Action RPGs

Action RPGs along the lines of the Diablo Franchise

Destiny Rising: The Sequel We Deserved

by

Good Morning Folks. Now that I have largely pushed Path of Exile II aside for the moment, I am diving with full force into Destiny Rising and spent pretty much all last night playing it. I’ve not arrived at the second world zone called the Red Rift and with it comes both new enemies and npcs to interact with. This is the realm of the world under the control of Saladin that we are VERY familiar with from Destiny 1 and 2. The thing is… he is a much different Saladin than I remember, way angrier and way more impulsive. The further into the game I have gotten, the more the story really matters and the better it has gotten. There are a few moments pretty early in the campaign that feel like throw away story bits, and there is some weird voice actor changes at times… where it feels like NetEase assumed any English voice was good enough. However the further into this game I get the more polished it seems to be.

From what I remember the first area was all that was available in the alpha, and it largely focuses on the Space Age China equivalent of Jiangshi and its battle with both the Fallen and the Hive. Red Rift however focuses around a group of plucky miners trying to harvest this resource that is used to activate the remaining bits of a dead sentinel, whose wreckage serves as the general shell of their main town. Instead of Fallen and Hive, we are introduced to the Cabal and later in the missions quite possibly the most dangerous enemy type in the Destiny universe, the dimensional and time hopping Vex. What is really cool is that in both cases… they are not just recycling themes we have already seen in the core Destiny games. We are getting new unit types and new locations that we have never experienced before. The visuals are fucking fire, like this weird vapor-wave chamber where we teleport into to fight a big Vex boss… and we can see in the distance a group of Vex worshiping some big statue… reminiscent of the very end of Destiny 1.

The other thing that is wild is just how damned much content this game has. I am going to talk for a bit like I am a diehard Destiny player… because I absolutely was from the launch of the game in 2014… up until the point that I checked out in 2021. During all of that time… one of the features that the players have begged for was a return of a limited time event from Destiny 1 called the Sparrow Racing League… or SRL. Guess what Destiny Rising has? Yup! Every day during a specific period of time you can race sparrows on some wild tracks. I think I need to maybe break out a controller for this because the mouse controls felt a bit kludgy trying to stay on the Vex track I randomed into. On top of this Shadowshaper Duels is a very Gwent style strategic card game led by this games version of the Drifter. Fishing is also pretty great, and really something I should be doing every day. I believe Iron Bar is a PVP mode that only happens on the weekend, so maybe this games version of the Trial of Osiris.

Yesterday I also unlocked the Iron Commander mode, which is effectively this games version of AFK missions that you can send your unlocked heroes on. When you do this, you essentially lose access to those characters in some of the casual gameplay modes. However it appears that you can keep doing all of the more core content like planetary missions, and queued activities like Strikes. Essentially you pick a mode and choose three of your champions and then can run that over the course of a few hours at the end of which you are awarded some of the unique items that drop in that mode. This is going to be really cool for collecting resources from some of the gameplay modes that I don’t really personally enjoy that much like the chaos roguelike mode.

I’ve also spent way more time with the Wolf Pack and now really want to build our own. This thing has guild housing that unlocks by default, and I believe there are limited customization that you can do as a guild. If nothing else it gives you a private shared space to hang out and mingle with your friends before going off to do other events. The game is really pretty for a mobile game, and I am shocked at just how well it runs over an emulator. While the controls are not quite as tight as an actual Bungie game… it is way the hell more approachable than actual Destiny. Like I said I checked out in 2021, and I installed Destiny 2 yesterday… and seemed to not have access to anything but the Tower. The only options I was given was travel to the tower or to buy the latest expansion… so in theory I have been gone long enough that all of the content that I once owned… has rolled out of the game making it entirely unplayable.

The thing you will spend most of your time doing with the pack is doing this hex grid exploration mode called the Pack Hunt. Essentially you send your character out to explore spaces on this map, and sometimes you uncover resources that you can loot for yourself and the guild. Occasionally you will uncover mini world missions that you can run, or resource drops that will show up on square you have already uncovered. You are given a limited number of actions a day and these work in the background so you can flip over and send your character on a longer mission, and then queue up for some other activity or just explore one of the planetary zones. This is peak mobile gaming nonsense, but it is kind of fun and it feels good to uncover resources that everyone shares in. There is a currency you collect through doing pack actions, and the more active the pack is… the more of this resource everyone else can harvest.

