Okay folks, this is Topic Brainstorming week for Blapril 2020, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to talk about one of the things that I have traditionally done where I update you all on what I have been regularly playing. I use this opportunity as a time to update the sidebar of the blog and talk about my feelings about some of the games that are in heavy rotation. I have been exceptionally bad at keeping this updated over the last few months, but that isn’t really a new thing either because I have gone through serious lapses before. The idea is that you have a dialog with your readers and talk about what has been going on in your gaming life. This topic could be adopted to pretty much any subject, talk about movies you have been watching, music you have been listening to or any number of other hobbies.
Since this is mostly a gaming blog I have simply chosen to call that aspect of my life out, and as such I talk about the games that are new to the list, the games that are still in regular rotation and the games that are departing the list. Last edition of this feature I also included the “ships passing in the night” feature where I talk about games that I have been enjoying but that won’t really have much staying power.
To Those Remaining
Destiny 2 – PC
Destiny sweet Destiny… I am not sure what is going on between us. You right now are hanging by a thread and are just barely making the list. I am not sure what it is about the seasonal format but it actually disincentives me from playing, because deep down I know I won’t have the staying power to unlock everything and squeeze every last drop of good from the season before it expires. I think mostly I just have a problem with expiring content. If the seasonal content allowed me toe work through it at my own pace like something along the lines of Elder Scrolls Online, I would feel significantly better about playing Destiny on a regular basis because it doesn’t feel quite so much like wasted effort. I hope they re-evaluate the seasonal formula and make the additions to the game stick around a little longer. If they maybe give you three seasons to complete the content before it expires that might go a long way towards making this feel like a better experience.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
I had an awful lot of fun at the beginning of the season hanging out with Grace and Byx and have since then sorta faded away. Diablo 3 is never really far from my mind however and I am sure at some point I will finish building a reasonable set and push toward the end goal. I did at least get the 4 chapters of the seasonal journey knocked out, but Set Dungeon Mastery right now is what is holding me up because it is the one step I hate doing each season. I end up delaying it until I finally can’t anymore and now it is holding up two separate seasons journey ranks. I just really don’t like being on a timer when I am gaming.
To The New and Returning
Animal Crossing New Horizons – Switch
This is effectively my very first Animal Crossing game, and as a result there has been a mountain of knowledge that I needed to climb in very short order in order to figure out what the hell was going on behind the various mechanics. This is a game that is exceptionally bad at explaining itself, and really this should have been their “Monster Hunter World” moment, because given that the Switch is an extremely popular console makes it attractive to a whole new generation of players. This should have been the title that they added a bit more scaffolding to the game in order to hand hold you through the process of engagement. There are so many things that I have had to take to external sources to figure out, and I feel like maybe some hand holding would have been nice at least to have an option to say “Hey I am a First Timer, Explain to me like I am 5 Years Old”. All of that said it is adorable and while I am not playing with the length I was in those first few days I am at least logging in each day to move the bar forward a bit.
Atom RPG – PC
This one is making this part of the list because I feel like there is a lot more here to explore. I have not finished the game, and I want to spend time once other things calm down a bit getting back in and roaming around. Essentially this poorly named game is “What if Fallout 1 and 2 were Russian themed and came out recently”. It is a re-imagining of the Fallout genre and plays like you remember those games playing, which is to say it plays much better than they do if you were to buy a copy from GOG and play it today. It can be brutally hard, and I seem to have more issue with ammunition than I remember having back in the day, but it did serve for several fun nights of gaming and I want to return to it.
Wolcen – PC
While I have not been playing this a lot recently, there is still a lot of meat on these bones and I want to return to it. Wolcen has released a bunch of patches and tweaks since I last played and it will be interesting to see if my tanky spin to win build is still functional. Wolcen is the best Diablo game we have gotten in recent memory and does a great job of sorta cherry picking the best features of both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile… in a formula that feels closer to D3. Essentially it is a recipe for what I like in an ARPG, but I realize for the folks that hold Diablo 2 up in high esteem it might not be their jam. I wish this was available on the Switch because as much as I like playing D3 from the bedroom… if this supported cross save and allowed me to progress my character while chilling out horizontally… this would become my new sleepy time jam.
