RPG

Interstellar Boxcar Heroes

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Hey Folks! I thought I would take a detour from my usual ARPG nonsense to talk about something else I have been playing the last few nights. I realize that practically everyone has been talking about Honkai Star Rail, but I’ve also dipped my toes into those waters. In truth, I started playing shortly after the game launched but apparently did not play long enough to save my progress. This was a little weird to me but it seems you have to complete the entire first tutorial segment… which is not exactly short… before the game actually saves your account. I am not exactly certain at what point this takes place, but my guess is once you’ve defeated the first boss and been presented with the choice of staying on the station or riding the rails.
As a result, I have a much high UID in the sequence than I thought I did, because my account was not actually finalized until over the weekend. I need to install the game on my phone to see how well my roughly five-year-old device handles it. In order to do that I will probably need to uninstall a bunch of junk that I am no longer playing. I have this bad habit of randomly installing games when I am bored… playing them for a day or two and then wandering away like a bored toddler. I think this game will probably work much better as a mobile game than Genshin did for me, given that everything is turn-based and high-speed inputs are crap on a touchscreen device. I remember when Genshin launched there was talk of a Switch version… and I really wish that had come to fruition because I also feel like Honkai Star Rail would be a perfect fit for that device. I suppose I could sort out how to launch it on my Steam Deck because there is very likely a solution for that just like there is for Genshin. Anyways if you are playing feel free to friend me up: UID – 604908816
I think what I dig the most about Star Rail so far is that it feels like a really good turn-based JRPG. You can definitely see how far Hoyoverse as a company has come since the release of Genshin. Admittedly I have not played Genshin Impact really since maybe the first or second major content area was added to the game. The last region that I explored at length was Liyue and I never really got into the big mountain region that they added after that. I am sure that likely Genshin has also improved its storytelling, but from someone who heavily played that game at launch and then walked away… Star Rail feels like a massive boost in quality levels. The combat and designs are also pretty great and so far I am pretty happy with the default cast of characters that you get handed to you along the way.
I am not very deep into the game and have just landed on the first planet after the tutorial space station. So far I am digging the story enough that I would probably keep playing the game just for that alone. I am also really enjoying the turn-based combat and setting up combos that feed off each other to try and burn through encounters quickly. I do however wonder if part of the reason they decided to go turn-based with this game was so that they could add the ever-present mobile game auto-battle option. I’ve not turned that on so I have no clue how successfully it actually does at managing combat. What I really dig is that the game is a TRUE turn-based, and not that active time battle type system that Final Fantasy games shifted to. You can sit there mulling over your next move for as long as you like and the game does not seem to hurry you along in the process.
Combat is flashy as heck, and this goes for your moves as well as those of the enemies you are fighting. This makes everything feel sufficiently epic, and I really dig the main character this time. Pretty much the entire time playing Genshin Impact I was using a cast of side characters and never actually using the default Traveler. The game gives me enough options in the dialog to feel like I am having some impact on the type of character that I have chosen to be, without getting bogged down doing so. I also really like that I am a melee… but that is probably not going to sit so well with my finger-wiggling friends out there. You can of course create a party NOT including the main character just like you could in Genshin but you will ultimately have to wait until you get enough side characters to make that functional.
I think ultimately my fate with Honkai Star Rail will be determined by if I can manage to play it casually. I do not want to spend any significant sum of money on this game, which means I will be relying on the slow drip of cash shop currency and free pulls in order to get additional characters. I’ve picked up a few new options but so far none of the much coveted five-star champions. I think my frustration with these games in general is the power difference between getting a five-star and sufficing with the much more common four-stars. Since you spend so much time and resources in leveling characters up in a game like this… getting a very powerful character early on really improves your overall experience in the long run.
If I can manage to play this as a casual story-driven turn-based RPG… then I think I will be happy. However, I have this bad habit of trying to go deep into the game as I did with both Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy, and when that happens… I get frustrated by the artificial walls that are put up as barriers that require you to dig into your pocketbook in order to get through them. So long as I can keep the mindset that this is like a Final Fantasy single-player game… I think I might just be okay. It does not really FEEL like an open-world loot-grinding game which probably helps my enjoyment. We will have to see what this game looks like once I have depleted the main campaign for content. I noticed there is a similar system to Genshin in that you can only do so much in a given day without paying for additional turns, so we will see how badly that impacts my progress.
Ultimately this is like every other one of these Gacha games in that they are free-to-start, but likely not free forever. We will have to see just how much FOMO is baked into this particular game, and how hampered I feel by things that I can ultimately gain for free. It isn’t that I mind spending money on games, I just don’t like the sort of spending that is attached to gacha mechanics. I would rather a game like this launch with an honest $50-$100 price point that allows you to feel like you have everything you need in the game. That is unfortunately fundamentally against the design of this type of experience because they are “Gone Whaling”. So instead my mindset has been to try and get as much fun out of them as I can until I hit that paywall and then wander off for a while, maybe to return at a later date to gobble up more free content. Like I said above, if you are also playing this game feel free to friend me. Not sure if there are any passive interactions between players like there are in something along the lines of Pokemon Go or not. I can’t guarantee to be terribly active because this is absolutely a side game for me right now. The post Interstellar Boxcar Heroes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Jedi Survivor Early Thoughts