I’ve also unlocked heroic content and with it a new gameplay mode called the Gauntlet where you queue up with six players in total. Now one of the cool things about all of this content is that if for some reason it does not fill in a timely manner, you get bots that replace characters and from what I have seen… they are really well scripted. Like I have heard of folks running the raids with the NPC bots, and them doing far better than the average random player. These six player modes really feel like where you want to be spending your daily activity currency, because the rewards are pretty phenomenal. They are not that much longer than a normal strike, but the things you are a fighting are a bit tankier, and you have to rely on other players to do some mechanics. For example there was a boss that we fought where every so often it would go invulnerable and we would have to fight mini bosses in three different rooms, so that we could flip a computer screen on… which then fired a blast at the boss when all three rooms were cleared which made it vulnerable to small arms fire again.

With the Gauntlet modes also gave me access to Mythic rarity weapons. These have a few mythic specific traits and then roll with legendary traits on the other weapon slots from what I have seen. Unfortunately I have yet to pull the Mythic Auto-rifle, but I did pick up a pretty sweet Pulse Rifle for Kabr. It seems like 60 gear level is really where the “endgame” gearing starts to begin. I believe the level cap for characters is 80, based on what I have seen in some of the activities. I look forward to reaching the point where I can really focus on trying to build something resembling a proper load-out. Right now I am mostly just using whatever weapon gives me the highest light rating at any given time. I have a few uniques, namely the grenade launcher that you unlock pretty early in the story missions, and Crimson which is an auto-pistol that I unlocked through one of the login bonus things.

I’ve leveled quite quickly, but put almost zero emphasis upon gaining experience. The game rolls out in a very structured manner where each chapter has various objectives that have to be completed to move to the next chapter. Each chapter usually has some sort of story bit associated with it, and then a bunch of activity unlocks or benchmarks that you need to hit with your characters. Once you finish unlocking everything… there is the option to refund ALL of the resources you have used during the campaign so there really is no negative in just choosing some characters and pushing them up to meet the benchmarks. For example I need to sort out my Artifacts and push up my power level a bit in order to move to the next story bit. The current game goes through Chapter 7-2 so I still have quite a bit to go. Ultimately I am trying to get caught up so that when the next story drop happens I will be ready to go.

I think I am going to give up on Hot Goth Waifu, and instead focus on gathering resources for attempts on Estela because a new banner starts in few days. I saw some early information that indicated that Estela uses an Autorifle and a Heavy Machinegun, which is a pretty favorable loadout. She is dressed like a Warlock, so I am going to assume that is her base class. Umeko on the other hand looks more like a hunter and I have no information as to what her loadout is going to look like. I would really like to find a Void character that I actually enjoy playing. Ikora is a bit too much of a one trick pony for my tastes, and the whole Grenade Launcher and Rocket Launcher gameplay… is awkward meaning that you mostly are going to rely on that one ability trick to kill everything. This is the first game where I prefer Hunter jumps to Titan jumps, because for some reason there is no way to do the rocket jump forward momentum thing that I loved so much in the first two Destiny games.

Right now I think I have all of the core areas unlocked that are currently in the game. I’ve only really just started in the Red Sea Rift area and I need to spend a bunch more time out there roaming around and looking for secrets. On top of that there are a bunch of quests associated with each character that you unlock, and you can only get access to these by actually playing those characters and leveling up their affinity system. Right now the only ones I have really played are Kabr which you unlock through the campaign, and Xuan Wei who is a very melee focused striker titan that I pulled from the perm banner, for which you get a bunch of free currency. Other than that I have Ikora whcih also comes from the campaign, and then Tan-2, Attal, and Finnala that all came from the perm banner free pulls. I would love to pull Jolder because they seem like a really strong defensive Void Titan, that is so far the only one that comes with the big bubble and shield throw nonsense.

Anyways… I am very engaged in this game. If you are like me and used to love Destiny, but bounced for various reasons as they started removing content… I highly suggest checking this out. Put aside that it is a mobile gacha game, because there is plenty of fun to be had here without spending a dime. All of that content that got removed… or that is limited time stuff that we remember fondly… it seems to be here. Destiny Rising really feels like the Destiny 3 that the players deserved.

