Month: February 2023

Beetle Racing Time

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Good Morning Friends! I am exceptionally excited that today we are getting the first drop in the new content that follows End of Dragons over in Guild Wars 2. I had the sudden realization yesterday that this was a thing, and not only coming soon… but today. I am nowhere even close to catching up on the story with my Ranger, so I will be venturing back to my Necromancer to experience the tasty new content. I think more than anything I am interested in seeing the sort of content drops we should come to expect from the loose roadmap posted on the 13th. In theory, the content we are getting today should be representative of the drops we will be getting each quarter. There has been much speculation on what exactly this roadmap and shift away from full expansion and full living world season means for the game, but I am interested in arriving at a more predictable release cadence. I guess my hope is that we see something akin to either Season 4 or 5 maps with lots of stuff going on in the game, vendors selling useful things to plug holes in your gearing process, and maybe even a really good meta or world boss.

After completing my Skyscale I set my sights on getting my racing beetle. This honestly was a pretty quick quest at least compared to what I went through with collecting scales and eggs. This chain of meta-achievements is almost entirely focused on the Domain of Kourma. Once again I employed BlishHUD to mark the locations of the various bits and bobs required for the quest. The piece I struggled with the most was the event centered around the invasion of the Moon Temple. I kept popping into the zone periodically while working on things with my Ranger, and almost without fail, I would arrive after the event had just finished. On Sunday I managed to catch the event just starting and pushed my way through the sequence of events and finally was able to break the plague beetle jars required to get the final component in the Beetle Feed quest.

So now I am the proud owner of Petey the amazing Roller Beetle. In theory, I should be able to use this to pick up a few Mastery points that I am missing that required breaking down walls with this little guy. I’ve not spent a lot of time on this, because given that I have a Skyscale… I am using it most often. I did however spend about fifteen minutes just zooming around the zone immediately following the quest. It feels very F-Zero when zooming about and less like the Mario Kart experience I was sort of expecting. I need to go try some of the racing tracks. Ultimately my focus has been on getting mounts because they are very much something that you immediately feel account-wide. I spent some time on my Guardian last night and having access to the Skyscale just drastically improved the experience of roaming around and poking away at map completion.

More than a fair amount of my time is honestly just exploring the world on the back of my Skyscale since getting it. It is extremely shocking how much detail has gone into this world. For example these tarps hanging up in Divinity’s Reach. Prior to the existence of the Skyscale, there was no way in hell you would ever be able to get this close. There are little subtle details that you barely notice from the ground, like all the guy wires attached to the surrounding buildings. This was an almost unneeded level of detail at the time this game was released and is just eating up resources that few people would even have a good enough setup to notice them. However the fact that they are there is interesting to me. Sure there are a few that sort of jut off into infinity and never make contact with anything, but the vast majority look like they would legitimately hold tension.

The World has always been the most interesting character in Guild Wars 2. It is such an intricate living thing that it never ceases to impress me. While I struggled with grasping the combat and role mechanics and honestly still do at times. From the day I first set foot into Alpha, I thought the world itself was exceptionally special. The other day I swam down someplace I had apparently never before and realized there was an entire underwater section of a living world zone that I had never explored before. Moments like that really cement how cool and intricate the zone design is, and similarly as a result I think this is why the shift to smaller more reliable content drops interests me. I am hoping as a result we keep getting these self-contained areas of content that are deeply intricate. I think I’ve come to realize that I enjoy specifically designed zones more than I enjoy the ability to roam an entire world without zone barriers.

The only thing that the ability to fly across an entire continent has really given us is a bunch of weird liminal spaces where nothing much is happening. I would rather see zone designs where every corner of a zone is packed with interesting detail, than the ability to free fly over wide sweeping vistas that are more or less empty. Sure there are moments that look cool as the clouds roll in over the world as you are flying across it… but also you stop existing in the zone itself. In World of Warcraft, I would point my mount in a direction, climb to as high as I could… hit the auto run button, and then alt-tab out while moving in a direction. The active flight of the Skyscale forces me to stay focused on what I am doing, and as a result, I am also way more likely to dip down and join an event that I pass. In WoW I made a straight line between quest objectives and rarely interacted with the world as a result.

