World of Warcraft – Page 18

Torghast and Palace of the Dead

June 29, 2021 by Belghast

Lately I have been back playing some Final Fantasy XIV and enjoying myself quite a bit. I am not sure if is the cavalcade of “leaving wow to play ffxiv” videos that the YouTube algorithm has deluged me with, or if I am avoiding finishing FF7R because I don’t want the story to be over. Whatever the case I have been back and piddling around several old haunts, spending a lot of time on my tiny paladin… which I guess sounds weird because as a Lalafell everything is tiny. I never really leveled up my Paladin past around 50 and I have been doing so because apparently I really like the ways they have changed that class over the years.

Over the years I have spent copious amounts of time in Palace of the Dead, so much so that I would probably put it up there as one of my favorite activities in the game. At its most simple level it is a roguelike dungeon exploration game mode where you progress through an one hundred floor deep dungeon. It uses its own progression system in the form of Aetherpool Weapons and Armor which gain strength by finding specific chests in the dungeon. Each ten floors you face a boss of sorts and your progression is locked in, allowing you to restart at the last flight of ten floors that you left off. There are also temporary buff items that you pick up along the way that allow you to deal with traps and challenges specific to the dungeon.

There are a few things that I find really interesting about the game mode. Firstly any square you step on in your travels could contain a trap, which makes you cautious to travel uncertain paths or stay too clumped up for fear an explosion will KO the entire party. Additionally any treasure chest could be a Mimic, which applies a very hefty debuff making each chest you open a risk versus reward decision. Clearing a certain amount of monsters unlocks the gate to the next floor, and in general because of the traps and mimics, groups tend to only explore the bare minimum needed to move forward. This is especially true if you are doing floors 51-60 which players tend to run over and over as a quick way to level alts.

I personally love it because it means I can level alternate jobs without having to worry about gearing. You can legitimately step into Palace of the Dead wearing nothing but your job weapon and be just as effective as a player decked out in full savage gear. The other aspect that I have loved is that there are hidden coffers spread throughout the dungeon which can be turned in for a random item. There are a bunch of interesting things on this drop table but the vast majority are cosmetics. For example most of the outfit I am wearing in the above screenshot came from random drops in Palace of the Dead.

All of this is why I was looking forward to Torghast opening in World of Warcraft with the Shadowlands expansion. At least on paper everything I had read about it prior to the launch of the expansion made me think that maybe just maybe they were taking notes from FFXIV and introducing a similar system. In practice however Torghast ended up feeling largely pointless. Palace of the Dead has this join purpose of helping you level your alts and at the same time get some cool cosmetics while doing it. Torghast on the other hand is a forced grind that you feel like you have to complete every week… with your only reward being yet another random currency required to unlock something that feels require… legendary items.

While there are some mechanically interesting things going on with Torghast, it doesn’t feel as balanced and it is also a much bigger time sink than clearing ten floors of Palace of the Dead. There is so much RNG given that you get a choice of three buffs each time you open one of the glowing orbs. Some of these are really good and others are absolutely horrible. Then there is the whole feeling that nothing I gained this week carries forward to help me with next week. If you are unlucky you have a really bad time and if you are lucky your power seems to snowball out of control becoming an immortal god of death.

On the other hand in Palace of the Dead I have over time increased my Aetherpool Arms and Armor rating to +99 and am effectively as strong as I will ever get. That means I can drag alts in there and get a pretty predictable leveling experience, yet still feel like I get the random chance of getting something cool as a drop. I mean even when it isn’t anything I need, I can still share the love and gift those items to someone else. Like yesterday my friend Clockwork Bells happened to be on at the same time as me and I gifted her a pet, a music scroll and a nifty pair of cosmetic boots that I got as a drops. If I don’t have someone to send to, I have often times gone into one of the newbie areas and just dropped goodies on people.

