Morning Folks! Like I said the other day… watching the Fallout Amazon Series has summoned forth a bunch of nostalgia for the series. As a result, I have found myself back in Fallout 76, which honestly is a better game than anyone gives it credit for. It was kinda janky at launch, but I remember having a heck of a lot of fun with the AggroChat crew. If you have Amazon Prime, you can get the game for free right now. As a promotion along with the Fallout series, you can snag a copy for either the Windows Store or Xbox. While there is no cross-platform play, the PC accounts on Steam and on the Windows Store both connect to Bethesda.net and can play together. So it is the perfect time to check the game out if you have never played it before.
Coming back to the game after a long absence, I have picked up a number of things that I figure I will share with you. First off… there is now a “Pacifist Mode” in the game which entirely disables PVP functionality. This can be found in the game section of the menu just below the look sensitivity and vibration settings. While the populace of Fallout 76 seems to largely be positive and non-toxic… there are occasionally bad apples that will come along attempting to trick you into PVP combat so that they can curb stomp you and get their jollies. If you are not PVP-minded… as is usually the case with most of my readership… then I suggest you pop into the settings and just set yourself to pacifist mode and never have to deal with it again. Similarly, you will want to make sure you set yourself to push to talk because by default the game is open mic which gets super annoying. I’ve just disabled voice chat in its entirety because it takes away from my enjoyment of most games.
This next piece of advice is going to seem entirely counterintuitive especially considering I just told you to disable voice chat. There is an odd culture that has spawned around this game of ALWAYS being grouped with other players when possible. The game gives you a pretty hefty experience bonus, so there are no downsides to grouping up. There are multiple types of teams available with specific ones that are focused on individual game modes. Casual teams however are largely thought of by the populace as “experience sharing” groups and whenever I play I hit Ctl+Tab to pop open the teams interface and see if there are any casual groups currently running. If they are all full you can just create your own Casual team which will likely fill quickly. One of the side benefits of being in a team aside from experience bonuses is the ability to teleport to the camps of your team mates to get around the map. You can also check to see if they have any vendors and are selling things that you might need cheaply.
Another thing that has been added to the game since I last played is Donation Boxes. These appear at hubs like the train station and outside the first vault allowing players to leave items for each other and to give players a good start in the wasteland. There always seems to be something in them especially ammunition and needed resources like bobby pins. I need to clean out my ammunition stores and drop some goodies in these to share with others myself. I’ve yet to find anything in them that I really needed so I have left them alone, but it is cool that it is a cultural tenant of the game now. Apparently, players used to leave goods in a specific box on the map, and it became an unofficial swap hub. The Fallout 76 devs noticed this and decided to make it an official system.
Another thing that was either not like this previously… or that I simply did not remember is that breaking down multiple copies of the same weapon teaches you mods for that weapon type. I believe when the game first launched this only worked if you happened to find a weapon with said mod already in place. Now just salvaging multiple copies of the same item seems to reward you a new mod each time, allowing you to build up your stockpile of recipes and resources. As someone who grew up playing Doom… I am of course using the pump shotgun quite a bit and slowly over time I have unlocked additional mods for it. I really need to find a higher level one however because as of writing this post I just noticed that it is level 5.
Another thing that I once knew but had forgotten… is that you want to use Photo Mode any time you are in an area that you might want to remember. Photos you have taken in-game in this manner will from that point forward be used as loading screens for the game. If nothing else it is pretty cool to see your character in various locations as you pop around the game incurring loading screens. I am trying to remember to do this more often because I think I only have five pictures currently in my rotation.
One of the things that Amazon Prime is giving away right now is a trial membership to Fallout 1st. This is essentially a subscription model to the game and gives you a number of limited-time cosmetics for playing and a fairly generous “allowance” of currency for the Atom shop. The big feature that you get with 1st however is the ability to create private worlds. The nice thing about this is that the same character progresses in both Adventure mode aka with other players, and Private Adventure which is your own private snapshot of the world. Sometimes in spite of all of the bonuses for playing with other players… you just want to be off in your own world doing your own thing. You can also spin up entirely custom worlds that let you fiddle with the ruleset. These however do not carry over progress to the “Adventure” worlds, and generally speaking, there is always some special limited-time event going on.
There is a battlepass-like seasonal model in the game, and the last time I played it was essentially a game board where you unlocked one slot at a time. This seems to have changed to something more akin to a storefront where ranking up gives you golden tickets and then those can be spent on various cosmetic stuff. Each page is gated by a specific rank and doing various Daily Quests and Weekly Quests earns you currency. If you have experienced the modern Guild Wars 2 dailies system it works fairly similarly to this, but the Fallout 76 goes much deeper in the various things you can unlock. Right now the season is focused around one of the in-world radio drama characters “Rip Daring” and some sort of cryptid-based theme. This current season began on March 26th and will run through June. If I can get into the swing of things and get used to running dailies then I might actually have enough time to unlock some of the cooler stuff.
