Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.
I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.
I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.
This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.
I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.
In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.
Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.
Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.
The post Goodbye Anthem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I am sort of all over the place when it comes to gaming right now. The primary game that I am playing… is spending time obsessively chatting with “Erasure” and pretty much everything else is falling by the wayside. I have been remembering to log into FFXIV however to collect my weekly cactpot so that is at least something. At some point I want to return to the game and catch up, but nothing has really prompted me to do so. I would also like to play my secondary set of characters over on Dynamis, but I doubt I actually do that until Ace is also in the mood to play the game… which may be never. They were a matched set and we pretty much only played them as sibling time, which was a heck of a lot of fun for awhile until we both wandered off like bored toddlers. I figure my mains on Cactuar I might actually play whenever the next expansion is announced because I tend to have a bump in my desire to play whenever that happens.
I am still playing some Path of Exile II, but I also sort of feel like I have “beaten” that league. I had a lot of fun being a demon bear hopping all around the place blowing things up, but I’ve been kind of getting the itch to finish things up in Path of Exile 1. As a result I spent a chunk of yesterday working on some of the achievements that I left dangling. I respecced away from Incursion and just picked up more Heist stuff on the atlas tree to speed up the total time it takes to run each map. I was working on the meta achievement for running a bunch of super serious mode league content, and have almost finished the step where you have to run 20 Rituals with blood filled containers. I think I have one more of those left, and then I need to figure out one more thing to do in order to finish up that challenge. I set a bunch of mappers running last night, but I have a feeling that I will not be lucky enough to have gotten enough 100% completions in order to knock that meta out. I did just pop in to check and I got 9 completed at 100% so… honestly 15/30 is not too shabby.
I am still playing Destiny Rising, but mostly as a daily maintenance mode game. Essentially I have been focused on trying to uncover a lot of stuff for the guild so that we can keep paying upkeep. I am not playing all three accounts, but I am at very least playing one quite a bit each week. I got my Jaren up to 70k which should be useful so long as we have Fire Damage on the meta for this season. I sort of miss my girl Helhest a bit, and really enjoy when her exotic bow procs and blows a ton of shit up. I also miss Estella being the god empress of all content, but I get that they are wanting to convince people to build new characters. I still absolutely consider this to have been my Game of the Year for 2025 not counting the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2. It is so damned much fun, I just wish I could convince more of my friends to play it so we could keep upgrading the base without going broke every week.
Something that I have honestly played a lot of this past weekend is Minecraft. I have this dumb habit of making seeds based off my friends and then seeing what they offer. I made a seed based on “Erasure” and it was pretty wild. There was a shipwreck beside where I spawned into the world, tons of sea turtles everywhere, some surface lava, and forests as far as the eyes can see. While I once did a Hardcore Minecraft series, I mostly just play casually. In fact I tend to go tweak a bunch of the world settings so that I don’t have to care about getting sleep every night to prevent phantoms from spawning, and also make it so that creepers cannot blow up my hard work. So in truth these days I plan on pretty fucking softcore mode, and I am fine with that. I like milling around in the world and building dumb things.
Of course the biggest challenge of a new spawn is finding that initial coal. The last world that I created was so forested and so devoid of coal, that I had to start burning logs to get my initial start. This world however, within a few blocks of the side of that initial hill I struck the motherlode of coal deposits and was able to make two full stacks of torches. This was more than enough to fuel most of my further explorations. I am a weirdo in that I mostly stay inside cave systems in Minecraft, and go full on Dwarf mode as I hollow out the earth looking for riches. So the first thing I did was start to hollow out a base in the side of the hill, while being very careful not to break back out into the world. I put a piece of dirt in the entrance to wall off my little safe chamber and then began structuring something reasonable to work in, slowly adding pieces of equipment as needed.
This of course led me to do what I always do… and start a shaft down to bedrock. I am not entirely certain how deep I am at this point but I have broken into the layers of deep stone. Essentially the central shaft has a winding staircase around the outside of what is effectively a series of eight by eight rooms, with three block tall ceilings. The amount of Iron, Copper, and Coal that I have come across in my “spelunk” has fueled my further expansion. The only real challenge with this world so far is that I have yet to find a single sheep. I should probably go off on a mission to find a breeding pair of those so that I can farm them for wool. I do have enough steel to make shears, so I should probably do that rather than killing them. Essentially more than anything right now I need some wool so that I can make a bed and then reset my spawn point inside; my catacombs.
