Yesterday was Geoff Keighley show of madness known as The Game Awards, and I was motivated to watch because there was a Path of Exile II mtx to be farmed as a twitch drop. I stuck around and watched the entire thing because if I was already a few hours into it… I might as well see the end. Prior to the show we had seen rumors swirling around Diablo IV and the fact that the Paladin was going to be previewed… which is why they had such a god awful league start time of starting up after the show finished airing. What I did not expect was the fact that they shadow dropped the entire Paladin class, pending you were willing to preorder the next expansion. The only sad thing about this… is that because they so hamfistedly planned their league start to stomp right on top of the much more exciting Path of Exile II league start… that I am not sure how many people are actually going to care about this. Blizzard has always had this way of trying to piss on the news from other studios to steal their thunder… but I hate to tell them that they are no longer the massive juggernaut that they once were. Path of Exile 1 and 2… and hell even Last Epoch are doing way more exciting things than Diablo IV is… so they will always be relegated to third or fourth fiddle when it comes to the ARPG community.
I of course fell for the madness and pre-purchased the expansion so I could poke my head in and try out the Paladin. So far I would say this class feels way more akin to the Diablo III Crusader than it does the Diablo II Paladin. The naming is largely just semantics and determins which of the holy orders the character comes from in lore more than anything. I am not shocked they went back to the Paladin as the name, but I am happy that they seem to be following the pattern set forth by the Crusader. That was probably my favorite character from Diablo III, and it makes me wonder if there is going to be an equivalent to Thorns Invoker in this game, which was my single favorite build. Right now I am leaning into the lunge attack that acts as a gap closer and the orbiting hammer throw that shatters into more hammers when it hits things. So far it seems plenty strong but I will be curious to see what endgame builds end up looking like on this class. However I am probably only going to play this over lunch, because once POE2 drops I am going to be focused on that.
Now you are going to get a bunch of trailers and me talking about them. The thing that I am absolutely the most hype about is Control Resonant. The only downside there is that it does not appear like we are playing as Jesse Faden this time. Instead we are going to be playing as her brother. Something has gone horribly wrong at The Oldest House and Jesse appears to be missing. So now we get to go on an adventure to save reality…. and I am so fucking here for this. I love Remedy games, and quite possibly… they are the studio that I now look forward to the most when they drop something new. They are a surreal feast of visuals and the storytelling and lore goes so deep that it feeds my hunger in those departments too. All of the Remedy games are connected… even though they cannot officially be so due to the weird history of how they released titles for various studios. If you ever want to deep dive into this madness… I highly suggest you play everything they have ever released.
In things that I absolutely did not expect… we are getting a sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic games featuring one of the folks from that era Casey Hudson. I have so much hope pinned on this nonsense, and the thing that bolsters me is the fact that it is not coming from Electronic Arts. I realize this is probably five years out at this point… but I can have hope… please god leave me with some shreds of hope. Knights of the Old Republic will always be one of my favorite games to have ever existed, and it is my favorite Star Wars era. I want to be positive about something for once.
Pivoting from the remants of Bioware… to a spiritual successor to Bioware… we got another trailer for Exodus. The disappointing thing about this is that we now know this is not coming until 2027. This game looks amazing and feels like they are leaning hard into the Mass Effect formula. Please god let this be good, because I also need this. Bioware is in shambles, and I have very little faith that Mass Effect 4 is going to be any good. I am okay with starting fresh with a new franchise and new characters to care about…. but what I really want is that good good ship of fools gameplay that Mass Effect provided. Give me a ship, and an interesting crew, and a bunch of cool missions to go on. Let me romance weird aliens and line the halls of my ship with all manner of miscreants. I am probably going to be there on day one if they manage to pull off even half of the joy that was Mass Effect 2.
So something you need to know… is that I fucking love Ma Dong-seok. I have loved him since Train to Busan, and if you have never seen that film… stop what you are doing and go watch it now. Wierd Yakuza adjascent game featuring Ma Dong-seok as the main character? Sign me the hell up. That is all honestly.
