Torghast and Palace of the Dead

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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.

MixTape Mondays: Semi-Charmed Panic Attack

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you are all having an excellent Monday out there in internetland. For those of you who might be stumbling onto this as your first visit, I do this thing every Monday where I post a new MixTape pulled from some of my musical tastes. I was one of those kids that made MixTapes for my friends or as a poor substitute for flirtation. There is a certain artform to placing songs in a very specific sequence in order to create a whole that is greater than any of its parts. I’ve missed this process and decided to revitalize it for you my readers. Again like my blog posts in general, I am sorta sending this out into the void and hoping that someone out there might get some enjoyment from this particular brand of nonsense.

Semi-Charmed Panic Attack

There is this particular moment in music that feels like it gets overlooked. Between Grunge and the more punk inspired stylings of Blink-182 there was this music scene that I find it hard to really define. It makes me think of college and the early days of trying to figure out how to be something resembling an adult. I attempted to reach back into that era and pull out a cohesive soundtrack to represent it. There was this weird thing going on where the songs were still peppy sounding, but the lyrical journey that was happening behind them was pretty damned depressing. I’m also abusing my powers to expose you to two excellent Tulsa area bands: Caroline’s Spine and Mollys Yes.

  • The Way – Fastball
  • Everything You Want – Vertical Horizon
  • Attention Please – Caroline’s Spine
  • Promise – Eve 6
  • Sugar – Mollys Yes
  • Load Me Up – Matthew Good Band
  • Father of Mine – Everclear
  • Semi-Charmed Life – Third Eye Blind
  • One Man Army – Our Lady Peace
  • Rain King – Counting Crows
  • Good Intentions – Toad The Wet Sprocket
  • Til I Hear It From You – Gin Blossoms
  • Get Off This – Cracker
  • Closing Time – Semisonic

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

And there we have it friends, another MixTape Monday in the bag. I had honestly been a bit concerned that I might be out of inspiration given that I had burned through all of my pre-made MixTapes last week. Then this weekend happened and I crafted no less than five brand new ones for the coming weeks as well as a handful of idea fragments kicking around in my head. Also of note if you are tuning in late you can view the entire archive of the past nine weeks at:

AggroChat #249 – A Subnautical Tale

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Tonight we start the show missing several people and then Kodra sneaks in while recording and claims to have been there all along.  We start out with a discussion of the Windows 11 announcement and the odd requirements it seems are going to be required to upgrade into it.  From there we talk about Grace’s adventures with Subnautica: Below Zero which I legitimately thought was an expansion pack and not a whole new game.  Bel talks about the trend of WoW personalities switching to Final Fantasy XIV and the videos associated with them.  We talk a bit about MMORPG Tycoon 2 and Lum’s delightful tweet thread making us want to play it.  Bel talks about his nonsense setup and how Sony Remote Play is so much better with a PS5…  and how TMACDev REPL4Y is even better than that.  Finally we close out the show with some talk about Ratchet and Clank and Kodra’s observations given this is his first game in that series.

Topics Discussed

  • Windows 11 Announcement
    • Leaked Build
    • Scalping TPM Modules
  • Subnautica: Below Zero
    • What a difference a story makes
  • WoW personalities playing FFXIV
    • The “quitting wow for ffxiv” video trend
    • What has lead to this point
    • Medieval Marty
  • Lum plays MMORPG Tycoon 2
    • Make bad MMOs for fun and profit
  • Sony Remote Play
    • Better on PS5
    • TMACDev REPL4Y
  • Ratchet and Clank Observations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Don Corneo and Remote Play

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I exist in a very odd space when it comes to gaming, or at least my gaming habits are less than average. Much of what comes with console gaming takes for granted that you would be playing said games in a comfortable couch based set up. That is not the case for me however because the screens that are “mine” and not considered communal space are up in my office. I’ve always felt like I couldn’t exactly commandeer the Livingroom television for the hours that gaming would require, when my wife might want to be watching some program downstairs or just basking in the silence and reading. When I am hanging out downstairs it generally means I am on a laptop with headphones.

This has generally meant that in practice I end up playing a lot fewer console games because it is just easier to remote control my gaming desktop upstairs and play PC games through either Parsec or Moonlight. In the past I have tried using the PlayStation Remote Play app and even an unofficial Remote Play app to varying degrees of success. Though as I sit down and write this article it looks like the second option has changed drastically and probably deserves a revisit. Basically the problem that I ran into is that the baseline PlayStation 4 that I had ultimately has fairly slow wireless and was limited to 720p game streaming… which looked and felt awful.

Since getting the PlayStation 5, I have to admit there have just not been a ton of games that I felt like I could play through remote control. Ratchet and Clank for example… has just enough input lag to make it exceptionally difficult to time some things. Playing Final Fantasy VII Remake however seems to be just fine given that most of the inputs are not exactly twitch oriented. I did struggle a bit with a puzzle that required me to pressurize a valve and then do another action extremely quickly to seal in the pressure. However for the most part I spent last night chilling on the sofa happily playing PS5 through my laptop with a Dualshock 4 connected.

I’ve now made it through the entire Don Corneo/Wall Market story arc and I am not back in Sector 7. I have no clue how much more there is to go in “Remake” but I feel like I have to be circling in on the end of the game at this point. It is going to be really weird to reach the end… knowing that the story is so far from over. I’ve been pretty pleased with how the story has gone and Cloud is finally starting to grow a heart. There are events that I know are coming… but I am curious to see how they play out. This mornings post however is mostly me re-exploring Remote Play with the PlayStation 5. I do need to investigate what became of TMACDEV and the new REPL4Y product. Previously it had way less input lag than the official offering so I want to give it a test and see how that goes.