Diablo Franchise Archives - Page 33 of 54

Regularly Playing: January 2020 Edition

March 7, 2025January 31, 2020 by Belghast

For those who have read this blog for awhile, you will know that I have this semi-monthly column in which I talk about the games I have been playing regularly and also use this as an excuse to update my blog’s sidebar. The fourth quarter of 2019 was not a good time for regular updates to this because I failed to do one in October and also completely failed to do one in December. With the new year I am hoping to get back on track and keep these, but I have to warn you… today is going to be a bloodbath. Many games are being dropped from the list because quite honestly some of my gaming patterns have changed drastically over the last few months.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 represents one of only a few games that I am regularly playing that would classify as an endless game. I’ve had a shift away from Massively Multiplayer Online gaming towards more finite single player titles of late, and as such those evergreen games that I always spent time in have suffered greatly. I’ve come to realize that I had not really finished many games because I always wound up getting distracted by the online fare, and if I instead ignore them I find I actually do enjoy polishing games off. Destiny 2 however is near and dear to my heart and is the sort of thing that I can return to over and over again for short bursts. While I am sure that I am making Thalen sad for not playing much, I have missed out on a bunch of things and am mostly okay with that. I do want to finish the seasonal grind at some point but I have 40 some days to do that.

Diablo 3 is another one of those games that is so much part of my core identity that I am not sure if there will truly ever be a period of time when I am not at least idly playing it. Since the time of last posting I completely finished the PC Seasonal Content as a Demon Hunter and made it up through Slayer on the Switch with a Whirlwind Barbarian. The Switch is excellent for grinding a bit from bed before falling asleep, but even of late I have been opting out of that for a few reasons that I will get into later. With the talk of Diablo 4 on the horizon and the conversion of Torchlight Frontiers to Torchlight III, I still find myself extremely connected to this now aging game. I’ve just not found an adequate replacement to truly scratch the same action rpg ich.

To The New and Returning

Here is where the sad bits come in… there really isn’t anything new to be adding to this list. I have played several games but none of them are the sort of things that I expect to be adding to the list in any sort of a permanent manner. Instead I think I am going to implement a new feature called “Ships Passing in the Night” where I talk about some of the games that I had short but intense interactions with, but feel the chapter is either closed or will be closed once I complete them.

Ships Passing in The Night

I have so much love for this game, and while I fully expect to go back and play it at some point I am effectively done with it for the moment. For years I found this game incomprehensible in the way it sorta just drops you in the middle of everything with limited explanation. It was only through watching the Netflix Witcher series that I was able to gain proper purchase and glean enough information to make me feel firmly planted in this games universe. Since then I have been on a tear of playing through everything I could stand from the Witcher games and even reading the novels. The first Witcher will likely always be an impassable wall for me, but I have accepted it. This third game however goes on the top games of all time list for me personally.

After playing through the first Witcher game I had so many unanswered questions, and as a result I opted to do things backwards and go back searching for the answers in Witcher 2. While it was a bit of a struggle to get used to the interface, I eventually mastered it and had a phenomenal time doing what was effectively a golden path play-through of the non-human side of the story. I even was engaged enough to restart and try playing through the human side, only to determine that I had absolutely made the correct choice the first time around and wander away like a bored toddler. This game is always going to have a soft spot in my heart, but it is a deeply flawed experience, but one worth experiencing. Unfortunately I realized too lately that the answers to all of my questions lie in the books and not the past video games.

Another flawed but phenomenal gameplay experience is that of Greedfall. It is a game that is tackling some themes that I have never quite seen a game tackle, which are really spending time exploring the sins of the colonial era. While there are some weird things going on at times with the interface and with combat, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing this game and as a result it has caused me to be interested in a deep dive of the developers back catalog of games. If you love the Bioware style of games you might legitimately be interested in exploring the games from french developer Spiders.

This is the second game I have played by Spiders and I am enthralled. This is currently my gaming main squeeze, at least until I finish it and It is a thoroughly interesting experience. The game is set in a post colonial Mars where it is ruled by rival corporations and military powers that end up creating a pretty damned oppressive environment. That said the game threw me a massive curve ball yesterday and opened up considerably and I am so there for the long ride. Imagine a setting that blends Blade Runner, Dune, Total Recall and the Red Faction games with a dash of Fallout into a single setting. I actually am enjoying the combat in Technomancer way more than I did Greedfall, and I am curious what things are going to be like if I keep going backwards in the Spiders catalog.

