Aggrochat

We did not record a show last week because the news of our country was a bit too fresh for most of us to talk about video games.  Now another week has passed and the wound has begun to scab over a bit.  Tonight we start down a Thalen and Grace but eventually pick up a Thalen as we go.  We talk about Summer Games Done Quick and have an aside about Wiley Wars coming to the Switch.  From there folks talk about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and trying to play it six-player on a console that does not support that.  From there Bel talks about falling back into Diablo III and finishing out Season 26…  while also playing a horrible ideas class that is really bad at boosting friends.  From there Bel talks about his recent experience diving down the Path of Exile rabbit hole.  Guild Wars 2 made many changes that were not well received by the most hardcore players, but we largely think they are a good thing and talk about that.  Finally, we wrap up with a quick discussion about Outriders Worldslayer and how it is still a very bleak game, but also a great mechanical experience if you can get past that.

Topics Discussed

• Summer Games Done Quick
  • Wiley Wars on Switch
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
• Diablo III Season 26
  • Bad Ideas Build
  • Being a Bad Carry
• Path of Exile
  • Bel Goes Down this Rabbit Hole
• Guild Wars 2 Massive Changes
• Outriders Worldslayer
  • Still a Bleak Game

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Tonight was a weird show.  Firstly we are recording this show on Belghast’s Birthday, which in our almost 400 episodes I am not sure we have actually recorded on one of our Birthdays before.  We set out with the mission of recording a show about the “Not E3” festivities that have been going on but get sidetracked as one does.  Instead, we go down a path of talking about Diablo Immortal once again, but from the standpoint of how exactly one should be funding game development.  Clearly, the NetEase and Blizzard team chose violence, but how exactly does one fund modern game development costs when the market has shown that if the price trickles up from $60…  folks freak out.  From there we do eventually return to talking about Sony, Microsoft, and whatever Geoff Keighly is running that now serves as the replacement for E3.

Topics Discussed

• Bel’s Birthday
• Diablo Immortal Again
• Funding Games Ethically
• Gamepass Model
• Microsoft Show
• Silksong
• Valheim Cross Play between Gamepass and Steam
• Star Citizen, Starfield, and the era of Space Games
• Redfall
• The Gamesir X2 controller reprised

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Tonight’s show is a bit of a strange one.  We had a bunch of absences and at the start of the show, it was just Ammo, Bel, and Thalen.  Then as we recorded a wild Ash and Kodra appear, but this does have the effect of causing a few topics to be rehashed.  We start talking about the nonsense that Bel is doing where he attempts to fix the episode gap on YouTube and re-releases the original 73 episodes.  We dive into Guild Wars 2 and specifically the Living World Season 1 and the current Dragon Bash event.  Bel reprises the topic of Diablo Immortal this week and talks about having gotten to level 56 and all of the many monetization traps in that game.  Then Thalen talks about his experiences playing Talos Principle and Stanley Parable.  Kodra appears and we reprise the Guild Wars 2 topics a bit before Bel dives into a discussion about the universally good changes coming to New World.

Topics Discussed

• Re-releasing Original AggroChat Episodes
• Guild Wars 2
  • Living World Season 1 Chapter 2
  • Dragon Bash
• Diablo Immortal
  • The Grind
  • Lootbox Bait and Switch
  • $450 Gem
• Talos Principle
• Stanley Parable
• Guild Wars 2 Revisited
• New World Upcoming Changes

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Hey Folks! Yesterday a conversation with MagiWasTaken basically brought something that had bugged me for a while to a head. I have projects within projects visualized in my head, but it often takes some measure of external stimuli to actually act upon them. AggroChat did not start out the way that it is now, and as we find ourselves approaching four hundred episodes… there are absolutely regrets I have about some of the early shows. For the longest time, I have just lumped them in a “bad” bucket mentally and moved on with my life. However, I think it was more a case that back then I was not doing half of the things I am doing today. We joke that there is no editing on the podcast and it is true within the realm of podcastdom… but literally those first few episodes had no real editing because I had no clue how to do anything in Audacity.

Coming back and applying some basic editing has made things significantly more listenable. The thing that has bugged me probably more than anything however is that the first 73 episodes of AggroChat did not have “Showcards” and are not available on YouTube. I only started adding things to YouTube when I found out that Libsyn had that functionality, and it apparently took me 73 episodes before realizing this. So my grand plan is to fix this gap and also apply a little TLC to these shows to revive them from their currently dormant states. I still don’t think that they are great podcasting, nor do I really think what we do today is great podcasting. However, it should greatly improve the experience for the handful of people who are mad enough to actually go diving into our back archives.

So we are starting off where we have to… with the very first episode of AggroChat titled “Finding the Format”. In truth, we had no clue what the format was at this point. The show started with Ashgar, Kodra, and Rae because those are the folks that I could talk into this madness and were available when I was recording. The cast would shift significantly before finally stabilizing on the seven that we have today. We did not really do the “Topics Discussed” construct at this point but here is my attempt at summarizing.

Topics Discussed

• Elder Scrolls Online Launch
  • Excitement over Craglorn
• My Little Pony Card Game
• H1Z1
• Fortnite Alpha
• Heroes of the Storm Alpha
  • Contrast with League of Legends