April 2019 - Page 4 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Exploring Grim Dawn

April 11, 2019 by Belghast

Last night was the very first night since February 15th that I have played no Anthem. Up until this point I had attempted to get a little bit in every night even if that just meant doing a single contract. Since the drop of Elysian Chests I had been trying to earn a key every night regardless if I actually ran the Stronghold to spend it on. After yesterdays post I realized that my frustrations were reaching a level where I simply needed to let it drop for awhile for my own peace of mind. For awhile I had contemplated playing some Destiny 2 given that it is theoretically in a pretty good state right now… however my fear would be that I would spend the night comparing it to Anthem and still wind up frustrated. I have been playing a lot of Diablo 3 on the switch, but again… there is the whole comparison problem seeing as we all compare Anthem loot to that game. Instead I decided to zig and zag off in a similar but different direction and spend some time with Grim Dawn. The game was announced in 2009, went through a successful kickstarter campaign in 2012, entered early access in 2013 and finally officially “launched” in 2016. Since then it has released three major content drops… The Crucible which is a sort of horde mode arena thing and then Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods that add new story and additional functionalities.

In spite of liking the game quite a bit I have never really made it terribly far because I have never played it as a primary game for any length of time. This has been my “go to” for moments when I feel like playing something LIKE Diablo but not Diablo. The game does not do much hand holding or explaining of anything… which is to its detriment given that some of the systems are less than clear. Effective you are thrust into a Victorian era world where demon like creatures called Aetherials have taken back the world is a Shadowrun awakening sort of event called the Grim Dawn. Magic the Aetherials and the Chthonians began flowing back in the world and as a survivor and formerly possessed you are trying to do your best to fight back for the sake of humanity. It is somewhat or a madlibs style remixed version of a bunch of different tales, but the long and short is you are in a world with both magic and guns and playing a game that sits somewhere between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 as far as feel. You fight zombies and demons and weird floating not-quite-beholder things for the purpose of getting loot and progressing your character.

When first starting the game you are asked to choose one of six masteries: Soldier, Demolitionist, Occultist, Nightblade, Arcanist and Shaman. At level 10 you get to pick a second mastery and effectively set what “class” you are going to be as a whole. For example I chose Soldier and Shaman which is apparently a combination called the Warder and known for its tanky goodness. I somehow arrived at this conclusion without ever actually doing research… it just seemed like the class combination that fit me the most. There was a terribly unreadable diagram on the Grim Dawn site with a really unfortunate font… so I decided to cobble together something more manageable real quick in Google Sheets. The Ashes of Malmouth campaign adds two additional masteries in the Inquisitor and the Necromancer and the Forgotten Gods campaign adds Oathkeeper. The names are rather evocative and honestly make me want to try playing a handful of those specific specs at some point or another. I am almost always deeply drawn to anything called a Death Knight.

Last night I managed to finally finish the first act of the game, in part because some of the quests are less than helpful in their directions. It is a game largely without modern quest advisement, so you have to sort of wing your way through most of them. There will never be an arrow pointing you in a direction other than maybe marking what general zone something takes place in. I still have a ton of side quests to knock out in the Act One areas, so tonight I might spend some time trying to clean those up before moving forward. Some of them I have PART of the things done… like I have managed to gather up 2 pieces of fabric but I need 3 total to turn in with the person in Devil’s Crossing which serves as the main quest hub. Occasionally Diablo style you might rescue someone out in the wastes that will turn into an NPC that either grants you quests or serves a functionality back in town. I seem to be missing whatever NPC allows me to craft things because I have picked up some blueprints but have nowhere to use them as of yet.

Ultimately Grim Dawn does a really good job of being an Action RPG without being a Diablo clone. It definitely has its own ideas about some things and while complicated… serves to be way more approachable than Path of Exile. I guess for the forseeable future I am going to spend my evenings in this game and see how far I can manage to get. I greatly enjoyed last night and found the whole thing super relaxing. I do however also want to play some Magic Arena with Tam and Mor over the weekend, so that might be what is actually on the docket for tonight. The biggest challenge I have right now is the fact that I cannot be on voice chat while playing over parsec. There are some cludgy workarounds that only work for Discord but getting Tam on Discord is a massive challenge. Even at that it forces me to try and relay through a second account which is a mess that I have just not dealt with. Essentially if I am downstairs on the laptop streaming through Parsec… then I can’t be on voice. Last night I started upstairs but Kenzie screamed at me until I went downstairs so she could in my lap while I gamed. Cats are like that.