Another game that I did not know anything about going into the show was No Law. Mostly I am here for the cyberpunk dystopia. It seems to be some sort of a shooter, and depending on how that plays out I am here for it. Mostly I am just into the visuals of this game. I am hoping it ends up being fun, and not chock full of weird microtransactions and AI Slop since it is coming out from Krafton.
There is a “somehow sebulba has returned” meme floating around and it is delightful. A game that I did not know that I needed was what feels like a spiritual successor to Star Wars Pod Racer on the Nintendo 64. What is cool though is it seems like it is not just pod racers, but also featuring a bunch of speeders. I love a good big dumb racing game, and I am hoping this provides. If nothing else the visuals look really cool.
For the most disturbing game trailer, that goes to Larian for their next Divinity game. They are supposedly taking everything that they have learned making Baldur’s Gate III and then bringing that home to their own Divinity setting. So expect a rich isolemtric CRPG with a truly staggering number of choices. Maybe this will prompt me to actually go back and play Original Sin 1 and 2 so I can get caught up on the lore of this setting. I played Divinity 1 and 2 and loved them, but never could seem to get into Original Sin. If you needed a trailer where children revel while a man is burned alive… while also simultaneously a bunch of random people are fornicating in the front row… you might need to get your head checked. Regardless it was certainly memorable. I loved Baldur’s Gate 3, and I have loved various other Larian games in the past so I am hoping this brings me back into the fold.
Another thing that I did not expect is that we are getting a Total War game set in the Warhammer 40k universe. This is especially confusing because we are just about to get another Dawn of War game, which is also an RTS. It seems like these two games would cannibalize audience from each other. It could simply be that Dawn of War 3 is much closer to release and this is much further out, and we won’t be seeing the Total War game for a few years. Either way I am interested. I’ve heard the Total War Warhammer Fanatasy games were great, though I have never played them.
The last game that I am going to highlight is Highguard, which is a really quirky looking competitive shooter. It sort of reminds me of a bunch of other games that I have played in the past mutated into a single experience. I am not entirely against competitive shooters, but I want the playing field to be level if possible and for there to be other objectives that we are focused on rather than just racking up kills. My favorite competitive shooters were the Enemy Terrritory series with both Wolfenstein and Quake games set in it. This sort of feels like a spiritual successor to that where you seem to be focused on holding objectives and setting up attacks like the siege tower that is built that the group is obviously escorting across the map. I am really interested to see how this plays it. It screams hero shooter to me, and that is ultimately going to determine how much I like it… because if you keep having to buy the latest and greatest hero it is going to limit my joy for the long term.
If you missed the show they released a 4k 60fps version this morning, but be warned it is a 3 hour and 35 minute long commitment. These shows always overstay their welcome, and while I had fun for the first hour or so… I was mostly just wanting to hit the fast foward button from that point on. You truly are better off just checking the YouTube page the next morning and cherry picking the trailers that you want to watch. The award portion of the show always feels like an afterthought, and there is generally one game that wins everything… for example I am pretty sure that Expedition 33 won every award it was up for. I like that there exists something like this, that is now the focal point of the gaming year…. especially with E3 long dead and gone… but in truth I would rather have an event like this once a quarter… that is half as long than have this one big dumb stupidly long event at the end of the year.
Did you watch The Game Awards? What games were you excited about that I did not cover? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a weird week and a lack of desire to put pen to digital page. As a result you’ve only gotten Monday, Wednesday, and Friday posts instead of one each day. Largely it has felt like I have not really had much to talk about, because in truth I am struggling to find purchase on anything that brings me joy. Part of this is due to the fact that we got a partial RTO (return to office) order yesterday, starting in July… after five years of being fully remote. I knew this was coming down, but I just did not know the timing. As such I am struggling to concentrate on much of anything, and while I am enjoying what I have played of Expedition 33 so far… it is just too much thinking. I need shut my brain off entertainment so that I can stew in my own mess and sort through my thoughts and feelings. I’ve also just sort of been bone weary tired lately, which is not helping either.
