Month: October 2024

A Not-So-Small Delay

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Good Morning Folks. When last we spoke I was excited and preparing for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion. More than anything I was excited that the launch was happening at a reasonable hour so that both myself who is in Central Time Zone and Ace who is in Eastern Time Zone could actually participate in the game together. Throughout the day we made plans to hang out and chitchat while making our way through the campaign that evening. It is really moments like this that we both look forward to when we are both reasonably excited about something at the same time and can do nonsense together. So often we are playing totally different things, but the stars seemed like they were aligning to give us a new game launch to dig our teeth into in a manner that was going to be enjoyable and not trying to stay up until midnight.

Then roughly thirty minutes before the game was set to go live at 6 PM CDT, the bomb was dropped that the launch was going to be delayed. In what has become one of the least correct posts in a while, they stated that there was a “small technical issue” that would lead to a “small delay” to the launch of the game. In true Blizzard fashion, they gave us no real information to work with, and as a result, the rumor mill started filling in the gaps. PC players were stating that it was a problem with one of the console releases that was to blame for the delay, Console players were stating that it was something to do with Steam’s rigid update schedule… and in the vacuum, we were left without any facts to go on. The rest of the evening was dictated by 2-hour blocks… of just needing a few more hours… which ultimately led to the game launching roughly six hours late.

Diablo IV has had a fraught history since its launch last year. So much so that “D4 Bad” has become a prevalent meme in the ARPG community with countless music videos released on the theme of it being “dogshit”. Admittedly some of these are bangers and largely feature a cast of characters from the ARPG streaming scene. The Vessel of Hatred expansion launch was a grand coming out for the game again, a cotillion where it was being presented to the world to show how much it had improved. Last night’s botched launch pretty much destroyed that goodwill in an instant. Pretty much every streamer to some extent had to deal with the return of the “D4 Bad” crew to their chats, and honestly… they weren’t wrong. How many games has Blizzard launched throughout the years, and how many of them have they bungled at the finish line?

What is even worse is that Streamers were left holding the bag for the botched communications surrounding this situation. Blizzard was simply not giving any real information about what is going on. Contrast this with the way in which Eleventh Hour Games communicated at the launch of Last Epoch when it had so many server issues. I was way more willing to show forgiveness towards a group of developers that were sharing what was actually going on, and how they were trying to resolve it… rather than last night’s refrain of “just a few hours more”. Raxx spent the evening playing various games with his stream, doing a bracket of games for him to play and eventually falling into chess.

Darth Microtransaction attempted to keep the attention of the crowd by giving away copies of the expansion, handing out battle passes, and then playing a betting game with his audience. He would bet that the game would launch within the next thirty minutes, and then when that time had passed he would give another five subscriptions away to his viewers. At one point I know he had over three thousand folks tuned in and watching his stream, in which he was playing a video he had recorded of Vessel of Hatred in the background while playing Old School Runescape in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and attempting to keep chat engaged.

Pohx who is quite possibly the sweetest person in all of the Path of Exile community, decided to give the launch of the expansion a go. He spent the evening playing Warcraft 3 custom maps and then eventually said fuck it and went to bed. I ultimately gave up around 9 pm and went to bed, I am not sure when Ace did but I don’t think they stayed up that late. I am glad that I gave up because the game did not roll out until after 11 PM my time and with it came a 23 gig patch… essentially negating the whole process of preloading the game that we did earlier this week. This is a massive black eye towards the game and towards the team behind it.

I was clearly annoyed enough to devote an entire blog post to that fact this morning, but in truth I was mostly having a chill night. I kept various Streams open in the background throughout the night so I could find out tidbits of information as they trickled out. The majority of the evening I spent in Path of Exile slowly chipping away at challenges, ultimately knocking two of them out. My map runners also brought about four divines last night so it was a pretty great time all around. I think my biggest frustration about this whole situation is the complete and total communications fail from Blizzard. I am not sure what they were thinking by trying to constantly diminish the impact of this outage because clearly, it backfired. Had they just been honest and set reasonable expectations… folks would have gone about their night and done other things rather than feverishly waiting for the launch of a game that was not coming… or at least that was arriving almost six hours late.

This morning I got in briefly and created a Spiritborn because I figured I might as well try the class while it was likely to have some grossly overpowered builds. I was happy to see that there was the option to create a character and start with the new campaign without also having to complete the original campaign. I’ve created a seasonal character because essentially my stable of standard characters is dead to me. I am probably going to go the whole poison Centipede build with it because it looks wild. I used to like playing the Monk in Diablo III, and I figure this is going to feel a bit like that based on the video footage I have seen.

