Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We were out last week but, as such, came back with a stacked list of topics to discuss. We start off talking about Path of Exile II and the bad launch patch for Dawn of the Hunt. We also talk about the interview between Zizaran and the Devs and the resulting updates. We then dive into some discussion about an amazing-looking season for Tombs of the Erased in Last Epoch coming next week and all of the new features. Kodra and Tam share their experiences with Blue Prince, which is a puzzle exploration game that highly suggests you keep track of some real-world notes. Bel discusses his thoughts on the Minecraft Movie and how it splits the line between brilliance and trash and ends up providing a pretty great time. Ash has restarted Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX, and Thalen talks about the Hugo Award Nominations. Sudokucon has happened, and Kodra shares how the event went. We also have a brief revisiting of Xenoblade Chronicles X, which Ammo and Ash are still playing through.
Good Morning Folks. There is a bit of a kerfuffle happening right now in ARPG land. Essentially this was bound to happen at some point, but the overlapping seasons combined with various setbacks have essentially conspired to multiple things happening all at once. Two days ago Grinding Gear Games released an announcement that 0.2.0 was not months away like we had thought, but would instead be landing at the beginning of April. With it came some new footage and the tease of one of the missing classes being released as part of this. The Huntress has long been an announced class for Path of Exile II and is playing into the Spear Amazon play-style that was popular in Diablo II. My personal guess is that the first successful builds are going to be Lightning Strike and chaining full screen pops with Heralds…. essentially copy pasting the current popular Path of Exile 1 builds.
This is universally a really cool thing though, especially for players who are not mainlining Path of Exile II, and do not care about the other ARPGs in the genre. Where the kerfuffle comes in… is that it is launching 2 days after the start of the second Last Epoch season. For me it is a no-brainer… Path of Exile II can wait and I am going to be spending my time playing Last Epoch until I tire of it. However what proponents of EHG and Last Epoch were hoping… was a little bit of clear runway so that folks bored of POE2 and POE1… might take a chance on seeing how much has changed in what I feel to be the game with the best systems design. That is not happening… and for a lot of players they are going to follow whatever Path of Exile is doing. If they had a few weeks gap they might check out Last Epoch, but with it only being two days… I feel like there are going to be a large chunk of folks who just skip that game entirely.
This also sucks for the dedicated ARPG community Streamers who have been putting a lot of time and effort into the lead up to Last Epoch Season 2. Sure Last Epoch has a dedicated core of streamers like Aaron Action RPG, Dr3adful, and Perry the Pig but they are honestly small potatoes up against the likes of a Darth Microtransaction,Zizaran, or Raxxanterax. Drawing the attention of the Path of Exile streamer community means that you are throwing a bunch of eyeballs on the game that otherwise might not take an interest in it. So they are stuck in a position of whether or not they follow their hearts and stick with Last Epoch, or if they follow the money and flip over immediately to start streaming the new Path of Exile II content. Having major events land this close to each other means… that they have to choose one audience over another and lose out on part of it.
So I am hearing a lot from both the Path of Exile and Last Epoch community that Grinding Gear Games is a bit of a bad guy for doing this. I do think they might have delayed it by at least one week to make things a bit easier on everyone involved… but they are also up against a wall here as well. In 2019 during the ExileCon presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson outlined that they did not want to split the community with the release of the new game. However that is precisely what has happened, so much so that Path of Exile II players and topics have been kicked off the Path of Exile subreddit. The POE1 players who do not care about Path of Exile II essentially rioted by the delays and we got the Legacy of Phrecia event as a result. In the weeks leading up to this Path of Exile II 0.2.0 announcement, I have been starting to see a similar current happening on the POE2 SubReddit of folks frustrated by the attention that Grinding Gear Games was devoting to something other than the game that they care about the most. Regardless of when…. they needed to release this first proper league for the new game as quickly as possible.
To further complicate things, as of yesterday we have a playtest active for Titan Quest II, another game that is throwing its hat in the ring of next gen ARPG. You have to request access to get into the playtest, but I did so before heading to bed last night and had been flagged for access as of this morning. There is just a lot going on right now and for those who care both Diablo IV Season 8 and a massive update to No Rest for the Wicked are landing at the tail end of April. It is going to be a very tight slot for ARPG enthusiasts, but at least there will be no lack of things to devote our time to. Since I am largely wrapped up with Monster Hunter Wilds, I am probably going to be spending the next few days checking out Titan Quest II. I am also still playing a not-insignificant amount of Legacy of Phrecia as I continue to tweak and improve my Righteous Fire Scavenger.
However when it comes to the Path of Exile II vs Last Epoch debate that is raging in the community… I am drawing my personal line in the sand. I am extremely interested in experiencing what the new endgame for Last Epoch has to show us. So I will be playing Tombs of the Erased on April 2nd and effectively play it until I get tired of grinding. I have no clue how long that is going to be, but on average I get about a month out of a Path of Exile league and a few solid weeks so far out of a Last Epoch event… so I am hoping somewhere around that time frame. Whenever I finish with Last Epoch, I am sure I will check out what is going on with 0.2.0 or as it is officially being called Dawn of the Hunt League. I will of course be tuning in on the 27th to check out the live-stream to see what all it will include. I am not a streamer and no one really cares what I am playing, but I do tend to devote all of my time for awhile to whatever I happen to be obsessed about and as such the pages of this blog.
In a perfect world… Last Epoch would move their own launch up by a few days and Path of Exile II back by a few days to create a bit more room. However there are other forces at play. For example I am pretty certain they cannot reschedule Twitch Drops willy nilly… so the particular timing is probably going to be stuck where it is. I would love to see more folks choosing Last Epoch as well, but I am also realistic that the Streamers are going to chase that money while they can get it.
The post Choosing Last Epoch appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
