It is league start day! This will be the first time that I am actually planning on starting a Path of Exile league on time. I am pretty freaking hyped, and even more than that I am hyped that several of my friends from AggroChat are planning on joining in. This is also going to be the first time Grace and I attempt to do a league start as a potential surrogate for our Diablo 3 season start nonsense. For those interested in all things kick off in a little over 7 hours from the time of posting this or 3 pm CDT. I will not personally be starting at exactly that time, but likely a bit later when Grace and I can actually meet up at the same time.
Coming along with the league start are a few more Twitch drops. For an hour of watch time, you get the arcane footprints shown above, and for three hours of watch time, you get an arcane throne decoration for your hideout. Sadly none of these are anywhere near as cool as the wings that we got for the Lake of Kalandra reveal event, but I will of course be farming them nonetheless. More than likely I will be watching the Zizarin stream when the proceedings go live this afternoon. Of the Path of Exile personalities that I have encountered, I would say he and maybe Velyna are my favorites. Not that I really watch much twitch in the first place. I am way more of a YouTube/edited video sort of person.
I think the core problem with a league start is deciding what the heck to play. In Diablo 3 I could easily swap builds halfway through a season if I was not really feeling it. Honestly you never really start with your final build in a Diablo season, and that is just part of the experience. In Path, however, respeccing is deeply punitive so you essentially need to know where you are going from day one to make sure that every point spent in the passive tree is lining up with your end goal. Last go round I really fell in love with my Inquisitor and the “brand” style of gameplay, where you drop a spell and watch it spread damage over time debuff to everything around it. I was originally designing my character to go Righteous Fire, but mostly got stalled out playing Wintertide Brand. I contemplated trying to go “RF” again and actually committing to properly following the build guide but instead decided to go in another direction.
Since so much focus has been placed on lightning this season, I am going to dive into another Inquisitor brand build… but this time instead of Wintertide focus on Storm brand. I am not sure why but I actually enjoyed playing the old man… or at least enjoyed him more than the big dude in the diaper. The truth is I have enough cosmetics that whatever I end up playing is going to look almost nothing like the base class anyway. In theory with this build, I will be dual-wielding wands or scepters which is not exactly my favorite class fantasy but the gameplay of the brand was enjoyable. Running around dropping hatred on the ground the melts enemies felt fun.
Part of this process is going to rely on me running up a Ranger first and muling a few spells. For those not familiar with that terminology it means running a character to the point of reaching the first town and then either selecting a few spells from quest rewards or buying them from the vendor. Because each class starts on a different spot in the tree, they also have access to a different series of spells at the beginning of the game. There are many spells that may not open up for a specific class until you reach Act III and unlock the Library, so it is simply easier to start a throwaway character and take it up to the town. Depositing the spells into your stash will then make them available for your main character.
Rather than create a completely throwaway character though, I figure it is probably better to go ahead and have a spec in mind. Keeping with the seasonal theme of lightning in Lake of Kalandra, I figured I would at least set this character up to be a Lightning Strike Raider. This would give me a backup character if for some reason I do not love the Stormbrand gameplay. Essentially my plan is to get in when the league starts, create a ranger, and run then to the first town. Then if the servers are still functional, go ahead and create my Templar and run them to the first town as well. From there once Grace and I can manage to be on at the same time we can start the acts properly from that vantage point.
If you have ever contemplated playing Path of Exile or tried it in the past and bounced… you might check out the new getting started section on Maxroll.gg. The Maxroll team is largely known for their support of Diablo games but has decided to branch out into Path of Exile with this league. While none of the builds they decided to cover as league starters seemed interesting to me, I have read through some of their information on how to get started in the game and it is pretty excellent. I honestly wish I had a resource this clean and helpful when I was first trying to sort things out. Path of Exile can be very obtuse and almost prides itself on being that way, but once you get engaged the gameplay is exceptionally fun. This legitimately might be the best ARPG on the market and gets a ton of support from the developers… but there are so many systems to learn and the game mostly just dumps you off in the deep end.
If you are planning on starting this league, hit me up and make sure we are friends. You can find me on the BelghastStern account and as soon as the league starts it should show my league characters on the profile page. If everyone does start that had originally talked about it, we should have a dozen or so players running around in Wraeclast. My goal this season is to complete my atlas, with a stretch goal being to knock out all of the objectives to get the league cosmetics. However, I am also going to be okay if I just get to endgame successfully with this new build. It is going to be a bit of a juggling act to keep Path of Exile progressing while also trying to get some daily Tower of Fantasy in.
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The internet can be a really weird place sometimes. This morning’s post is more or less me explaining a rabbit hole I have been going down over the last few days. So some background information… I often times listen to YouTube as though it were a podcast while I do work on the other monitor… and admittedly also spend a fair amount of time reading Twitter. On the second something about MGK aka Machinegun Kelly aka Colson Baker aka Megan Fox’s boyfriend… scrolled across my Twitter feed. Now I have listened to quite a bit of music from him because at face value his newer stuff sounds like a lot of the pop-punk music that I actually dig. However the longer I have listened to it the more it has bothered me… how it is essentially this inch-deep surface-level interpretation of the 90s pop punk and emo genres.
