Good Morning Folks. This past Thursday dropped the head start for Dune Awakening, a Survival MMO set in the Dune Universe. Essentially this falls along the lines of something like Valheim but set in the Dune Universe, with really high quality environment graphics and an interesting twist to the story. This is a universe where Paul Atreides was never born and Duke Leto Atreides was never successfully assassinated leading to the downfall of that house. The Fremen were wiped out by the Sardaukar in a mass genocide… and the planet of Arakkis is actively in play with the Harkonnens, Atreides, and other minor houses of the Landsraad vying for control. You can choose to join forces with either Great House, or carve out your own path in between them pitting each against the other. At least that is the pitch for the game… and I can neither verify nor disprove any of it… because I am not terribly far in the overall progression of the game. At this very moment I am level 24 and barely progressed in the main story… because I am prone to fits of being a murder hobo and ignoring quest chains.
I saw some early advice that greatly tweaked my initial plans with the game. Namely that it was very easy to specialize in Trooper because there is an NPC trainer at the first town… but much harder to subclass in other things. I had read that Mentat was a really solid early start because you got access to the very powerful turret ability, and I leaned on this heavily during the early game. Combat is rather challenging at least until you get some decent weapons and gear under your belt, and a lot of my early experiences were me sneaking into a camp… deploying my turret which would fire off 3-4 shots before exploding but was highly capable of dispatching the few scavengers that were in each camp. From there I would mop up whatever was left off… drain all of the corpses of their precious precious moisture and then loot whatever I could and rush back to base to dump it into storage.
You can build up to two bases at a time, and very early you will probably end up creating a box like I did that only served as enough of a base to get you in out of the weather and protect you from the real dangers of Arakkis… the Sun and the Sandstorms. The game does something really interesting in that when you have to abandon a base… it still exists in the world and any other player can claim it by plunking down one of the control beacons. Additionally all of the stuff that you had in your base sticks around in the same way that you left it, and you can trek back to loot it later… but relinquishing control of a base essentially opens up all of that stuff for free for all looting. This has to be really interesting on a public server because I fully expect the entire zone to be littered with little hidey holes created by players… full of random smatterings of loot.
That is the first part of why this experience has been so enjoyable. I am not playing on a public server. Funcom in their infinite wisdom opened the game up so that third party server providers could sell private servers that players could rent. Tam opted to rent a server for the AggroChat crew to play on, which allowed us to play from Thursday all the way through the weekend without a single connection issue. I heard in passing that there were some significant lag and connection problems playing on the public servers, but for us… everything was calm and peachy and allowed for an interesting leveling experience as we could pool resources and share bases. Right now there are just two of us playing on the server, but I believe there will be another batch joining us when the game officially launches for everyone that did not pay the early access tax on Tuesday. You can also see that I tried to lean into the whole Mentat thing with my character appearance.
There are essentially three vectors of progression in the game that I have seen thusfar. The first being your character level and spending skill points in the trees that are available to you. Essentially a build is a combination of points spent, three active abilities, and three passive buffs called techniques. I do not know when my third active ability unlocks but right now I am running my ever faithful turret from Mentat, and the Shigawire Claw from Trooper that allows me to rapidly ascend cliff faces and honestly fly around the battlefield if I need to. When combined with a suspensor belt that allows me to float slightly or more often fall gracefully… I can mimic flight for short periods of time. I’ve unlocked the Trooper class tree and have spent points related to gunplay there and reduced weapon durability loss. Through a quest chain I also gained access to the Planetologist tree which has a Mechanic branch that makes it so that I use less fuel and my sandtrike takes less wear and tear.
A slightly more important progression system is the tech tree gained through researching. Roaming around the map and uncovering new areas, and scouting camps and bandit settlements rewards a currency known as Intel. You can then turn around and spend that Intel researching various patterns that you can then craft. This is going to be a significant hurdle in your progression because not only do you need to research the crafting machines, but you will need to research individual patterns. For example I am not currently using the most efficient mining laser, because I have prioritized combat resources above it… and at some point in the future when I am flush with Intel I might upgrade it for efficiency… or will become a higher priority when I actually need to harvest carbon. Early on it is pretty easy to research everything… but now that I am in the second region of the game I am having to pick and choose what I want to research. Were Tam and I actually doing this game efficiently… we probably should have tag teamed this and focused on different things so that we could have access to everything easily.