I sincerely hope that the community did not devolve into death threats last night, but the Diablo IV team deserves some ire for their fumbling of this launch. More than anything they need to reassess how they communicate with players because what I saw last night was insufficient and sad.

A Cup of Hatred

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern this week. I have a very long post kicking around in my skull but have not quite committed to writing it yet, or honestly even know how to approach it. However tonight the Vessel of Hatred expansion launches for Diablo IV and I am planning on giving that a go. I did not last terribly long in Season 5, but I am interested to see how things sort out for all of the changes that they are making to the game to make it a bit more Diablo III-ish. Remember I was a D3 seasonal player for over a decade so that is not necessarily a bad thing for me. I am trying to decide if I am going to try out the new Spiritborn class or do my normal Barbarian run. If I go Spiritborn I will probably go the nonsensical-sounding centipede poison build, because might as well play it before it gets nerfed.

In other weekend news, my Minecraft nether tunneling project has finally paid off. Essentially I had been branching out of my main portal in every direction looking for the Warpwood biome, so that I could collect some resources from it and be able to grow the blue-green trees in my base. I really need to plant down some sign posts because my tunnel network is getting a little hard to navigate by memory. The thing I forgot about the Warpwood Biome though, is that Endermen spawn there so I might have to create some structures to be able to farm them for Ender Pearls. I doubt I have a dedicated post to the nonsense I have been up to, because quite honestly… digging tunnels is a big boring, but I find it relaxing.

I also spent a little bit of time this weekend playing around with Tiny Glade. This game essentially is a diorama-building tool that lets you procedurally generate really cool-looking castles and cottages and then terraform the land surrounding it. I wish there was a bit more “game” here like the ability to have tiny NPCs inhabit your world akin to Sim Tower. I used to love that game and then watching the tiny pixel people going about their day. The game is gorgeous though and if you get the hankering to build some cottage-core palaces then this is probably the game you have been looking for. Players have already recreated Rivendell and other massive structures from fiction. One of the neat things about the game is that there is a daily theme to help you get started in your creations.

I’ve also played a bit more Soulframe, but honestly… one of my core complaints about the game thus far appears to be a feature. One of the plots of the game is that this group that you are fighting back against has destroyed knowledge in the world, and as a result, all of your quest objectives show up as this foreign language that you cannot read. Then as you recover knowledge, you begin to be able to translate things a letter or two at a time. This is a cool idea from a storytelling aspect, but it largely just leads to a frustrating in-game experience as you have no clue what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going. Even more frustrating is that it appears that objectives can be completed multiple times, so your sparrow friend who is supposed to show you the way to the next thing you should care about sometimes sends you back to things you have already completed before. It sure is pretty and combat feels fairly fun, but right now… I am struggling to attach to it due to the obtuse nature of the narrative. Souls players who love obtuse bullshit will probably be in their element here.

Instead of doing new things though, this weekend I fell back on the old and familiar and spent a lot of time playing Path of Exile. It is shocking how good the Currency Exchange system is and how well it works this late in the league. Normally speaking trade would be completely dead and it would be a chore to do any sort of large-volume currency swaps. However, the asynchronous nature of the Currency Exchange means that players are still actively putting things up for sale and creating open buy orders for things that they need. I sold so many Valdo’s Puzzle Boxes for 190 Chaos each, and they did not sit on the exchange for very long before getting snapped up each time.

I’ve been slowly chipping away at objectives and in theory, if I can get to 31 total challenges for the league I will be able to get the same sized totem as I had last league. I have a few candidates to get there, namely the two related to Scarabs that I am getting closer to finishing. I need to look at Sublime Starlight and see what the cheapest path to completing that is as well, given I have a pretty good backlog of the runes from the league mechanic. Arduous Atlas is easy enough, just requires a lot of brute force mapping and is only a matter of time not necessarily effort. I am slowly getting closer and closer to level 100 so the gear grinding goals or whatever that achievement is called might be within reach as well. I’m not super far from several o the ones un Unbelievable Undertakings, but those all for the most part will require me to spec into specific league mechanics to get through them.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend exploring The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and I am already a proud member of team Beds for life. I honestly have mixed feelings about the game. It is extremely well built and I think the idea of roaming around as Zelda, but so far combat feels fiddly. Legend of Zelda for me was always a combat experience first and foremost and a puzzle-solving experience as a fun secondary activity that blended along with the combat. I am not sure if Zelda gets better tools but right now killing anything feels a bit annoying so I find myself just avoiding combat whenever possible. Maybe that is the overarching theme that they were going for. I want to get deeper into the game but right now I am only a few hours in and not super far past the initial tutorial.