I’ve been having quite a bit of fun just roaming around the West Virginia Wasteland. In a few days I have leveled up a bunch of times and unlocked several battlepass levels. From what I understand the first real breakpoint in the game comes at level 50, and any levels after that are just sort of gravy. You can start a fresh character at level 20 now, but I think I am pretty happy just slowly leveling my way up from where I am currently. That is one thing that changed that I think is really slick. So the world originally was tiered allowing you to accidentally wander into some really high level areas. Then they made some changes which had the group leader set the level of the world, making it awkward for low levels grouping with higher levels. Now it seems that they have done something similar to the Elder Scrolls Online level scaling tech where the world around you is set based on your own level allowing a level 1 player and a level 100 player to be effectively fighting the same monster.
Anyways, I am having quite a bit of fun poking around with this lately. If you make it into the game my Bethesda account is Belghast so feel free to friend me up and say hi.
The post Return to Fallout 76 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are back with the whole crew. We start off the show talking about how Secrets of Grindea, a game that we did an early gameclub show about… has FINALLY launched out of Early Access. From there we talk about Last Epoch some more as Kodra was out last week and has much to say about explosions. We also discussed building different characters and how the game rewards them. Bel attempts a Tier list but gets shut down as he is the only one who still prefers Path of Exile. Finally, Tam and Ammo share their early thoughts about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Good morning friends. I had a bit of a stressful weekend. So we have a bathroom adjoining our main bedroom and for a while now the toilet has been a bit wobbly. Saturday morning I noticed that it was more wobbly than normal. I thought maybe the bolt just needed to be tightened a thing that I could in theory do for myself because I have the barest modicum of mechanical aptitude. When I reached down to pop the plastic cap off that covered the bolt on the right side… the entire apparatus including the head of the bolt came off in my hand. The bolts themselves were just corroded and rusted messes and seemingly disintegrated. Like I had not put any effort into it… I could have just brushed it lightly aside and had it come toppling off the base. Turns out that the same thing was happening on the left side and essentially the toilet was not securely bolted to the floor anymore.
Thankfully there was no leak that I could find… but in a severe panic, I called the plumber who was able to work us in that afternoon. However, the meant for the entire day the arrival of the plumber became the “main character” of that day. I am thankful that they were able to work us in but it also sort of wrecks the momentum of the day, but anything is better than a continued “precarious potty”. Everything is fixed now and the toilet is “strongk”, but the plumber seems to have used quite possibly the slickest substance on the planet when they cleaned up their work area. I have no clue what exactly they used but it had hints of Orange Oil and Anomia and feels like the floors have been permanently coated with Teflon. Despite several attempts to mop the nonsense away… we are having to cautiously tiptoe into the bathroom like we are walking on a sheet of ice so that is less than enjoyable. We did thankfully have a roll of the clingy rubber rug underlayment that we put under our bathmat so there is at least one section of the floor that is firmly anchored for when we step out of the shower.
Other than this I spent a good chunk of my time not worrying about the bathroom playing Baldur’s Gate III. I had hopes of being able to complete this game prior to the launch of the Affliction League in Path of Exile on Friday. I am no longer under this illusion because last night I finished up Act II. I realize that technically I only have a single act to go… but every act seems to get longer than the previous one. I screwed up Act II, but am mostly fine with this. Apparently, I was not spending enough time talking to Halsin and as a result, missed a critical quest chain that was required to buy off his loyalty. So basically he is no longer in my camp because he is sticking behind in the Act II area for “nature reasons”. So I am attempting to say this in the least spoilery method possible but… maybe talk to Halsin a lot so you will have a clue what this quest is and do it before leaving the Shadowlands. Also also… Owlbear Cub and Scratch are pure beyond words. I sorta wish “Owlbear Cub” had a proper name though.
I’ve continued to play a little bit of Final Fantasy XIV each day and am slowly chipping away at my jobs leveling them. I am working on Red Mage currently, and honestly… it kinda feels bad to play it in PVP. Essentially each day I have been doing a round of Elephant-Friend dailies and the Frontline roulette. This combined adds up to roughly a level, meaning that I enjoy playing a tiny bit of the game but not so much that it begins to feel bogged down. Essentially it takes me about 10 days to level a character from 80 to 90 and feels like I am making some progress. I am not really taking a logical approach to leveling, and more so I am leveling whatever characters that do not have broken gear profiles. I realize this is lazy… but I don’t want to figure out WHY the gear profiles are broken and instead just want to pop in and do my daily nonsense before getting back out and moving on with other things.
Similarly, I have been popping into Guild Wars 2 on a daily basis and playing a bit of the expansion content, and doing whatever it takes to knock out my “wizard chores” aka Astral whatever dailies. One thing that I want more than anything… is for the dumb Krait monument in my Home instance to be able to withdraw from my bank. It sucks trying to remember to pull out some Quartz crystals before I do my home instance farm for the day. I realize that a lot of the older systems of this game are prodigiously hard to update… but there are times I daydream about getting a job for Arena.net just so I can fix some of these things. The game is so fucking close to absolute greatness at times… that if you pushed a few kludgy bits out of the way it would really shine for all the world to see. Friction can be good, but the sort of friction that Guild Wars 2 has… is the unfortunate friction of “tech debt”.
