Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
One of the things about AggroChat is we very often rarely get into a game when it is new, which leads to us putting several titles on our games of the year list that are several years old. This week Belghast finally got around to playing Control and is now trying to hook everyone else on it. From there we talk a bit about the cyberpunk state of Guild Wars 2 End of Dragons and how Cantha is now a high tech kingdom. Keeping the cyberpunk theme going we talk about Kamigawa Neon Dynasty. Ash talks a bit about Trials of Mana and their New Game Plus system that allows you to easily see how the OTHER party would have finished the game. From here we roll into a discussion about the most recent controversy going on with Star Citizen. Then we wrap things up with a few quick topics like how Elden Ring might have a serious security vulnerability. Then Kodra talks for a bit about Kaizo Mario and how maybe things aren’t as difficult as folks seem to think they are.
It is day two of the snowpocalypse and so far our sanity is mostly intact. To be honest… being snowed in would be much harder were it not for the fact that for the past three years I am leaving the house like once or twice a week. I’ve gotten exceptionally good at staying home. On Wednesday we received around four inches of snow, and over night it appears that we gained another three or so. This means the level of the snow is now above our front porch. My wife is off right now due to snow days and has seemingly made it her personal mission in life to clear the front porch.
Throughout the day yesterday we saw no signs of life from our neighborhood cats. I largely took this as a good thing because it probably meant that they had found some warm hidey hole and were safe and happy. However over night they started to roam again which prompted us to put some food out on a plate. Throughout the night we were visited by three cats… but sadly no “greybie” which is the one that lets us pet him. I am hoping he found some warmth and food elsewhere. I suppose we will keep putting out food on the front porch in the hopes that the neighborhood cats can at least come get it if they need it. In the backyard we have seen no signs of tripod, but with her I know she has access to some rabbit burrows where she hid out during last years much colder weather.
On the game front I have continued my journey into Control. I think probably the most remarkable thing about this game is its set pieces. Like this level design is just gorgeous and framed with cinematic flair. The Bureau has this characteristic of simultaneously looking like every government office you have ever been in. while at the same time evoking an otherworldly and “not quite right” aspect that is very hard to place. Sure the rugs are very reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but other elements also serve to create this timeless unreality of the place. If anything it reminds me of the treatment of the TDA from the Loki series, which admittedly came out after this game. It does make me wonder if anyone on the staff drew inspiration from Control.
The other aspect of the game that I am absolutely in love with is all of the care that has been placed in the educational materials scattered throughout the Bureau. There are a number of how to videos reminiscent of the educational films of the seventies. There is even this series of films that are puppet shows about a group called the “Threshold Kids”. All of this only serves to add additional texture to this world and make it feel all the more real as you explore it. I’ve never beaten the original Half Life or Half Life 2… but this game continues to remind me of what I have played of both. Additionally there is a gigantic spoonful of X-Files and Parasite Eve in play. The more I get into it, the better the story gets.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you are safe and warm and have completely avoided the snowpocalpyse. The northerners will think we are crazy down here… but this is a lot of snow for us and we have no real infrastructure to deal with it. My wife is a teacher and is effectively going to be out on snow days all this week. The positives and negatives of the pandemic is that I have been working remotely going on three years now, and as a result my job continues to function effectively the same regardless of how much snow is on the ground. I pulled this shot from our front porch camera where it caught activity around midnight, and since then the snow is effectively even with the front porch with drifts much higher.
As much as I have been enjoying Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I decided that I needed a break from it. The world of ancient Greece is so freaking huge… and honestly there are so many boxes to tick and objectives to discover that I can get a bit lost. On the podcast we have a phrase “leave the hinterlands” to denote that we should probably stop chasing the minutiae in a game and move the story along. This comes from Dragon Age Inquisition, where the game dumps you into the Hinterlands which are vast and full of detail… and completely a mistake if you waste too much time there. I am having one of those moments with Odyssey where I have spent the last several nights roaming around and doing all sorts of things… but also not really feeling like I am making any progress.