Ships Passing in the Night
Star Wars Galaxies – Legends Server – PC
In the months since January I have been on a bit of a MMORPG Emulator server binge. The first of these was Star Wars Galaxies because my good friend Tam got into the game heavily, as it was one of his nostalgia jams from the past. For him this was a great experience about space combat in the Star Wars universe. Since I do not really like flight simulators, it was less enjoyable, but I did greatly appreciate the first few levels that felt similar to a WoW or an Everquest 2. Unfortunately once you have finished the first ten levels and the game opens up… this helpful scaffolding falls away and the “real” game was far less enjoyable for me. What was there instead was slow progression and the unpredictable difficulty curves that I remember from Everquest. I was happy that Tam was having so much fun, but I was a bit saddened that I really was not.
City of Heroes – Homecoming Server – PC
This lead me down a path towards one of my nostalgic remembrances… and the game I was likely playing while Tam was playing SWG… City of Heroes. I had so much fun with this game and for the full nostalgia trip, I opted to play a Katana/Regeneration Scrapper. The game itself was way different than I remember it being, but not in a bad way. The homecoming server effectively is picking up where the game left off when it was shuttered, meaning it is several years worth of patches past the point at which I actually left off playing. For the most part the game holds up well unlike SWG or Everquest, and I could see myself maybe returning to it at some point in the future when I am not deluged with other games I want to be playing.
Everquest – EZ Server – PC
Eventually this path of madness lead me back to the progenitor of MMORPG gaming (for me at least), Everquest. I tried a few different server options and eventually landed on EZ Server, which is a super fast progression and super low difficulty Everquest experience that lets me play tourist and revisit areas I loved in the game without having to deal with finding a group. I realize this largely defeats the purpose of Everquest, but I also don’t have the time or patience that I did when I first played this game, and as a result I am down for cheat mode. It was a lot of fun for about a week and then I wandered away like a bored toddler. I might return the next time I get nostalgic about Norrath, given how hard I have found it to ease back into Everquest II.
Mars: War Logs – PC
This is the third game by Spiders that I have played and it suffers from a lot of the same problems. However still like Greedfall and Technomancer there is something about the gameplay that I find compelling. They all sorta play like low rent Bioware titles, but they are doing a thing that Bioware no longer seems to be doing which makes me interested in them nonetheless. Mars: War Logs was the first game in a series that continued with Technomancer, and I could definitely see some merit in playing this game first because it does introduce parts of the Mars setting that never get explored fully in the sequel. That said it is a much more primitive gaming experience, and while I enjoyed it I could see a lot of the awkwardness turning others off. If you want to experience a spiders game and have never done so… probably start with Greedfall and see if it leaves you wanting more before diving in deeper.
The Touryst – Switch
This game was in heavy rotation for me for about a week and then once again as is my usual I wandered away like a bored toddler. It is really charming and interesting, and I liked the pace of feeling like I accomplished something each day. What I did not love about it were how many precision jumps that were required to complete some of the puzzles. The basics of the game is that you are visiting an archipelago and each island has a different them, as well as a central puzzle to solve in how to unlock its shrine. There is no real combat, and if you fail something you start over immediately at the beginning of the room that you are in so it allows you to fail fast and rapidly iterate through ideas. The voxel theme is a lot of what makes the game charming, and the engine that is running it is among the more impressive ones available on the switch. The lighting, the animations, the subtle details all add to the feel of it being a living and breathing world.