The problem with Torghast I think is the fact that I felt like I was required to do it. If I skipped a week I felt like I was falling behind the curve in the amount of soul ash that I could have obtained. Similarly that end goal of maybe crafting a legendary… that I would have to spend hundreds of thousands of gold to obtain just wasn’t enough carrot to make the stick feel manageable. If Torghast also became a source of gear that you could take out of it and put to use in the rest of the game… maybe just maybe it would feel worthwhile. If they turned it into an alternate leveling path like Palace of the Dead and made it so that gear was completely normalized and you could effectively walk in naked… also like PotD I think that would have been enough to make me get into it.

As it stands, Torghast seemed like someones pet project… crafted by someone who maybe heard a FFXIV player talking about how much fun Palace of the Dead was, without actually understanding any of the things that made it enjoyable. However what is more likely the case is that Torghast was initially designed to be a super challenging replacement for the Mage’s Tower from Legion, that just sort shifted purpose somewhere along the way. The end result is something that isn’t fun enough to do just for the sake of doing it… and not rewarding enough to make making to do it feel like a good use of time. There are so many ways that they could improve upon the design, but at the end of the day we all know that it is going to stop being relevant the moment the next expansion is released. On the other hand I am still playing Palace of the Dead and it is still relevant some two expansions after it was initially put into the game. The post Torghast and Palace of the Dead appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition

March 31, 2021 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I was realizing this morning just how completely out of date my blog side bar is when it comes to the games that I have been playing regularly. In theory I claim that this is my semi-monthly process of trueing up the sidebar so it represents the sorts of games that I am playing. What actually happens is that I go for large blocks of time without updating this and when that happens massive swings occur. For example the last one of these that I did was in October of 2020 and some stuff has changed. So here goes an attempt at maybe doing these regularly again for a bit. For those not already indoctrinated into the process I divide things up into a few categories:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

To Those Remaining

My sweet sweet Diablo 3, you are rarely ever gone from this list. There is even a new season starting this Friday and I am looking forward to going through the routine of the seasonal grind. This season has a bunch of changes to the game and as a result they sorta gave us a greatest hits collection of sets available through Haedrigs Gift. As a result I am looking at probably starting a Whirlrend Barbarian for this season because those are so stinking fun to play.

I am going to be honest, I am leaving this one on the list more as an aspirational placement than a game I am truly actively playing. I boot it up from time to time and play through a few encounters and then put it to bed for a longer period of time. I hope to get back in and play it more intently because also while we have been spilling truth… I feel a little guilty that I am not really doing much with my PlayStation 5.

This one retains its spot because it is still probably my go to “playing switch from bed” game. The pattern of play just fits spending a few minutes before falling asleep. I am not terribly good at it but I enjoy it mechanically and thematically. This is the only game I have played where I enjoy losing, because it means I am going to get some more story beats.

I am leaving this on the list for reasons of which I am contractually not at liberty to talk about. It comes out in August officially and I am looking forward to that release. I’ve never seen a game that has gone through quite so many changes during its late development cycle as this one. It is going to be interesting to see the state of this game at launch. I have quite a bit of faith in it.

Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, RG350, Retroid, Raspberry Pi 4

Still very much spending a chunk of my time playing games that I grew up with… that are now referred to as Retro games. Still feels really weird to be calling them Retro to be honest. Actually yesterday I literally just got an 8 gb Raspberry Pi 4 model in that I am going to be playing with. That is probably going to become my main emulation device for the short term for anything other than higher end stuff like Cemu that absolutely requires the power of my gaming PC.

To The New and Returning

Putting this one back on the list because I am technically playing it again. I am nowhere near as engaged with it as I would like to be and I am not exactly certain why that is the case. From all accounts this is a really good season but I find myself just unable to get stuck into it very deeply. Since we are trueing things up it is in somewhat regular rotation so it is going to get a spot on the list.

I am experiencing a massive renaissance of Elder Scrolls Online and it has rapidly become my primary game over the past month. While I am mostly leveling alts right now, I am going to return to the normal course of trying to quest my way through all of the content in the game and maybe just maybe be ready for the launch of the next expansion in June. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing because I have to make it through large blocks of content and I know I will become distracted by other games that spring up along the way.

