Witcher 2 Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Packed Weekend

August 7, 2023 by Belghast

Screenshot from Path of Exile showing a Righteous Fire Inquisitor firing off Scorching Ray with the Shaper Beam Micro-transaction.

Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.

A screenshot from Sir Gog's review of recent 3.22 Path of Exile spoilers showing off the Unending Nightmare atlas passive node.

Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.

My Baldur's Gate 3 Party does a murder of some Gnolls

Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.

Screenshot from the Code: Action mini game in Honkai Star Rail where I have created a movie poster themed after The Matrix called "Super Hacker" featuring Blade as Neo and Silver Wolf as Trinity.

There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.

A screenshot from Palia Beta showing off my plot and the fact that you can have multiple storage chests.

I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.

A screenshot from The Witcher Netflix series during happier times in Season One with Geralt and Yaskier/Dandelion

I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.

Photo of me and Greybie our Tigerstripe Grey Tabby Stray "Community Cat"

Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.

I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.

Regularly Playing: January 2020 Edition

January 31, 2020 by Belghast

For those who have read this blog for awhile, you will know that I have this semi-monthly column in which I talk about the games I have been playing regularly and also use this as an excuse to update my blog’s sidebar. The fourth quarter of 2019 was not a good time for regular updates to this because I failed to do one in October and also completely failed to do one in December. With the new year I am hoping to get back on track and keep these, but I have to warn you… today is going to be a bloodbath. Many games are being dropped from the list because quite honestly some of my gaming patterns have changed drastically over the last few months.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 represents one of only a few games that I am regularly playing that would classify as an endless game. I’ve had a shift away from Massively Multiplayer Online gaming towards more finite single player titles of late, and as such those evergreen games that I always spent time in have suffered greatly. I’ve come to realize that I had not really finished many games because I always wound up getting distracted by the online fare, and if I instead ignore them I find I actually do enjoy polishing games off. Destiny 2 however is near and dear to my heart and is the sort of thing that I can return to over and over again for short bursts. While I am sure that I am making Thalen sad for not playing much, I have missed out on a bunch of things and am mostly okay with that. I do want to finish the seasonal grind at some point but I have 40 some days to do that.

Diablo 3 is another one of those games that is so much part of my core identity that I am not sure if there will truly ever be a period of time when I am not at least idly playing it. Since the time of last posting I completely finished the PC Seasonal Content as a Demon Hunter and made it up through Slayer on the Switch with a Whirlwind Barbarian. The Switch is excellent for grinding a bit from bed before falling asleep, but even of late I have been opting out of that for a few reasons that I will get into later. With the talk of Diablo 4 on the horizon and the conversion of Torchlight Frontiers to Torchlight III, I still find myself extremely connected to this now aging game. I’ve just not found an adequate replacement to truly scratch the same action rpg ich.

To The New and Returning

Here is where the sad bits come in… there really isn’t anything new to be adding to this list. I have played several games but none of them are the sort of things that I expect to be adding to the list in any sort of a permanent manner. Instead I think I am going to implement a new feature called “Ships Passing in the Night” where I talk about some of the games that I had short but intense interactions with, but feel the chapter is either closed or will be closed once I complete them.

Ships Passing in The Night

I have so much love for this game, and while I fully expect to go back and play it at some point I am effectively done with it for the moment. For years I found this game incomprehensible in the way it sorta just drops you in the middle of everything with limited explanation. It was only through watching the Netflix Witcher series that I was able to gain proper purchase and glean enough information to make me feel firmly planted in this games universe. Since then I have been on a tear of playing through everything I could stand from the Witcher games and even reading the novels. The first Witcher will likely always be an impassable wall for me, but I have accepted it. This third game however goes on the top games of all time list for me personally.