Doom (2016) – PC
It only took me four years… but I finally buckled down and finished my play through of Doom 2016 in anticipation of the release of Doom Eternal. It was a fun if nonsensical ride through a world of exploding demon corpses. I had an awful lot of fun pushing through the final bits of the game and would definitely suggest it to anyone who loved the earlier era and arcade shooters. I’ve not really had a chance to dig into Doom Eternal but it also seems to be a similar style of enjoyment. Right now I am buried under a bunch of games and I need to dig out before I really tackle anything else.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
During the crisis we currently find ourselves in… I’ve struggled to allow myself to sink into the warm embrace of a video game. I’ve had trouble disconnecting mentally enough to really allow myself to engage fully with another universe. As a result I have been in desperate need of something that I could more or less play while at the same time shutting off my brain and just giving it time to rest. World of Warcraft fits that bill perfectly because all of the patterns of engagement are more or less muscle memory at this point. I’ve been taking advantage of the experience bonus currently going on in game and the speed of leveling is pure nonsense. I took my Horde Paladin from 110-120 in a few days and hit 118 before I had finished the first zone I chose to go through, Zuldazar. Now that I have that character at 120 I am swapping over to pushing up my Warlock, while at the same time dipping my head in periodically to gobble up any upgrades from World Quests. I’ve also leveled my Paladin on Alliance side as well, since it was the closest to the level cap… and am in the process of working my way towards unlocking the allied races.
Summary
When I allow myself to go more than one month without an update it ends up being this mammoth post as I have a bunch of things that I feel like I need to talk about. My hope is that I can get back in the swing of doing these early in each month. I find it helpful to sorta clear the slate each month and talk about what is and is not seeing play time. There are a lot of games that I might play, but ultimately don’t feel like dedicating one of my daily posts to, and this gives me the space to address those.
Last night I managed to get the credit roll for Wolcen and this comes after putting roughly 40 hours into the game. I did not exactly rush through and spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly. I believe I was level 42 when I finally pushed through past the final encounter. Monday night Grace and I were both at roughly the same spot and even though I was insanely sick last night I pushed through to see the end. I’m happy that I did because the very last encounter is a gigantic pain in the butt and we only managed to make it through because I was so damned tanky in the previous build. Any time Grace would go down I could pop juggernaut effectively making me invulnerable and use those frames to bring her back up.
In general I am pretty happy with the gameplay experience and its story. I am sure there will be some folks for whom it was a disappointment, but I would rank the story overall as better than Diablo. There are some interesting factions and some events that I didn’t fully expect. Then again there are other shocking turns that I absolutely did expect. The final battle didn’t play out quite like I had expected it, but did cover some of the story beats I was assuming it would. I am being purposefully vague for those who are not quite there as of yet. The three act structure is pretty solid and the levels themselves take enough time to get through that the feels like a substantial experience. I admit I pushed through the last little bit on Story Mode and the final fight was difficult event then, so I hate to see it on normal.
Throughout the course of the game Stormfall has getting progressively more and more destroyed by the onslaught on the primordial forces. When you finish the game, something has happened to Damaskas and after some back and forth the factions have decided that they need to appoint a new leader of Stormfall to oversee its revival. You are now playing what is called the Champion of Stormfall mode of the game where it largely focuses on running randomized content in order to gain “productivity” and resources in order to begin the slow process of unlocking a ton of new systems.
In some ways it feels like you are suddenly thrust into a seemingly good version of the World of Warcraft Garrison system. Through choosing projects you can unlock additional skill slots, extra pips of stamina, permanent discounts on vendors and all manner of other systems that have not existed prior to the moment you pushed into the end game. This is ultimately your gold sink for the late game and gives you a purpose for running repeatable content over and over. Now this isn’t going to be for everyone, but so far I am digging what I have seen of it.
So far you seem to have two methods of grinding out productivity. The first is through running expeditions, which are a series of dungeons that block you from returning back to town. At the end of each floor you have the option of exiting the dungeon and going back into town or continuing on to the next floor. There also appears to be a vendor at the end of each sequence allowing you to do some selling of loot because I was tossing away whites to loot yellows throughout the entire run. This seems interesting but also seems like it is going to be a large time sink as well. You can reroll the modifiers trying to get a run with extreme gold find for example or some sort of specific bonus.
The other option is to run Mandates from what appears to be a quest board. These are more straight forward dungeons with some sort of a loot reward that drops at the end. The good folks of Reddit have of course created a flowchart of how the various upgrades work that might be worth looking at to sort of plot your choice to the ones that you want to unlock first. During our play through Grace managed to find an insanely cool looking Two Handed Mace and I have been holding onto it waiting for me to finally hit 40, at which point I swapped from Sword and Board over to Two Handers. I finished out the story with my weird tanky build but last night I opted to respec everything.