This led to me tweeting that it sounds like the music had been generated by an AI that was trained by feeding it essentially everything from the 90s and early Oughts and having it regurgitate a song. The lyrics are bad, the emotional content is shallow, and ultimately sounds like the most generic version of the music you have already heard before. It is a recreation of a genre without understanding any of the elements that led that genre to come into being in the first place. This is where things take an interesting turn. For years I’ve known that behind the scenes everything we are saying and doing is being linked to some algorithm designed to feed us more relevant content. I cannot count the number of times my wife and I have had a conversation inside our home… and then moments later we are getting fed advertisements related to that conversation. Granted we don’t have any voice assistants but I am pretty sure that both of our phones are reporting back what we are saying.
It was shortly after writing this tweet that I turned around and hit refresh on the YouTube home feed to find the next thing to listen to… that I was served up this video. So some background that I did not know going into this adventure. Pat Finnerty is a musician from Scranton, PA, and a member of a band called Okay Paddy and has toured with other bands and projects. Based on my further journey down this rabbit hole, it seems like his moment of internet fame came during the quarantine era of this pandemic doing Instagram live concerts from his home and eventual rooftop. During one of these he staged a “Grohl-a-thon” where after 9 hours of being on air, Dave Grohl hopped on the feed and joined him for some discussion of Dire Straights of all things.
The other thing that he is known for, and the reason I now know he exists… and have subsequently torn through all of these videos… is a series called “What Makes This Song Stink”. He explains in the first video that he is a fan of a series by Rick Beato called “What Makes This Song Great?”, and wanted to essentially create the counterpoint. At face value that is a reasonable concept, but what carries it forward and makes these videos so damned entertaining is that they go some places. It is not just Pat technically breaking down what is wrong with a given song, they are this entire story journey weaving in bits of his past and a whole cast of characters that grows over the course of the series including “Blinds-to-Go Guy” and a fictitious radio station called “The Moose”.
What is even wilder is during the course of these videos… sometimes he decides he can do it better. So in the MGK video, he creates his own emo/punk pop band called “August is Falling”. During this, he goes to the Mall of America and gets fashion advice from a pair of extremely good nature people at Hot Topic. It doesn’t stop there… because apparently he actually played on stage AS the band.. after finding an Emo rock bassist on Instagram to sit in on the set. Taking the joke even further… you can now listen to Mad This Summer by August is Falling over on Bandcamp. Another video has this entire running gag about Here Comes the Hotstepper rocking… and he convinces the band he rents a studio from to release a cover… which now exists.
Then there is the whole Kravitz Bowl… which is a video parody of the classic era of the Super Bowl pitting American Woman against Fly Away in an attempt to determine which song stinks the worst. Like I said before these videos are a lot and in around 45 minutes each… they go on this wild journey while actually explaining the technical faults with each song covered. The could be a slog to get through at that length were it not for the fact that Pat is legitimately hilarious. I guess one of the traits that musicians and comedians both share are understanding how important timing is… and he nails the delivery of what would otherwise feel like purely video parody.
I think it would be unfair if I did not close by sharing one of his performances. On top of being funny as hell… he is legitimately a deeply talented musician. I’ve always loved Sultans of Swing and this rendition is most excellent. One of the things that have come up multiple times during this most recent Blaugust is whether or not you should stick to a theme with your blog. While Tales of the Aggronaut is for the most part a Video Game blog… I have to leave myself room to talk about other things that interest me. This morning is a prime example because I could not experience this ride… without sharing it with you all.
The post Pat Finnerty Rocks appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning’s post is in part an addendum to yesterday’s post. My opinion on Stray is changing a bit as I get further into the game. Essentially the game seems to be a repeating pattern of miserable alien blob infested “endless runner” segments perforated by moments of exploring adorable robot settlements. I feel like on some level the alien segments are there only to be able to claim that the game has some skill-based gameplay when in reality the studio should have simply embraced the fact that it was a walking simulator. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the game would have been much better if I was just a cat roaming around a dead city talking to cute robot friends and never having to deal with these alien abominations.
In fact, I can outline the exact moment my opinion of this game started to shift. Light spoilers but The Slums is the first settlement that you spend time in, and during your travels, you find out that one of the robots has figured out a way to fight back and went out into the sewers to test this weapon never to return. So you go through a series of events to uncover this technology and when you have it… it is great. The weapon overheats so you have to carefully time your attacks but it works… you have some way of dealing with the alien swarm other than trying to run perfectly without getting captured. Then just as soon as you have the weapon… “story elements” take place and rob you of your only line of defense pushing you back into the “endless runner” territory. This feels so phenomenally bad and only serves to make the next sequence of awful alien-swarm-time feel all that much worse.