Instead I spent last night playing Control. This is a game I have wanted to play for quite some time and I figured something with a smaller scope might be beneficial for a little while. I am completely in love with the visual language of this game. It feels more movie than game… and very much lives in this weird space of how we remembered movies from the late 70s and not how they actually were. The game is super cheap pretty much everywhere right now, and I had a few copies of the game on various platforms that were given away. For anyone familiar with the internet phenomena of SCPs, this game draws heavy inspiration from that genre of an illusive organization trying desperately to keep a tight lid on reality. The game itself feels a bit like a truly modern version of Half Life… because things start out feeling pretty normal and then event unfold around you.
It has hooked me enough that I feel like I need to know where this story is going. Additionally I like the character of Jesse Faden quite a bit already. The game is not terribly forthcoming with a lot of details and I feel like there are going to be some major revelations in the middle act of this game. There is what feels like the main character is addressing us directly… like she knows we exist and I am not sure how that is going to shape over time. For the last few years I have had this notion in my head of playing more narrative focused games, and this year seems to be the time when I am actually doing it. I am sure I will get lost along the way again and mired in an MMORPG… but for now I am enjoying the variety.
I tell you friends… we continue to live in interesting times. It is not as though the chip shortage and the global pandemic were enough… it is apparently acquisition season which is bringing on some odd happenings. Yesterday three events took place that might have each inspired a blog post, but instead of dragging this out forever I am going to talk about all three this morning. As always I have already used my Twitter account as the social relief valve that it is, and hopefully you my blog readers will get a more measured response.
Sony Acquires Bungie… sorta?
News broke yesterday that Bungie would be joining Sony Interactive Entertainment in a deal worth 3.6 billion dollars. My initial take was that it seemed like an awful lot of money for a single game studio, given that most of the recent acquisitions have been far more about a grab for intellectual property rather than acquiring specific actively supported games. Bethesda/Zenimax for example had a pretty robust back catalog and some extremely high performing and beloved franchises under its belt… and that was 7.5 billion. Disney acquired the entire Star Wars franchise for what seems like a bargain basement price of 4.05 billion. Maybe the recent acquisition fever has inflated the price tag associated with studios… but this just seems like a lot for Destiny 2.
Bungie is a really weird freaking company. Lets take a moment to trace their recent history:
Starts life as a Macintosh exclusive developer
Gets snatched up by Microsoft who gains Halo franchise
Fights for freedom losing Halo in the process but becomes independent again
Enters into a 10 year exclusive publishing deal with Activision/Blizzard.
Fights again for freedom and becomes independent again.
Gets acquired by Sony but still maintains autonomy?
Specifically with that last point, it sounds like in this deal Bungie is going to retain a lot of autonomy and if you are a Destiny 2 player… nothing much is going to change. Under Activision the PlayStation used to have exclusive content in Destiny, and it seems like we are not returning to that just yet. What I think is likely however is that the new IP that Bungie has talked about in veiled statements is probably going to be a PlayStation exclusive, similar to Starfield becoming a Microsoft exclusive even though all of the existing published content did not during the Bethesda acquisition.
Sony has come out and said that this deal was not a reaction to the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard and that is likely entirely true. Deals take awhile to bake and reportedly this has been in the works for half a year or so. However I do absolutely think this is a panic purchase on the part of Sony because regardless of this most recent ground breaking acquisition… we are in a climate where studios are being taken off the market left and right. It is not only Microsoft, but also Embracer Group, Tencent, and NetEase that are locking down studios, and Sony has to feel this pressure to make some of their own acquisitions. Which then leads to the weirdly high price tag and unusual autonomy that seems to come with this deal. Again this is me talking out of my ass here, but like everything on this blog it is effectively my editorial statement on things.