My previous build sorta went after any talent that could in some small way make me have higher survival. This time around I have been way more cautious in my picks and am specifically targeting things that increase my damage while still adding a bit of resistance and health. I made a beeline to get the talent in the bottom left hand corner which takes away wisdom completely and makes it so that I passively generate rage instead. This makes a massive difference and now I really can finally be spinning almost the entire time. Right now I am sorta making my way across a bit of green in order to dive down into another red warrior block across the board from where I started.
So far it more or less seems to be working for me as I can just shred things now with blade storm. I am trying to start gemming in a manner that buffs frost damage since a large part of the raw damage of the weapon comes from that. Additionally it procs a freezing effect, so it is probably worth having that up as much as possible just for the crowd control aspect. I am nowhere near as tanky as I was before, and the big monsters can shred me pretty quickly. As a result I am going to have to play way more nimbly than I was before and making sure I don’t end up getting trapped in a corner I can’t dodge out of. So far… I think I am going to like the end game, but I guess after a week of it we will be able to determine that further in another post.
Last night I returned to Final Fantasy XIV or at least attempted to. I had not played much since the first or second week after the release of the Eden raid. If my math is right this would have been around the beginning of August, and after doing my traditional FFXIV thing of leveling my tank and a dps class I checked out in a massive way. I’ve more or less purposefully been holding off knowing that if I could come back with a large chunk of MSQ to consume I might be able to stick around long enough to get into the swing of things. As a result I did not return when 5.1 released and since last night was the launch of 5.2 I decided that was a reasonable time to start poking my head back into the game.
I did not make a ton of progress and more or less unlocked the first dungeon and ran it with a trust. I did not at all expect the Crystal Exarch to fill the tank role… but the fact that he was a Paladin makes some measure of sense as far as tank roles go. I am playing my Samurai figuring it will be easier to get back into the game if I am able to do so with limited responsibility. My biggest challenge with FFXIV has been the fact that the game expects everyone to be a DPS, and if that is the case I might as well just play an actual DPS. I am of the mindset that Tanks should be Tanks and Healers should be Healers and if they can throw the occasional damage dealing spell awesome… but FFXIV is a game that has devolved into a state where everyone is expected to have an optimized dps rotation. I can’t say if this trip back into FFXIV is going to stick or not but at a minimum I will probably gobble up the main story quest and we will play it by ear after that.
Also happening yesterday was the launch of a new in game Destiny 2 mini-cinematic showing an a confrontation between Osiris and Rasputin. I guess this means that unlike the rumors of maybe going back to the Prison of Elders we will once again be entangling ourselves in some manner with the Warmind. I am split in a bunch of different directions this week because it is probably the last Iron Banner of Season of the Dawn and I really would like to earn a set of the armor available in its 2.0 variant. It was my favorite of the Iron Banner armor sets and I am sure with the changing of the seasons it will be gone. I am also sitting at level 60 of 100 and would feel sad if I did not manage to grind out all of the season levels.
Then there is Wolcen which I am completely enamored with and want to play more of. I was super happy to find out that cosmetic choices are on a per slot level and not per gear, so if you swap gear your cosmetic choices stay put. The only thing that I have done so far is hide my helmet because quite honestly I usually hate helmets in video games. I’ve not made a ton of progress because of course last night I was distracted by Final Fantasy XIV, so add this to the list of games that are pulling me in different directions.
Finally at some point I really want to finish off Mars: War Logs and see where that story goes… so that is a 4th game to throw on the pile of things fighting for my attention. On top of all of this… something has been going around at work and causing people to drop like flies and yesterday my direct boss as knocked out of commission by it. Last night I did not feel amazing and this morning I am feeling completely awful, so I am wondering if I am about to go on my own roller coaster ride of illness. Basically I have gone from being super single threaded on single player games… to being distracted constantly by the allure of multiplayer games that I am playing in a single player manner. I feel like for the entirety of this decade I have been living in this state of having way too much that I want to be playing.