Shazam and Geek Culture

April 10, 2019 by Belghast

I did not do much in the gaming front last night as I spent the evening watching Shazam. Firstly this movie is pure joy, and I really wish we had more super hero movies that could tell a good story while also maybe not pushing the envelope quite so far into Warhammer 40k Grim Dark future timeline. I realize this maybe only works for a movie like Shazam where you have childhood wonder mixed with instant super hero powers. Basically I loved it and want more of it, however I am not sure if you can bottle the same sort of lightning twice with a sequel. So far however this is probably my favorite DC movie? For reference the other two that I really love are Aquaman and Wonder Woman… so your mileage may vary if those were not your movies. I never really thought the Heath Ledger Joker was that amazing even though he delivered a pretty great performance… I loved the first movie in that series and they sorta went downhill from there for my personal tastes.

What I find weird is the situation we are in right now where DC is decidedly the more gritty movie series, which seems to be the exact opposite of my experience reading the comics growing up. Marvel was the one that had more “realism” and DC was filled with a large number of what I would consider hapless Pollyannas. Movie wise we have the polar opposites going on, where Marvel gives us movies that deliver both crushing sadness but also moments of pure joy and DC has given us “MAAAAARTHAAAAAAA”. I was never really a follower of Shazam or “DC Captain Marvel” depending on how you choose to refer to the character, and I think in many ways that helps with the joy. I went into Guardians of the Galaxy knowing only the most basic of information about those characters and was super fine with whatever tweaks they took to get them on the screen. For Shazam as far as I am aware they represented the character pretty well, but I also don’t know a ton of information and as a result wouldn’t know if they completely butchered something… or care.

There are definite times where our geek cred gets in the way of our enjoyment of things. I’m sure you have experienced moments where you are watching some pop culture recreation of something you loved growing up… and they completely failed at some small piece of it. Then that small piece works at the back of your brain until it starts to color your opinion of the thing as a whole. You don’t want it to happen but it sort of happens automatically without you meaning to, and the next thing you know you are spitting venom about whatever that thing is. I still personally find it hard to reconcile the Star Wars prequels for example, even though I realize they aren’t as bad as I originally thought they were. Also there are moments like when you listen to the actor who played Jar Jar Binks… and hear what hell he went through all over a bunch of fans galvanizing disappointment into something far more dangerous and militant.

Ultimately us geeks need to reach a point where we are capable of taking our loves not quite as seriously as we do. That is the core problem with a lot of the toxicity that I see online… is when disappointed love turns to hatred. Example… I am trying very hard not to allow myself to become that guy with Anthem even though I have already waded knee deep into those waters on many occasions. It is hard when your hope turns sour and you start lamenting all of the things that could have been… rather than focusing on the things that exist and are good. I think the opposite is also bad where you have a sort of toxic positivity that everything is fine and everything is working as intended. I think we need to reach a point where we can accept the fact that occasionally our heroes will let us down and that a lot of things will never quite live up to our expectations. I am trying to get to that place myself honestly, but the fact that I realize I am being unreasonable is probably the first step. The problem is… it feels good to ruminate on that anger especially when it comes in the form of snarky semi-anonymous posts on some message board or YouTube comment section.

The long story short… I loved Shazam and would love to see more movies like this. Not necessarily more Shazam movies… but more super hero movies that are capable of embracing joy. Weirdly one of the other movies that sorta fits these guidelines is Deadpool, which is a fairly joyous movie… in spite of the body count and ribaldry. I feel like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies also were very much in this same style as was Thor Ragnarok and the Antman movies. I want more movies that make me feel like I can ignite the spark of hope inside of me… rather than simply wallowing in the fact that the world is shit and will always be shit. All I have really seen is some reports that the movie did not live up to expectations… but then again much like with a video game release I am wondering if those expectations are deeply inflated and unrealistic. It is a good movie and if you need something that invokes pure joy in your life… then I highly suggest checking it out… especially if you loved John Hughes movies.

Prone to Rant

April 9, 2019 by Belghast

I love it when a game makes me seem like a whiny madman. I regularly read reddit, but very rarely comment about anything. However my frustration levels with Anthem have been growing to the point where I occasionally want to vent. I mean I try my best to keep this blog fairly positive, or at least balanced… but the Anthem reddit has been a salt mine since release so I figured it was a safe place to vent my frustrations. After today’s patch still announced no relief to the loot woes… I wound up venting at the nearest thread basically stating that apparently Bioware considers the current state of the game to be working as intended. To which I threw this lengthy comment.

So they have stated that loot isn’t where they want it to be. However it has been 52 days since the launch of the game and there has been a constant drumbeat from the player base that “loot is broken”. They have “accidentally” fixed loot twice to much praise from the players, so I find it hard to believe they do not understand which levers need to be pulled to give us what we actually want.