Warcraft Pokes Holes in Faction Wall
So I realize that every single article reporting on this is using a version of this image… but quite honestly it fits the mood. I would say this is surprise news, but honestly it has been rumored for awhile. Yesterday it was officially announced that Blizzard would be poking some holes in that faction wall to allow for limited cross faction grouping. Essentially if you have a friend on the other side of the chasm that is a RealID or BattleTag friend, you can invite them to a group and run structured content with them like Mythics or Raids. Random activities will for the time being stay faction specific, and the factions will remain hostile to one another in the open world. This is designed to be an opt-in system.
So my first reaction aligns closely with this gif that Anna tweeted out yesterday. It really is about fucking time they made this move. My stance has long been that anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is awful. Faction walls are awful. It ends up with a scenario where some people have to make a sacrifice in order to do the thing that allows them to play with the majority of their friends. Grace made the sacrifice once of playing Alliance so that they could raid with my guild in Legion. Then later I made the leap to Horde because I no longer really had much in the way of ties to raiding and that was their preferred faction and I had another friend group on that faction. None of that should have needed to happen and we SHOULD have been able to play together regardless of our personal cosmetic choices… because really that is all a faction is… a cosmetic choice.
My second reaction is that Blizzard did not go anywhere near far enough with this move and I hope over time they continue to loosen the restrictions. Guilds are going to remain single faction, and really… that is a shame. I would have liked to have seen that barrier to drop as well as the one preventing players from communicating in the open world. Probably my favorite take is this one:
I find this so fascinating as both a business decision and also an ideological one – WoW’s game design was built around this idea of conflict and hostility between players and it never yielded a positive outcome
It is absolutely true. This weirdly antagonistic stance of always pitting player against player and creating artificial zero sum scenarios… has only seemingly fostered the toxicity of the community. Final Fantasy on the other hand goes out of its way to foster cooperation between its players, and it shows allowing the community to weather even the weirdest of times. I hope we see more just universally positive changes for the community as a whole, because you cannot turn this ship around with business as usual. For me however, I am still holding Blizzard at arms length and still hopeful there are more groundbreaking changes to come.
New York Times buys Wordle
Viral sensations come from seemingly nowhere and often disappear in the same manner. How many of you are still playing Flappy Bird for example, of hell even the more highly produced Angry Birds? Over the last few months a weird social experiment has been taking place on twitter and I officially joined the cult. For those who might not still be initiated into this madness of Wordle, each day you have to guess a five letter word and you have six tries at it. Grey squares indicate that the letter is not used in the word, yellow squares that the letter is used but in the incorrect place, and green that the letter is in the correct position. Each day millions of players post their results to social media, and as a result the viral meme continues to grow.
My wife and I play and I have been participating for roughly a month. These statistics are incomplete because it keeps track of things in a cookie, which limits the tracking to a specific computer and even a specific browser. I’ve yet to fail at getting the word, and many of us have developed a series of strategies like starting with a specific vowel heavy word each day and then moving from there. Anyways… yesterday New York Times purchased Wordle from its creator for what is termed as “low seven figures”. Josh released a statement on twitter that it was stipulated in the purchase that the game would remain free to play, which is good. However the specific verbiage of NYT is a little different… that it would “initially remain free to new and existing players”.
Now to be fair to Kodra who has reminded me of this on multiple occasions… the New York Times Sudoku remains completely free and without AdBlocker barrier. However the site as a whole is an awful experience without a subscription, and since this purchase was designed to drive additional digital subscriptions… I do wonder how long Wordle will remain free. Viral hits like this are a combination of so many different elements that lead to a general feeling of good will in the player base, and any amount of friction can sour that experience. NYT is going to have to be very careful about that line and how much they push against it, because as quickly as this entered the zeitgeist it can exit it even quicker.
Please note I do not begrudge the sale of Wordle one little bit. I mean shit… if someone offered me “low seven figures” for Aggronaut, I would sell it in a heartbeat. I’ve never done anything to monetize this site, but that sort of payment is life changing and there is no way I could turn that down. I can always go out and build another site, just like Josh can always work on a new game. I am happy he got a payday over what has ended up being a deceptively brilliant game. As interesting as I find it though, the moment I have to navigate a nag barrier or come up against a paywall… I am out.
