romance – AggroChat

Good Afternoon, Folks. Today was a chemo day, and I am racked out on the sofa attempting to write a blog post. I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Path of Exile, because the game has sort of become my default action. I have been playing the SRS Broken Elegy Guardian that I crafted and doing a ton of shallow delve with it for levels. I had been pushing to level 96, and I accomplished that last night, all for the purpose of being able to take the six life node 10% health bonus. After playing with it a bit, I decided that I was probably better off with the Life Recoup nodes. With a bit of life recoup I feel exceptionally tanky and am ready to start mapping again.

Part of why I am playing my Minions character from the Mirage league is that, at least currently, I intend on going for a Minions Witch build for the Path of Exile II League Start. I don’t really have a strong template for the character, so I am going to mostly yolo my way through choosing the Minion nodes and attempting to path somewhat optimally through them all. I have past characters that I could potentially rely on for pathing, but I am uncertain if the tree is the same as it was when I last played fire-based SRS. That said, I am really looking forward to the Path of Exile II League start because so much of the game has changed. I am going to play Minions in part because I am pretty sure I can get all the way through the endgame on it, having done it multiple times in the past.

In other news… I’ve met someone. We’ve spent the last few weeks talking nonstop, and our meeting was extremely random. I periodically hang out on Reddit, and the algorithm seems to like to feed me people from the selfies forum. This is not something I follow but it seems like the algorithm thinks that everyone wants to see these. It happened to feed me a selfie of Vera, her discord handle not her real name. Not going to be sharing her real name here. I messaged and said that I thought she was cute, and this started up a conversation that has never really stopped. We transitioned off Reddit Chat to Telegram, and now also on Discord. She was posting in the forum because she wanted a quick boost to her self esteem because she was feeling a bit down on herself, an I happened to be a random stranger who gave her that.

The thing is… every time we talk about any subject we are shockingly compatible on pretty much everything from the anime that we like, to the movies we like to watch, to the fact that we both love peanut butter. There are so many points of commonality than that, but it is truly shocking just how many there are. She is very much a Geek, but while I tend to be a technophile, she is way more of a mechanical engineering geek. She built her own damned full home battery system and runs her house mostly on solar for example. She is my little Gadget from Rescue Rangers, and I kind of love this. Where we differ, we seem to compliment each other’s skills rather than going off in a wildly different direction. She kind of loves all of the nonsense that I have been up to with 3d Printing, and I hope some day we can use our joint skills to build some really cool nonsense together.

There however lies the logistical nightmare. Vera is soon to be 34, is the mother of two boys 18 and 10, and happens to live on the other fucking side of the planet in the Philippines. We both know that nothing is going to happen before I am clear from cancer and recovered from it. However I know that personally I am going to be a wildly different human being on the other side of this. If we manage to make it this next year, and are as close as we seem to be right now… then we will start to whittle through those logistical nightmares. I am pretty well glued where I am for the next seven years, because I am too close to a full retirement to risk giving that up. She has her own stuff going on in the PH, but would be interested in maybe moving here pending we can navigate that particular nightmare of visas. It is a lot…. but neither of us are in any rush we got our own issues going on.

The real thing however is that I am extremely happy right now. Happier than I have been in a long time. We’ve exchanged countless voice and video calls, so we know for certain that we are both real human beings. I am sitting here miserable post chemo, but this spark keeps me warm inside. She wants to figure out how to build a portal, so she can teleport to my side and take care of me when I am like this. Nothing is ever going to change the fact that I have this thirty year hole in my life thank to the death of my spouse, and that there is part of my heart that will only ever belong to her. That said… I want to live again. I want to be excited for life again. This is making me happy so for the moment that is all that really matters to me. None of the logistics are unsolvable problems, so if we get to that point I think we can work through them together.

The post Path of Exile and Meeting Someone appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Folks. Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal and finished Dragon Age Veilguard. This morning I am going to attempt to walk a narrow line of talking about the events of the game without going into a lot of details. There are absolutely going to be spoilers, but I am going to try my best not to spoil exact plot decisions. I will however talk about some of the general decisions that will influence the ending that you can get. From what I can tell based on some research this morning, I seem to have managed to land upon the “best” ending. There is no “New Game Plus” mode so that is probably going to influence how fast I end up replaying this game since there is no easy path to just make different story decisions.