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Good Morning Friends! I hope this week is excellent. Last week was a kick in the teeth as far as weeks go, so by the time I reached Friday evening I was just too exhausted to start anything new and unfamiliar. So as a result I did not get engaged in Star Wars Jedi Survivor until Saturday morning, as I wanted to start the game with fresh eyes and a good perspective on life. I am playing on PC and I had a really good experience playing at 1440p and at the default settings which are a mix of High and Epic. I did not have any significant instances of slowdown other than one place on the first real planet where there is just a massive volume of particle effects.
That is absolutely not the case for everyone. Digital Foundry who obsesses about PC detail and performance has decreed this the worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023. When we recorded the show on Saturday night I found out that Tam was bit by this problem. My system is fairly beefy with an 11th gen Intel i7, RTX 3080, and 16 GB of ram… but so is his with a Ryzen 7, RTX 3070, and 128 GB of ram. Both are systems that should have run the game at 60 fps at 1440p without any issues. It did on my machine but it absolutely did not on Tam’s which led him to refund the game on Steam and pick it up on the PlayStation 5. Basically, I am throwing this out there so if you are on the fence… maybe wait a bit on the PC version of the game.
When you boot up the game, it is going to give you a warning message stating that the game is best played with a Controller. If you are most comfortable with a keyboard and mouse, then I would ignore this completely. I remember the first game having this warning as well, and I took its advice and bounced off the game pretty quickly. It was not until I stuck to my guns and played the game with my more greatly preferred mouse and keyboard input that I made it all the way through the game. Essentially I am telling you to take this with a grain of salt. There is one thing that frustrates me greatly though. While you technically can change some of your keybindings on the PC, you can’t change all of them. For example, I want to change dodge to something other than tab… because that feels like a keybinding decided upon by Joe in Accounting. So if you play with Mouse and Keyboard there are going to be some things you are just stuck with.
At this point, I don’t want to talk a ton about anything that would venture into the territory of spoilers. The game is gorgeous and manages to do something that so few games do. It allows you to pick up effectively where you left off without having some narrative device that caused you to forget everything you learned in the previous game. You effectively start with all of the movement and traversal abilities that you had at the end of Fallen Order and rapidly add a few new tricks to your repertoire including apparently the Jedi Mind Trick. The last bit I have admittedly only used once so far, and it was during a speech dialog, but I can influence animals with the force to either calm them or agitate them and get them to attack baddies.
The Tutorial Planet takes place on Coruscant, giving us an amazing romp through the lower levels of the machine city. After completing that mission arc and refreshing yourself on all of the movement, you are set loose on a much more open planet allowing you to explore fairly freely. This gives the game a bit of a Breath of the Wild feeling, though the exploration is not quite THAT free but you do eventually unlock the use of animals as gliders. You also open up a new lightsaber stance which is the ability to break apart your lightsaber into two sabers and fight dual-wielding style. This has absolutely been my jam so far and I am investing heavily in the ability to throw my sabers at enemies.
There are way more friendly folks scattered throughout the world that you can help out. There is also the introduction of Boglings, which serve a similar function to the golden birds from Ghost of Tsushima in that they occasionally lead you to the next objective. You can of course pet the Boglings which is super pure. The detail of the world is so much better than in the previous game. Fallen Order suffered from the problem of several tunnels and areas of work looking pretty similar to other areas. I know this was really bad on Kashyyyk, and caused me to get completely turned round at several points. Navigating here by visual landmark seems to work much better for me at least, but they have also improved the 3D mapping system if you need to lean on that instead.
Over the weekend I played all of the way through the Tutorial planet and unlocked everything that I think I can currently from the second planet. This led me onto the third planet… which frustrated me to the point of shutting down the game and going back to Path of Exile for a while. This third planet is “the floor is lava” the planet, and is comprised of shale piles that you can’t walk up without sliding down… and some sort of sandworm-like creature that can detect your movement and jumps up from the ground to eat you. Which means you have to do a series of annoying wall runs and duck from shelter to shelter while traversing the early areas. I opted to bail out because I did not want to tarnish the great experience of that second planet. I am sure I will return to it at some point this week and deal with the frustrations.
Probably my favorite aspect of the new game is that I can finally have a beard. Look this is important to me. I also can fiddle a bit with different styles of gear and assign some basic color options. My hope is as the game continues there are some really cool-looking options. What I really want is something akin to Obi-Wan’s Jedi Battle Armor from the prequel series. I have a few pieces of tactical armor that I have picked up but nothing quite that grand. As far as the story goes, it isn’t terribly interesting as of yet but does seem like it is going to bridge the gap between the Kenobi Series/Rogue One era of Star Wars and the burgeoning High Republic era. Nothing really has grasped me though story wise other than the desire to “get the band back together”, as all of the characters went their separate ways at the end of the first game. I think that is probably all I will talk about for now. Expect more attempts at spoiler-free updates on my progress. If you were going to play this on PC… maybe wait for a patch for two until someone like Digital Foundry calls the all-clear. The post Jedi Survivor Early Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

