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Finishing Season Six

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Yesterday I realized that I was a heck of a lot closer to finishing up the Seasonal Journey in Diablo IV Season Six than I thought I was. Essentially all that was required was leveling my fifth glyph up to 15, which I had not even started leveling because I am only on paragon board four. What I was not expecting was just how many boss-summoning materials that I would end up getting. It now totally makes sense that Ace had so many more summons than me the other night because they are absolutely the sort of tryhard person who cares about the seasonal track. They had finished it up a few days ago I think, and I was not even vaguely paying attention to the items there. In fact this is the very first time I have finished the seasonal track in Diablo IV. I used to push to do it in Diablo III because there were cosmetics on the line, but the sheer practice of ticking off boxes… that has never driven me terribly hard.
What DOES drive me however is the cosmetic rewards track. I still have around twenty more levels to go before finishing that out and I think whenever I accomplish this I will probably bid adieu to Diablo IV. This time around especially there is some really cool armor associated with this rewards track and I had the currency for it when the season launched so I figured “what the heck”. I really like this spear, which oddly enough reminds me quite a bit of the spear that I regularly use in Guild Wars 2. Sadly I never made it super far in last season’s battlepass, but there were some cosmetics there that I would have liked to have gotten. What is cool about this rewards track more than any season previously, is that the free track is actually good. It is this whole really detailed pirate outfit, which is a significant change from the boring “casual clothes” look that previous free cosmetics have been in this game.
I am also nowhere near finishing the Zakarum Remnants faction, because I hate the consumable league mechanic. In theory, I need to grind out a lot of Hordes trying to get an Ancestral version of my boots, and that is probably a decent mode of play to burn some opals on. I gotta admit that I am days away from just macroing all of my attacks to a single button. It feels like the optimal mode of play for my build is just to mash all of my keys as fast as possible to make sure I never miss a single ability cast. Folks will clown on the one-button builds in Path of Exile, but there has to be a happy medium between that and “toddler pretending to type” gameplay that we currently have in Diablo IV. The reality is everything about my build is designed to lower the cooldown of abilities so that I can hit them faster… and hitting them faster means more damage output.
My current build is sort of a bad ideas build, where I am using this unique item called Jacinth Shell that is trying to kill me. Essentially it deals 10% of my maximum life per second when I have abilities on cooldown… which lowers the cooldowns of those abilities… so I can hit them faster. It also heals me every time I spend vigor. The problem with my current chest is that I really need a maximum roll of 10% on the healing bit… and I really wish this game had Divine Orbs. Essentially this would feel much better if I was healing and damage at the same rate… but I am not. So I mostly just survive due to the fact that I am also building up like 3000 barriers at any given time and 8000 fortify. Unfortunately, there are times when I just take random death similar to how those feel in Path of Exile, and it is sort of miserable.
I have been contemplating just shifting over to the IWIN build that Ace has been running often referred to as Orange Quill. I would absolutely do this thing in a heartbeat if Diablo IV had the Armory system from Diablo III. The thought of going through the hassle of setting back up my Paragon Boards is probably the main thing keeping me from doing it. I have one of the scrolls that resets everything for free, so I could do it… but lord is it a pain in the ass to build a character in this game. That is coming from me… who thinks nothing of the complete nonsense of the Path of Exile passive and atlas trees. It just feels so much more tedious because you are spending so many more points, most of which don’t really feel meaningful until you have amassed the entire structure. I need to look at the build and see if I actually have all of the uniques ready to go because I think I have ratholed a copy of pretty much everything that build needs.
I feel like I have hit a bit of a cap. I barely made it through The Pit 55, and it is wild because I can pretty reliably do Torment 3 content aka Pit 50. I just can’t quite kill things fast enough to keep from falling behind, and the bosses themselves take forever. I have technically done a 55, but it isn’t something that I can guarantee every single run, and relies on a lot of luck regarding what types of mobs spawn. So I am not sure what I need to do to push my build a bit higher. I spent a good chunk of last night trying to level my Glyphs thinking that might help, but I just don’t seem to have the raw damage output or killing speed that Ace has had when we have grouped up. So I am in an awkward spot with my build where I need to essentially decide how committed I am to that Centipede life. Anyways. I do sort of feel like my engagement with Diablo IV is winding down. I had a lot of fun getting to this point, save for the main story quest… but I am also not sure how much I want to keep pushing for the sake of pushing. The post Finishing Season Six appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Diminishing Returns