I finished Andor season 2 however, and it is quite possibly the best Star Wars anything out there. Everything else is going to feel like a bit of a let down after how phenomenal this tale has been. At some point I want to watch Rogue One, which was already my new favorite Star Wars movie… to see how the character of Andor evolved between the two properties and see if it matches up cleanly at all. Even if you are not a traditional Star Wars enjoyer, you owe it to yourself to watch the two seasons of Andor. Even from a pure artistic standpoint it is so lavish and stylish, giving us a whole new view of the galaxy far far away. While we are only getting two seasons of Andor, I would honestly really love to see some more connected properties about characters that were introduced here as gap filler between these events and the more familiar events of the Star Wars original trilogy.
I also finally got around to watching Freaky Tales, which is a weird 1980s quadrilogy of odd tales… that feels oddly adjacent to the connected story-lines in Pulp Fiction. The trailer gives the impression that it is much more of a fixed narrative, rather than four individual stories, each from the point of view of a group of characters. The events of everything weave in and out of the narrative, but effectively each story is a closed loop. What is wildest about this sequence is that apparently they are based on actual events that took place in Oakland around 1987. The entire story is woven by Too Short, who is played in the movie by an actor… but actually makes a cameo himself. There are a bunch of odd cameos, specifically Tom Hanks as a gambling den running cinephile video store owner was specifically out of left field. It is well worth the watch, especially if you grew up in the 80s and were ever a member of any of the various subcultures from that era.
Last night I started watching my way through Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld which is a Dave Filoni animated show tracing a series of events centered around Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane. I am not sure if there is an eventual crossover in the series between the two characters, but thusfar there appears to be a sequence of Ventress specific episodes and then a sequence of Bane specific episodes. I’m only a few episodes into the Bane part of the show, but the Ventress episodes were phenomenal. I’ve always liked this character, specifically the interesting redemption arc that they have given her. She went from being just a really cool looking villain to a very textured character over the source of the Clone Wars series. I think that has honestly been my favorite part about the Filoni-verse is how his shows have taken relatively paper thin characters and added mass and form to them.
So when I said that I was done with Sir Gog league… I had apparently lied. I’ve needed something that I can shut my brain off while playing… and Path of Exile at this point is one of those things. I’ve committed most of the game to muscle memory, and I accidentally landed on a fairly reasonable build. I’ve continued down the path of Sunder, but making it do lots of fire damage and leaning into buffing that through a few support gems. Combine this with a bunch of gear that I am getting through running Kingsmarch shipping missions, and you have a reasonably tanky character that does fairly decent damage. That said… the boss fights continue to be complete nonsense. They just feel progressively more and more cheap, like Grinding Gear Games was setting out just to find brutal ways to kill players rather than making well thought out fights.
I do think I have hit my hard limit though with this fight, because I have reached the point where I just cannot grind through an encounter. During the Doedre fight in Act 8… I am doing almost zero amount of damage to the boss before the massive room wide area of effect attacks take me out. All I am really doing at this point is incrementing the death meter, and showing zero sign of making it through the fight. I think this is the point where my character just ends. I made a good attempt at getting through the gauntlet, but it beat me. I could get my second ascendancy points, but I am not sure that would actually buy me anything significantly in the survival department. Like I said before, all of the builds that seemed to do this when it was a hardcore event were some form of miner that just one-shot everything. I believe this was during the seismic trap is overpowered days of the game.
The other game I have been playing quite a bit of lately is AFK Journey. Normally I have this as part of my nightly before sleep ritual of playing through a bunch of daily missions, and then never really getting around to anything else. One of my friends though is looking for someone to duo a bunch of corrupted monster encounters, and in order to get to them I have to have progressed a certain amount of way through the storyline. So as a result I am mainlining the story and trying to get as much of it knocked out as I can. Yesterday I believe I cleared the bulk of the seasonal storyline, and am now in optional territory. However I am going to keep cranking through this just to make sure there are no walls later in the game when we actually attempt to group up and do the content. I still find the game deeply charming and am consistently shocked at just how much of it you can play without having spent a dime on it. It is not that I am against spending money on games… even mobile games… but games like this don’t really give you any reasonable feeling means of doing so. All of the money sinks are specifically designed for whaling out.
Anyways that is where I am at. This is going to be an exceptionally busy weekend because Mother’s Day has snuck up on me once again and I have no clue how we are going to see everyone within the constrains of a single two day weekend. Hopefully y’all have your own affairs figured out, because I surely do not.