What I do believe however is they do not understand the kind of game that they built. They seemingly created Destiny with Flight… but with the loot system from Diablo 3 without fully understanding what makes either game tick. In Destiny… Exotics are these rare drops that feel super special when one happens, but that only works because every Exotic Weapon that you get is a curated roll and in the case of the armor that has some variation you have a way of re-rolling the stats. Diablo 3 on the other hand has a lot of variation in the loot and with that a bunch of crap items that are immediately going to get sharded… but the drops are plentiful which makes up for the fact you are going to keep very few of them.

If they want to continue to be Destiny with Flight and Diablo 3 Loot… then they need to make the tweaks and turn on the fountain of loot that makes that concept work. Either that or they need to change Legendaries so that they drop as perfectly curated rolls for optimal play if they want them to still be as rare as they are currently. The current combination is an incongruous mess.

I don’t want to abandon hope… I really don’t. However after gearing up all four Javelins to Masterwork level, and with the very limited content that is currently available there isn’t much for me to do right now other than decide either to walk away and cut my losses until “Year Two” and everything magically gets fixed like it did for Destiny, Diablo and The Division… or to keep slamming my forehead into the brick wall until I am dizzy enough not to care about the lack of legendary drops in GM2.

I had heard the term “Reddit Gold” before but never really understood what it was. I had to get Ashgar to explain to me how exactly it works because I legitimately had no clue. Apparently someone paid money to give me an award for that post? Anyways the funny bit about this when I got home and I did my daily run of trying to get a key and then doing a stronghold to use said key, the game decided to actually drop a legendary.

It is actually a fairly good legendary at that, if you are the type of person who enjoys playing with sniper rifles. I run with Siege Breaker for one reason and one reason only… it can freeze targets. Otherwise I would probably never use a sniper rifle in this game, and unfortunately because I know I squandered my luck on this drop it will probably be another week before I see something else. There was someone in the comment thread that theorized that they are working on some sort of a Stronghold challenge similar to Nightfalls in Destiny 2, and that maybe it would reward guaranteed legendaries. There is still supposed to be a large patch in the works for some point this month, so I guess we will wait and see. In the mean time I am trying to decide if doing dailies to get crafting materials and crappy decals is worth logging in on a daily basis.

Since I complain that Anthem is a game that wants to be Diablo 3 but doesn’t exactly understand Diablo 3 Loot…. I decided to play some actual Diablo 3. The last few nights I have been hanging out before bed working on my Crusader on the Switch version, and last night I wound up playing while upstairs in my office piped through my Elgato HD. I find it weird that my default method for playing consoles right now is through a capture card, but it more or less works other than the fact that it doesn’t take amazing screenshots of the switch given the amount of upscaling that happens. Over the weekend I finally beat the main story and now I am focused on running Rifts and doing bounties. Over the last two nights I have worked my way act through act doing a full set of bounties… only to realize that apparently the season that I started playing on is over and that didn’t count towards the normal seasons journey achievement. Ultimately I am progressing too slow to really be worrying too much about seasons in the first place.

Right now I just want to hit 70 so I can gear out in the Thorns set which is hands down my favorite way to Crusader… and a play style that I thought would translate well to handheld mode. By the end of the night I managed to hit 58 and just a little bit away from 59, which means right around the corner I will start being able to collect Deaths Breath and finish unlocking the rest of the stuff in camp. Additionally it means that I will be able to start Cubing some of the low level drops that I have gotten like the Heart of Iron that I managed to get during my 40s. I am still only playing on Hard and have not ratcheted up the difficulty at all… but without Haedrig’s Gift I feel like that ratcheting process is going to go way slower as I try and painstakingly collect a set of Invoker gear.

It would be nice of Haedrig’s Gift worked for pretty much any character to be honest, season or not. The highlight of the night was seeing my very first Menagerist Goblin on the console and it dropped one of my favorite pets… the Flaming Skull. At some point I will have to test out how grouping works as I know a handful of my friends have the copy on Switch. That said this is largely a before bed solo grinding game for me as I find it incredibly relaxing. I do however wish there was a way to link your Blizzard account and get some sort of cross play going on. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing anytime soon unfortunately.

Outward and Blades

April 8, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I do not have a ton of great screenshots because for some reason over the weekend GeForce Experience decided to stop doing its thing. So the majority of the time when I thought I was taking a good screenshot… I got nothing at all which is insanely maddening given that I rely on these screenshots for this blog. This weekend I tried a couple of new things, firstly Outward which is billed as a survival game published by Deep Silver and developed by Nine Dots Studio. For me personally however it is something completely different. Playing Outward reminds me of how it felt to play Everquest. I don’t necessarily think this game was intending to be one of the many Everquest nostalgia titles out there, but in my hands it ends up being the best one so far. I am not entirely sure what exactly throws it in this category, but a large piece of it is the fact that you have no minimap and the overworld map you do have does not show you where your character actually is at any given time. This means you need to sort your own directions out by following the compass rose or by moving around based on landmarks.

