Fallout Fever

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The release of the Fallout Amazon Series appears to be a rousing success. It appears that critics across the board have given the show high marks, and similarly, long-time fans of the series are loving it. Tim Cain who worked on the very first Fallout game released his review of the show on YouTube and pretty much gave glowing praise for the level of detail. Sure there has been some minor controversy about the timeline of events and whether or not it reset the timeline of Fallout New Vegas… but overall folks have been happy. I shared my own praise of the show a few weeks back and I feel like I need to watch it again just to soak in all of the detail.

We are now seeing this Fallout love, translating into a rush of players to games like Fallout 76… which never really seemed to find its place and launched with a peak concurrency of 32k players on Steam. Recently it has been breaking those records with a new peak hitting just shy of 73k players. What is even more telling is… Amazon is giving this game away for free through the Microsoft Game Store and these Steam numbers are not even accounting for that. I’ve said recently that it seems to take about two years before a live service game is really worth playing, and now some five years later… Fallout 76 is in prime shape (pun intended) to welcome this influx of players.

The thing is… this isn’t just impacting the live service Fallout offering. The player numbers in Fallout 3 show an over 200% increase, New Vegas around 130% increase, and Fallout 4 similarly around 130% increase. This is translating to more than just players dusting off their existing copies because Fallout games are now seizing spots on the Steam Top Sellers Chart. As of the time of writing this Fallout 76 is 4th, Fallout 4 5th, Fallout 4 GOTY edition 9th, New Vegas 20th, and Fallout 3 GOTY edition down at 48th. I remember the Witcher Netflix series having a similar effect on sales of Witcher 3 boosting it by around 500%. While the Witcher series went off the rails and lost fans in later seasons, this is evidence that a good project surrounding a game will absolutely have deep impact on sales as it brings in a whole new group of fans.

Over the last week or so I have had a number of gamer friends reach out to me for my advice for where to start in their Fallout adventures. Namely how far back they should go… and as much as I hate to admit it my advice has been to skip the first two games unless they are already indoctrinated into the world of 90s CRPGs. The best Fallout game is New Vegas, so I feel like at a minimum everyone needs to play that one. There is merit however to start with Fallout 3, because while it is a very monochromatic wasteland… Three Dog is without a doubt the best DJ. Fallout 4 is a reasonable starting place if you are unwilling to deal with the jank of older games even though it has plenty of that good good Bethesda jank to contend with. My general advice would be to play Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and then Fallout 4 in that order… and if you find yourself craving more then maybe go back and do Fallout 1 and 2 if you can handle the downgrade in tech. Fallout Tactics was a game that I did not enjoy in the least so it isn’t going to get any sort of recommendation from me.

Personally, I find myself sinking further and further into Fallout 76. This is probably a bad starting place for anyone who cares about the story elements of Fallout. The lore of the game feels a bit too malleable, and while I am enjoying myself if you actually care about the story of the world… the other games are a much better option. What I wanted was to explore the content that has been added to this game over the years. I’ve poked at it off and on… and then got into the habit of logging into claim the various offerings throughout the years. However, I’ve never really played it as my main game and I am trying to find my way into that stance. I talked about it quite a bit on the podcast this weekend, but the community is very intriguing.

At some point, I need to dedicate some serious time to building up a proper base. I somehow ended up getting my original destroyed when I tried to move it, but truth be told it was sort of a mess. I would like to actually spend some time building something I am proud of. Above is an older screenshot and quite honestly… I just sort of kept throwing things at it without any real design goals. I’ve found a fairly flat area of land that no one seems to ever have a base… so I am going to attempt to build something more proper there.

AggroChat #475 – Wasteland Dreams

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

We had a bit of a cursed show…  Tam lost power and was essentially knocked out of the rest of the show and then Ash disconnects as well and takes a bit to get back in.  We push through however as we always do.  Bel talks about returning to Fallout 76 and all of the cool changes that have been put in since he last played.  Thalen talks about Open Source Star Control 2 aka Free Stars.  Ash continues his journey into Roguelikes talking about Anomaly Collapse and Inkbound.  Thalen and Kodra share their thoughts about The Sign, the latest episode of Bluey, and Grace shares their thoughts about AFK Journey.  Finally, Bel talks a bit about the recent market crash in the Path of Exile Necropolis league, making many chase items more accessible. 