It is possible that this game might make it to regularly playing status, but for now I am throwing it in this category because I am just not sure. It is a Not-Pokemon MMORPG and it is charming as hell and does a really good job of both mirroring the best parts of Pokemon and bringing new things to the genre. The only thing that I find lacking is there is no xp sharing system and you legitimately have to fight with your not-pokemon to level them instead of doing what I do and just dragging them along for the ride. I’ve only played a few hours on this latest build even though I was a backer and have played various builds along the way. Time will tell if this becomes something more serious for me or not.

To Those Departing

Sorry Dragalia… you had a really good run but there are two things that happened. Firstly the gameplay finally reached its point where it became repetitive to a fault. Secondly I have been trying to read more often and as such that time when I was spending playing Dragalia Lost got replaced with time in the Kindle app. I am not the type of player that ever opts to play a mobile game if I have access to other options, so once it lots its prime real estate for bedtime gaming it really dropped off my radar. I am happier to be reading each night than to be spending time in a repetitive grind that doesn’t really go anywhere.

Sorry Boo, it’s me not you. This is a game I expect to return to and finish up, but in truth it is one of those things that should have graced the new category and not really added as a regularly playing. I’m somewhere around halfway done with the game and I figure when I deplete my current run of bioware-like games I fully expect to dust this off and finish it up. I love the game lots, but just have not been playing it.

It just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I can’t fully explain it, but after the absence when I was frustrated with Blizzard over the Hong Kong thing… I found it impossible to get reconnected and actively start playing again. Someone let the magical blue smoke escape and it just doesn’t do much of anything for me right now. I am for whatever reason in the wrong mind state to be enjoying it and as such it leaves list.

While I know without a doubt that I will be back and playing Shadowlands… for the moment I have zero interest in anything going on in this game. It is sad because I dearly love my Facepull family, but for now at least I am loving them from a distance. There is just something about World of Warcraft at the moment that I find a massive turn off, because I have tried to log in a few times but jettison in a perpendicular trajectory really quickly. Battle for Azeroth really did ruin the game for me, and I guess I hope it is not a permanent condition because I still have fond memories of how much I enjoyed Legion.

Summary

So there we have it, like I said it is a bit of a bloodbath because I have whittled down the regularly playing list to two titles. I am pretty sure this is the smallest it has ever been since the implementation of it. For now I am very much on a kick of not playing MMORPGs, but time will tell how long that will actually last.

Games of the Decade: 2012

December 13, 2019 by Belghast

Last week I started this series where I am talking about the games that were particularly important to me during this decade. The end of the year generally makes me introspective about such things, and with this being the first “decade” I can really observe on this blog I figured it was a reasonable series to dive into. I’ve already covered 2010 and 2011, but today we are diving into 2012 which wound up being a pretty significant year for various reasons.

Diablo 3

At the time it released I would have had no idea that this game would become as important for me as it has. In fact I am not entirely certain if I actually managed to get a character all of the way to 70 before the end of 2012. The initial release of this game had some problems, namely when it came to any sort of loot drops that you actually needed. To make matters worse this initial release also had the real money auction house and it would not be until the release of Reaper of Souls in 2014 that a lot of this got sorted out. It was a game I dabbled with and I know that at the very least I had “beat” the story of the game within that initial month.

However in the years since its launch, I met my good friend Grace and with that I got indoctrinated into the tradition of running seasonal content… which also released significantly later. We’ve gotten into this cadence of every three months we return to Diablo 3 with excitement and spend a week or two of serious playtime before fading away again until the next seasonal launch. It mimics the behavior that we have towards any sort of a new MMORPG release and also manages to capture that same excitement every three months like clockwork. Due to all of these peripheral reasons… Diablo 3 has become one of my favorite games of all time, so it most definitely reserves a slot on this list.

The Secret World

Every so often there are games that mean an extreme amount to you on a personal level… but that you also just don’t really play anymore. Secret World is definitely in that camp and I cherish all of the moments we experienced during the launch of this game. It is firmly set in one of my favorite genres… occult fantasy, and saw me being able to mangle together a character I enjoyed that was not quite like any other standard character build. I ran around with a Sword and a Shotgun and had an immense amount of fun figuring out how to make penetration damage combos. It was a glorious time for many of the AggroChat crew as we each got to build our own very custom and tailored version of the character we wanted to play.