Additionally I have been thrust into a world where I don’t quite understand the rules, and I realize this will fade over time… but for now everything is interesting and dangerous. I have no clue what might be around the next corner and if it will end up killing me. Lastly the game has a system the requires you to venture back into the wild to do a manner of corpse recovery in the form of your backpack that is ultimately left behind when you die. All of these things combine to provide a much truer experience to how Everquest felt as a brand new player than anything to date, and I am pretty certain that was not at all what this title was going for. I think the design goal was to have an RPG rooted in the survival game tradition with extremely challenging stamina based combat that makes you choose your attacks carefully. It succeeds at that, but I honestly don’t think I would have spent nearly as much time playing it this weekend were it not for the fact it was playing upon my memories.

In the above screenshot I remember not noticing that I had a disease for a really long time… because it was the common cold and not the insane life drain disease that I had gotten before. The common cold mean’t that my stamina regeneration was greatly impacted… which also lead to me taking a death in the cave just in front of me. Little things like that sneak up on you in this game and honestly make it feel way more cruel and brutal that any other similar game. The story is pretty bleak so far as well given that you are effected by a blood tax due to the fact that your ancestor turned away some religions pilgrims… that ultimately became the majority power in the setting… things are pretty harsh. After returning from being shipwrecked… the townsfolk demand 150 silver within five in game days or they will repossess your house. So you are set off on a path of either finding a way to earn that money, ignoring it and letting your house get taken… or finding a way to do a favor for one of the locals big enough to get some debt relief. It is a call to action, but sort of a maddening one… that caused me to restart the game a few times until I sorted out how best to play it.

The other new game that I tried out this weekend was Elder Scrolls Blades which promised to be a mobile Elder Scrolls Experience… which admittedly was something I had been throwing a little side eye towards since the original announcement. I’ve played Bethesda mobile games before and was greatly concerned about what monetization methods would be built into this one. Ultimately the choice landed on a timer based system that locks your loot behind a gate of either waiting for it to open or paying to open it immediately. Additionally the first chest you get has a wide array of stuff that is actually useful to you including a significant weapon upgrade. The chests that I found following that initial tutorial chest however largely included unexciting common rarity junk, that admittedly is probably useful for the games in built crafting system… but nothing hear as exciting as getting item drops that you can equip.

The game itself feels like a really weird point and click adventure game… with the addition of real time combat that feels awkward and non-intuitive. My instinct is to click on the mob with my finger to swing my weapon at that body part. Instead you have to press and hold and then release to swing your weapon. You guard by pressing and holding on the shield icon… that isn’t on your screen all of the time and seems to only appear roughly a second after stopping attacking… making the whole experience feel a little stilted. The purpose of all of this appears to be to go on missions and complete objectives… like in this case I was saving some prisoners that you can see caged in the central image of the above triptych. Then you go back to town and use the resources that you just got to rebuild the town. The only negative is… this is fairly time consuming and requires something close to 20-30 minutes per iteration rather than the normal 5-10 minute loop that I expect out of mobile games. This is definitely something you would play on your lunch break… rather than something you might pop open while waiting in line somewhere.

The other big problem that I encountered is that while I have a fairly modern phone that has feature parity with all of the current flagship models… I apparently was ineligible for app install. If you are curious here is a supposed complete list of devices the game is available for… which seems to be missing a ton of devices it can technically run fine on. So when you encounter a situation like this… you don’t really have to sit and take it or at least not if you are an android user. Sure Google Play is the most common app store and the one in general you want to use for most purposes. However there are a bunch out there that will let you install literally anything you want on any device you want… whether or not it will run is a completely different challenge. Personally I tend to favor APKPure as I have had a lot of luck with that app in the past and it has some built in patcher support similar to Google Play. Functionally this is going to be a two part step… firstly you need to enable installing apps from unknown sources and secondly you need to download the APKPure app to your device. After that you can install Elder Scrolls Blades on your device and log in with your Bethesda.net launcher account. If everything worked as expected you should be able to try out Blades on any device not listed on the official list. For me it ran perfectly fine on my ZTE Axon 7… though admittedly it is a significant battery drain taking me from 100% to 79% before completing the first tutorial quest… which admittedly was like 20-30 minutes worth of game play.

I will probably poke my head into the game a bit more, but I am not entirely certain if it is really for me. I was expecting Mobile Skyrim… and what I got was a traditional mobile device game. Once I reset those expectations I am sure I will probably enjoy the experience and add it to my before bed roster of mobile games.