Both have their places and there are times that I find myself teleporting to Mistlock Sanctuary just to have a moment of safe reprieve from the otherwise hectic pace of the world. I also find myself trying to figure out how to get to places that I have never gotten to before, if for no reason other than to give me a new vantage point on scenes that I have already seen. Both design models have their place, but I think I am just more engaged in the action focus of a game like Guild Wars 2 than I am in the traditional MMORPG mold at this point. I am sure at some point my brain with shift again and I will put away all of my ARPGs and crave something more sedate, for now, I am just going with my instincts.

Diablo III Season 28 Start

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Good Morning Friends! On Friday evening Season 28 of Diablo 3 started, and I returned to my regular rhythm with my good friend Ace in attempting to complete it. We decided to come back to Diablo in part because this is probably the last great hurrah for the game before the launch of Diablo 4, and the title goes even further into “maintenance mode”. Speaking of maintenance… I had a bit of a rough start. I logged in early Friday morning and was encountering all sorts of issues where my stash tabs were not loading immediately and when they did load it looked like a 90s-era GeoCities site loading one icon at a time. This stabilized but when it came to the actual seasonal launch, I started encountering a problem where I would hard lock every 30 mins or so and then have to hard kill the application to get out of it and back into the game… occasionally having to go so far as to go into task manager and kill battle.net entirely.

I am not sure what caused this or honestly what solved it. I tried to do a client repair but it did not seem to be doing much of anything. Instead what I ended up doing is exiting Battle.net entirely, moving my D3 install, and then going through the process of reinstalling the game while pointing at the new directory. From there I attempted a client repair again, and this time around it took about 10 minutes to complete making me think that maybe it was actually doing something that time. When I got into the game I noticed that for some reason it was set to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. I swapped that and from that point forward the game has been extremely smooth and I’ve yet to crash out to the desktop again. I am not sure exactly which of the things I did actually solved the problem, or even what the problem was exactly… but for now I am going to stop asking questions.

When I want an easy mode season, I always lean heavily on the Demon Hunter. This time around the Gears of Dreadlands set was on Haedrigs Gift, which meant that I completed most of the early seasonal accomplishments on that set. It is perfectly cromulent and is technically supposed to be the best set currently for progression. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of it because it feels a bit piddly given that you have to keep weaving in normal attacks or you just stop functioning entirely. Weaving normal attacks is always a good idea mind you, but if you get to a point where you can’t easily the wheels sort of fall off.

I used my farming ability however to piece together the Unhallowed set and swap over to Multishot. While my brain had gotten used to the spin to win strafing GoD build, I am slowly getting adjusted once again to the more familiar Demon Hunter gameplay. For the longest time I was waiting for a Yangs to drop and then… waiting for a second Dawn. Once I got both I swapped over and can immediately more comfortably farm T16. Saturday night after recording the podcast several of us knocked out two conquests in rapid order, so I should be able to complete the third one without much issue when I finish leveling 3 gems to 65.

That puts me in a very familiar spot when it comes to finishing up the season. I’ve not touched a set dungeon at all because I hate them. Right now I plan on doing the Marauder set because if I remember correctly it is a pretty easy one. I’ve almost completed building out Marauder and am only missing a few pieces. I have everything that I need ready for the Augment minus one of the red gems, and then it is simply a case of extracting a bunch of cube powers and pushing the gems to 70. I feel like some of the pressure has lessened because I could slack off entirely and then finish up all of this stuff in the final weekend if that ended up happening.

