Marvel Future Fight Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!

To Those Remaining

I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.

If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.

While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.

While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.

To The New and Returning

I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.

With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.

I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.

To Those Departing

Grim Dawn

I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.

Marvel Future Fight

I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.

Mortal Kombat 11

Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.

Outward

This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.

Honorable Mentions

Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.

While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.

I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.

I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.

And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.

Lately I have been feeling fairly awful, which is leading me to vary my gaming patterns a bit. The last few nights I have been heading to bed earlier, but not necessarily because I am ready for sleep… but more because I am tired of being upright. Additionally my wife has been drained as she is entering that end of the year rush…. and when she decides it is time to sleep I tend to follow her to the bedroom as well. However since I am in a state of not quite ready for sleep I have been looking for activities to do on my phone. Dragalia Lost is still great and still something I pretty much play on a nightly basis… but since we are between events I do my five or so daily activities and then pop right back out of that game. As such I have been looking for new things to try and recently landed upon Marvel Future Fight, in part because I have been nostalgic about Marvel Heroes the Diablo-esc action rpg that was cancelled a few years back. In a post about Marvel Heroes someone mentioned that Future Fight was probably the closest thing that was currently available… which peaked my interests. Future Fight is not exactly new however as it is currently celebrating its 4 year anniversary with an event based on Avengers Endgame.

Effectively it is an Action RPG where you build a team of characters to bring into the content… but only actually control one of them at a time. Each champion of sorts has a basic attack and a range of abilities that can all be powered up. I am weirdly playing Morgan Le Fay in part because I had read she was one of the easier characters to get through the main story with… and seeing as how my mobile skills are still not amazing I figured I needed all the help I could get. At various points over the last couple of days I have been given free unlocks… and have wound up building a team that consists of Morgan as my main and Sharon Rogers and Shuri as my alternates. Ultimately everything appears to be gated based on where you are in the story, and as you progress through you unlock new options… which in truth seems to be a common design for mobile games in general. To some extent Dragalia Lost does some of this with various things unlocking as you reach different chapters in the primary story. The missions thusfar involve running through a few small areas, encountering a boss… and then getting some story afterwards and usually unlocking whatever character you just fought as something that becomes playable.

So far in my experience the character unlocks appear to be plentiful, however the vast majority are all “one star”, which means that they are really not that usable until you start pouring resources into them. I’ve played two nights… and already have an arsenal of 15 characters that have been unlocked and are playable. Among that mix is 4 6 stars, 4 5 stars, 2 3 stars and 5 1 stars… and I am not entirely certain if this is always the case or if the escalation of six stars is somehow due to the fact that there is an Avengers Endgame themed event happening right now. As is almost always the case I am probably going to stick with the same core team before I start messing with other characters. As you work through the main story you are effectively ranking up Captain America, Ironman and Black Widow… that begin as 1 star champions but now that I am halfway through chapter three of the story are up to 5 stars. I am somewhat assuming that before long they will be 6 star champions giving you three freebies in the process.

The only real negative is that Future Fight is what I would refer to as a “very free to play game”. What I mean by that is you are constantly having “special offers” thrown at you, and this game seems to go one step further than most. When you cancel out of one of the offers you are occasionally greeted with a message that states you will not be able to get this offer once you close the window. In the case of my screenshot above it is simply advertising something that already exists in the store… but those “limited” offers are there to try and invoke FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. If you are susceptible to this sort of twisting of your arm… then it might not be a game you want to try. In all truth there is a past version of me that would have been turned off massively by it… but now I am mostly apathetic about it and just accept it as part of the price that comes with playing games on your phone. They all seem to do something like this in one form or another… with the only real exceptions being the ones that are released by Nintendo and their advisement to not abuse the users. In the end… Future Fight is a fun time waster and fills the bill of laying in bed and messing around on my phone.