Good Morning Folks! Right now, I am all over the place in my gaming, and cannot seem to land on any particular title as my main grind. I know this is going to rapidly change because we are two weeks out from the drop of a new Path of Exile league, and I am certain I will be devoting all of my time and attention to the 3.28 Mirage League. However, for the time being, I am playing a game for an hour or so and then flipping to a different game. I wish I could mainline Dune Awakening, but the combat is way too focused for me to spend much time in it. I need games where I can turn my brain off, and this is not that game. I am still enjoying myself, but doing things in the world requires too much attention and cannot really be chained with something else like an audiobook. There is a weird bug happening right now where I will consistently log in on top of my base, so I made a rooftop entrance to solve this problem quickly.
The biggest achievement for the weekend is that I expanded my base, made my craft floor two floors high to accommodate some of the larger crafting machines like the vehicle fabricator, and made my very first buggy. We talked a bit about this on the podcast this weekend, but each vehicle that you acquire feels like a massive quality-of-life improvement. I am still working on unlocking the research needed to get the mining rig, but once I do so, I will be taking this out into the desert in hunt for more materials, and rapidly speeding up acquisition. Right now, I am more gated by levels and research than pretty much anything else. I need to really buckle down and focus on taking out some of the bandit camps, especially since I just upgraded to the slavers stillsuit and have a bit more armor. I need higher damage weapons, but that is going to require me to craft a weapons fabricator… which again needs more research points. I might bip over to the Anvil and see if there is anything I can buy there that might help me out.
Tam has a really good base in the North, so I think I might be keeping this one for a while. At some point, I will abandon my Hagga South base, but I have left it up and running because there are still some folks down in the south questing. I know Mor found my base yesterday, and it serves as a great staging location for both the shipwreck and the testing station. Really, I need to push the main story quest forward a bit and need better weapons. I might research where the really good legendary crafting patterns drop in these middle zones and set out to get some of those. I also might flip the style of my base from the standstone dormitory to one of the other appearances. I really like the existence of the “replace” tool for this purpose.
I spent a fair amount of time in Enshrouded, roaming around and unlocking crafting NPCs for my current save file. A lot of this has centered around climbing up to some high point and then gliding long distances since I have one of the really nice legendary gliders. I need to spend some time looking for resources on this game, because surely by now someone has created the equivalent of POEDB for it. I really want to know where some of the good farms are now, and then set out to maybe get a good weapon with a rune socket in it. My armor seems fine, but not having a rune socket means I am missing some critical functionality. It feels like, at least for the short term, that sibling time is going to be in Enshroude,d and I like being overgeared for content.
In the continued focus of trying to find games for us to play together, I reinstalled Wayfinder to give it another spin. I remember us having fun with this, but since we last played it has transitioned from being a server authoritative online service, to a peer-to-peer buy-the-box sort of experience. Legitimately huge kudos to Airship Syndicate for doing this because when they realized it would not function as a live service, they pivoted the game design to being something that can be enjoyed evergreen by players. I wish more games would do this. I spent some time roaming around the world and did a dungeon, and it is still quite a bit of fun. The number of systems in this game is staggering, and I completely forgot that it had housing and mounts and all of that nonsense. It could definitely be fun to check things out further and see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.
Unfortunately, the art style… and the existence of the housing system… made me want to check out the new World of Warcraft housing system. I’ve kept my World of Warcraft account active for years, without really ever playing it. I reactivated it around the time The War Within launched, could not really get into that expansion… and then just never turned it off. I made an attempt to play during the Legion Remix and bounced from that as well. I will probably be talking a bit more about the current state of World of Warcraft in another video, but this morning I am largely going to talk about housing. I have to say… so far, I think this feels like a much better version of the Final Fantasy XIV housing system. At least at face value, it seems like it has gone back and added a bunch of new housing drops into older content, effectively making those evergreen. Giving players a reason to experience older content feels like a massive boost to the game in general. While this is still World of Warcraft, it feels like they are learning lessons from other games out there, and the fact that you collect appearances for your house and do not have to juggle physical objects… immediately puts this a world ahead of FFXIV.