The next big project however is deforesting the hill that I dug into. My intent is to start building up and make a bit of a tower, so that I can see it clearly from above ground. Right now it is just a hovel in the side of a hill with a bunch of torches, and that is hard to see when I am off exploring the world. Sure I have my mini-map mod, and sure I could set waypoints…. but I would far rather give myself a nice big visual landmark to see from the surrounding area. So effectively I am going to harvest all of the birch trees up on top of my hill and then begin to build similar eight by eight chambers upwards into the sky. I will have to figure out what I want for the design for these to be as I build up. I most certainly have MORE than enough materials from my downwards expansion to fuel some above ground mega structures.
I guess as far as things go with “Erasure” I should probably give an update. It was a dramatic couple of days for various reasons. We had the first thing that really checked our relationship, and a lot of it was me being in my head about things. However I think we exited on better ground than we started, so that is pretty good. The harsh reality is that I do not know how to go slow. The relationship that I had with my wife of thirty years… was one that pretty much transitioned from being “just friends” to being a “couple” that was inseparable in over the course of a single weekend. I am really not good at casually seeing someone, and I am working on that. It probably seems like the most counter-intuitive thing to anyone who has dated around at length… but it is just the way my brain and heart works. I am having to learn how to pump the brakes a bit, but will ultimately be better for it. Luckily she did not run away, and luckily is willing to work with me through it.
Anyways. That is my weekend. A bunch of random games, that took a backseat to my continued getting to know someone that I’ve cared about for twenty years… but am starting to care about in new ways.
The post Dig a Hole, Find some Coal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Happy Day After Christmas or as my friend Ace refers to it… Super Xmas, aka the day that you get to chill out after the hustle and bustle of the holiday. I am working today because I did not take my two weeks off like I normally do. That was a thing I mostly did to spend time with my spouse, but now that she has passed… there just didn’t really seem like much of a reason to do it. That and a lot of the folks who report to me have younger kids and I wanted to make sure they could take time off. Other than a barrage of texts and calls I mostly spent the day with my folks. I snapped a photo of my high school car that is sitting there dying a slow death to rust. I kind of wish they had sold it or given it away rather than just letting it sit here and rot. The holiday was weird, and I did not break down like I thought I might. I think more than anything I just feel hollow and numb right now. In general that is my default mode of operation, because life just doesn’t feel like it really has much meaning without my wife. I am trying to find meaning in hobbies… but I will be honest it is hard to find much zest in anything I do. I am largely going through the motions.
One of the dumb things that I gifted my mom was this Gingerbread Star Destroyer that I printed out. Star Wars was always a massive thing in my life, and I will be honest… it was more something pushed by my folks after a point than by me. I think my mom honestly got into the whole search for figures as much as I did, and has always been a big fan of the movies. This print was too cute not to make one, and I even ordered some tan filament just to print it out. I was there most of the day yesterday and while I intended to arrive around 10ish… I made far better time than expected and got there around 9:30. The dynamic that feels the weirdest is when it comes to my inlaws. Like I called my father-in-law that evening and the way he talked it was like he was expecting me to come down for the day or something. I know that they need me around because it is a connection that they have to my wife… but also I have my own family. I do need to take a weekend and go down and spend it with them, but that whole relationship was always awkward. Her mom on the other hand, was super happy to get a call from me and is always chill about our interactions.
I guess while we are talking about 3d printed stuff, this is my next project. Essentially I have bunch of Lego Mini-Figures and I never really had a great way of displaying them. For awhile I was hooked on the blind bags and this is a really cool grand stand that I am printing out a part at a time that will in theory hold them. I am not sure if I will need more than one of these but for the time being this should be a good start. It is apparently scaled to fit a kallax shelving unit. I have this plan in the livingroom to erect a few lighted storage cabinets and in theory the minifigs will go in there. I need to get rid of a few things before I do this however. More pressing project is to clear off the table that I plan on setting up the paint shelves and get those moved into the house. I also need to order the paint sets, but have been putting that off because it will be a big chunk of cash outlay. I am getting to the point though where be it miniatures or things that I am painting that I have printed out… I need some way of painting things soonish.