Topics Discussed:

  • Steamdeck Modification Adventures
  • Returning to Fallout 76
  • Open Source Star Control
    • Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters
  • Roguelike Rundown Redux
    • Anomaly Collapse
    •  Inkbound
  • The Sign Bluey Episode
  • AFK Journey
  • Necropolis Market Crash

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Finding Hidden Delve Nodes

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Good Morning Folks! I don’t have a heck of a lot to talk about this morning, but I thought I would share something that I realized yesterday. I spend a lot of time in Delve and it is quite possibly my favorite game mode in Path of Exile. I would not be shocked if I had spent over a thousand hours running delve nodes. The thing is… the structure of Delve is something that has confused me a bit. Namely, I seemed to be missing the inherent understanding of how to find hidden nodes. There are a lot of things in this game that are based on rules, but for whatever reason I had yet to grasp something fundamental about the way Delve was laid out. Now I have to admit that I had heard this information before, but never fully grasped what it meant.

Veteran Path of Exile players speak like you understand what they are saying. I remember specifically Zizaran talking about this in a video here he was explaining that you could tell where hidden nodes were based on the connections that they were making. A node cannot have only two connection points. It can have one, it can have three, and in rare cases, it can have four… but no node can have only two connections. To illustrate this point I took a screenshot of an area down in Delve where there were two hidden nodes side by side… one azerite and one fossil. I’ve applied some labels to count the connections and you can see there are two places where there are only two visible connections. So I sketched an estimate of where I thought the connections might break off and labeled the expected node path in each case with a “3?” indicating a hidden third connection.

Last night I farmed each of these areas out so that I could take a follow up screenshot showing what the actual connections ended up looking like. I have highlighted the paths in green and in both cases I was more or less right. In the case of the Fossil node, the path broke off to the north instead of to the west, but it was in the same region. In any case looking for nodes that only had two paths connected to it, gave me a place where I knew for certain there would be some sort of path breaking out that I could bomb to get access to the tunnel.

Sometimes there are going to be places on the map where there is a hidden node, but there are two nodes around it that only have two connections. In these cases, you need to look for places where there might be a phantom fourth connection. If I were going to try and get to this currency node then I would start looking at the armor node and azerite nodes that I have highlighted. There is not enough room for a path to break off the Cartography node above the highlighted area, and while technically the singleton Lightning node could break north, that seems to happen really infrequently. Again you can have a single point of connection, three points of connection, or four points of connection but never two.

This is not my image, but it represents a concept that took me a bit to grasp. Delve is aligned to a strict grid of nodes. So when thinking of the way things connect up… there has to be enough room for a path to travel through without interrupting nodes you have already revealed. The way the biomes are laid out gives you a hint for where the edges of the individual blocks are. if you were to start drawing along those boundaries, you would eventually end up with a grid similar to the one above showing you where your hidden node has to be connected to. In the above example, we are going back to the rule of two again making it very clear where the connection is going to be. However in my example, if I follow the biome boundary lines, I cannot rule out either the two four connections that I have highlighted or the potential of that singleton going north.

Delve has long been something that was largely instinctual for me. I would get a feel of which tunnels I could dive down into the darkness and find riches, and which I should skip. However, I knew there had to be a method to the madness, and understanding the rules… makes it so much more straightforward to find those hidden nodes. Again this is something that EVERYONE might already know and I am just slow on the uptake… but I am going to take the risk to look like an idiot and explain it clearly regardless. That has been the problem I have had with most Path of Exile knowledge transfer, is that there is a general assumption that folks already understand core concepts. I’ve played roughly 2500 hours of the game and there are still core concepts that I am finally grasping all the time. It is my hope that this will help someone out there because I am too old for posturing that I know everything.

Return to Fallout 76

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Morning Folks! Like I said the other day… watching the Fallout Amazon Series has summoned forth a bunch of nostalgia for the series. As a result, I have found myself back in Fallout 76, which honestly is a better game than anyone gives it credit for. It was kinda janky at launch, but I remember having a heck of a lot of fun with the AggroChat crew. If you have Amazon Prime, you can get the game for free right now. As a promotion along with the Fallout series, you can snag a copy for either the Windows Store or Xbox. While there is no cross-platform play, the PC accounts on Steam and on the Windows Store both connect to Bethesda.net and can play together. So it is the perfect time to check the game out if you have never played it before.

Coming back to the game after a long absence, I have picked up a number of things that I figure I will share with you. First off… there is now a “Pacifist Mode” in the game which entirely disables PVP functionality. This can be found in the game section of the menu just below the look sensitivity and vibration settings. While the populace of Fallout 76 seems to largely be positive and non-toxic… there are occasionally bad apples that will come along attempting to trick you into PVP combat so that they can curb stomp you and get their jollies. If you are not PVP-minded… as is usually the case with most of my readership… then I suggest you pop into the settings and just set yourself to pacifist mode and never have to deal with it again. Similarly, you will want to make sure you set yourself to push to talk because by default the game is open mic which gets super annoying. I’ve just disabled voice chat in its entirety because it takes away from my enjoyment of most games.