Another thing that happened since my previous update is that I have returned to Minecraft in a huge way. I spent a lot of time playing solo and even recorded a semi-daily YouTube series on my adventures. Now however I spend my time either popping between my own private Realms world or a closed server run by my friend Zeli. Not playing near as much as I was but I am still popping in and wandering around. There is a stronghold in the nether that I am clearing and trying to set up a dual blaze farm right now so I still have projects that I am plugging away at. Right now I am likely going to wait to re-engage heavily until the new caves update comes out and create a brand new world.

Outriders is the new looter shooter hotness that is shipping tomorrow officially. I played the hell out of the demo and now am looking forward to consuming this game peacefully. I am not really planning on playing it as my primary game because I am super engaged with Elder Scrolls right now, but I am absolutely going to slow grind it. The launch time is just really bad because it overlaps with a bunch of other things going on like the launch of a new Diablo 3 season.

Valheim is freaking great. If you do not already own this game you should pick it up because it is dirt cheap and one hell of a lot of fun. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium with this game at least until new content ships. I had been playing regularly on a server but I have mostly been playing lately on my solo world. When the hearth and home update ships, I might start a new world depending on how deep the changes go. I will likely always keep Beltopia around given that it is set up nicely for crafting and such.

To Those Departing

I have no real idea why I bounced the way that I have from this game. I think partially it might just be that I don’t love “maintenance gaming” where all I am really doing is dailies. However in this game that isn’t even true because they have released a ton of story content since I last played and I never can quite bring myself to come back and play it. There are a lot of things about this game that work so well and then a lot of things that just frustrate me. For example the fact that I feel like I don’t have a reasonable manner in which to level new characters and catch them up to my core party… means that I largely feel like I am stuck always using my core party. Maybe at some point I will return when it ships on the Switch but for now it is a distant memory.

Shadowlands is a bad expansion filled with systems that I am not interested in engaging with. In fact I would probably say that Shadowlands is going to be up there with the worst expansions of all time. I talked about how frustrated I was with Battle for Azeroth, but at least that is an expansion that I actively enjoyed the leveling process. Shadowlands I barely made it to the level cap with one of my characters and couldn’t even manage to stomach a single zone on my alts. I am not exactly sure how things went off the rails in the manner that they did but for now at least I am done with the game. Like I have not talked about it a lot because in truth I am not even sure it is worth talking about it. I miss hanging out with my friends who play the game but I miss nothing about Shadowlands.

Ships Passing in the Night

Unlike most of the internet I have nothing but love for this game. I apparently had a sufficient system to play it and lucked out on not encountering many bugs during my play through. As such I am actively craving more content for it, but throwing it on the “ships” list because I have more or less put the game aside for the moment. When DLC releases I will either play through the DLC on my current play through or start a brand new campaign. I hope the issues surrounding this game do not kill this franchise because I loved it deeply on so many different levels.

Dragon Age Inquisition was one of those games that I had bounced off of so many times in the past and then suddenly was able to play happily. I have found with the hustle and bustle of the end of the year… I crave deep single player experiences. This is one of those games that I played during that period and had a blast. Looking forward to this story continuing.

When this game first released I tried playing it with a controller because it seemed like that was the proper way to play it. I bounced because the game is not terribly good at explaining when you should leave a planet. However over the holiday break I returned to the game and had a blast, this time playing with my more native control scheme of keyboard and mouse. Truly great game and great experience. If you have not played this game you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you like Star Wars even in the least bit.

Another game that I have bounced off numerous times is Knights of the Old Republic 2 and for some reason over this break I managed to make my way through it. Like the game is a mess… there is no getting around that but it is a mess that I am happy to have experienced. There is a lot of interesting things going on in this game and knowing now that this released before Fallout New Vegas I can see some of the things that they expanded upon later and made work better in that game. Would I recommend it to someone else? Probably not, but I am still very happy to have experienced it myself.