I have to admit I also don’t feel amazing giving Nintendo money right now. I had already bought Echoes of Wisdom, but their crusade against Switch emulation is a major bummer for me. Playing Switch games on PC has been my primary source of enjoying these games. I would buy the game on Switch and then play it on my PC via emulator because it was simply a more comfortable option than dealing with the short battery life and heft of the Switch console in handheld mode. Additionally playing via emulators allowed me to “patch” things out of games that annoyed me… for example, I ran mods to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom that removed durability from the game entirely. My guess is whatever the Switch 2 ends up being will be backward compatible and the current crop of emulators will likely successfully run all of the games on day one.

All that Nintendo will have done with their action is push the scene underground. They went from having three emulators that were open-source projects that they could easily keep tabs on… to having to deal with what will be countless unofficial forks that are being maintained by piracy distro groups. You can already buy the Miig Switch and Miig Dumper through AliExpress and the price of them keeps dropping. Basically, Nintendo has destroyed the methodology that allowed folks to buy legitimate copies and play them on legitimate Open Source emulators and will now force those folks to either play the inferior version on official hardware… or rely exclusively on distro groups and torrent sites to get the games.

AggroChat #495 – Just Let Your Soul Glo

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

Hey Folks! We start the show with a quick discussion about Path of Exile, and how we are now two months into a League, a position where things would normally be dead…  and that the Currency Exchange is still hopping.  This leads to a secondary discussion about Kodra’s woes as he attempts to do the Merchant Guild thing in the Last Epoch.  From there Bel talks about Witchfire with its Hexen meets Destiny meets Hades PVE extraction shooter gameplay. Bel also got an invite to Soulframe Preludes the next game from Warframe maker Digital Extremes and shares some of his early impressions.  From there we dive into the Magic the Gathering Commander situation with controversial card bannings, death threats, and Wizards of the Coast yoinking control of the format away from the players.  Tam shares his thoughts about playing Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and Thalen his early thoughts about playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile
    • Currency Exchange in a Dead League
  • Last Epoch
    • Woes of Merchants Guild
  • Witchfire
  • Soulframe Preludes
  • The MTG Commander Situation
  • Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast
  • Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Rebranding of New World

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On the 15th of October, New World is launching the latest version of itself as Aeternum. There has been a heap of confusing marketing surrounding this event, and quite honestly a bit of weasel wording when it comes to what is actually about to transpire. Essentially Aeternum is the attempt to launch New World on consoles with a clean slate, in order to wipe a bit of the bad taste of the dwindling PC player numbers out of the collective mouths of an audience that may have not actually played the game. Treating this as though it were a new and fresh gameplay experience, is what feels like a last-ditch effort to make this game succeed. The hard truth however is that PC players have not received any substantive updates since the launch of Angry Earth in October 2023.

The truth is that New World has struggled since its just slightly under 1 million concurrent player launch, and has never quite found a large enough player base to keep the game successful. It is very obvious that Amazon does not really consider this to have been a success, because while they often laud the achievements of Lost Ark… you never quite hear the same rhetoric surrounding their other MMO New World. Steam Charts paints the picture clearly of never quite getting a critical mass of players interested for the long haul. I feel like the console launch is essentially the last lifeline that the game has before Amazon ultimately shutters it. For that reason, I legitimately hope that this awkward rebranding is what the game needed in order to sell the notion of it to a new group of players.

I’ve loved this game deeply since its release three years ago. Over the course of that time I have dedicated 92 blog posts to the game, including this one… and probably would have had more except due to the fact that I spent a lot of time playing the game when it was under NDA. Unfortunately, New World is also a game with deep systemic problems due to the awkward way that this game was built. It is a game that needs about 1200-2000 players on a single server in order to make the game feel alive but was crafted in a manner that limits the total population of a server. It was designed more in the manner of a Rust private server than a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. We struggled at the release of the game to get everyone on the same server at the same time, and ultimately that is the core requirement of an MMORPG… the ability to play with your friends. This fresh coat of paint and renaming does nothing to solve this fundamental issue that exists at the core of the game.

At launch, there were one hundred and seventy-seven servers available, and it was simply not enough capacity to contain the millions of players attempting to play the game. Within days they spun up a number of servers at least doubling the total number, and quite honestly… I cannot remember how many servers that number eventually ballooned to. As the influx of players waned quickly, you were left with a ton of servers with little to no population and no way of those players migrating elsewhere. The game has been plagued with a long history of server migrations as we have now shrunk to twelve servers serving the global population. This gives players no real identity for what server they play on. I’ve not played in almost a year at this point and I could not tell you off the top of my head what server I was playing on. This makes it extremely hard to link up with friends wanting to play the game, which again is the most important requirement of an MMORPG.