I was surprised that there were still housing plots available in the House Stalwart neighborhood. Essentially, the Alliance gets a bunch of human-inspired housing areas, and I bought my plot in the area that is like a baby Duskwood. I have no clue what the Horde version of this looks like, but I kind of expect there to be areas that represent a bunch of in-game zones similar to how this one is. I seem to already have a massive amount of items unlocked through the content that I have already played through. I spent some time roaming around the housing area, and so far, the best-looking house is probably Kylana, the current Guild Leader of House Stalwart. I handed off to Elnore, Elnore handed off to Rylacus… Rylacus briefly handed it back to me during Pandaria, and then Rylacus got it back and made the very wise choice of handing it off to Kylana, who, to the best of my knowledge, has been the leader since at least Draenor. Ky was always a stable hand at the wheel, and I greatly appreciate him keeping active this thing that I so thoroughly abandoned.
As I said, I will probably talk a bit about my experience of getting back into World of Warcraft in a future post, but so far… thing seeem really well maintained. The new user interface system is shockingly good, and so far at least seems to be a cromulent replacement for all of the addons that I had been using. I purposefully installed the game fresh on my new computer and did not take any time to install addons because I wanted to see what the stock experience looked like. I am honestly also enjoying the single combat button thing, which seems perfectly reasonable for brain-off grinding. I need to spend some time logging in my plethora of characters because each one I have done so has unlocked additional cosmetic appearances and housing tat. All in all, I am pretty impressed with what I have seen so far.
The post Digital Nesting appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back after a week off last week due to too many being out. When we do one of those weeks missed we have a truly stupid number of topics to discuss, and this week is no exception. We start off talking a little bit about Xenoblade Chronicles X getting a Switch release date, and Utopia Must Fall the game that you get when you make Missile Command a Roguelike. Related we also talk a bit about Nodebuster which is going for a somewhat similar thing. Bel and Grace talk about their experiences with Wayfinder, a game that completely changed its business model from freemium cash grab to buy the box. Tam talks about an interesting situation of being in a deeply collaborative “competition” and how cool those moments are. Ash shares his thoughts about Windblown the new co-op ARPG from the folks behind Dead Cells. Tam shares his thoughts about I Am Your Beast and Kodra in a bit more detail about Tactical Breach Wizards. Bel talks about his recent adventures in Return of Reckoning, a fan-run Warhammer Online server that itself has been up and running for a decade now after the official game closed down in 2013.
Wayfinder is an interesting game. Back in March of 2023, I got into beta testing, which was under a strict NDA, so as a result I never talked about it publicly. I played the game quite a bit at the time and even managed to get into some multiplayer testing with my friend Ace and I think maybe even Ashgar. It was a perfectly cromulent experience, but also a deeply flawed and buggy one. I thought given enough time this might turn into a really great game. However, when August rolled around it was suddenly launching with a premium “Founders” pack price tag associated with it… I noped the hell out. I had just done beta testing prior to this launch announcement and the game was still in what felt like a relatively sorry state. Early Access is launching your game, regardless of what you think about that process or how much you claim it is still “in testing”. Launching a broken game is launching a broken game.
Wayfinder was an interesting combination of being developed by Airship Syndicate (Battle Chasers, Darksiders Genesis, Ruined King) and being published and hosted by Digital Extremes (Warframe). However in November Digital Extremes cut their publishing wing, and with it Airship Syndicate was suddenly floating in the wind. What was not necessarily expected was that the game was pulled from Steam, and effectively retooled to change it from being a lobby-based MMORPG, to a peer to peer based Co-Optional and largely single-player experience. It returned to Steam early access earlier this year and started the uphill process of attempting to earn back players. On Monday the game launched its 1.0 version and I started playing it some over the weekend on Sunday, just ahead of this rework.
There is a lot to like about the game, just like I felt when I beta-tested it… but this time it is extremely polished and ready for players. Essentially the best comparisons I can give it are what if you took Monster Hunter but made it a Dropped-Loot-Based Dungeon Crawler, or what if you took a Hero-Shooter… but made it an Action-Combat-RPG. It also very much lives in a space adjacent to something like Genshin Impact but instead of being cash shop-based Gacha nonsense, everything unlocks over time while playing through the campaign. You start the game by choosing one of three heroes and then pretty quickly after that point you unlock the ability to play as the other two. Then over the course of the main story quest the remaining five “Wayfinders” are then unlocked when you reach specific milestones.
