Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start this week with the fact that Bel cannot distinguish a 6 from an 8 when looking at it from the corner of his eye. We dive into a discussion of Goodbye Volcano High that Kodra has been playing. From there we talk a bit about what is happening at PAX West this year and this leads into a discussion of all of the games. We talk a bit about some of our first impressions of Starfield in as spoiler-free a manner as we can. Finally, Tam talks about rolling the credits on Armored Core 6 and his final thoughts.
Good Morning Friends! I figured I would break things up a bit and talk about Honkai Star Rail. This is very much a game in my current rotation and I am spending at least a little bit of time every day working on assorted objectives. Yesterday we had the rate-up banner go live for Kafka, the next in the series of Stellaron Hunters. I missed Blade entirely because I didn’t really try for him. I knew Kafka was following up shortly thereafter and wanted to save all of my pulls. After struggling to get Luocha, I fully expected to be spending the next month desperately making a pull every time I got the currency gathered up and hoping.
I had something in the neighborhood of 100 pulls worth saved up, and luckily I didn’t really need it. My very first ten-pull I happened into Kafka along with Serval and a Light Cone. Actually, Serval is now sitting at six Eidolons thanks to this banner. I made three ten-pulls in total and picked up the other unique character on that third pull. That means I am more or less back in currency-gaining mode until the next banner. I had a Light Cone that I picked up somewhere along the way for Kafka, so there isn’t even the temptation to go after the Light Cone banner. Now I just need to get her leveled up so that I can start mixing her into my rotation of characters.
As far as Luka goes… he is probably going to sit there in my graveyard of characters that I have never leveled. He looks cool enough but I don’t feel like I need another bruiser character to do physical damage. If I need that… I am going to level up Sushang as I have her at six eidolons. Though I figure there are going to be some folks out there that go for Luka just because they think the robotic arm looks cool. Maybe I will change my mind if we ever get a character mission for him. Speaking of that I completed the Kafka mission and was somewhat shocked that she won’t visit the Astral Express. I guess technically we are at odds with the Stellaron Hunters, but heck… I really like Kafka. There is a sadness and weariness in her that is relatable.
Another great thing about yesterday’s update is that we got a new event. While this might not be as cool as the Museum Sim was, this is probably my second favorite so far. Essentially we are hunting treasure, in a weird roguelike dungeon crawler minesweeper game. The storybook event was not necessarily my jam, but I kinda love that this one plays out like an alternate reality version of Simulated World, where you can rescue characters while crawling and swap them out to make a few of the fights a bit easier.
Essentially you are trying to find the key to the next floor, and every tile you uncover eats some of your stamina pool. Sometimes you find power-ups or stamina refills in the process, so you are essentially trying to see how far down you can dig and if you can complete all eight floors. There will be monsters that block your path, that require you to do battle… or blow them up with a bomb. So far it seems that more often than not… the door key is in the opposite corner of the grid. This is not necessarily 100% the case but I tend to work my way in that direction by default.
There are a ton of rewards tied to this event, and the various ruins are time-gated. This morning for example the second ruin opened up and there will be completion bonuses tied to getting to certain depths with every ruin. All told I am rather fond of the mini-games that they have been rolling out with Honkai Star Rail and more importantly the fact that you can do them even if you missed their initial rollout. That is one of the problems with Genshin or at least when I last played, was that if you miss an event you are just out of luck.
All told I am exceptionally happy that my luck carried me forward in this banner. It does however make me a little sad that I did not even really try for Blade. It would have been cool at some point to have an entire team of Stellaron Hunters. If I didn’t struggle so much to get Luocha I might have made an attempt, but I could absolutely see that playing out again with Kafka and she was a character I cared way more about getting. Blade is basically just a slightly better Dan Heng, and I could live without him.