I last played the game around the launch of Angry Earth and quite honestly… the game was in a pretty good state then. It was fun and the new story was pretty solid. The “new” zone was also pretty great, but I say new in quotation marks… because it wasn’t a new zone at all. It was taking the existing zone of First Light and changing everything about it to create a new endgame zone for the Angry Earth campaign. Similarly, the launch of Aeternum in 11 days is destroying the previous zone of Cutlass Keys to turn it into a new endgame zone that is half-dominated by full PVP. Instead of adding content to the game they are removing content by way of repurposing it. I didn’t care that much about First Light, but I loved Cutlass Keys and it was a destination that I went to regularly because I enjoyed the material farming loops there. the New World team has not actually “added” content to the game in the form of new open-world real estate since October 2022 when they introduced the Brimstone Sands region.

All of that said, I guess it should not shock me with what they are trying to do with Aeternum, but renaming something that has existed for four years at this point considering pre-release gameplay time, and treating it as though it were a brand new gameplay experience. They have attempted to put a shiny coat of paint on things several times with limited results. I get that this might be a team that is strapped for resources and might not have the time to devote to building entirely new zones out of whole cloth, but do have time to rearrange a bunch of chess pieces on the board in the form of a zone redesign. However, as a long-term player, it feels like I am losing content much in the same way I did with Destiny each time they vaulted a zone… instead of gaining content.

I have baggage, and I know that. I still have bitterness surrounding the patch where they effectively killed all of the player-created elite farm trains out in the world that were amazing. Bitterness aside though I really do want this game to succeed, if for no reason other than that they might get the resources required to fix some of the deeper fundamental flaws that the game has. The game keeps chasing the PVP player base, but time and time again the MMORPG market has proven that this is not a big enough community to ever support a game in its totality. PVE gamers are deeply social gamers by nature, and all of the flaws surrounding server limits and connectivity have always been a giant impediment for that style of player.

I feel like the healthiest thing for New World would be a change in server methodology to something akin to Guild Wars 2 where servers do not matter other than for WVW combat, and now there is a semi-regular process of matching up different guilds into groups to balance that. I could see something like that where companies are matched based on activity level and assigned to a relatively leveled playing field so that they are vying for control of the map against a similar group of players. Then remove all of the negative things that impact PVE players from other factions owning territory. This would lean into the fun PVE nature of the game while also serving the desires of the more bloodthirsty competitive minority in MMO players.

I think half of the revamped Cutlass Keys zone being devoted to full-open PVP is going to be a mistake in the long run, but I feel like it is probably a carrot being thrown to the players who have stuck around and are more PVP-focused. I imagine a few months from now, it is going to be a dead space with the same few people dueling each other. That said… I have no clue how you sell this game to PVE players in a way that does not exist currently. The thing that killed the game for me, was the fact that I was competing for harvesting resources constantly with a bunch of bots who were running a loop constantly. I feel like the game would be better served with longer node respawns, but having them flagged to your account so that if you go out into the woods looking for resources you are not actively competing with other players for them.

I’ve not had the game installed for a few months, and I last played in May. Even then I only played for a little bit to poke my head and see how things were going. I’ve not played a ton since the release of Angry Earth last year. I’ve seen nothing about this Aeternum rebranding that is really speaking to me. For the PC players… there really isn’t a lot of change. I think there is some new story, a new dungeon, and half of a revamped zone to explore. Aeternum is not for us, it is an attempt at luring a brand new audience of previously untouched console-first gamers. I think this is probably a make-or-break moment for New World. If on the 15th it fails to find a brand new audience, it is probably the eventual death of the franchise.

I think what I would have personally liked to see instead of this, is a shift in the model of the game as a whole. Instead of being a persistent forever game… focus on being a seasonal game like many of the ARPG Diablo-likes are. In that scenario, the crippling server constraints are not that big of a deal, because you are playing the game for a three to four-month shot at a time. They would need to amp everything up… experience, resources, gold… but honestly some of the most fun I ever had playing New World was rerolling fresh on a new server when they launched the story updates and fresh start servers in 2022. I could see having a heck of a lot of fun rolling fresh characters and going through all of the content again at an accelerated pace with a group of players doing the same thing. I think it could have worked, pending they came up with some gimmick for each season in the way that Path of Exile does its leagues.

As it stands, I will have a lot of happy memories from the time I played New World. I hope they find a new audience and get the resources to make this game the game it could have been. I hope they come up with a hook to earn back PC players who have felt abandoned by the staff. I legitimately hope this dangerous gambit works, because the alternative is that the game goes away. The stakes feel extremely high… but given everything else coming out this month, I can’t bring myself to join the folks who will be playing on the 15th. I wish them luck, but will be doing so more than likely from the sidelines.

Are you going to be checking out New World Aeternum? Did I completely miss the mark in my assessment of the game? Drop me a line below.