Aggrochat

The release of this show was delayed a bit this morning because I tried really hard to apparently release the show from two weeks ago all over again due to my gross incompetence. However now that I have righted that particular ship… please enjoy the show!

After having to miss last week we had more topics than realistically could fit into a show and only actually made it through three of them.  The first is the launch of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem and how maybe early access isn’t actually a game launch in certain circumstances. We talk about the myriad problems with the online components of the game and the struggles with an indie trying to buy server capacity for high volume bursty connections.  Thankfully there is an offline mode which allows us to talk a bit about why the game is worth the struggle. From there we talk about the impending Final Fantasy XIV 5.2 patch and the most recent live letter previewing features coming up for the game. Lastly we talk about returning to an alternate future where the NGE didn’t kill Star Wars Galaxies as Tam convinces Belghast to play Star Wars Legends.

Topics Discussed:

• Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem
  • High Capacity Launches are Hard for Indies
  • Going from 1000 to 65,000 concurrent users in a day
  • The solid underlying single player experience
• Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter
  • 5.2 Patch
  • Catching up
  • Free Company Leveling Up
• Star Wars Galaxies
  • Star Wars Legends Server
  • Piloting Rebel Starships
  • Tam talks Bel into Playing
  • NGE and Combat Update

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Tonight we start the show by letting you off the hook and explaining a reference that originally I was just going to make the show title without explaining. Bel has been playing an obsessive amount of Greedfall and it is the sort of experience that the deeper he gets into the game the more his opinion of it improves.  Tam has been playing Elsinore a game where you recast Hamlet with the goal of trying to get Ophelia to survive. In many ways he says this is the game that he wished Return of the Obra Dinn had been. Bel talks about TemTem the not-Pokemon MMORPG which will likely give the storied franchise a run for its money because it is really well done.  Kodra takes our advice and explores Into the Breach and has an “Oh Crap It’s 2 am, how did that happen” moment. Finally Bel is astonished that Theros Beyond Death brings back Underworld Dreams at Uncommon rarity.

Topics Discussed:

• The Mighty Ferrite Bead
  • What it does do
  • What it cannot do
• Greedfall
  • Improving Opinion
  • Games that Sucker Punch You
• Elsinore
  • Obra Dinn with Better Story
• TemTem
  • As close to a Pokemon MMORPG you can get without being sued
  • Legitimate Competition for Pokemon
• Into the Breach
  • Oh Crap It’s 2 am
• Theros Beyond Death
  • Underworld Dreams is Uncommon?

Original Blog Post from AggroChat.com

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Tonight we start off with a discussion about Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 which just concluded and raised a little over 3 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.  From there we talk about Pax South 2020 and the interesting things Ashgar has encountered while being there. Bel goes into a diatribe about the Witcher games not doing a great job of explaining the cast of characters.  2020 is a year of game delays so far and we talk about a few of them and why we are mostly okay with them. We then close out with a long discussion about Fire Emblem: Three Houses which leads its way into a discussion about Tactics versus Strategy.

Featured Topics

• Awesome Games Done Quick – January 2020
• Pax South 2020
  • Indie Games
  • Small Publishers
  • Tabletop Gaming
• The Witcher Problem
  • Related to the Destiny Problem
• 2020 The Year of Delays
  • Wishing it meant no crunch time
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  • Tactics vs Strategy
  • Perfect Information vs Learned Insight

Original Blog Post on AggroChat.com

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As we work on our “Games of the Decade” show, one of the things that kept coming up was whether or not to put tabletop games on the list.  After some back and forth we decided that really the tabletop show was a show of its own, because this decade changed the status quo significantly.  There is a certain amount of hyperbole in the show title, but in truth this is the decade when D&D and Settlers of Catan started being sold at Walmart and Target, and you can’t get much more mainstream than that.  We talk about the meteoric explosion of tabletop gaming and some of the factors we feel potentially triggered it. It was a wildly meandering show and we found it impossible to come up with a bullet point list of what we discussed.  We almost completely missed miniature wargaming, which may end up being its own show at some point.

Topics Discussed

• Pen and paper
• Board games
• Card games
• Pop culture references

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