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Morning Folks! I’ve loved toys and assorted video game/nerd culture kitsch for my entire life. The problem that I have run into is that I just don’t really have any more room for anything… and I am not exactly displaying what I do have in a reasonable manner. This has deeply curbed my desire to pick up things that I otherwise think would be cool. Don’t get me wrong… my office is stacked full of nonsense that I could not pass up and that I have not had a chance to deal with. For example… the pile of “mini” consoles behind me that I got on closeout but never really did anything with. Thing is… there is a specific brand of YouTube material targetting folks just like me. I’ve been collectively referring to this as NostalgiaTube which is centered around Toy Stores, Video Game Stores, and assorted Garage Sale and Flea Market pickers. This morning I am going to share some of my favorites in this relatively broad genre.
Toy Federation
This is probably my favorite channel of the bunch because it is also potentially the most professionally run. Essentially this is the marketing wing of a very popular toy store of the same name in Greer, South Carolina. The channel is sort of a “day in the life” type view of running the store and evaluating trade-ins and collections that come through. This style reminds me quite a bit of the way that Alpha Investments felt when I got heavily into that channel during the “Rudy owns a Store” phase of that channel. As a result of folks bringing in a non-stop chain of collections, you end up getting to see so many items that summon forth “member berries”.
Would I love to have a showroom full of complete collections of all of the things I remember fondly? Hell yes. Will I ever actually collect this stuff? Very unlikely. Also of note, this store and team are behind Retro-Toy Convention which also lends its way to seeing a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff of setting up a convention. Probably the best aspect of this is it is part of a “Saturday Morning Cartoons” block of channels that tend to release content each week on Saturday mornings and I often watch the latest video while eating my breakfast.
Eternia Dreams
Eternia Dreams is another channel that is based out of a Toy Store that has a location in Gettysburg Pennsylvania and another in Westminster Maryland. In addition to two storefronts… one of which that is located in a still functional mall, there is a lot of footage as the team goes and sets up as vendors at toy conventions. As the name would indicate, the channel focuses a lot on the Masters of the Universe toy line but largely covers pretty much everything else that is out there. I’ve seen way more focus on newer toylines on this channel than say Toy Federation, which is sort of cool. Mythic Legions for example is a hot property targetting these independent toy sellers. Again however probably the most interesting aspects are the “day in the life” stuff focused on what it takes to keep the stores and convention business running.
Pixel Dan
This is a channel that I found through some of the other channels and tends to be focused on a lot of stuff that was coming out when I was in high school or college, so a bit younger than me. I think Pixel Dan is probably most widely known for his work as an archivist on a Masters of the Universe photo reference guide, or at least that is where I first heard his name. There are a number of tomes that have been created featuring some of the best reference photos for various figures and equipment along with assorted variants, which end up getting used by the various toy stores to “complete” disparate parts of figures. The channel itself tends to focus on his trips out to find various stuff with his family and is edited in a sort of montage style where he talks about things from his studio/office and then shows examples. Worth watching, especially if it looks like it is going to be something interesting. He also visits a lot of other toy stores around the country giving you a glimpse into what each of them is like.
Froggy Flips
Froggy Flips similarly gets a lot of traction but instead of visiting stores he largely visits big regional toy and vintage shows. He is based out of Greenfield Indiana and tends to cover a lot of the upper Midwest area as he roams around. What I dig about him is his focus on Madballs and assorted early Horror and Monster toys. He also seems like a genuinely cool dude and comes off as very respectful towards everyone he meets. I appreciate that he has a following but his videos are peppered with moments of him stopping to have a chat with a viewer. He also seems to genuinely get to know all of the vendors that he interacts with, but I guess if you are making a lot of regional shows you are going to see a lot of the same faces over and over. I remember when I worked at a card and comic shop in high school, we saw the same vendors time and time again when we worked shows. I often have videos like this on in the background while I am doing something else and it is cool to see the various stuff that he finds.