After playing through the first Witcher game I had so many unanswered questions, and as a result I opted to do things backwards and go back searching for the answers in Witcher 2. While it was a bit of a struggle to get used to the interface, I eventually mastered it and had a phenomenal time doing what was effectively a golden path play-through of the non-human side of the story. I even was engaged enough to restart and try playing through the human side, only to determine that I had absolutely made the correct choice the first time around and wander away like a bored toddler. This game is always going to have a soft spot in my heart, but it is a deeply flawed experience, but one worth experiencing. Unfortunately I realized too lately that the answers to all of my questions lie in the books and not the past video games.

Another flawed but phenomenal gameplay experience is that of Greedfall. It is a game that is tackling some themes that I have never quite seen a game tackle, which are really spending time exploring the sins of the colonial era. While there are some weird things going on at times with the interface and with combat, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing this game and as a result it has caused me to be interested in a deep dive of the developers back catalog of games. If you love the Bioware style of games you might legitimately be interested in exploring the games from french developer Spiders.

This is the second game I have played by Spiders and I am enthralled. This is currently my gaming main squeeze, at least until I finish it and It is a thoroughly interesting experience. The game is set in a post colonial Mars where it is ruled by rival corporations and military powers that end up creating a pretty damned oppressive environment. That said the game threw me a massive curve ball yesterday and opened up considerably and I am so there for the long ride. Imagine a setting that blends Blade Runner, Dune, Total Recall and the Red Faction games with a dash of Fallout into a single setting. I actually am enjoying the combat in Technomancer way more than I did Greedfall, and I am curious what things are going to be like if I keep going backwards in the Spiders catalog.

It is possible that this game might make it to regularly playing status, but for now I am throwing it in this category because I am just not sure. It is a Not-Pokemon MMORPG and it is charming as hell and does a really good job of both mirroring the best parts of Pokemon and bringing new things to the genre. The only thing that I find lacking is there is no xp sharing system and you legitimately have to fight with your not-pokemon to level them instead of doing what I do and just dragging them along for the ride. I’ve only played a few hours on this latest build even though I was a backer and have played various builds along the way. Time will tell if this becomes something more serious for me or not.

To Those Departing

Sorry Dragalia… you had a really good run but there are two things that happened. Firstly the gameplay finally reached its point where it became repetitive to a fault. Secondly I have been trying to read more often and as such that time when I was spending playing Dragalia Lost got replaced with time in the Kindle app. I am not the type of player that ever opts to play a mobile game if I have access to other options, so once it lots its prime real estate for bedtime gaming it really dropped off my radar. I am happier to be reading each night than to be spending time in a repetitive grind that doesn’t really go anywhere.

Sorry Boo, it’s me not you. This is a game I expect to return to and finish up, but in truth it is one of those things that should have graced the new category and not really added as a regularly playing. I’m somewhere around halfway done with the game and I figure when I deplete my current run of bioware-like games I fully expect to dust this off and finish it up. I love the game lots, but just have not been playing it.

It just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I can’t fully explain it, but after the absence when I was frustrated with Blizzard over the Hong Kong thing… I found it impossible to get reconnected and actively start playing again. Someone let the magical blue smoke escape and it just doesn’t do much of anything for me right now. I am for whatever reason in the wrong mind state to be enjoying it and as such it leaves list.

While I know without a doubt that I will be back and playing Shadowlands… for the moment I have zero interest in anything going on in this game. It is sad because I dearly love my Facepull family, but for now at least I am loving them from a distance. There is just something about World of Warcraft at the moment that I find a massive turn off, because I have tried to log in a few times but jettison in a perpendicular trajectory really quickly. Battle for Azeroth really did ruin the game for me, and I guess I hope it is not a permanent condition because I still have fond memories of how much I enjoyed Legion.

Summary

So there we have it, like I said it is a bit of a bloodbath because I have whittled down the regularly playing list to two titles. I am pretty sure this is the smallest it has ever been since the implementation of it. For now I am very much on a kick of not playing MMORPGs, but time will tell how long that will actually last.