Then unfortunately all of that joy came crashing down around us as we entered what represented the end game… the Nightmare difficulty dungeons. We had an amazing time with the Story mode and the Elite mode… but when we moved up to that highest tier all of our fun and custom builds started to fall apart. At that level you needed very specific tank builds, healer builds and any sort of melee damage was punished to extreme levels and not really viable. It was around this time that the magic faded from the game and we all sorta went our separate ways. I would attempt to return periodically to gobble up the story content, but even that only lasted through episode 8. I have fond memories of Secret World but they are also deeply tinged with regret.

Guild Wars 2

My experience with Guild Wars 2 is deeply fraught. I’ve told the story a dozen times now, but this is the only game I have ever resigned from an alpha process for. I remember being extremely excited when through my connections I managed to score a seat in the testing process. It also represents the most thorough NDA I ever had to sign, involving so much detail that it felt like I was signing away my first born. It was one of those testing processes where they forced everyone to join one massive all hands Ventrilo server, and gave us very focused testing directions. I was so excited for that first four hour testing session that I was nearly vibrating… and then I also remember the crushing “wtf is this shit” feeling I had moments later.

Guild Wars 2 was not the game I was expecting or the game that I wanted it to be… but by the time I reached launch I managed to push a lot of that beside me. However it still took years before I finally reached the point where I understood what people enjoyed about it. Now I get it… it is this weird casual sandbox that allows you to roam around and feel like you had an effect on the world with extremely short play sessions. It is a game of more or less checking things off lists, and if you are a list maker and a list completer I am sure it is an amazing experience. For me who was still very much in the rush to end game and raid all of the things mentality… I found the dungeons to be an extremely frustrating experience and the game play experience to largely be pointless. I’ve since found the joy in this game and the things that I apparently was missing, but in this first year it was a lot of confusion and frustration.

Borderlands 2

I am not really sure how much I actually have to say about this game save for the fact that it is important. The style of dialog and story was something unique at the time, and the slick package that it was all wrapped up in lead to some thoroughly enjoyable game play experiences. I played an awful lot of the original Borderlands, and this game took everything that was good about that game and iterated upon it. It truly is a masterpiece that still holds up extremely well by today’s standards. Unfortunately this is also the beginning of the end of the magic for Gear Box. I’ve not played Borderlands 3 at all, but the “pre-sequel” felt like they were phoning it in. When BL3 comes out on Steam I will likely use that as an excuse to pick it up and see where the game has gone. So far it has given me twinges of the same disappointment I felt playing Rage 2 just based on the trailers and such.

Dishonored

Dishonored is a game that deserves not only its spot on this list, but a spot on a “best games of all time” list as well. I have a bad relationship with stealth in games, and often times when I encounter a forced stealth sequence it causes me to nope the hell out of the experience. Dishonored is this weird game that works perfectly well for Tam on his desire to get “clean hands” and “ghost runs” where he is never spotted and never has to kill a single person… or for me where I murderate every single person I encounter. The game does an amazing job of allowing you to play however the hell you want to play… and then brutally judges you for your actions.

The first game is a masterclass in level design and how exactly you bring a brand new IP to market. I love everything about Corvo Attano and the setting of Dunwall. I love the weird mix of Steampunk, Magic and Chthonic monsters of the deep that come together perfectly in a single tight package. I also love the way that this game and its two DLC perfectly feed into the experience of playing Dishonored 2 and give the player backstory about the events that take place between the two games. The entire series is a phenomenal and I highly suggest that everyone play the entire thing through just to experience it. This is one of those settings that could be made into a television series on Netflix and would be almost universally loved. It is the type of game I feel comfortable suggesting because it allows you to largely carve out your own game play experience with so many different ways to be able to complete it.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2012

It was an extremely rough year for me. We had a bunch of deaths in the family and I was still more or less recovering from events that happened in 2011. One of the high points of the year however was recruiting my friend Rae to come work for me. I miss having her at work because her excitement and the unique way she viewed the world was infectious. 2013 would be a banner year, and 2012 was sorta this weird doldrum between the horrible year that was 2011… and me finally starting to come out of that storm.

Kenzie and Walled City

December 10, 2019 by Belghast

This morning is one of those mornings when I am not exactly sure what to write about, so as a result I figured I would give an update on Kenzie. Some weeks back in a stress filled post I talked about her being diagnosed with diabetes. In the time since then we have begun an insulin regiment in the morning and evening and are going back for another round of tests on Friday morning. The good news is that the insulin has seemingly halted the weight loss, and she may have gained some back but I am not sure if I am imagining that or not. The bad news is that due to some miscommunications the Vet was not able to successfully complete a glucose curve last week and we have to reattempt it this Friday.