Little BIG Robots
This one is a bit of a departure from the rest, mostly because it is less a show about acquiring vintage toys and instead about what is new or interesting that is currently on the market. Some of you who have been around the MMORPG blogging world for a while will know Beau Hindman and Little Big Robots is what he is up to these days. He takes a less holistic approach towards toy collecting and instead focuses on the things that he really likes for one reason or another. I don’t watch every video that comes out but if something interests me like the D&D remake line for example that I linked above, it is well worth a watch.
Retro Rick
Shifting from Toy Collecting to Video Games I thought I would throw in a few different channels that are similarly feeling. Retro Rick is effectively a picking channel that sort of branched out into a bunch of different things. Last year he purchased a game store in his area and as such has branched out into another channel called Retro Rick’s Game Point and from that point on… the two channels have sort of blended a bit where they are part “day in the life” of running a video game store and part going out into the field and hunting for stuff either for personal collection or to restock the shelves. Mostly a large chunk of why I dig this channel is because he exists in my area. It is not out of the realm of possibility to go up to Conway Arkansas at some point to visit the store. Additionally, he has hit a bunch of stuff in the Bentonville>Rogers>Fayetteville sprawl which is an area I am in way more often.
Arkansas Picker
Lastly, there is the Arkansas Picker which I found through Retro Rick, and I am mostly including it because the above video is from a show in my area that I did not even know existed. I would have potentially gone to it just to look around. As the name would indicate the channel is way more about going out and “picking” for items but there is also a little bit of running a booth in a flea market. He had some issues where folks stole from his booth and there was a whole saga of trying to secure it better while also tracking down the thief. I’ve just started watching the channel and again don’t watch every single video but given he operates in my neck of the woods it is interesting to see places I have been before.
Do You Watch NostalgiaTube?
Do you partake of NostalgiaTube? Are there any really cool channels that I am missing? The other thing that I really dig are found footage from the 80s/90s of folks walking around toy stores or just stores in general. I miss the existence of the Toy Store. When Toys R Us was a thing, I went there probably once a month at a minimum just to roam around and see what was there. I dig that there are independent stores that are stepping into that niche, but I do miss the existence of giant walls of toys in physical stores. Nothing used to be as magical as getting to roam around one of those stores and spend your birthday money. Anyways different post from my normal posts but thought someone out there might enjoy it.
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Yesterday I hit the credit roll on Jedi Survivor. I’ve always thought the “production babies” screen on these games is fun and tends to illustrate the scope and timeframe required to create these experiences. In High School I saw Jurassic Park and Lord of Illusions back to back… and I have never been entirely certain if Lord of Illusions felt awful because Jurassic Park was so brilliant. Similarly, I am not sure if I am judging Jedi Survivor harshly due to the fact that I just finished Alan Wake II and it was so brilliant. While I enjoyed myself this game was a bit of a mess, and nowhere near as focused as the first game Jedi Fallen Order. This morning I am going to do my best to give a non-spoiler explanation of my thoughts.
Jedi Survivor is simultaneously too large and too small… in that, you essentially have one massive world called Koboh that allows you to explore every inch of it and a bunch of very shallow destinations. So much of the gameplay revolves around going and collecting some MacGuffin, flying across the galaxy to have a conversation, and then flying back to Koboh to do something. This cycle repeats several times during the course of this game and it ends up making the entire experience feel like a series of fetch quests. I feel like I am supposed to be in awe of being able to explore this planet and find all sorts of little diversions… that do not really matter to the game as a whole and only serve to muddy the waters when you are attempting to follow the golden path. The first game felt like it did a better job of giving you a concrete reason for going everywhere, and if you wanted to go back later and 100% that area it was up to you to do so. Fifteen hours into the game I was still being introduced to new NPCs with their own currency chase to unlock a different sort of cosmetic.
What the game does nail however is giving you these perfect vignettes of action scattered between miles of mashing the shift key in order to try and make yourself run faster through the boring bits. How clean and tight these corridors are designed, only serves to illustrate how muddy the waters really are. Jedi Fallen Order was a game made up of only the good bits, and Survivor feels like a game that has been watered down significantly in order to increase “player engagement” artificially. The game has a fast travel system, but it never seems to really matter because anywhere you might need to go… is down a path that you did not have access to previously. So ultimately you still end up spending huge amounts of your time running past landscapes that are all too familiar as you seek that one area that a new widget or ability allows you to access.
