Across the board, this seemed like a game that no one really wanted that was released into an already packed hero shooter genre, put up against games that were free to play as opposed to its $40 buy-in price. I remember briefly getting excited about the trailer only to lose all interest when I found out it was “yet another live service game” and more than that… focused on PVP combat. The trailer was this really cool science fiction heist thing and I felt like it could have been a really interesting game along the lines of the Guardians of the Galaxy game that came out a few years ago. Unfortunately, it was not and was part of the larger forced march that Sony seems to be on towards trying to mint a live service goldmine.
Why do we find ourselves on this path? The answer is simple… FIFA Ultimate Team exists and it was enough to make the financial types stand up and take notice and believe that live service games were an infinite money glitch. This feature went into FIFA soccer in 2009 and has been the prime revenue earner for Electronic Arts almost since that point. Just like World of Warcraft levels of success poisoned the waters for future MMORPGs, every game now is seemingly expected to produce “FUT” numbers. Just so you understand what this means… in 2020 during peak pandemic spending FIFA Ultimate Team brought Electronic Arts 1.62 Billion Dollars. That is from selling what are effectively digital trading cards that come along with a stat package for your game.
It was not until yesterday that I realized just how much money Sony has seemingly poured into trying to make Concord a thing. Secret Level is an Amazon Prime Streaming project from Blur Studios… aka the people who created pretty much every big-budget game trailer you have ever loved as well as the popular “Love, Death & Robots” anthology series. In the teaser trailer the text flashes by “15 Stories Inspired By Your Favorite Games”. So let’s take a look at the list of games that are going to be included.
● Armored Core ● Concord ● Crossfire ● Dungeons & Dragons ● Exodus ● Honor of Kings ● Mega Man ● New World: Aeternum ● PAC-MAN ● PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities) ● Sifu ● Spelunky ● The Outer Worlds ● Unreal Tournament ● Warhammer 40,000
There are a few of these that don’t really fit, that “your favorite games” bit. Firstly you have New World: Aeternum which I am guessing was included because Amazon is at least in part bankrolling the project and that they really want their console rebrand to work. Honor of Kings was new to me, but apparently, it is a really popular MOBA in mainland China from Tencent. Similarly, Crossfire is wildly popular in the South Korean market. Then you have Concord, which I am assuming was included in the list as part of the Sony marketing push behind this project or potentially part of a larger deal to allow for other properties to be included. This feels like an awful lot of money to put behind a product that had not been released and that is an IP that is unproven.
There has been a spate of large-budget flops lately. Suicide Squad for example looks like a massive winner compared to Redfall and Concord and reportedly it was an over 200 Million Dollar loss for Warner Brothers. Redfall cratered hard enough to effectively destroy the studio because Arkane Austin is no more. Concord will likely destroy Firewalk Studios as that seems to be the stakes that are on the line currently when a large game fails to find its market. 2023 was a brutal year for Video Game Studio layoffs and closures, and this year has reportedly already surpassed it. I don’t exactly revel in the death of these studios, but I do think that we have been on an untenable trajectory for a while. Video Games have been financed through the cult of green candles, and the belief that the line will always go up.
Even games that were large successes are beginning to flounder. Helldivers 2 was a massive success, but then as Sony pushed some unpopular practices like required use of the PlayStation Network…. it began to shed players. Recently they have been shedding players due to balance decisions, proving once again that a live service game is only one bad patch away from failure. Similarly, the title that Sony bought to herald its new Live Service push was Destiny 2, and it has been bleeding players for years. I know I used to be a massive supporter of the game but left more or less permanently after they removed the Forsaken content from the game. Now that the game has entered what is effectively maintenance mode after the release of the Final Shape and what is reportedly the last major expansion for the game, it is similarly shedding players.
The weird thing about “Live Service” games is that while the big budget money grabs are failing to gain purchase… a lot of the existing games are trucking along and doing just fine. If you search for “best live service games” you will find a ton of listicles and the vast majority of the games listed are all around ten years old. Warframe for example is potentially the best looter shooter on the market, and it has pioneered a business model that seems to have worked for them. Sure they do not generate FIFA Ultimate Team money, but they have reached a place where it is sustainable for the studio. Similarly, Path of Exile is doing amazingly well hitting brand new peak concurrency numbers for the Settlers of Kalguur league. Similarly, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and hell even the often-panned Fallout 76 seem to be hitting their strides. This leads me to believe that “big business” has been bad for games as a whole because they do not care about the sustainability of platforms… only about extracting the maximum amount of value out of the players.
I am sure this is terribly naive of me, but I would love to see more “Indie Darlings” like Last Epoch which is financed in large part through supporter packs similar to the model that Path of Exile pioneered. They are not massive successes necessarily, at least not in the billions in the sales department… but they are functional and enough to keep the studio churning out new content. Games have been a bubble and I am sure it will continue to burst, but my hope is that what is left in its place is something that makes more sense. The zero-sum game that we have been playing over the last few decades clearly is not working as intended.
Unfortunately, we are probably going to lose a few more studios before this tale is finished. Bungie recently laid off a massive number of employees due to “underperformance”. In this, they canned several projects leaving themselves with only Destiny 2 which is on life support, and placing all of their eggs in the Marathon basket which is an IP reboot turned extraction shooter. The thing is… it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of hype surrounding Marathon, in part because just like Concord it is attempting to launch itself into an already packed genre. The only people who really remember Marathon were Macintosh gamers from the 90s who subsisted on playing it when everyone was playing Doom. You know what a bunch of 40 and 50-somethings are probably not big on… extraction shooters. Those who are into that genre are already probably Tarkov stans. I feel like this is maybe not the right play for the already stratified ecosystem that the game is launching into.