This season’s gimmick is the Altar of Rites, which ends up driving a lot of your farming and grinding. Essentially you sacrifice items to the Altar to get permanent buffs. For example, now my pet can salvage whites, blues, and yellows in addition to picking up gold. The problem with this however is that it cannot keep up with the process and seems to miss a ton of gold and a ton of materials. Another buff is that it makes it so all gear has no level requirement… but what it actually does in practice is set everything to level 1. However Companions don’t seem to be able to take advantage of this, so it means while leveling you cannot tell if your companions can or cannot equip something. The Altar is cool, but also seemingly introduced a bunch of jank into the game that they seemingly were not quite prepared for.

What I was not really prepared for… is how much more I seem to enjoy Path of Exile as compared to Diablo III. I just don’t feel nearly as engaged this season in Diablo, and it is almost as though the gameplay loop is nowhere near as rich as I remember it being. I had fun running amok with Ace, and I had missed that sort of experience, but for whatever reason, the gearing process in D3 has felt way more hollow this season than it has in previous ones. I could micromanage getting exactly the right stats, but it doesn’t feel as repeatably enjoyable as roaming around in Delve, Heist, or doing Maps in Path of Exile.

I am really hoping that when the Last Epoch Multiplayer launches, it can be that happy medium between the more casual grouping play of Diablo III, and the more rich systems of Path of Exile. I also hope to get into testing for Diablo IV so I can try that out and see how it feels. Basically, I am not sure if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this season of Diablo III, but something feels missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I am going to wrap things up, but I think I would rather be playing Guild Wars 2 when I am not actively playing with friends.

AggroChat #424 – We Got The Beat

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week we accidentally recorded an hour-and-a-half-long show.  I guess this is what happens when you punt a bunch of topics to another week because we were missing the folks attached to said topics.  We start off with the discussion about Theatrhythm Final Bar Line that we hinted at last week.  From there we talk about Media from our Childhood that is not cursed… aka The Princess Bride.  From there Tam talks about his further Steam Deck adventures with Eastward and What The Golf.  Bel talks about his experience buckling down and getting his Skyscale in Guild Wars 2.  We talk briefly about the Valve Honeypot catching over 40,000 DOTA cheaters, and Kodra talks about playing Troll Mario Maker levels, more specifically Super Wagon World.  From there we go down this nostalgic trip about pulling dungeons and the puzzles that they used to present and our niche desire for randomized dungeon runs in MMORPGs.

Topics Discussed:

  • Theatrhythm Final Bar Line
  • Princess Bride and Kids
    • Media from our Childhood Still Valid for Modern Standards
  • Eastward
  • What the Golf
  • Bel Gets a Skyscale in Guild Wars 2
  • Tam is Experiencing Good Crabs Again
  • Diablo 3 Season 28
    • The Altar
    • Bel’s Rough Start
  • Valve Crafts a Cheater Honeypot
    • Over 40,000 Bans for DOTA
  • Super Wagon World
    • Troll Levels for Mario Maker
  • Xenoblade III is a Pulling Puzzle
  • Nostalgic Trip Down Memory Lane about Pulling Dungeons
  • Niche Desire for Randomized Dungeon Crawls

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Magic Blue Smoke

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Good Morning Friends. This is going to be a bit of a light spoiler day because yesterday I caught up with the last few Marvel movies that I had not seen. First I finally got around to watching Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I was not entirely certain how a film without Chadwick Boseman would go, but in the grand scheme of things I think it went pretty great. I’ve always liked Shuri, but what I really liked was the quirky scientist character she was allowed to be. Shuri as Panther was also enjoyable but did not feel as uniquely “her” for lack of a better term. I thought overall the film was enjoyable but lacked the clear focus that the first film had. I think that is the problem with the current crop of Marvel films… they feel like they don’t quite know what exactly they are building towards. The highlight of the film for me was further world-building and seeing both Namor and Talokan.

Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania was another big world-building movie bringing us finally to the Quantum Realm. Again I think that the movie itself was fun, but lacked a lot of the focus that the earlier outings had. It sorta felt like a D&D campaign where your GM just kept throwing new faces and locations at you without giving you much in the way of the backstory behind any of them. We know Kang is a big bad because we have been told over and over that he is a big bad, but it feels like it isn’t something that has necessarily been earned. For Thanos, we saw the effects of him long before he took the field, so, as a result, he was a bad guy that we fully grasped and respected without having to keep explicitly stating that “this dude is really powerful and bad”. I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie and the settings… but it doesn’t feel like we got enough time with any of it to really matter before booping us back to reality again.

In electronics work, there is a term called “Magic Blue Smoke” that happens when you phenomenally screw something up. There are usually some sparks, the air is filled with the smell of ozone, and a little puff of blueish-grey smoke billows up from the object. After this point, it is completely dead and no amount of poking and prodding is going to bring it back from the dead without replacing some major components. I feel like the Magic Blue Smoke has left the Marvel projects, and while they are interesting spectacles they are missing both the core focus that the pre-endgame sequence had and also missing a lot of the heart. I think this is what happens when you truly stick the landing and complete the story in a largely satisfying fashion, and anything more just ends up cheapening the experience. I’ve felt this a few times before with franchises, and I think Marvel as far as movies go is “done”. I still enjoy them for what they are, but the magic is gone and I am uncertain it will ever truly come back.

I feel similarly about Final Fantasy XIV and how Endwalker was the extremely satisfying conclusion to a ten-year journey. I’ve struggled with returning to the game because I no longer have that narrative driving me forward and making me want to crave more knowledge. FFXIV is still a technically competent game and I am sure will keep producing interesting content, but the journey I was on has finished. I am uncertain what the next journey is going to look like, but they will need to hook me in the same way they did with A Realm Reborn in order to get me to commit to following the next one. I’ve reached a level of maturity in gaming to understand that is what is happening, and not that the game is somehow “worse”. In fact the game is probably in the best state it has ever been in, but the adventure I was on has finished.

Looking back with wisdom… I think this is ultimately what caused me to peel away from World of Warcraft. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the story had reached a conclusion and we had dealt with all of the “big bads” left over from the Warcraft RTS lineage. I know I struggled with Cataclysm but was never entirely certain WHY I struggled with it so hard. It was an expansion of changing the base world and lacked the big adventure aspect of the other expansions of going someplace we had never gone before. More than that however it featured a central story arc that I did not care about in the least. I’ve never much cared about the Dragon storyline and Deathwing just seemed like a convenient reason to revamp some of the older zones that were showing age. Arthas and Illidan were what kept moving me forward into new content, and with them forcibly retired at the hands of the raiding players… it felt like I had reached the logical conclusion of the game.

I think we’ve reached this point at least with Marvel where the best stuff is happening on the smaller screens. Loki, Wandavision, Werewolf by Night, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and event the somewhat maligned Moon Knight are doing extremely interesting things. The movies just seem to lack the same spirit and creativity that is being played out in short-run series form on Disney Plus. I mean Star Wars has also suffered from this problem for quite a while where the Dave Filoni-verse represented the best and brightest of what was available for that setting, and the movies were hollow shells. Disney will always chase big box office gold, but I think maybe that era is over. I find myself enjoying the more focused and personal stories of the series. For a while in the Marvel films I have been waiting for another conflict to erupt that feels as good as the sequence that ultimately ended with End Game, but I am no longer certain it is coming. I think maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and now that it is concluded the entire concept of what a “Marvel Movie” is needs to change.

I’ve seen a growing dissatisfaction on social media for awhile surrounding the Marvel releases, so I am pretty certain I am not alone in thinking the original focus of the films is finished. I am not sad that I watched either the second Black Panther film of Quantumania, but neither made me necessarily excited for what is to come. I am sure I will keep watching these films in the future when they come to streaming media, but I think I am done with the “going to the theater” phase of the Marvel cinematic experience. I am way more excited about what is happening on the small screen than anything I know coming to the big one.