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Good Morning Folks! Two days ago Sony unveiled its technical presentation for the upcoming release of the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro, and it has not been well received by the gaming populace and media. Largely the key sticking point seems to be the price point of $700 for the digital-only version, which becomes around $850 by the time you add in the optional disc drive attachment and vertical stand. That is starting to get into gaming computer territory when it comes to pricing and seems to be out of band with the current pricing for all other consoles on the market. You can pick up a PS5 Slim, which is capable of playing all of the same games currently for $440, making this product almost double the price given that the slim model I just priced comes with the disc drive.
The key complaint that I have seen about the digital-only focus, is that it essentially locks players into always paying the highest possible price for a given game. Sony is notoriously stingy when it comes to sales. Just a quick example Spider-Man 2 at this point is a year old roughly and you can pick it up pretty reliably for $50 new in disc form if not cheaper whereas on the Sony store, this is still a $70 title. Console players already pay a roughly $10 premium over PC Gamers for their titles, so I get why folks would want to buy the disc version of games so they can get a bit of a price break. There is also the fear of digital titles disappearing, for example, the ill-fated Concord recently was removed from players’ inventories, and I remember something similar happening with the Scott Pilgrim game during the PS3 era that if you did not have it downloaded it just poofed from your library without a refund.
All of that said… I think something else is at work here. Right now the most popular console of this generation is the Nintendo Switch with some 143 Million units sold. This is compared to the PS5 which currently just crossed 60 million units. The Nintendo Switch has arguably the worst hardware and output quality of ANY console on the market currently. However, its focus on having really fun gameplay and bringing interesting experiences to the players has made it a bit of a media darling. Almost everyone owns a Switch regardless of where they land on the Xbox vs PS5 vs PC tribal debate. The games that it plays well, it plays really well and as a result, it becomes this amazing Swiss army knife of a device that you can take with you or dock to get maximum usability. Basically, my theory is that players care way more about the gameplay than they do about graphical fidelity.
We’ve been in this cycle for decades of hardware manufacturers telling us that we want the new hotness just on the horizon. 4k was the big thing, now it is high refresh and 8k resolutions, but the truth is… I don’t think most gamers really care about these things that much. I bought into 4k gaming pretty early on with a 1080 Ti and later “downgraded” to 144 hz 1440p displays because it fit what I actually wanted a bit better. Similarly, the above image is pulled from the Steam Hardware Survey and shows that the “average gamer” is still playing games in 1080p. While the most popular video card right now is the RTX 3060, most of the games that are being played don’t actually even support Raytracing. The cycle of constant hardware sales has been more about padding corporate bottom lines and fueling AI and Crypto growth, and less about what the players really wanted.
I think the biggest “L” of the Sony Presentation is that they didn’t really bring out any jaw-dropping definitive proof of what players would be getting for that hefty price tag. Instead of showing new games that can only really be achieved because of the technology of that upgraded console… they showed a bunch of older titles with marginal improvements. During the presentation, they stated that 2/3rds of all PlayStation gamers choose to play games in performance mode, rather than in fidelity mode. That feels extremely damning proof that players mostly care about the gameplay rather than the pretty graphics, because in truth… the graphics have been “good enough” since we got to the 1080p era. Basically, I feel like we have entered this era of diminishing returns, where the amount of extra money you pour into an experience is not equivalent to the extra amount of enjoyment that you gain from it.
I feel like another example of function over form, is the general popularity of the Steam Deck. This is effectively a gaming PC that runs at Nintendo Switch resolutions. The Steam Deck reportedly hit 3 million units sold in 2023, which is somewhat impressive considering how strained the available units were through the end of that year. Essentially the Steam Deck provides the performance of a budget laptop with integrated graphics, and folks are eating it up. It feels like it is way more about the polished nature of the Linux Steam OS distribution and the “consolification” of the entire PC Gaming ecosystem, than anything related to performance. There is also a massive amount of fun to be had in games that run at relatively low resolutions and with relatively few bells and whistles. Not to mention how much of a Console Emulation powerhouse the platform has become.
I also think there is a certain amount of hubris at play for Sony. They have been able to successfully raise the price of the PlayStation 5 in the Japanese market three times. This is the first time we are seeing what is an equivalent price hike hitting the North American and European markets. With the 60 million units sold of PS5, I feel like maybe Sony has been believing their own hype a bit recently. I am not sure if the negative reaction from the North American market will make any real changes. This combined with the colossal failure of Concord recently, should be a few shots across the bow that maybe players are not just going to take things as status quo anymore. It feels like a weird gamble considering during the presentation they stated that only around 15% of the total PlayStation 4 installed user base was on the Pro model during that generation. Maybe this console really is only for the bleeding-edge gamers who have to have the best of everything. However, I figured those users would have long since migrated to the PC platform where they can easily pour money into performance.
All of this said… I am clearly not the target demographic for this device. I spent 99.9% of my gaming time on the PC either on my gaming desktop or my gaming laptop. While I have a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X… they both spend more time collecting dust than they do actually serving as a gaming device. Most of the folks that I knew who were big into the PlayStation 4 Pro, were Destiny players… and when the PC Version of that game was released the majority of those migrated there for better performance. I am sure folks will buy this thing, but I am not sure how many will be actual players and how many will be scalpers trying to make a profit. Time will tell how this shakes out in the long run, but for the moment… I am seeing nothing but hatred about this announcement in my social feeds. I really do think we have reached a point where graphically things are “good enough” and instead folks would rather see a focus on gameplay than on shinier baubles. Of course… I might be entirely clueless here. The post Diminishing Returns appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Reinvention