Summary

The funny thing about this is that I just realized upon writing out this post… that my sidebar was never actually updated from the October edition meaning it was even more out of date than I realized. Now I will hopefully remember to do the thing and actually make the updates once I finish with this post. Here is to also maybe doing this at least once a quarter going forward… if not monthly. The post Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Azeroth Needs Gods

March 19, 2021 by Belghast

Lately as you all know I have been playing an excessive amount of The Elder Scrolls Online, and in doing so it has made me realize one of the things that has always bugged me about World of Warcraft and more importantly the cosmology of Azeroth. There are not actual gods. There are beings that they place in the same position as gods but those largely serve the role of large monsters that we will eventually take down in a raid. This morning I am going to try and explain the difference from my perspective, or at least my particular point of view.

Over my years on this planet there have been a number of games that I have played with baked in pantheons of worship. Likely the first of these was when I got my hands on a copy of Deities and Demigods it seemed both really cool and also extremely natural. I had been studying mythology and the fact that I was also catholic… which sort of has its own pantheon of saints… it all made sense in my tiny brain. I personally was super engaged with the Norse mythology and my deity of choice has almost always been Tyr the Even-Handed. In part because it was really fucking cool that he sacrificed his arm in order to bind Fenrir and in essence stop Ragnarok from happening. It is only as an adult that I tend to feel more for Fenrir in this scenario.

The key characteristic of the gods in a good RPG is that they don’t actually have the ability to directly influence the mortal plane. They can occasionally manifest themselves in the form of an avatar, but for the most part they wage a proxy war for control of territory and the hearts and minds of people. As such various cults spring up that worship a specific deity and generally speaking the only difference between these and the accepted religion of a people is whether or not it actually aligns to their collective morals. As I moved into online games, I found Norrath to be a very believable and vibrant setting in part because it had so many deities vying for power over the world. In Norrath we had a core pantheon of gods with various alignments and realms of influence:

Good Aligned
- Mithaniel Marr
- Quellious
- Rodcent Nife
- Tunare
Neutral
- Brell Serilis
- Bristlebane
- Karana
- Solusek Ro
- The Tribunal
Evil Aligned
- Bertoxxulous
- Cazic-Thule
- Innoruuk
- Rallos Zek
- Anashti Sul

In addition to these there were a whole slew of other minor deities and demigods and general forces of nature that were in various states of activity an influence on the mortal plane. So many of the best storylines in Everquest involve the gods working against each other and attempting to exert influence on one part of the world or group of people. This also ends up creating interesting dualities as different races within the world view the same god in vastly different ways. Brell Serilis for example is the creator of the Dwarves and the Gnomes, but also is referred by the Goblins of the Runny Eye clan as their deity as well along with all of the neutral earthen elemental forces. The gods also work in concert with others for example Cazic-Thule, Ralos Zek and Innoruuk have an unsteady alliance because they all collectively hate Mithaniel and Erollisi Marr and actively seek to do harm to them through their followers.

Elder Scrolls similarly has an extremely rich pantheon of gods and demigods that vie to influence Mundus aka the physical world. In later games this coalesces around an imperially mandated pantheon of the nine divines but there are so many other pantheons present and active in the world. Not the least of these are the Daedric Princes which have a wildly varying number of approaches to their worshipers and motivations. Ultimately what separates a Divine and a Daedra seems to largely be the favor of the government as many of the Daedra themselves took up roles in older Pantheons within the races of Nirn. Similar to Everquest a large number of the questlines that you find yourself on involve one or more “Gods” moving against each other or trying to exert their influence in a specific sphere of power. The core storyline of the base game of Elder Scrolls Online centers around a plot by Molag Bal the Daedric Prince of Domination and Enslavement attempting to merge his realm of Coldharbour with Tamriel effectively giving him power over both. Meridia another Daedra who is associated with the energies of living beings is aligned against Molag Bal and often times offers assistance to the players in order to fight back against this aggression. Other deities like Nocturnal are closely tied with specific organizations within Nirn, more specifically the Nightingales are her sworn servants but there has often been a rumored connection between her and the Night Mother revered by the members of the Dark Brotherhood. The keys to both Everquest and Elder Scrolls and honestly Dungeons and Dragons before it is that the gods are alive and well and actively trying to influence the populace. I contend that there doesn’t really seem to be an equivalent of this sort of interaction happening within World of Warcraft.