Honestly switching from Lobby based to Peer to Peer has been a pretty seamless swap. The only time you encountered players organically in the previous incarnation was in town, so having to manually party up before going on adventures does not really feel that different. I’ve not done much testing but it appears that you can invite people through an invite code system, through posting a public party listing in an in-game party finder, through your Steam/PlayStation friends, or through a discord integration. The 1.0 version also adds cross-play so that console and PC players can both group up together. Right now the only console that the game is available on is the PlayStation 5, but there is apparently an Xbox Series X/S version and an Epic Game Store version in the works.
There is no cash shop and currently, the game is the low low price of $23 on Steam, or $25 on the PlayStation store. They have a single DLC pack available for the game right now which is a collaboration with Critical Role which gives you some themed skins for various Wayfinder characters. I am fully on board with selling additional skins as a way of expanding the purchase of the game and doing this through one-time purchase packs instead of an in-game microtransaction shop with a contorted third currency system. Founders apparently got a bunch of exclusive stuff when the business model changed, which I don’t love… but they had to do something to make it right for the folks who plunked down $100 to play their early access game.
I am only around seven hours into the gameplay, but am having quite a bit of fun. Essentially it is a blend of open-world exploration in the Genshin/BOTW style with respawning mobs and treasures to find, combined with dungeon instances that have semi-randomized objectives. So far I have ventured forth into the Gloom and fought void monsters and also explored these weird frozen-in-time “lost sectors” of how the world was before whatever calamity befell it. In both cases, there are a bunch of hidden objectives to find and loot to be gained, while fighting a bunch of baddy archetypes with differing attack patterns.
The character that I am mostly playing is Wargrave, which starts the game out as a Sword-and-Board style tank with an almost paladin kit. I heal myself by completing automatic swing combos and have a battery of abilities to deal damage and also shield the party. I can also seemingly swap what type of weapon I am using to change up this playstyle. I’ve gotten Shotguns, Rifles, and Daggers so far as drops but know there is also some big Two-Handed options from my limited-time beta testing. The only thing that annoys me a bit is that the loot seems totally randomized and can be for any of the Wayfinders you have unlocked. This means I am a bit starved for items that I can actually use for the tanky gameplay style that I have focused on. There is a gear vendor in town that appears to upgrade every time you ding a level, so I have mostly been having to buy a new sword/shield combo there to keep pushing up my power.
A lot of the expeditions that you go on center around taking out specific boss monsters. These often unlock crafting abilities, but I have not dabbled heavily into any of those systems. Mostly the main story quest will occasionally tell you to go kill X boss and then walk you through the process of crafting your next upgrade that is required to progress forward. I know in beta crafting played a much bigger role in the upgrade of gear, but so far this does not seem to be the case. Gear appears to mostly be acquired through loot drops, which is both good and bad. However, so long as I can keep buying reasonable upgrades from the NPC vendors I won’t complain much about it.
On top of ALL of this… there is a fairly robust housing system in the game. Exploring the world is constantly giving me items to put in my house. For example, I found this adorable little Hermit Crab pet that I now have roaming around my house. I can stop and pet it… which will cause it to pinch me… which I find both adorable and hilarious. There are a whole slew of items that I appear to be able to craft as well, but I do not think I have made it far enough into the game to fully unlock the crafting system. I have however picked up a bunch of random items in my journey, and the Housing system itself unlocked right before I went to the first big boss dungeon, so plenty early enough for you to keep unburdening yourself of items you found by dumping them in your rather large mansion.
All in all, it grew into the really cool game that I thought it could be when I first beta-tested it. The business model has shifted entirely to a buy-the-box, no cash-shop thing… which is honestly always welcome. However, that means folks need to buy in… and I really want this game to succeed. I was honestly shocked it was as cheap as it was, so if anything I have talked about this morning has interested you… maybe head over to Steam or the PlayStation store and pick it up. This is not a sponsored post in any way, I just genuinely want the games that I think are cool and a good value proposition to succeed. If you end up checking it out, drop me a line and tell me what your thoughts are.
The post Wayfinder 1.0 Launched appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