Another positive however is that because she has been with me since a kitten, she pretty much will tolerate me doing anything that needs to happen. That is not to say that she does not protest furiously when I do have to poke her with a needle, but she more or less forgives me immediately. I am so thankful that if I were to have any cat come down with this disease… that it is Kenzie, because there is no way in hell that I could have given twice a day shots to Mollie. I can barely even pick her up without her freaking the hell out. Kenzie on the other hand I can carry around on my shoulder indefinitely because I have done so since she was super tiny. Above is photo evidence of this era when she would sit on my shoulder and watch me game.

While not super evident by the fact that I am only level 50… I have been spending a lot of time playing Diablo III on the Switch. This has recently replaced Dragalia Lost as my before sleep game that I am playing while laying down in bed. Last night I was not feeling super great and wound up going to bed around 9 pm and then hanging out and playing D3 until the news came on. I am mostly spending my time going through bounties, and I doubt that I will complete the seasons journey on console… but it does give me something to work towards. Seeing how freaking brutal Kolrath was I opted to play as a Barbarian, and I like the female Barb way better than the male one.

Another thing that has been going on recently is that I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. I opted to start in creative mode and started piddling around on a giant castle project. I started work on this as some point during Saturday and this is around the time of recording the podcast Saturday night. You can see that I started putting up a giant wall but hadn’t made much progress in actually hollowing anything out. I find the whole process relaxing as hell and lately I have been in this weird funk of not really knowing what to play. I could be finishing up Outer Worlds and I could also be finishing up Jedi Fallen Order, but instead I have spent my time building a castle.

This screenshot is from this morning and hopefully shows off some of the scale of this monstrosity. Inside there are four levels worth of construction, and the “ground floor” enters into what is effectively the 3rd floor going up, with two floors below the ground. I am not entirely certain what I am going to do with the 1st and 2nd floor as of yet, but I think the next big project is to build essentially a “keep” on top of the peak that you can see on the right side of the walled city area.

Since I have been building on creative mode, I have not been super concerned with torching things off and as a result I have a basement full of monsters that have spawned in. This is the second floor or Basement 1 depending on how you think about it, and I need to sort out what I have planned for down here. My general idea was that the ground floor would be shops and this floor would be small houses/apartments and maybe the same for the lowest floor, but ritzier houses since everything floats out over a giant underground lake of sorts. I want to build some other buildings out along the countryside as well, because there would be an assemblage of housing NEAR the walled city but not quite in it as well. Maybe build up a walled farm or two that are protected to feed resources into the city.

I am back playing the Java version of Minecraft because for a bit I kicked around starting a server in my home for this map. I also really miss the minimap addon whenever I am playing on the Windows 10 client. Ultimately this is sorta what I do when I am playing the game. I invent civilizations and build the structures that they would have used. The funny thing is… once the process is over I do absolutely nothing with the end product and often times just discard the maps after having spent hundreds of hours working on them. All that ultimately remains is a series of screenshots to prove that I did the thing.

Diablo 3 Keybinds

December 2, 2019 by Belghast

Over the Thanksgiving break I spent most of my time playing Diablo 3. I go through these periods at the beginning of a new season where I play hard and heavy for a few weeks and then taper off once I have achieved whatever goal I thought I wanted to achieve for the season. This time around Blizzard put a Tyrael themed Goblin pet at the end of the process and as a result I ground my way to the very end. This was supposed to be the season that I learned the joys of playing a Wizard, but I have to say I am just not a big fan of that class. The highest I managed to get my Wizard was a solo Greater Rift 60, and now that I am in the post seasons journey I might try finishing out the set I was going for and seeing how well it plays.

My friend Grace bailed me out and helped me power level a Demon Hunter and get some of the basic gearing that I needed. This ultimately was the class that I finished the Seasons Journey on and has rapidly become the class that I am the most familiar with. Effectively it and the Thorns Crusader are pretty much my favorite ways to play Diablo 3. I should branch out more, but when I find something I like I end up sticking to it. On the Demon Hunter I effectively ran a variant of the Unhallowed Essense Multi-shot build that you can find on Icy Veins. The most important part about playing the build is never stopping long enough to get hit, because you are still relatively squishy… but Demon Hunter has the mechanics to keep that from happening whereas I felt like the Wizard lacked them.