Maybe I am being overly hyperbolic, but I feel like a lot of these games would have made really fun single-player and co-op PVE experiences. Suicide Squad, for example, seemed like it was itching to be the next game in the Arkham series, with similar gameplay. Concord, the game that started this post… at least based on the trailer felt like it really wanted to be a PVE game where you built up a team and planned and pulled off successively larger heists until you uncovered some plot where you had to save the world. Redfall similarly felt like given a bit more time baking and a story-driven focus… it could have leaned on the best parts of that Arkane DNA to create a memorable experience similar to Dishonored. It feels like these games are failing because they are being pushed into a mold that relies on massive player engagement to succeed.
Anyways… I am done rambling and yelling at the clouds. Maybe I am off my base, but Concord feels like a gauge of customer sentiment more than some of these other games. We went from “low interest” to what feels like “no interest”. All of this said… what the hell do I know? I will very likely be over here in my corner playing the same damned games that have been out for the last decade or longer, and enjoying myself doing that.
The post Live Service Gold Farm Over? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was a rather rough day, and I never actually got around to writing a blog post. So this morning you get a bit of what I would have written about yesterday and a bit about what I would have normally written about today. So on Monday, I spent a lot of that post talking about how I was largely done with my alts in Path of Exile… then proceeded to spend a bunch of time leveling my Widowhail Deadeye and liking it quite a bit better. The heart wants what the heart wants I guess. Basically, I did some super chill yellow maps… got a bunch of levels… which started to fix some of the issues with the character. I still have awful defenses… and I wasted a ton of regret orbs trying to flip to a more crit-based version… but I am back and happy with precise technique and trying to keep my life totals below my accuracy.
I currently have the weirdest passive tree I have ever had for a bow character. I’m getting a lot of mileage from an Unnatural Instinct jewel currently, which is in part what has prompted some of the weird pathing. My hope is to respec things a bit, gain some more levels, and add in another elemental cluster jewel down in the lower quadrant, freeing up one of my other jewel sockets to maybe add in a Light of Meaning Jewel wherever it will have the most benefit either going for Life, Evasion, or Fire Damage. This build is a bit like trying to make “Fetch Happen” but I am having fun doing my own thing here that again… far as I know no one is actually trying. My life and defenses are still awful but it is softcore and I am mostly okay with dying occasionally on my alts.
In other news, I am creeping ever closer to my shiny pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I have not been doing the daily roulette as religiously as I should, and I might spend some time this coming weekend just grinding it out the rest of the way to victory. I have to be honest… as often as I have run PVP Roulette for leveling… I really wish I had been cognisant of this rewards track before now. There is no telling how many things I just failed to collect and missed out on along the way. I am looking forward to raiding again this weekend because last Sunday we had the original four of Ashgar, Grace, Thalen, and me but then picked up Solaria who was piloted by Ammo because world travel was disabled. In theory maybe this weekend we can get Ammo on her off-server character giving us six of eight total players.
In Guild Wars 2 news, I am largely resigned to not making it through Secrets of the Obscure for the time being. I am basically at the end of the 5th chapter and then had a whole other chapter in Nayos on top of that to finish before moving on. This was such a weird content drop because some of it I liked quite a bit… and other bits I was not feeling at all. I feel like we were supposed to care about the Kryptis, but it reminded me entirely too much of the whole Vampire Courts thing from Dresden Files. In those books, Harry ends up aligned to the White Court at times for reasons that are deeply spoilery, but also in part because they are only sexually and emotionally abusive… as opposed to just straight-up murdering, devouring, and/or potentially wearing victims like fashion accessories. Guild Wars was trying to do something with this story of having a redemption arc for monsters… that just never really landed for me.
Janthir Wilds on the other hand so far seems amazing. I am all about hanging out with a delightful group of furries… err I mean Bearkin. I have a type when it comes to favorite zones… and this is absolutely playing directly into those interests. Grizzly Hills for example in World of Warcraft was such a pure joy to quest through, and I would go so far as to state that maybe Lowland Shore is one of the best zones Guild Wars 2 has at the moment. I’ve not gotten terribly far into it because I spent way too much time being a short-order cook last night for a bunch of hungry bears. I was hoping to get far enough to unlock player housing… but I did not even get far enough to unlock spears.
That is honestly probably my only complaint thus far is that the main story quest chain hits a brick wall when it asks you to level up the mastery that unlocks spears in order to continue. I was already working on the mastery that allows you to do more things with your bouncy kitty mount. So I closed out the evening hopping around the zone doing events, and hunting down a few of these mini-boss tundra beast encounters. I have no clue what the zone meta looks like if it exists, but I have heard it was pretty “spicy”. I am in no massive rush, but I would really like to get player housing as an upgrade to my home instance. I had enough Astral currency to pick up the next Legendary Weapon box… which has Twilight in it… which is probably the next one that I will craft because pretty much every character that can use a Greatsword is currently using one. I am building up a backlog of these because I never crafted the Juggernaut. There is also a weapon quest up on the Astral store, that I will probably devote the next 1000 points towards because from what I understand there is a really cool interaction between the weapon and the gloves that it comes with.
All told though, I am already feeling way more positive about Janthir Wilds than I did about Secrets of the Obscure. The zone design so far is just better. I get what they were trying to go for with SOTO, but flight-required maps are a bit frustrating given that it was not like they just handed you the Skyscale. It still took a lot of effort to unlock it, whereas from what I can tell here… you are pretty much just handed a Warclaw in a similar manner in which you were just handed the Raptor in Path of Fire. I already had my Warclaw from the WVW Track so this mostly amounted to me just getting a new skin to play with. It was cool that I got some cosmetics given to me for having already completed that before Janthir dropped. I will probably be back playing quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 in the coming weeks.
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