Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
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
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
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.
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.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we go back to our normal format and open up talking about Kodra teaching Eli how to play some Pokemon TCG, and how the last time several of us played that game was during the Wizards of the Coast era. From there Grace and Bel talk about Gunfire Reborn, a game where you play anthropomorphic animals with guns in a roguelike… that occasionally features lizards as weapons. Bel talks about his experiences playing Diablo Immortal and we talk a bit about its very predatory monetization scheme. Tam talks about his experiences attempting to get into the very obtuse X4 series and obligatory comparisons to Star Citizen. We talk briefly about Star Trek Strange New Worlds and how it is a pretty good onramp to the Trek franchise. This also ends up in a bit of a brief discussion about the new Kenobi miniseries of Disney Plus.