On Lancer, Again

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Blaugust is half over and I haven’t even posted the thing I promised months ago.

Lancer’s Setting

Because it’s been so long, Lancer is a tabletop RPG about giant robot pilots (for a somewhat flexible definition of “giant” that also includes power armor). It’s set in the Somewhat distant future of our galaxy, in which mankind has used both FTL and long-form travel to spread out among the stars. There’s a mild space-fantasy element primarily consisting of AIs that do things that can’t be explained by physics and what humans have learned from studying them. The term used for this is “Paracausality”, borrowed directly from Destiny.
Monarch Cutaway

Lancer’s History

Lancer is a post-apocalyptic setting, but not in the usual sense of the term. In Lancer’s theoretical future mankind developed near-light ships and managed to establish some colonies on distant worlds. With colonies established and more ships en-route, the collapse of society cut off communication and ended most life on Earth. After a roughly ~5000-year dark age or so, old knowledge was rediscovered in the Massif vaults, and a “world government” called Union was created after a bit of fighting. The game’s narrative present is about 5000 years after this.
IPS-Northstar Mechs
As a Lancer, you (probably) work for Union’s Third Committee. Old Earth (now known as Cradle) and most of known space are recovering from the aftermath of the Second Committee, whose authoritarian and imperialist policies (referred to as “anthrochauvanist”) made a bit of a mess of the place before they were overthrown. Time has resulted in some of the original colonists re-establishing communications, and they’ve had plenty of opportunity to develop their own cultures and in some cases technologies in the thousands of years since contact was originally lost. The most notable of these are the Karrakin Trade Baronies (who existed before the Fall) and the Aun Ecumene (established during the dark ages). Relations between these entities vary.
Smith Shimano Corpro Mechs