I talked briefly yesterday about the “red screen” where you get overwhelmed by the alien blobs and your cat lies down… and the game asks you to reload from a save point. Admittedly I was fine with this the first time I saw it after sorta learning the ropes of how to dodge the blobs. I was less fine with it the several deaths that I took trying to install a transceiver on top of a very tall, very blob-infested tower. Then all the deaths I took trying to get through the sewers… made me significantly not fine at all with it. I crossed that threshold from “it’s okay this is just a game” to “this is a sweet baby cat that I want to protect and I am failing”. This is the danger honestly of including cats or dogs in your games, because if you make our failure cause them to die… it hurts a lot.
So while my opinion yesterday was extremely good in this game, after more play I am starting to create some sort of risk versus reward matrix in my head. The gameplay of me roaming around a settlement and making robot friends is delightful, but at what point does that joy not outweigh the pain of watching a sweet cat die over and over. Granted like I said yesterday the death sequence is tasteful and not graphic… but just knowing that my cat is lying down because I failed them and that they are getting eaten alive… is not cool. Having to continue to confront the blob bullshit while simultaneously being robbed of the only defense I had… is not cool at all.
The post Updated Stray Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I set out with every intent to play through the new Guild Wars 2 Season 1 chapter 3 drop. However Stray, a game where you play a cat in a city filled with robots also dropped yesterday. What originally started out as my sitting down to play it “for a few minutes” wound up being the game I spent my entire evening in. Instead of talking about the story this morning, I am going to instead talk about the sort of game that it is. I am playing this on Steam because it is my platform of choice if I am given a choice at all. You are greeted by a message that this is best played with a gamepad, but if you are a keyboard and mouse aficionado you can safely ignore that. I’ve yet to encounter any sorts of movement that would be hard to pull off on the keyboard if you are not also very familiar with that control scheme.
Stray is firmly placed in the genre that is referred to as “Walking Simulators” where you are set in a world where most of your time you spend exploring, with little to no combat. The key difference is that instead of playing a human being, you are a cat, and your only interaction with the world is through batting things, meowing at things, or scratching on things. There are a number of games that I feel vie for the modern title of “Adventure” game, where you roam around looking for objects to interact with that you then use on other objects. Stray is very much in this same vein where as you progress through the game you will collect various bits and bobs and then will use those to either barter with robot companions for other bits and bobs, or unlock different things barring your progress.
I place this in the modern adventure game category because all of your interactions apart from freely being able to meow at will… are driven by prompts. On the keyboard, the most common prompts are Q for doing some sort of physical manipulation of an option and Spacebar for jumping, and if you can actually jump the spacebar icon will appear hovering slightly over the thing you are intending to jump towards. Most of the gameplay so far involves roaming around a rich urban decay setting and looking for things that can be interacted with. As you begin to reach objectives, the game does a really good job of somehow highlighting where you should be paying attention either with illuminated signs or yellow lighting effects. This is nowhere near as obvious as the yellow-painted rocks in some games… but if you know what you are looking for can be similarly effective.
In your travels, you encounter a drone that has lost its memory, and through interacting with various objects it can begin to remember things. It can seemingly understand you and ends up acting as your translator for both the world and the robot companions that you eventually encounter. This adds a new button to your repertoire which is E on the keyboard, allowing you to have the drone explain things to you or communicate on your behalf. Additionally, you can toggle on a flashlight mode which is helpful for exploring dark spaces. When not in use the drone docks on this nifty backpack that you get outfitted with. I am guessing the drone is also the person who is storing all of the things you pick up along the way because you sorta have to suspend your disbelief that a cat can easily carry some of the items you end up carrying.
While most of the game involves peaceful interaction, that is not to say everyone you will encounter will be your friend. There is an organic menace that has taken over the dead city, and there will be times when you need to avoid swarms of these critters. You can run and you can weave to avoid them, and if my theory is correct I am about to get some sort of device that will help me hold them at bay. However there is nothing that I would refer to as traditional combat, and it is a series of active puzzles that you need to solve. For example, you can meow to draw a swarm to a specific point, and then use your superior navigation skills and speed to distract them while you run to safety. Thankfully there are effectively “safe” areas and “dangerous” areas, so the moments you need to traverse one of these hot spots are clearly delineated.
The best moments of the game so far however have been in the interactions with the robot companions. They have seemingly outlived the humans they used to take care of and now do their best to honor the memories. This is a game where rich stories are being told through the scenery and very limited interactions, allowing you to read between the lines and flesh out the setting, and begin to understand small snippets of what happened to the world around you. For example one of the companions that you meet styles themselves as a musician, and as you find sheet music around the world you can bring it back and they will play the song for you. The game is filled with simple moments of joy like that, and if you are needing a bit more joy in your life then this might be a game for you.
I found myself enjoying the chill vibe of exploring the dead city, and honestly am probably going to mainline this game until I finish it. I’ve heard that the entire game is somewhere in the neighborhood of five or six hours in length. The experience of playing it though has been great for me personally. You all know I am a cat person and I would already die for this sweet baby.
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