One thing that is a bit interesting is the inclusion of Unique patterns. These are essentially what good drops would be in any other game. You often get these from the chest at the end of more difficult content, and they grant you access to craft a single instance of the item. These are HIGHLY relevant items and are a power level that even in the second zone of the game I cannot quite hit by crafting normal items. I focused on crafting the Way of the Fallen Pistol and Kaleff’s Drinker Knife and they hard carried me through the first chunk of the game. The emperor’s wings gave me early access to the ability to float… well before I would be able to research that on my own, and the unique literjon is a massive upgrade given it comes with six pips worth of storage instead of the normal four. I got all of these items way earlier than the main story quest would have given them to me… because again… I have a tendency to go murder hobo and ignore the story. In truth I would absolutely do this again even though it led to me having to do certain chunks of content two or three times as a result.
The third and arguably most important vector of progression… is the main story quest. This is unfortunately where I have fallen down in this game, because generally speaking when you give me an open world experience… I don’t want to be chained to someone else’s timeline. If you look up at the research screenshot, there are a few items that have a lock icon on them. This is effectively locking progression behind some step in the story that you have not reached. I smarter person than I appear to be… would focus fire the story and churn through the progression steps to fully unlock the tech tree more quickly. Tam as a result is way further along in the progression than I am, because he has the proper mindset for this sort of game. Personally I feel like it would be a much BETTER game if you unlocked various tech trees when you first encounter the materials that are used for them. One of the things that I love about Path of Exile for example is that you can completely ignore the story and if you know what you are doing you can short cut all of the quest steps just by obtaining the final items required for them. I have an inventory full of items that I am certain will be used for quests later in the progression… but cannot really do anything with them for the moment because I went somewhere too early.
It admittedly took awhile before the game got into my blood. I think when I last spoke about it at the tail end of the week… I was neither a for or against it… but It has won me over. First off it is just really gorgeous and you have some truly haunting vistas like this guild heighliner floating impossibly silent above the world amidst all of these auroras at night. The true dangerous of the world of Dune are the sun which saps you of moisture, the sandstorms which shred bone… and will absolutely straight up kill you quickly if you are out in one when it happens, and the sandworms which will swallow you whole and cause you to lose everything that was on your body. Pretty much everything else is recoverable by running back to the sight of your death and picking up some of the random stuff that you dropped. I’ve not experienced it but apparently running over top of quicksand is another instant death with 100% loss of everything on you.
Technically I survived a sandstorm, but it involve me chain resurrecting myself… and then blowing through all of the bandages that I had crafted in order to just barely keep alive. I would not recommend it in the least. The game generally gives you one to two minutes of warning, and when you hear the automated voice… you better be booking it to some area that is showing up as “sheltered” or better. Otherwise you too will be doing the resurrection dance trying to stay alive until it blows over. Thankfully they seem to be fairly quickly moving… so you don’t have to stay sheltered for terribly long but so far… it is absolutely the thing I am the most terrified of. The sandworms themselves… seem to travel in patterns and if you just saw one pass then it is probably safe for you to venture forth towards that next rock outcropping. I think of Dune as an ocean game… with the sand being the water, and the rock outcroppings being the islands. Every step that I make… even now that I have transportation is about minimizing my time out in the open so I plot my moves carefully from island to island as I get to my final destination.
I spend a lot of time moving around at night, because at least then you are removing one of the risk vectors from the equation. I do a lot of short trips out to destinations and then ferry back my resources to my base. Essentially I am worried about carrying too much in the open for too long, and it also becomes very important for you to create a garage of sorts to store your vehicles in because if you leave them out during a sandstorm… they will essentially get disintegrated. I’ve not reached the point where I can begin to repair my gear which is extremely nice. However I also feel like I have fallen behind the tech tree as I moved into the second area. Tam has a base near mine that I absolutely used for a bit just because he had more machines available than I did. You can share out your base with your friends, and as a result it has been useful to sort of leap frog our way around the map. I just saw that Tam built a new base to the far north… so I might chose to build something in a different region just to give us more access to safe spots to hole up for awhile.