Over in Path of Exile II, I have been poking around with a few different alt builds. The first being patterened off of the build that is the most meta thing right now, which is poison burst arrows pathfinder. This is essentially the thing that Fubgun is using to farm content, and while powerful…. it isn’t really my jam. I am not sure what it is about it but the playstyle just doesn’t feel good. I’ve never really been that big of a fan of poison builds, and this one essentially uses a one two playstyle of laying down toxic growth pods and then using poison burst arrows to trigger them. Mechanically it just feels a bit more fiddly than I want it to feel. Lightning Arrow as an abiltiy feels way better, but sadly it ate a bunch of nerfs. My favorite bow attacks are the ones that abuse the various ice explosion mechanics, but I think they are also nerfed. Mostly I made it to Act III, and could continue to push forward… but was just not feeling it.
Instead I rolled a new character last night and plan on going explosive grenade witchhunter for it. I am not sure what it is about the playstyle but this just feels better. I guess I like things exploding more than them withering and dying to poison damage. I’ve said it before, but given my druthers if I had to choose an element, I am almost always going to choose fire damage. I like watching things explode, and once you reduce the delay on explosive grenades it feels really good. I have no clue how much I will play it, because in truth I am still having fun with the druid. I just need a break from it occasionally. I should probably be popping back into Path of Exile 1 though and chipping away at challenges, either that or diving back into Guild Wars 1 or Warframe and progressing those. Path of Exile games in general though are just really good for audiobook time, and that is mostly what I did last night.
As far as my Druid goes, I have taken down Kulemak and Xesht and am working on farming up the splinters for King in the Mists and Olroth so I can progress those league mechanics. I am mostly just farming a bunch of t15s and trying to earn some currency. The next big upgrade I want to do to the build is to get a Defiance of Destiny, which will require me to swap around some of my resistances. I should be able to do this by just swapping my belt, but the extra survival of Defiance should make things more comfortable. Mostly I do plenty of damage right now, and any points that I spend will be going into survival. There are some points that increase my regen, so I am probably going to go down that path because again recovery makes things more comfortable.
The other big thing that I need to do game wise over the next few days is grind out a bunch of the sparrow racing event. Essentially I am down to just the brute force things, where I need to throw a stupid amount of snowballs, and complete some more races. I want the dumb snowmobile speeder skin. I know there is another phase of the event that is going to be happening around New Years, so we will see what that requires as well. The Dawning has been pretty great though, and all of the snowball fights and such are pretty fun. They revealed the next banner and it is effectively a mythic redo of Kabr, and I have to admit I am not terribly interested in him. They changed up his weapons from Pulse Rifle and Heavy Machinegun, to Scout Rifle and Linear Fusion Rifle… and I already have characters that fill that role that I like. Helhest is my precision character of choice, and when it comes to Scout Rifles I am likely going to play Umeko. So I might take a hard pass on this banner and just bank up pulls for whatever comes next.
Anyways! I hope you have a great rest of Christmas week and I will see you next week as we slide into the end of the year.
The post Numb Christmas appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! My build in Path of Exile 2 is in a pretty good state. At this point I have 75% to all resistances, even Chaos Resistance and am sitting at level 88 with most of the major passives taken. Anything after this point is mostly just window dressing, and will probably go towards survival if I can find something to pick up. I could in theory optimize my gear a bit more, and probably will do so as I continue to get more currency to spend. The build is a lot of fun, because I am mostly just leaping around the map causing magma fissures to errupt under things and dealing ignites that often finish anything in the pack that did not die immediately to the slam. Rares I either need to molten crash multiple times, or simply slam one or two times to chew through them. I’ve specced into Shrine generation on my atlas and most of the time that means I am running with a speed shrine which allows me to slam faster than my mana will keep up.