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Shaking off some cobwebs on this site. There’s quite a few of them.
It’s been six years since I last posted here, and more like ten since I posted regularly (if my addition to this page could ever have been considered ‘regular’). A lot has happened. It’s interesting to read a log of my own thoughts from years ago, especially because I can plot an arc of my own mood and where I was in my life through just the last five or ten posts. Pretty bleak, all told.
Change is inevitable and I am very much changed.
I’m not yet sure how or if I want to use this space, but I’ve kept it online largely because I can look back at my own writing and thoughts and while I’ve advanced my thinking since then, I don’t fundamentally disagree with myself from six to ten years ago. Despite everything, it’s still me. That said, I don’t even know if this will even work when I hit “publish”. The site is old, and has had some updates, but still keeps throwing me errors as I type into this draft that I started in 2017.
I would use this post to write a plan for my posts, a schedule, etc, but the truth is I don’t have one. What I do have is a broader understanding of games and the business surrounding them. In the last few years I’ve spent time outside of games in Big Tech and since returned to games. It’s given me a lot of perspective on things I didn’t fully understand before, and I can answer some of my own questions from years ago. Right now I have a lot of thoughts, and it’s hard to keep them all organized.
There are a few things I want to write down, to get them out of my head. With any luck, I’ll put them here.

Reinvention

by
Shaking off some cobwebs on this site. There’s quite a few of them.
It’s been six years since I last posted here, and more like ten since I posted regularly (if my addition to this page could ever have been considered ‘regular’). A lot has happened. It’s interesting to read a log of my own thoughts from years ago, especially because I can plot an arc of my own mood and where I was in my life through just the last five or ten posts. Pretty bleak, all told.
Change is inevitable and I am very much changed.
I’m not yet sure how or if I want to use this space, but I’ve kept it online largely because I can look back at my own writing and thoughts and while I’ve advanced my thinking since then, I don’t fundamentally disagree with myself from six to ten years ago. Despite everything, it’s still me. That said, I don’t even know if this will even work when I hit “publish”. The site is old, and has had some updates, but still keeps throwing me errors as I type into this draft that I started in 2017.
I would use this post to write a plan for my posts, a schedule, etc, but the truth is I don’t have one. What I do have is a broader understanding of games and the business surrounding them. In the last few years I’ve spent time outside of games in Big Tech and since returned to games. It’s given me a lot of perspective on things I didn’t fully understand before, and I can answer some of my own questions from years ago. Right now I have a lot of thoughts, and it’s hard to keep them all organized.
There are a few things I want to write down, to get them out of my head. With any luck, I’ll put them here.