Wolcen had what can only be described as a rough launch week. This is a game that has been in early access for roughly two years, but was also in what I would term as a “very alpha” state for much of that time period. Throughout the early access period it had a peak concurrency in the ballpark of 1000 players. Immediately after launching on Thursday this shot up rapidly to a peak concurrency in the range of 65,000 players and Steam Spy now lists 67,375 as the current peak. There is a massive difference between balancing a server for 1000 connections and balancing one for over 60,000 connections and as a result not surprisingly the game cratered hard under the crush of this traffic.
Gamers as the masters of hyperbole as we are, jumped straight to 11 and started thrashing Wolcen in every possible venue. For me as a grizzled veteran of bad game launches sat back realizing that they were dealing with “some shit” right now and the ship would right itself in time. The only place where they failed in my eyes is that they should have communicated the depth of the problem immediately. Yesterday morning the above message showed up on the steam forums explaining what was going on and what they were trying to do in order to fix it. I probably would have lead with this message on Friday, but that is also coming from someone with management experience in situations where projects have gone south quickly. The instinct is to batten down the hatches and rush into “fix all the things” mode, but the real first step should be formulating a message to get out to your customers.
There is also a scale thing going on here with this launch and my reaction to it. When you have someone like a Blizzard, UbiSoft or Electronic Arts and they botch the launch of a game, I have way less forgiveness in my heart because “they should know better”. They are AAA publishers that have been through more than one bit “massively multiplayer” launch and also have the resources that they can bring into play in order to rapidly scale their solution. The eponymous Wolcen Studio at least at the time of writing their “meet the team” piece is a group of 13 people working out of what looks like a house. My reaction as such is commensurate to the staggering effort it is for a first time team to publish a game like this and while they could potentially learn from the sidelines, the best laid plans are discarded when your servers suddenly have a 6500% increase in traffic.
The silver lining to all of this however is that unlike most ARPGs there is a way to play the game offline without needing to care about the servers burning down around the team. As such I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with a brand new character on the offline mode and catching up to where I was in the progress in the online mode. This is my biggest complaint right now is the inability to flip characters between these two modes. I mean I get it from a “wanting to stop cheating” standpoint, but especially in the eyes of the bad launch we are dealing with it becomes frustrating to try and keep two different characters in sync with each other. Between the various late stage beta game-play and these multiple characters I have created I more or less determined what sort of build I wanted to go with.
I’ve been focused on a tanky build with high block and resistance and then I essentially leap into battle which gives me some initial rage and then spin to win. Bladestorm is specked out so that it doesn’t cost that much rage and each time I hit something I gain rage back allowing me to keep this reaction going for quite some time. I’ve also poured some points into Rage Conservation allowing me to take a bit of time to move between packs of mobs and also took the ability that allows me to gain rage while being hit. All combined allows me to spin around the battlefield in relative safety while chewing up encounters. I am sure I could probably make a more effective version of this build if I focused on bruiser gear and maybe dual wielded onehanders… but I am me and I have a sword and shield fetish.
Last night I managed to connect with Grace who has also been playing this when the servers came back online and were more or less stable. There seems to be a hefty group xp bonus and a bit of a catch up curve because when we started playing there were 3 levels difference between us and by the end of the night we were dinging within a few minutes of each other sitting at the same level. The teleport to friend system seems to work more or less like you would expect from Diablo 3. I am not sure what the restrictions on trade are but I seemed to be able to trade pretty much anything that I got as a drop as I was funneling Grace some spells that might be useful for her “Demon Hunter” build. The biggest thing we both noticed was how much loot the game seemed to drop in group mode because we were constantly running back to town to sell. I would love to see some sort of a sell all button to speed this process up.
In the grand scheme of things I am still very happy with this game and it is effectively the thing that I have wanted for quite some time. Wolcen is a game that takes the best bits of Diablo 3 and combines them with the best bits of Path of Exile, creating a hybrid that is more enjoyable at times than either of its predecessors. Time will tell if they can grow the game into something truly amazing, and I have yet to see what the end game is like. My hope is that all of the hyperbole surrounding this game will fade as people actually get access in order to play it. Wolcen is absolutely worth picking up especially for its sub $60 price tag. Here is hoping that they can nurture the game for the long run and keep making tweaks and additions in order to keep the content fresh.