Is this game the best thing ever? Absolutely not. Am I enjoying myself? Very much so. It is a survival game, much like any other survival game with the added bonus of being Dune themed. If you are looking for the best possible version of this sort of game, I highly suggest checking out Enshrouded. For the moment I am having fun and I am interested to see where this adventure goes. I think I will essentially peter out when the next Path of Exile league drops at the end of the week, or if I high the Landsraad segment of the game…. because we are not a big enough guild to matter there. I kind of hate that the Deep Desert is shared between all of the private servers, and will still be PVP enabled. I was hoping that by renting a server we were skirting that functionality and could just have our big chill player versus environment game-play. Thing is… the environment really is terrifying at times… that was enough for me without having to deal with other players in the mix.
If you were ever a huge Dune nerd then this game is probably something you would want to check out. If you are also a big survival game fan, and have reached a point where some of the other offerings in this genre are stale for you personally… then again it might be worth a shot. However I do not think that this is revolutionary enough to really be a massive hit on its own right. I am not interested in the PVP and Guild Combat aspect of the game, because I am just not wired in that manner. If you are, then it might be a thing you care about far more than I do. I think it is a mid to interesting game experience that comes flavored in a science fiction universe that I care about… and for me personally that is an enjoyable offering. I do not think this is going to be a game that most people are going to care about however. Right now it is a strong six out of ten for me.
Are you playing Dune? What are your thoughts? Over the weekend I saw Scopique made his post like this… but I purposefully skipped reading it until I had written my own thoughts this morning. Now I will be heading over there to hear his experience.
The post Dune Awakening Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This past weekend I originally set out to start a brand new world in Enshrouded, and see all of the content. What I have done instead… is compulsively hollow out the side of a mountain, with the goal of building down to the shroud. There are certain patterns that I get suck in with games… where I cannot bring myself to do something else until the mission has been accomplished. I even built a worktable and a bed on this nonsensical shelf floating above the shroud just so that I could quickly reset the day or build more stone blocks as needed. There is nothing impressive about my build… it is mostly just a box, but I still find myself compelled to build in this manner. Often times I “pretty” the structure up once I have reached a point where I feel okay about it… but at least for awhile I always go through a bulk utilitarian building phase.
Removing spawned material in Enshrouded is a massive pain in the ass… so what I learned when I decided to dig a basement at release, is that you can use prefab blocks as a way of removing chunks of the world in a consistent manner. For example my preferred floor height is two 2×2 blocks stacked on top of each other. So as I started hollowing out the side of the hill, I started placing these blocks and then removing them in a structured manner so that I could clear out individual floors of my weird boxy structure at a time. Effectively… I will probably be stuck in this pattern until I have hollowed out as far down as the current parameters of my base will allow. Then I will go back into a phase of adventuring again… until I can increase my base size… and then likely back to hollowing out the ground again.
This is not just an enshrouded thing… in Valheim I could not hollow out the earth easily… so instead I built this stupid network of connected bases. I had no real reason to build so many bases… but I just felt compelled to keep creating beachheads in new areas of the map. I even went so far as to create this secret base, with a hidden portal… that was MASSIVE and way deep out into the chain of islands on a shared map. I thought it would be funny if someone on our server stumbled onto it and wondered what the hell was going on. In Valheim specifically I used to use the fact that you could transport the same character between multiple save games…. to rapidly transport materials between locations since things had so much weight. I would pop over to a private save… dump my inventory, then move to where I wanted to dump the items in the public save… and pop back over to retrieve them into my characters inventory. I think this “efficient” gameplay annoyed Kodra who was all about the real world ramifications of having to transport objects around the world.
Minecraft is the real place where you can see my compulsive patterns in action. I have so many different save files… all with the same basic patterns. Something super common is my trademarked tunnels to nowhere. I will just start digging in a direction and keep going until I hit something that looks interesting. For example this tunnel goes for unknown thousands of blocks… I think I went through four diamond pickaxes to carve this 3×3 tunnel that effectively leads to nowhere interesting at all. I saved every bit of the stone that I harvested meticulously in a bunch of chests, so that I could then in turn use it to build other dumb structures that no one will ever see. A lot of times I will find myself compelled to build like this while I am listening to an audiobook or something, bringing subtle order to the chaos of the random spawns.