The game does however manage to set the stage for a whole slew of interesting characters that are not exclusively Human and Twilek. For example meet Skoova Stev, a delightful “Big Daddy” reference and the NPC that unlocks this entire fishing and fishtank maintenance mini-game. Someone poured a lot of love into this character and I find it a bit sad that it is entirely fluff… and does not really play any importance in the thrust of the main game as a whole. The game is littered with these loveable characters that don’t really matter and you could probably go through the entire game without ever actually encountering them. I love that they all exist, but wish they were more than glorified vendor NPCs.
The game hits the ground strong with one of the best tutorial sequences I have ever played through in one of these action combat platformer RPGs. The same is true for so many moments in the game, but the story that is attempting to weave them all together is a bit muddled. I think on some level I never really bought into the main Villain of the title. They are bad because the game tells you that they are bad and that they spend a lot of time doing “megalomanic monologues”. There is a mini-boss that is way more relatable other than the fact that they keep “playing with his food” as it were and letting you go every time you encounter them. When I finally had to kill them… I sorta felt bad because they had hitched their honor to a cardboard cutout of a villain.
Then there is the big reveal at the end… that legitimately did throw me for a loop and served to kinda make up for some of the muddled mess in the middle. The thing that I cannot entirely forgive however is that the game robs me of any agency. This is where we get into some light spoiler territory… but there are several points in the game where you must embrace the dark side in order to complete an encounter. I was given no choice save for a fail condition and having to restart that area. I am not edge lord enough to revel in Darkside Cal Kestis. I am a Paragon path player in Mass Effect, and no matter how much I might think I am going to do a renegade playthrough I always shift away from it quickly because it “feels bad”. Being the villain feels bad. Turning to the Darkside even for a moment… feels bad and feels like a betrayal of the character I have been building in my mind.
Do I think Jedi Survivor is a bad game? No, not at all. Do I think it doesn’t really deserve to be on any “games of the year” lists? Probably. It has some great moments but the muddy middle serves to tarnish everything that was great about the experience for me. It was a “mid” game for me, and aggressively so… but it was still something that I felt was worth finishing up. If you enjoyed the first game, then I would suggest you eventually pick this one up as well. I would probably wait for it to go on sale however as it was nowhere near as impressive as some of the other titles from this year. I still love Cal Kestis and the characters that are being woven together in this world. I still hope at some point these characters cross over into the Mandoverse that is being built on Disney Plus. It would be a crying shame for such a great actor as Cameron Monaghan to not get a live-action Star Wars debut.
Now that I have talked about the story and gameplay… let me dive into the other thing that harmed my experience. This fucking screen shows up every time you launch the game. You would think that once the shaders were compiled and cached… you would never see this screen ever again. However, you would be wrong and it takes a couple of minutes to load through this screen every time I launch the game. Worse than this is the fact that the game can only seem to run for about an hour before locking up and crashing to the desktop. If you happen to get a crash during one of the many sequences that do not checkpoint your progress in the form of a save file… you will have to repeat whatever nonsense you were doing before the crash. This meant that a lot of my gameplay was trying to log out every hour and reload the game in order to forestall a crash…. only to see this damned shader caching screen again. I get that I am a weirdo in that I want to play this with a mouse and keyboard… but I do feel punished for not just playing it on a console.
The game has a lot of really cool things going for it, and I know that I will be picking up the next game whenever it releases because you sort of end at the midpoint of a larger story arc. This is the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Respawn Jedi trilogy. While we end on a more hopeful note than Empire did… there is definitely a lot of baggage that our crew is going to be sorting out. I am “bought in” to the franchise and the characters at this point, and I will be here for the entire run however long that lasts. I hope however that they return to something closer to the first game for the third. This type of story was better served by a tighter style of gameplay as opposed to the more open-world experience. I get that this is odd since I never liked any of the Assassin’s Creed games prior to them attempting to replicate the Witcher 3 format… but I feel like it just does not work for the Respawn Jedi series.
Did I completely miss the mark? Did you play it and love the faffing about? Drop me a line below.
The post Jedi Survivor Final Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