Teer Fradee and Me

January 21, 2020 by Belghast

Since this is the Monday of my week due to the holiday yesterday, I feel like doing a sort of general update post. I had previously been grinding away on my second playthrough of Witcher 2, in an attempt to see the other side of the story. I have more or less stalled out there because I am not a really big fan of the “humans” path thus far. It feels very much like I chose the correct path the first time. I am generally fine about hatred of high elves… but the dwarves and halflings are always my kinfolk. Witcher universe sets up a world where the elves are assholes, but also greatly abused assholes making me somehow care more about them. Dragon Age did the same thing to me with the Daelish, which I feel are probably at least inspired by the Scoia’tael. For now however I am probably setting this aside realizing that my first attempt was the best attempt.

Instead I managed to find traction finally in Greedfall, which is an RPG that came out last year. The control scheme is a little wonky with mouse and keyboard, but after my extensive playing of Witcher 2 it feels pretty solid compared to that mess. The game as a whole is Tolkien meets the evils of Conquest and Colonization as you set forth to the “new world” represented in this game by the Isle of Teer Fradee. The main continent is effectively divided by a central conflict of Science over Religion with its proxy factions of The Bridge Alliance representing Science and Theleme representing Relgion. You make up a third and attemptedly neutral faction called the Congregation of Merchants, which along with the Coin Guard attempts to make sure that commerce flows between the various warring groups. Lastly there are the factions of the Nauts which make up a group that controls the over ocean shipping lanes and the only route to Teer Fradee and then the Yecht Fradi which represent the native populace of the island being subjugated by these invaders.

You are thrust into a game world where the only group with potentially clean hands are those who originally inhabited the isle. I am doing my best to be a good man when presented with this central conflict and to the right and just thing… but truthfully right now that is more or less having me focus on nothing but the side missions of which there are plentiful. The Theleme are of course the faction of religious zealots dead set on conversion of the natives. The Bridge Alliance are unchecked scientific progress who wants to capture and experiment on all manner of creatures and peoples from the island. The Coin Guard and Congregation in theory are attempting to be neutral but in doing so have many of their own skeletons in their closet and a seemingly dark past that will need be accounted for. The Nauts have their own issues in the form that they demand children or “sea-born” as payment for trade contracts and any child born on one of their vessels becomes theirs as well.

You would think with all of those morally compromised positions, that the game-play experience would feel rather fraught. These things serve to set the texture of the world you are inhabiting, and the game gives you plentiful options to do the right thing and also plentiful options to abuse the powers bestowed upon you as the Legate of the Congregation. I’ve not spent a lot of time working on the main story because the game thrusts you into all of these deeply personal character arcs for your makeshift crew and I am finding myself enjoying that way more than any of the larger beats. I figure at the end of the day I will probably wind up at war with both of the major factions because I find them thoroughly distasteful. Ultimately I am spending most of my time running around with Vasco the captain of the ship that brought us to Teer Fradee and Siora the daughter of the Queen of a faction of natives at war with the Bridge Alliance who sought your assistance. I care about both of them as characters and more or less the joy of this game is running around with them doing stuff, thought Vasco’s “a bit of poison on my blade” combat line gets a little old.

I did not make it through yesterday without paying another visit to the animal shelter and seeing our kiddo. Right now we are leaning towards Josie… as in Josie the Pussycat. I am hoping all of these visits are doing a little bit of bonding along the way, in at least showing here that there are humans out there waiting on her. We still have to wait for final approval that comes after surgery… however we were given a bit of hope. There was talk that maybe just maybe they would be doing a number of surgeries today, and if she is in that batch we might get a call tonight. We have the isolation room set up and ready for her with a brand new fresh litter box, bed and some toys. However during the time when we are here we are likely going to be grabbing her and either shutting off my office, my wife’s office or the bedroom to let her roam around while we do our thing and get used to the world. You never really know how long you need before you can introduce her to the other cats.

I will close things out with another photo. While I was trying to take a photo, she kept trying to climb across my wife and come over to visit me which was adorable. She pretty much started purring as soon as she saw us, but our visit was a little truncated. By policy they have to have a staff member back with us while we interact with the animals, and in the middle of our visit they called the person up to the front to help another family. We didn’t have to leave but we opted to do the right thing and free up the resource, and I am glad we did because they had a family who had lost their animal trying to check to see if it had been captured as a stray. Right now I am hoping beyond hope to get a call, but I will I guess also be okay if I have to wait until Friday.