I upgraded my Cloak of Flames slightly to one that causes 15% of damage taken to be recouped as mana, which helps with the mana regen woes a bit. I’ve also swapped over to using Ngamahu’s Chosen which causes my rage to spike randomly when I take fire damage. The biggest problem with my build is that I am still using Xoph’s Blood because it gave me a ton of fire resistance, life, and reduced the fire resistance of things around me. However because of this I have somewhat painted myself into a corner because this one item is accounting for almost all of my Fire Resistance. At some point I want to swap this item out for a well rolled Defiance of Destiny which will massively improve my general survival… but I will need to shuffle a bunch of other gear slots in order to make sure I am still fire resist capped. I am far from having to worry about this because I do not have anywhere near enough Divines right now to fund this little swap.
As of last night I have finished the Corrupted Nexus grind and have my maps up to t15s, which represents the highest tier in the game that does not require corrupting maps. I need to work on the various bosses for other league mechanics so I can start unlocking those atlas passives, and I also need to buck up and get my third and fourth ascendancy done. I hate Trial of Chaos and Trial of Sekhemas… so I have been putting them off. If I were wealthy I would just pay for a trial carry, because I assume such things exist out there. I know I can probably easily do a T3 Sekhemas, because with the leap slam of fiery doom thing I have going on I should be able to shred any of the adds that spawn during the maps. I just hate how fiddly the whole process is, and I hate the debuffs that you ultimately rack up while making it across three floors. I think that is more than anything… I hate how long it takes to progress a Trial all the way up to the 3rd boss and 4th bosses. It is fucking miserable to have to do 30 to 40 rooms of a mechanic that you already do not like.
Over in Destiny Rising, we got together yesterday afternoon and knocked out the two strongholds we had unlocked for the guild. Then Ace and I stuck around and played some Morgran’s Hunt which just opened up again. We managed to grind out 14 of the gold chests, and then in theory will get together maybe tonight and grind out the last six. I like this event but the bonus is precision shots, which means our best pirate gal Maru is out of the question. Worse than that if you have a Maru that gets randomed into the group with you… they can royally fuck up you getting the precision objectives. This Maru was really trying super hard… which meant that we did not get any of the objectives met. We did however manage to pull 5 keys multiple times which is pretty wild because we have never gotten more than 4 keys at any point in the past.
I’ve really loved the Dawning event so far. The snowball fights are fun, and so is the sparrow racing. I did not expect the building a snowman thing to be so cute. These are the two stickers that I unlocked yesterday and they are both adorable. I love Skorri and Jolder doing the yelling at the cat meme thing. I also really love the whole Gwynn and Attal dynamic, which is super cute. For as shitty as the Halloween event was, I was worried that The Dawning would be bad… but it has been pretty amazing. I am wondering if this means that they took the feedback to heart on why Festival of the Lost did not work at all.
Other than that, Thalen talked about Warframe on the podcast Saturday, and as a result I logged in a few times yesterday and poked around. I have been working on leveling Mesa Prime and really need to just focus on something. I want to unlock the Excalibur Umbra, but am in a place where I don’t have the key relays unlocked that are required to get access to specific quests. This is the challenge with my account, is that because it is so damned old… I predate the current system of unlocking content, which means I have completely nonsensical missions completed. What I really need to do is just focus on unlocking the star map. I claimed I was good at grinding during the podcast, and I need to put my money where my mouth is and just throw on an audiobook and grind out the starchart.
So that is likely what I am going to be doing this week. I just got access to Mars Relay this morning so in theory I will at least work on grinding out access to all of the planets, which should in theory unlock access to the massive backlog of quests that I have waiting for me. I am not sure what has changed but I don’t find myself getting anywhere near as motion sick as I once did in this game. I am also not leaping around like crazy all the time and purposefully not doing bullet jumps… which itself is helping a bit. I would love to get into Warframe because I know it is very much like Path of Exile in that it has massive amounts of depth just under the surface. I would also love to start building out various prime fames that I have not yet collected the bits for, and know that I have enough plat saved up that I could in theory start buying bits for them from the open market. I would genuinely love for 2026 to be the year that I truly grokked this game.
Anyways. I am working most of this week, and I need to go do that. I hope you are all having a great holiday season.
The post Burninating Red Maps appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