In the same save file you can see a “stack of boxes” similar to what I have going on in Enshrouded. What you cannot see is just how many floors are below ground that I compulsively dug all the way down to bedrock. Once you get down there… you can see a bunch of mining operations as I scoured the earth looking for resources. There are people who build pretty houses in these games, but for whatever reason… I always strike down into the earth to find my safe domicile. I think on some level if I had my druthers… my perfect house would be dug into a mountain side with big windows facing out into the world… but plenty of shadowy places where I can escape the light of day. I keep effectively building these same structural ideas in whatever game I happen to be playing.
Another thing you will find in a lot of my saved games… is interlinking paths that don’t really serve a purpose. There is no reason why I built skyroads between mountain peaks…. and then also hollowed out paths between them. Like there is no mechanical purpose to any of this. As soon as I closed off an area and lit it up, I was completely safe from anything that might spawn at night. However I just kept building these random terraces and cascading staircases that went up the sides of hills… and then dipped inside of the mountain only to poke out the other side and go in a different direction. My builds in games often feel akin to the Winchester house… where I just kept building for the purpose of building. Then randomly I will decide to roll a brand new world and start the entire processes over again.
Sometimes I will end up with something unintentionally beautiful… like this area where I dug into a mountain and found a natural grotto with waterfalls coming down from above and a subterranean pond. So I then set forth to build a stairwell that went up through said pond… for reasons that do not really exist other than to do it. I am sure all of this is some sign of a malady or something…. but I find a weird level of peace just sort of aimlessly building. I used to sit in the floor with building blocks, legos, or later contrux as a kid and effectively building the same sort of structural designs over and over. Now said buildings… exist in digital form. Because of this weird compulsion that I seem to have… all of these games will likely remain evergreen. Hopefully there will never be a time when I do not find joy in the simplicity of placing or removing blocks. On some level I think this is probably some way I deal with anxiety… because I am shuffling around quite a bit of it right now.
The post Compulsive Building appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I guess I might still be taking a bit of a break given that I did not blog yesterday. I am mostly spending my evenings chilling out mapping in Path of Exile II while listening to the latest book in the Divide series by J.S. Dewes. However there is another game that I have been exploring a bit. One of my friend tipped me off to Vintage Story, which is a game that attempts to bring back the confusion and fear that was playing Minecraft back in Alpha when we did not have all of the patterns and progression trees memorized. This game has apparently been out since 2016, and started its life as a mod of the same name. However mechanically it feels fairly similar to Minecraft in that you punch blocks to harvest them, place them with the right mouse button, and open your inventory with E.
The similarities however go careening off a cliff pretty quickly. In Minecraft you punch a few trees, get some resources to craft some basic tools and then rapidly start progressing your way up through the skill tree as you immediately dive into being able to mine resources properly. In Vintage Story… you go through the Stone Age first. Essentially in that first day you are looking for a few resources, the first being flint, which shows up occasionally in these stone piles scattered around the surface of the world. In the above image there is a stonepile in the middle of the screen, and flint will show up as a slightly darker colored rock in those piles.
When you have at least two pieces of flint you can create your first tools by the process of knapping, which is a legitimate thing that our ancestors used to create effectively the first known tools. Essentially in the real world, you use one rock to flake off pieces of another rock until you have shaped it into the manner that you wanted. In Vintage Story you place down the stone on the ground and then slowly knock out pieces of rock until you have freed the shape of the toolhead that you are trying to create. Initially you are going to create a Knife which then can be used to harvest plants, because you will need grass and reeds to progress further.
Once you have a toolhead you can place it in your crafting inventory along with a stick, which you can either pick up off the ground, or get from punching bushes rarely. You can also create an Axe with flint that allows you to start felling trees… and then taking those logs and splitting them into firewood. When combined with dry grass you can create your first campfire. You have to use dry grass and sticks to create a firestarter though… which has a seemingly random chance of lighting something on fire as it loses durability.
Once you have your trusty flint knife, you can wander around and find bodies of water… which often have cattails growing beside them. You can now harvest these and then use them as reeds for the creation of wicker goods. Namely you want to create hand basket which allow you to expand your meager inventory beyond the tool hotbar slots. You can also use these to create more permanent chests that will be helpful once you settle down and build shelter.