Has luck been on your side? Are you pulling for Kafka? Drop me a line below.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good Morning Folks! This is me doing a Saturday post, which is not exactly something that I do often. However this month we have Blaugust running and I thought that just maybe for once I would try and hit 31 posts in my own damned event. In truth, the only day that I don’t normally post is Saturday given that I make weekly normal blog posts, and on Sundays, I advertise the podcast episode. So that really means I am only trying to squeeze a few more blog posts in total to hit 31 so I might as well actually make that happen. I figured that I would start off the first of these and talk a bit about what has garnered the majority of my attention for the past two days… Baldur’s Gate 3. This is a game that I have technically owned since 2020, but have avoided doing much with because I did not want to spoil the experience. I get that probably does not make a whole lot of sense, but I am a huge fan of Larian Studios and I viewed my purchase of Early Access as a way of helping fund the development. It turns out that faith was rewarded as all of the early access holders got access to the digital deluxe version free.
The original Baldur’s Gate was a heck of a lot of fun, but I will be honest it wasn’t really until Icewind Dale was released that I began ravenously devouring these games. So when Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn I was well enough indoctrinated into the series to be hyped and ready to go on launch day. Playing Baldur’s Gate III, over the last few nights has felt like my memories of Baldur’s Gate II. What I mean by that is that I have been transported back in time to an era when I could just meld with the game and become hopelessly engrossed in it. I’ve experienced “time loss” like I have not in years where I sit down thinking I am only playing for a few minutes, and I look up and three hours have passed. I mean this in the best way possible, and while it took me a bit to get used to the slower pace of a real-time-action game… now that I am engaged I am fully engaged.
I’m not going to dive too deeply into the story, that will probably come for a much later blog post. For character options, I decided to keep it simple and went with a Barbarian. I opted to go for an entertainer background which gave me performance and acrobatics, both of which have already come in handy. For the race I decided to follow my heart and go with a Dwarf and given the Ithilid roots of this game, I opted to go with Duergar. So far I am pretty happy with all of my choices save for maybe the voice I went with. To be truthful, none of the voice actors really felt like a Duergar should feel. Thankfully most of the time I am a silent protagonist, but there is a bit of a mental disconnect whenever I say anything.
For the most part, I like all of the characters. If you told me this was a Bioware game I would have believed you, because I already care about my little party of misfits. Like we really are a “bad ideas” party, but I am enjoying adjusting to the nonsense and I am glad I am able to be zero shocked when someone reveals more awful things that they are dealing with. It does feel a bit weird that in a party of “chosen ones” I seem to keep being set up as the “most chosen” of them all. The only character I am sus about is Lae’zel but mostly because she is a bit aggro all the time. I run around with her mostly because apart from me she is the strongest hitter.
I like Gale an awful lot, but he has this weird uncanny resemblance to a young Mel Gibson. I have to see it every time I play the game so now you do too. All things told though while I don’t normally like “finger wigglers” as I call them… he is pretty cool for a magic user. Like he has his own “bad ideas” traits about him, but he reminds me a bit of my love of Dorian from Dragon Age Inquisition. Shadowheart is probably my favorite, but truthfully… were Shadowheart introduced differently I probably would have hated the character. I have this thing against the “does not trust you” characters… so I could see Shadowheart reading as a “Corso Riggs” if I was not already inherently wired to want to help her because I saved her from a pod.
All told I am about ten hours into the game and still have yet to replace the weapon I got from the tutorial. Admittedly there are a lot of people who probably did not get that weapon, and I only did so because I happened to read a bit specifically stating that I should. Right now my party comp is Shadowheart, Lae’zel, and Gale and I am not sure if I completely missed getting Wyll. I’ve done some research as to where to find him, but I never seemed to bump into him in that area of the game. I do wonder if I screwed that up and am completely unable to get him now. I need to backtrack a bit and roam around the area just to make sure I did not miss something.
Anyways greatly enjoy the game, and will very likely be mainlining this at least until the launch of the Path of Exile Ancestor’s League on the 18th. I hope yall are having a most excellent weekend. It is raining this morning, which we desperately need because it hit 107 the other day… which is just not fun.