Roughly five years ago from the time of writing this, Blizzard released a book called World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1 that attempted to take the wildly disparate lore of the World of Warcraft and condense it into a unified world view. This was effectively the equivalent of an ecumenical council and attempted to sift through the various lore and discard the bits that didn’t quite fit while modifying some in order to fit into this neat cosmology. I was fully in support of this notion because Warcraft lore was a complete mess. However what came out of this as well was the fact that this larger world view didn’t have room for dieties really. In the early days of Warcraft however I thought there was effectively a pantheon of good deities aligned against a pantheon of bad deities. The good represented by the Titans and the bad represented by the Old Gods and this nebulous concept we kept hearing known as the Void Lords. The longer the game has run however it is very clear that the Titans are effectively just a different sort of race of beings birthed out of the core of a world and not really immortal gods. Similarly the things that keep being referred to as “Old Gods” are just sort of this race of elder beings that defy logic and reason but also can absolutely be killed as we have done this to several of them.

The closest thing that we really have to a proper pantheon of deities comes in the form of the Loa that the Trolls worship. However apart from Bwonsamdi and Hakkar we really don’t see a lot of interaction between these individuals and the races of Azeroth apart from the Trolls consistently figuring out ways to “eat” their gods and drain their power. As a result these are also very mortal beings that maybe exist in a different manner but cannot really be thought of eternal forces quite in the same way as a Quellious or a Dibella. The absence of this clear pantheon of power aligned with and against the players has always ended up making the world of Azeroth feel every so slightly hollow. There was always something missing that I never could quite put my finger on until I started to think about it more recently.

Up until this point I could still sort of lean on the Wild Gods of Azeroth as being this eternal force that impacts the world. However Shadowlands even closed the loop there and taught us that what we think of as the Wild Gods are just beings with a different life cycle where they travel to Azeroth, live a cycle there and then return to the shadowlands to regenerate before manifesting again. This makes me not really consider them to be a true pantheon of gods either. There is this new Pantheon of death that we have been introduced to, but they also are very much killable which again makes me question if they represent gods either.

I think the truth is more that World of Warcraft exists largely to create powerful figures and then allow the players to kill those powerful figures. A major force cannot exist for very long without it eventually turning into a raid encounter. Maybe this comes from early frustrations of the folks who shaped the raid content of World of Warcraft being long time Everquest raiders and travelling to the seats of those gods powers… and only ever killing an Avatar and never being able to actually slay the god themselves. I think the storytelling potential of a game is weaker however if you don’t have all powerful beings with their own motivations pulling the strings of “mere-mortals”. World of Warcraft plays at this, but in every case those forces eventually end up on the chopping block as the players end those threats permanently. I think I like the concept of having endless beings that we can momentarily defeat, but never quite go away and never forget the actions we have taken against them in the past. Everquest has managed to churn out so many expansions in part because they keep relying upon familiar enemies to invent new schemes to take over the mortal plane of existence. Instead World of Warcraft feels more akin to Dragon Ball Z or Bleach where they keep having to invent more extreme versions of cardboard cutout villains for us to eventually knock down in the end. The end result is also a lot of retroactive changes to storylines as new forces and shoehorned into existing events. That neat cosmology chart that I posted earlier from World of Warcraft Chronicles has already been mostly nullified by the expansion we are going through in Shadowlands. Without a reoccurring cast of Gods, new and more extreme versions of evil need to be invented in order for us to keep prevailing over them. The post Azeroth Needs Gods appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.