I built a relatively simple shelter… that is honestly quite ugly… but I don’t know how to make decent looking building blocks. Essentially the game has a day/night cycle that is 45 minutes in length. In the default survival mode when night falls, a monster type called creeps spawn and hunt you down. You have to be inside in order to really survive this. Similarly wolves are another massive problem in survival mode as they will aggro you from quite a long distance away and chase you for a good ways before giving up. You can also customize your difficulty level, and for the time being I am playing on a custom mode that delays the nighttime spawns for several days and makes wolves neutral. I am essentially trying to get my feet under me before I deal with chain deaths.
I’ve reached the point where I am beginning to move into the metal age, and with this I need clay in order to form molds and crucibles. Essentially once you have a shovel you can seek out clay deposits and then similar to knapping, you form the clay into specific shapes building up several layers of blocks until you have reached the final shape. Here I was creating four crucibles where I had to create the base for each and then build up several layers of walls before finally adding the top to the container.
However your clay doesn’t become usable until you have fired it in a kiln. The cool thing about this is… so far everything that I am doing in this game mirrors the real world practices. So the simplest form of a kiln is a pit kiln, where you effectively dig a whole… surround the raw dry clay vessels by material that burns, and then layer on things that will burn more slowly above that… finally lighting the whole mess and letting it burn and cool on its own. Weirdly enough I have actually fired clay bowls in the real world with a version of this… in essentially a metal trashcan. In the game version you dig a single block hole, place your vessels on the ground, layer up 5 layers of dry grass, then 2 layers of sticks, and finally place 4 pieces of firewood on top before lighting the whole thing. It takes 24 in-game hours to complete the process at which point you will have your fired pottery waiting on you at the bottom of the pit. These however catch EVERYTHING on fire… so make sure you surround the pit with some sort of non-flammable retaining wall. Definitely DO NOT do this in a wooden home.
There are a lot of random spawns out in the world, including traders that will buy things from you and sell other things back to you for the gears currency that they trade in. There are various ruins of buildings, that occasionally will have chests that you can loot with resources that you might not yet be able to create on your own. When I last stopped playing I was firing a hammer mold and a pick mold, and was roaming around the world looking for surface deposits of copper. The next step is to go through the process of smelting that copper in a crucible and then pouring the molten copper into the two molds. From there I will need to create a pair of tongs so that I can take the toolheads once cooled and go quench them in a nearby body of water.
One of the things that I really appreciate about the game is that it has a very robust mapping system. You can right click on the map and add waypoints noting various things that you find in your travels. I’ve heard that finding copper deposits on the surface also indicates that there should be nearby copper once you are capable of mining below the ground. So I’ve marked all of these with a copper colored pickaxe with the goal of eventually going back once I have the necessary tool to go exploring further. Similarly if you find clay, you can mark it on the map so you can go back later and harvest more of it given that there always seems to be a lot of it when it spawns.
The game is definitely interesting, but I am not sure if it is the sort of thing I will play with any frequency. I play games not necessarily to mirror the difficulty of how you might do the same thing in the real world, and while I appreciate the level of “sim” built into this survival Minecraft clone… it might be a bit too cumbersome for me personally for the long run. Especially given how quickly your tools break down, forcing you to create new ones. The level of nonsense that I am going through to create my first copper tools… is not something I want to do on a daily basis. In theory once you move on to smithing, things get a bit easier… but still the amount of resources needed to do only the most basic things seems a bit on the extreme side.
If you are the sort of person who likes to run Minecraft with the super simulation heavy mods installed, it might be worth checking out Vintage Story. One thing of note… this is not on Steam but is instead on Humble Bundle, Itch.io, or directly from the developer. I picked my copy up from Humble mostly because I already have a bunch of games on that platform.
The post Minecraft But Cumbersome appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back after taking a break last week due to the limited number of folks available. This week we start off with a topic that has bounced around a bit on our docket. Namely, we marvel at just how balanced City of Heroes/City of Villians is and what a pinnacle of system design it really is. Bel spent a bit of time playing Nightingale now that is available in early access, and talks about the mess of a game that it is. Finally, we dive into our primary topic this week and talk about the Last Epoch 1.0 launch and how phenomenal the game feels right now despite all of the server-side woes.