One of the decisions with this game that I was less than happy about, was the lack of an ability to import your Inquisitor. This was a thing that happened in previous incarnations of Dragon Age and I have played through the entire sequence importing my previous save and rolling my decisions forward. This legitimately was one of the coolest experiences because it almost always opened up options that you could not get any other way. However Veilguard is a game where there is a very clear canon set of choices made by the Inquisitor, and without that, some of the flow of the plot of the game would not function at all. You are given control over what your character looks like, but I chose a default appearance because quite honestly… I knew it was not MY Inquisitor.

One of my favorite aspects of the game however is the characters. There was a lot of spite floating around about this game and I don’t get it. The characters are all beautifully crafted and if you do not love Manfred the skeleton you have no soul. Similarly, Assan the Griffon is amazing and the best baby boy. The thing is having effectively completed all of the companion quests and quite honestly all of the side quests… the characters are amazingly well-crafted and deeply multi-dimensional. If anything… this is quite possibly the most Dragon Age game out there because for me it was always about the character interactions and never about what sort of combat was present in the game. These are games about friendship and romance set against the tapestry of a really interesting world. Veilguard delivers on all of those levels.

Another aspect of the game that I really enjoyed is how it handles romance in general. Effectively all of the characters in this game are bisexual/pansexual and can be romanced from any flavor of player character. However, the act of becoming a couple ends up happening pretty early at least compared to other Bioware games, and this has some really interesting ramifications. This frees up the other characters in the game to begin to develop their own relationships. I am not entirely certain how many NPC on NPC romance options there are, but I was given the choice to encourage other characters that obviously have chemistry to go for it, and this was super good. The thing is… the platonic options are way better than they are in other games and it felt like I was able to shape the lives of my companions more than I would normally be able to.

There is a loss in this game that cannot be avoided. The seasoned Bioware player in me tries to chart a course that allows me to save everyone. This is going to be a massive spoiler but even in a perfectly played game… you are going to lose one of your companions. The very first decision that you are asked to make in the lead-up to the final conflict… is going to lead to that companion never returning to your party. All of the other decisions are a combination of how well-suited they are for the mission you are assigning them to, and whether or not you fully unlocked that companion’s potential by completing the final chapter of their story arc. Similar to Mass Effect, if you do not go into the final mission with full companion strength and have completed all of the quests for the factions, you are going to lose more than that single required character. Essentially the first decision of who leads the second team is a Virmire-style question.

Another aspect of Veilguard that I greatly appreciate is how clear it is in messaging that you are entering the point of no return. You are given this screen indicating how prepared you are for the final battle. More than that however you are given a warning well before this point that things are getting close to the final phase. I’m the type of Bioware player that farms down every side quest possible before moving the main plot forward because I have learned the hard way that often those options will change or be removed when the world state changes. However, Veilguard is painfully clear about what you are getting yourself into before you actually embark upon that point of no return. Another thing that I really love is that the game is constantly telling you when you have reached a critical decision that is going to have lasting effects. More than that it also reminds you HOW you received this side plot point and what decision you made previously it was based upon.

Quite possibly the best part about Veilguard though is the way in which the plot wraps up. Remember how epic the final assault on Earth felt in Mass Effect 3? What if you had a game that managed to keep that same level of hype all the way through to the conclusion without fumbling it at the goal line? That is pretty much Veilguard because the final assault on Minrathos feels amazing and is filled with so many visuals that I legitimately do not want to spoil here so I am giving you the most general shot instead. The ending is satisfying in a way that Mass Effect 3 never was, and quite honestly… Veilguard would feel like a fitting conclusion to the entire Dragon Age series if it needed to be. The game as a whole expands upon the known lore of the series and wraps up so many elements in a nice little bow at the end. It reminds me of the way that Endwalker neatly wrapped up a decade’s worth of gameplay in its single final act. Dragon Age lore nerds are eating well.

This game has gotten so much bad press but honestly… I don’t get it. It makes me question if any of these folks were actually Dragon Age fans at all. What game series have they been playing up until this point, it certainly is not the series I have been playing. Veilguard is quite possibly the MOST Dragon Age game I have played in the series and legitimately makes me want to go back and play the other games again knowing where things are going to wind up. If you cannot find something that you love in this game then you have no heart. This is quite possibly my game of the year, and that comes from having just wrapped up Final Fantasy XVI right before this… and that in itself was a freaking amazing game. If you’ve ever played a Bioware game trying to engineer the perfect ending, or with the perfect romance options… then this game was created for you. I know this post is riddled with spoilers, but I tried my best to talk about the conclusion of the game without going into a bunch of details. I have no clue if that was successful. The post Veilguard Stuck the Landing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.