This next piece of advice is going to seem entirely counterintuitive especially considering I just told you to disable voice chat. There is an odd culture that has spawned around this game of ALWAYS being grouped with other players when possible. The game gives you a pretty hefty experience bonus, so there are no downsides to grouping up. There are multiple types of teams available with specific ones that are focused on individual game modes. Casual teams however are largely thought of by the populace as “experience sharing” groups and whenever I play I hit Ctl+Tab to pop open the teams interface and see if there are any casual groups currently running. If they are all full you can just create your own Casual team which will likely fill quickly. One of the side benefits of being in a team aside from experience bonuses is the ability to teleport to the camps of your team mates to get around the map. You can also check to see if they have any vendors and are selling things that you might need cheaply.

Another thing that has been added to the game since I last played is Donation Boxes. These appear at hubs like the train station and outside the first vault allowing players to leave items for each other and to give players a good start in the wasteland. There always seems to be something in them especially ammunition and needed resources like bobby pins. I need to clean out my ammunition stores and drop some goodies in these to share with others myself. I’ve yet to find anything in them that I really needed so I have left them alone, but it is cool that it is a cultural tenant of the game now. Apparently, players used to leave goods in a specific box on the map, and it became an unofficial swap hub. The Fallout 76 devs noticed this and decided to make it an official system.

Another thing that was either not like this previously… or that I simply did not remember is that breaking down multiple copies of the same weapon teaches you mods for that weapon type. I believe when the game first launched this only worked if you happened to find a weapon with said mod already in place. Now just salvaging multiple copies of the same item seems to reward you a new mod each time, allowing you to build up your stockpile of recipes and resources. As someone who grew up playing Doom… I am of course using the pump shotgun quite a bit and slowly over time I have unlocked additional mods for it. I really need to find a higher level one however because as of writing this post I just noticed that it is level 5.

Another thing that I once knew but had forgotten… is that you want to use Photo Mode any time you are in an area that you might want to remember. Photos you have taken in-game in this manner will from that point forward be used as loading screens for the game. If nothing else it is pretty cool to see your character in various locations as you pop around the game incurring loading screens. I am trying to remember to do this more often because I think I only have five pictures currently in my rotation.

One of the things that Amazon Prime is giving away right now is a trial membership to Fallout 1st. This is essentially a subscription model to the game and gives you a number of limited-time cosmetics for playing and a fairly generous “allowance” of currency for the Atom shop. The big feature that you get with 1st however is the ability to create private worlds. The nice thing about this is that the same character progresses in both Adventure mode aka with other players, and Private Adventure which is your own private snapshot of the world. Sometimes in spite of all of the bonuses for playing with other players… you just want to be off in your own world doing your own thing. You can also spin up entirely custom worlds that let you fiddle with the ruleset. These however do not carry over progress to the “Adventure” worlds, and generally speaking, there is always some special limited-time event going on.

There is a battlepass-like seasonal model in the game, and the last time I played it was essentially a game board where you unlocked one slot at a time. This seems to have changed to something more akin to a storefront where ranking up gives you golden tickets and then those can be spent on various cosmetic stuff. Each page is gated by a specific rank and doing various Daily Quests and Weekly Quests earns you currency. If you have experienced the modern Guild Wars 2 dailies system it works fairly similarly to this, but the Fallout 76 goes much deeper in the various things you can unlock. Right now the season is focused around one of the in-world radio drama characters “Rip Daring” and some sort of cryptid-based theme. This current season began on March 26th and will run through June. If I can get into the swing of things and get used to running dailies then I might actually have enough time to unlock some of the cooler stuff.

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun just roaming around the West Virginia Wasteland. In a few days I have leveled up a bunch of times and unlocked several battlepass levels. From what I understand the first real breakpoint in the game comes at level 50, and any levels after that are just sort of gravy. You can start a fresh character at level 20 now, but I think I am pretty happy just slowly leveling my way up from where I am currently. That is one thing that changed that I think is really slick. So the world originally was tiered allowing you to accidentally wander into some really high level areas. Then they made some changes which had the group leader set the level of the world, making it awkward for low levels grouping with higher levels. Now it seems that they have done something similar to the Elder Scrolls Online level scaling tech where the world around you is set based on your own level allowing a level 1 player and a level 100 player to be effectively fighting the same monster.

Anyways, I am having quite a bit of fun poking around with this lately. If you make it into the game my Bethesda account is Belghast so feel free to friend me up and say hi.