Lancer’s Technology

A major event in Lancer’s timeline is referred to as the Deimos Incident. A summary is that a super-powerful AI (known as RA or MONIST-1) was being studied on the aforementioned moon of Mars, and it managed to somehow take over and leave, taking the entire moon with it. It reappeared to force Union to sign a treaty concerning AI research, and has proven to be willing to show up personally to enforce violations. Much of Lancer’s “advanced” technology is the product of studying this entity, and is the given explanation for FTL. Some other factions have their own unique technologies: The Voladores are space nomads and have some knowledge of folding space that no one else does, and the Aun have “hard light” and their own unique form of FTL.
Horus Mechs
As far as what players get, there are 5 major Manufacturers. (It’s really 4 and a cult that has a gear catalog.) Your starter gear is from General Massive Systems, who produces a really quite good generalist mech and weapons of every type. As you advance as a pilot you get access to gear from the other manufacturers with more specialized portfolios. Horus has a strong emphasis on both hacking and defying physics, SSC makes fast, lightly-armored mechs, IPS-N mostly makes the opposite, and Harrison Armory uses the most advanced tech (some of it stolen) in theirs. These manufacturers are also some of the major players within union, so you may end up working for/against their interests. Just like Shadowrun, it doesn’t prevent you from using their gear while you do it.
Harrison Armory Mechs

The Unknown

One of my favorite things about the setting as written is that there are a lot of explicit and implicit mysteries. What does RA want and where is it? What happened to most of the colony ships during the dark ages? What are NHPs really? What weird tech is HA currently developing? What happened on Hercynia? That last one is the subject of the first module, but the rest of these you’ll just have to figure out as they come up.

On Lancer

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In the most recent podcast, I mentioned Lancer, a sci-fi mech RPG that’s currently on Kickstarter. I feel like I didn’t entirely do it justice, so here’s a bit of a longer explanation on what it is, and why I think it’s great.

The Premise

Lancer is a Mech-based Tabletop RPG using a custom d20 system. (A d20 is used for resolution, but the “standard stats” and levels and various other things that are in a normal d20 system are not here.) It’s set in a sort of future version of our galaxy with some hand-waves in the form of “sufficiently advanced technology” (think Mass Effect or Infinity) but very little in the way of aliens. As a result humans have spread across the galaxy, multiple factions are trying to advance their own agendas and the players are mech pilots who Got Involved. How exactly that works is left pretty open.

On Lancer

The System

One of the more creative things about Lancer is that it’s basically two games stapled together. There’s a very open narrative system for pilot interactions while you’re not in a giant robot, then also has tactical combat built in for when you need to get into fights. In this way it avoids the tendency of other narrative systems to break down when negotiations do (I know this is a complaint my usual GM has about World of Darkness-based systems) but also supports doing more than just fighting (which is the generally largest complaint about systems like D&D 4e). Interestingly Kodra proposed something like this on the podcast for playing 4e, so it’s interesting to see it in a more realized form.

On Lancer

The Mechanics

Part of the fun of Gundam Breaker 3 to me is the very high amount of customization you can do on any given robot. Lancer uses the concept of Licenses to add their own spin on this, and getting more licenses means you have more options to choose from when designing a mech. Each license has one associated frame, and then an assortment of 6 associated weapons and systems that go with that frame thematically. Once you have enough license levels you can mix and match these as you choose (within certain limits) until you have a mech that does what you want it to.

There’s also a little bit of vertical progression associated with license levels, as your pilot skills increase and can result in your mech having more ammo, more HP, faster movement, etc. Pilots also have talents for further customization, plus a set of things they can do while not in their mech.

On Lancer

The Fluff

This is actually complicated enough that I think it deserves its own post. Until next time!