Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.
Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.
Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.
There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.
I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.
I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.
Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.
I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.
The post A Packed Weekend appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off with a discussion about Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 which just concluded and raised a little over 3 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. From there we talk about Pax South 2020 and the interesting things Ashgar has encountered while being there. Bel goes into a diatribe about the Witcher games not doing a great job of explaining the cast of characters. 2020 is a year of game delays so far and we talk about a few of them and why we are mostly okay with them. We then close out with a long discussion about Fire Emblem: Three Houses which leads its way into a discussion about Tactics versus Strategy.
This morning is a day of reckoning. I’ve been on vacation since the 20th of December and in that amount of time you can really screw up your sleep schedule. Though over the last few days I have made failed attempts to reintroduce getting up at a specific time, this morning and the day as a whole is going to suck. This holiday was a dual edged sword in that I spent most of it sick, but because of that I also spent most of it gaming. Over the course of this extended break I poured 80 hours worth of game time into The Witcher 3 and have reached a point where I am happy to walk away from it having seen how the main story plays out and having knocked out most of the Heart of Stone and Blood and Wine expansion content. Blood and Wine specifically was fantastic because I absolutely adore the Duchy of Toussaint. I love my Vineyard and it helped give me a sense of ownership in the setting as I explored it.
Sometimes my brain works in a specific pattern where I end up going all in on something. Anyone who has engaged me in a Destiny lore conversation will understand what I am talking about because I sometimes get obsessed with things. Right now I am decades late becoming obsessed with the world of the Witcher and as a result I have started reading the novels. I don’t read particularly quickly and I tend to read before bed and as a result a chapter or two at a time. That said I am slowly chewing my way through The Last Wish which seemingly based on the consensus of sources I found was the proper starting point to this series, and also more or less what the Netflix show has been drawing from. I’m still on the first of the short stories but probably about halfway through it at this point.
As far as Witcher 3, I have to admit it is a little depressing to be walking away from it. I mean I could keep playing it and whittling down the remaining tasks that I have or collecting the last few Gwent cards that I am missing. That said when I reach the “endgame” for a single player game it just feels hollow. I know that all of those NPCs that I love will never gain new dialog lines and will just more or less sit there as a testament to the fact that the world is forever frozen with no new adventures to be had. I may at some point start New Game Plus to see if that is any different, but really I left the game in a good spot and am more or less happy with the various conclusions. There is only one thing that I might have tweaked but it was not worth the back tracking required to change the way something played out. Also I am just going to throw this out there… but Triss is infinitely better than Yennefer. Maybe the books will change my opinion, but Triss is a delight to be around and Yen basically treats Geralt like shit all the time.
In my tradition of doing everything the wrong way… I spent yesterday trying to find the next game to play and wound up falling back into Witcher 2. There is no way I will ever be able to complete the first game because it just feels like crap, and while it was suggested that I remap everything to a controller… that isn’t how I way to play it either. I would love to see someone do a complete port of the first game to the Witcher 3 engine. In the meantime however I have watched a few Witcher 1 recap videos and more or less understand what happens. Witcher 2 is way more sluggish befitting the era in which it was released, but I do think I will be able to get used to it. The pacing is just more slow than I had expected and it is frustrating dealing with all of the invisible walls that appear to be everywhere to keep your character from getting out of bounds. I am interested however in seeing how the story plays out, so more than likely this is what I will be playing for the next bit.
The weirdest thing about all of this is that I always thought that the Witcher universe is one that I would enjoy, but for various reasons I struggled to gain purchase. In some ways it is too reliant upon the source material because it expects you also to be obsessed with things in order to actually understand what the hell is going on. I’ve talked about this before, but the game absolutely throws you down conversation trees where you are expected to know who the hell someone is and are going to be struggling to pull together context clues as you go or make a trip out to the wikipedia page in order to sort out just why the hell we know who this Regis guy is for example. That said because it draws so deep upon an existing work, it means there is an absolute wealth of interesting characters to draw upon and I chose that specific example because I love him so much.
The witcherverse is a bit of a slog to get into, but having recently been indoctrinated into the cult of the white wolf… it really is worth the effort. The truth is had I not watched the Netflix series I probably would have bounced again. That is not to say that it is required viewing, but it did give me enough of a primer to feel like I could understand at least the layout of the world and how the various kingdoms fit together. It also helped that as I dug further into the Witcher 3, there were places and events that were brought up that I saw in the series giving me a bit of a rope ladder to try and climb towards understanding. At this point… I would probably suggest just starting with the 3rd game as the first is an unplayable mess and the second seems to have some pacing and user interface issues especially in the quest advisement area. I’ve spent way too long figuring out what the hell I am supposed to be doing already and have yet to clear the first area. The third one while it absolutely drops you off a cliff and expects you to learn to swim on the way down.. it does present itself in a familiar interface that is easy for any MMORPG player or someone who has played a modern open world game to understand.