Lastly I did pop back into Path of Exile since Righteous Fire may be a dead spec going forward… which will mean I have three basically useless characters from three different leagues. I had never run a simulacrum before now, and the other day Kodra mentioned that he was able to get to wave 22 and I wanted to see how far Righteous Fire could get. Essentially I gave up after wave 29. I was not going to die… but also Kosis was going to take like 20 minutes to kill and I got tired of waiting. I am certain that if I was not impatient… I could have probably cleared wave 30 because I was more than capable of surviving the incoming damage. It just took so long to rip through Kosis’s constantly regenerating energy shield and begin to whittle him down. I am still holding out some hopium that maybe there is an alternate quality version of Righteous Fire that will work like the previous one did. I don’t really want to play an Inquisitor going forward and would prefer to keep playing Juggernaut.
I am really hoping that we get the big dump of information that includes all of the alternate versions of gems. I could legitimately see them favoring the edge case for Righteous Fire and wanting to push more players toward it, but I feel like they really need to keep the current version around in some form rather than decimating the best-documented build in the entire game. For the moment though I am really leaning towards Explosive Arrow Champion and maybe muling a ranger just to make it easier to start with a bow and go Lightning Arrow until the switch.
The post Precarious Potty appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This is one of those blog posts that I am not highly likely to syndicate widely. There are essentially two reasons why I do this… the first is that the content is of a deeply personal nature and the second is that I am writing about something that I don’t think anyone is really going to care about. This blog post is the later because I don’t have a ton of import to discuss, but also sort of feel obligated to make a post given the whole weekly blog posts schedule thing. Firstly I wish Henry Kissinger a long well deserved stay in the deepest levels of hell. Last night was the first time Mastodon/Fediverse felt like Twitter as everyone came out of the woodwork to dance on his grave. I know it is generally thought poorly to speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose truly awful policies are responsible for roughly four million deaths and throwing several countries into decades’ worth of turmoil is excluded from that statement. Congratz to the Grim Reaper for finally getting that epic pull.
Next up on today’s wild ride of topics… I finally left the Hinterlands. For anyone who does not understand that reference… in Dragon Age Inquisition, the Hinterlands is this massive nigh endless zone full of busywork that has stalled out many a playthrough. I know for me it personally wrecked at least two attempts to actually get through that game. Act 1 in Baldur’s Gate feels like a similar experience. That first area of the game is so packed full of content that you feel like you have to complete everything before just moving on with the damned story. I have graduated into Act II, and have now officially made it further in this playthrough than I have before. My previous run stalled out in the middle of the Underdark segment, and last night I crossed that barrier and finally met “Not-Gandalf”.
I have to admit that I have really mixed feelings about Baldur’s Gate III thus far. I love the story, and I love the dialog options… and the truly stupid level of detail brought on by the smallest changes in the way you approach things. However, I still feel like combat in the game is a deeply tedious process. There are times I realize that my tastes have changed and while I loved Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 back in the day… and ravenously played them… my tastes have changed. I would kill to have a version of this game with action combat, because I get so overwhelmingly bored while waiting on combat to resolve. Were this more akin to something like Mass Effect, it would easily be my game of the year. I’ve realized this is a “me” problem and not a game problem because I find 4x games similarly tedious when I used to lose entire weekends playing them.
Nick aka WithoutAGout replaced Bex as the community manager for Grinding Gear Games. If his tweet yesterday is to be believed… the theories surrounding a return of Sentinel are wrong. That is not to say that they could have simply not renamed that mechanic or this tweet could be a troll… but I guess we will find out in a short enough period of time. I think this does however indicate that we are likely to get a full patch notes drop shortly after the reveal. I am still banking on there being some sort of a Ritual rework coming with the Affliction League. What I however am most interested in is knowing when I can set up the “Bel League” private league and get that ball rolling.
This is your reminder to make sure your Twitch account is connected to your Grinding Gear Games account and that if you watch 45 minutes between 12:30 PST and 21:30 PST you can earn a set of cosmetic wings. I can’t say that I am terribly interested in insect wings, but I am going to try and watch this regardless so I might as well get some free mtx? You will of course have to redeem them from your Twitch Drops Inventory before getting them in game. I am sure tomorrow I will be making a post talking about my thoughts about the announcement as a whole, and as such today is this awkward middle ground of almost being there but not quite knowing much.
SirGog has once again done a big ole video talking about his thoughts about 3.23 and what is likely going to be on the chopping block. Various other folks have thrown out a few ideas, for example, Ghazzy thinks it is time to nerf Righteous Fire. However as an “RF Enjoyer” I hope that this won’t be the case, and I honestly think it isn’t likely because it isn’t like that build is overpowered. It is widely played because it is the best new player experience and has hands down the best guide creator supporting that build. GGG desperately needs an approachable onramp to the game, and right now RF provides that… and I feel like they would be shooting themselves many times in several sets of feet if they did anything to damage that. The only thing that is going to pull me away from RF for Bel League is if Guardian moves forward completely untouched.
I hope you all are having a wonderful week. Tomorrow I am sure I will have more cogent things to say about both the Affliction League and whatever comes from the Diablo IV Campfire chat.
The post Maybe Not Sentinel appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