I’ve seen a bunch of friends dipping their toes into this season, and because of this I thought I would spend this morning breaking out the most cogent advice that I have. I have to credit Grace for starting me down this path initially, but the single best thing I did to improve my gameplay in Diablo 3 was set a keybind for “Force Move”. This effectively gives you a key that pressing it down moves your character towards your mouse cursor. I highlighted the keybinds that I am going to be talking about in the above image but the first one is that when I hold W my character moves towards where my mouse cursor is allowing me to move the mouse to steer rather than relying on the sometimes sloppy click to move. This is important because it allows you to be moving independent of any other actions you might be taking with your character and rapidly change directions as needed.

The next important keybind is that I bound my first skill slot to space bar. This is where I put my movement key on whatever class I happen to be playing. So on Barbarian this would be Leap Attack or Furious Charge, on Demon Hunter it would be Vault, on Witch Doctor it would be Spirit Walk, Wizard it would be Teleport, and Crusader it would be Steed Charge. It is plays on a key that is super easy to spam because you are going to want to be moving as fast as possible most of the time especially when dealing with higher level Greater Rifts.

You are probably questioning why I have Action slot 2, 3 and 4 bound to 7, 8 and 9… and I have to admit this is a fairly new revelation. I play with a Logitech G600 gaming mouse with a keypad on the left hand side. For me the most natural and comfortable keys to hit are in the 7/8/9 row as that seems to be where my thumb naturally rests. That means I can comfortably move up to hit 4/5/6 or down to hit 0/-/= without really interrupting my play in MMORPGs. Most builds involve putting your most important abilities on Left Mouse and Right Mouse and then anything you just want to keep hitting periodically on keybinds 2/3/4. I find it takes me out of the action less if I am hitting these on the mouse as opposed to trying to reach them on the keyboard while holding the W key to be moving forward. Ultimately you sorta have to figure out what feels best for you, but for me this works.

The truth of playing higher tiers of Diablo 3 is that standing still is going to kill you. You effectively need to stay in constant motion to be able to avoid the cavalcade of nonsense that is being thrown at you as far as ground effects and missiles headed your direction. I find it way easier to do this while staying shifting around the battlefield and in order to do this effectively you need to be able to move independent of you performing any attacks. Similarly there are a bunch of attacks that are effectively skill shots requiring you to swing your mouse cursor around in a specific direction and I find this easier to do it I am doing so without worrying about what directional inputs I might be sending my character. Keybinds made Diablo 3 feel so much better and I need to see if I can set up something similar in Path of Exile to maybe fix some of the bad feelings I have towards that game.

As far as my late game seasonal journey, I have had a decent amount of luck with Primal Ancient drops. I aligned these in the order of which I got them, and the one I got from clearing my first 70 Greater Rift is the Nemesis Bracers, which are usually a cube item… but I wound up shifting up my build a bit to accommodate them. The most important drop was my Primal Ancient Yangs which I managed to get by re-rolling a spare Yangs over and over trying to get an Ancient and then somehow winning the Jackpot. The St. Archew gloves are mostly a throw away drop, but I got them on a character I will be talking about in a few minutes making that a little bit more viable. Lastly I got a Primal Ancient piece of the Unhallowed set which blends perfectly into the build on the Demon Hunter.

At the beginning of the season I mentioned that I had never played a Wizard or a Witch Doctor before and apparently this is the season where both of these have been remedied. Grace mentioned that since we are both done with the seasonal journey that we should roll a couple of “Chicken” build Witch Doctors to do some nonsense farming with. I leveled a Gem of Ease and ground up the Witch Doctor yesterday afternoon for fun. I have to admit while I don’t have anything close to a final build, the leveling build I am running is rather enjoyable. The class as a whole feels like this weird blend of the Necromancer and the Demon Hunter… both of which classes that I greatly enjoy. So I can see this being enjoyable.

I’ve only managed to get up to Torment VI with the character, but right now I mostly need the rest of the Helltooth Items and the weapon set that makes the Chicken build work. More or less this is going to be the thing that keeps me invested in this season, and I may even dust off the Wizard and get it moving again. Weirdly at night I am going from playing Diablo 3 on the PC to laying in bed and playing Diablo 3 on the Switch for awhile as I play up a seasonal Barbarian there. Apparently I am in the zone as far as it comes to playing Diablo, and I am sure this will last right up until the point that the new season starts in Destiny 2.