We start off the show with a hearty congratulations to Tam who will likely be out for a few weeks because he is in dad mode with a very “smol hume”. From there we talk a bit about the Fall of Babylon… or at least Babylon’s Fall and the game we never understood why it was a thing officially shuttering in February. It has been a very Not-E3 week as all major players had a significant presence at the Tokyo Game Show. More specifically we talk a lot about everything that came out of the Nintendo Direct. It is time for the Nightmare Tower in Guild Wars 2 as Season 1 Episode 4 drops, leaving we believe only one more episode to go before the story hole has officially been patched. Bel talks at length about his adventures on the New World PTR and more specifically some of the massive changes to how crafting works. From there we dive into a discussion about Path of Exile and how it isn’t really a “chill” game. When the game is good it is great, but when it is bad it is atrocious. As always though when we complain about games it comes from a place of love, because if we don’t really care… we just don’t talk about it.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post, and after reading through the comments… specifically that of Bhagpuss I realized I did make quite a few assumptions. After playing so many MMORPGs with so many different people over the years, I assumed that most people had a stacked list of acquaintances after spending decades playing these titles. I long ago ran out of space in my Battle.net friends list and am consistently having to delete people to find space to add new ones, but that is in part the side effect of leading a raid for a few expansions. As a result, I decided to test these assumptions to see how true my point of view happened to be. So the easiest means of doing this was to cobble together a Twitter poll and then ask folks to retweet it around a bit to try and get a more diverse smattering of eyeballs on it.
So first off I realize that my methodology is a bit flawed. There are only 144 votes at the time of taking this screenshot, and it is limited to those who are active on twitter and the range that 29 retweets will get you… which according to Twitter analytics is a little over 800 impressions. Folks who are active on social media are probably already self-selected into a group of those who are either more socially active or at least more interested in being socially active. However, if you accept those flaws, the numbers more or less shake out like I thought they would. Some 86.1% of users view starting on the same server as friends as a positive thing, 4.2% considered it neutral, and 9.7% prefer to go it alone. Part of what makes me think these numbers are pretty stable is for the most part yesterday after the first hour of the poll, the percentages stayed mostly unchanged within a margin of error. If you want to chime in or just watch the process of the poll, I believe I have it up for another day.
I played a bit more of New World on the PTR server yesterday, and if I thought the redone Monarch’s Bluff was cool… Everfall is even cooler. It has a whole gaslit industrial revolution era vibe to it, with considerably more modern housing. This makes me wonder what exactly the rework of the other towns will bring. I am hoping that they keep this going forward with doing each town as though it had been built during a different era on the island. I think I have followed the main story quest as far as I can for right now because it bugged out when I tried to do the latest version of the Soul Warden trial. The leveling is so much faster than when this game went live initially. I’ve only really poked at this game for two days and am already level twenty, and most of that was just from following the story quests. So I do believe then when they say that you will no longer need to do the town boards to gain levels.
In my travels, I came across someone with the name “Dr Demone Kim” so I am not sure if this is actually THE Youtuber or just a fan trying to look like him. I do know that he was recording some videos in Monarch’s Bluff but I have no clue what his new character name is. He got his original character stuck in Brimstone Sands, where anytime he logs in he pretty much instantly dies. It is super cool thought to bump into a name I at least recognize, even if it is not his account. We are still trying to sort out how we are going to approach this game when the patch drops. Right now I am leaning towards picking whatever normal server happens to be the lowest population and rolling there, in the hope that everyone else that is planning on doing the same can as well. This would leave open the option for folks who don’t want to re-roll to just move their characters with one of the free tokens, whereas the fresh start servers will be locked for transfers.
I had one of those weird nights where nothing really felt right gaming-wise, so toward the end of the evening, I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077. I thought I would check out some of the patch changes, and so far I am on board with the wardrobe system. It was always one of the things that bugged me that I could not really control my appearance if I was trying to optimize my gearing. I would try and latch onto the first decent-looking legendary item I could find and then just keep upgrading it, so I could maintain a specific look and feel. I started another femme V as I have yet to play through the game completely on anything other than my original masculine V. I went for the nomad story start, in part because I actually want to see the questline that involves Alanah Pearce. I have no clue if I will stick with this play-through or bounce back into more multiplayer nonsense.
It is a bit of a scattered post this morning, but those sometimes happen.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Tonight we attempt to record a show that is only an hour in length but fail again overshooting by about fifteen minutes. We are down a Tam because life happens, and Kodra had to travel to Ash’s house to get internet… but we get a shot out the door regardless. We start off with a quick recap on the experience of starting Ooblets from scratch, then dive into a discussion about the next Shovel Knight game from a different studio. Ash talks a bit about his experiences with PAX West and we discuss games that evoke the style of a specific era in console games. This dives into a whole discussion about our console gaming experiences throughout the years. Bel talks a bit about the upcoming patch to New World and how it is completely changing the starting game experience for the better.
From there we dive into a discussion about Path of Exile and how spending some in-game currency on a build can make a massive difference. We talk about narrowing down the hunt for Atlas completion as Grace and Bel get close to wrapping that up. Then we dive into a side topic about how easy it is just to write off bad performance when maybe it is something you did to cause it. Essentially running Path of Exile on a mechanical drive makes a massive difference, and you really should use a high-quality SSD.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! What happens when we have a few weeks’ worth of Path of Exile discussion bottled up? Well, apparently we record a two-hour-long show! Bel was completely oblivious to how long we were recording in spite of the entire crew trying to warn him. First, we have a few quick topics about Return to Oz and the launch of Ooblets on all platforms including Nintendo Switch. From there we dive into a long discussion about our thoughts relating to Path of Exile and how the Lake of Kalandra league has gone. We have different points of entry from those of us who have been grinding away at maps and those who have yet to finish the campaign. We also attempt to scare Kodra who thinks he has seen a lot of systems so far… but has yet to unlock half of them.