In the meantime however we are continuing to spend as much time as possible with Kenzie and Mollie because I am sure very soon they will be grumpy with us.

Friday Debris

January 17, 2020 by Belghast

This is Tripod, named such for the fact that she is a three legged cat that comes to visit from time to time. Tripod does not realize we love her yet, and bolts at the sight of us… but we do our best to try and make sure she has food. She is one of a handful of neighborhood cats that occasionally visit our house and we were scared to death that she was no longer with us. We’ve had a cold snap and for a couple of weeks we had not managed to catch any sight of her on the front porch cam where we put out food every day. However several times this week we have seen her lurking around the backyard which was pretty much the highlight of the week. We are hoping she is still around during the spring and summer months and maybe just maybe we can teach her that we are friendly people while we are out and about in the back and front yard more often.

This Friday post is somewhat turning into a “things left on the cutting room floor” post about the week. The other day I talked about restarting Witcher 2 so that I could go down the path that was not taken, and I have now reached the first branch in the road… and more or less determined that I made the correct choice the first time. While I greatly enjoyed the “non-human” path, I gotta say I am not loving the blatant racism and bigotry of the “human” path right now. Additionally it is super weird to have as my companions, characters that I more or less learned to greatly dislike during the other play through. As a result my completion of this play through is pretty much in jeopardy. In many games the various path options are equally good and it is just a matter of taste, but for me at least there seems like a clear correct choice here and I made the wrong one on attempt two.

The other issue from which I am suffering is that I am staying up way the hell too late reading and it is starting to cut into my sleep schedule. It feels thoroughly odd to be saying this because I have not been a person to stay up late reading that often in my life. This is complicated by the fact that I read relatively slowly and that at least until my wife falls asleep she is pretty regularly making random comments while I attempt to follow the text. At this point I am roughly halfway through the second book in the Witcher series and I am looking forward to getting into the novels proper having focused on the two prequel short story collections first. The books have not really done much yet to improve my opinion of Yennefer, which is weird because I thought all of the loyalty fans have must have come from reading the books.

Another weird revelation is that there were a lot of moments in Witcher 3 that I mistook as me not knowing what was going on because I had not played the other games. Now I know I am completely incorrect in that assessment and instead the game is just deep diving into character relationships from the books without giving the player much of a heads up about it. Last night I read for example the story of Dudu Biberveldt, a character that I just assumed had showed up in the games before. However having played the second game and watched several synopsis videos of the first game… I am pretty certain that is not a thing and he just lives in the novels. I have to admit though it is this sort of thing that makes the setting so infectious for me, because the things that are constantly left unanswered make me want to go then dig for the answers. I have a feeling that it might have the opposite effect on some of my friends however.

Yesterday was a big reveal of the next expansion for Elder Scrolls Online, and we are going back to Skyrim. The expansion seems like it is going to center on the Solitude area and more importantly Blackreach, one of the coolest areas in Elder Scrolls V. I am all about Dwemer ruins, and supposedly Blackreach is going to make up roughly half of the playable content area in this expansion. They are once again doing a year long story that unfolds over the course of several updates, and considering that I didn’t play any of the “Year of the Dragon” content, I am wondering if this is time for me to update the client and go back into the game. I have most of Morrowind and all of the newer content to experience.

I realize this in some ways goes directly in the face of my whole desire to stop chasing the forever game, but for Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars the Old Republic I play them more or less in a single player manner. I come back to the game after a large bundle of content has built up and then can happily binge the new story in an almost Netflix manner before leaving once again and going off and playing other things. I wish I could play World of Warcraft in the same sort of manner, but the way their patch content is released makes it a struggle to try and figure out what the hell is going on at any time if you were not around to see it doled out in small chunks. I am realizing that I find I greatly prefer content that is gated behind completing the previous content just for sake of making it easier to follow.