Biggest Blaugust Ever

by

Good Morning Folks. I want to start out this week’s posts by giving a rousing round of applause for the Blaugustans who just finished participating in Blaugust 2025. This event would not have existed were it not for the wonderful community of mentors that have volunteered for that role over the last decade. Specifically I want to recognize Krikket who was the first to take up the mantle and acted as defacto leader of this event. Yesterday she made the summary post talking about the participants and handing out of awards and I highly suggest you stop reading this and go check that post out. This is a year that I could not have handled the rigors of running this event, and while I will be happy to take up that mantle again in the future… the success of this event goes out to the crew that helped make it happen while I could not. This is legitimately the largest event that has ever been run, and I was shocked to see the final tally of almost 170 participants. 2024 was previously the largest year with 116, and this 2025 represents roughly 30% growth rate between the two most recent years.

The wildest thing about this event is that we had people participating that did not know until the very end what the event even really was. They just viewed it as a hashtag that got popular on the fediverse and tagged along. In many ways the event has long since outgrown me and my meddling and just become this fixture of our small corner of the internet. I will always think of it as this small game blog thing… but that stopped being true many years ago. The Blaugust discord is super active all year round, but is especially so during the event. The Welcome channel is full of people signing up for the very first time and it has been cool to watch. Watch from the corner of course because everything about the activity levels of the discord now triggers the fuck out of my introvert tendencies… so you only really see me speaking when spoken to directly or talking to something in the super secret mentor channel. This is sort of the way of things that I start… they get bigger than my anxiety can reasonably handle and I get quiet. Folks either tend to view me as aloof or stoic… but in reality I just can’t handle that many people at once.

In other news I have been playing quite a lot of Destiny Rising and am shocked at just how good this game is. That said it has made me contemplate clearing up some disk space to reinstall Destiny 2 so I can have a more direct comparison, since it has been ages since I last played it. The story has been great in Rising, but I am not the biggest fan of the way in which it is doled slowly. You have to do a bunch of different activities to unlock the next bit of story, and my preference tends to be to mainline the story so that I can spend more time enjoying the endgame activities. I know this method is an attempt to keep people engaged longer, but it goes against my natural instincts for this sort of experience.

One of the things that has been really impressive is the breadth of activities and how different they feel. You still only really get a limited amount of activity currency each day in the games pseudo-stamina system, but in truth I am not mainlining the game so it has been more than enough to do anything I might want to do in a single day. If you are playing this game you should absolutely friend me and my code is 20953603268. I attempted to create a version of Greysky Armada but it ultimately timed out. You have 24 hours to get 6 people signed up into the guild (Wolf Pack) in order to create it, and I could not hit that number. If we manage to get enough people playing I will make another attempt at it, because there are a lot of cool things to do in a pack. I joined one of the temporary ones and have been enjoying the weird little missions that open up as a result.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have made it up to level 87 and am capable of pretty comfortably running t15 maps. With that I have unlocked all of the +5 atlas point nodes through cleansing corrupted nexii. Now I am mostly hunting out various unique maps which themselves reward 2 additional points for completing them. I am not sure if there is a place where I can see a total tally of the number of unique maps that I have run, but I think I have done four of them so far. The Lake of Kalandra one is my favorite, but mostly because I love the look of that area. I thought it was cool during the Kalandra league and I still think the effect is extremely slick.

The only problem that I am having right now is that after beating the campaign, and unlocking most of my atlas points… I sort of feel like I don’t have much of a reason to keep playing. I could always keep improving the gear on my character, but it works well enough to do the hardest mapping content, and since I never really care much bout bossing… I sort of feel like I have beaten this league. That is the same problem that I had with Last Epoch, is that after I unlocked all of the Harbingers and took down basic Aberroth I felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. What makes this game more challenging though is that I keep struggling with technical difficulties. Firstly I cannot watch youtube on my second monitor while playing this game because while the audio keeps playing… the video playback always freezes. Secondly the game crashes constantly, and while I can log right back in where I left off… this eventually grates on you after awhile given that I can only finish one or two maps before the client dies on me. Lastly Path of Exile II as a whole is just not as performant as Path of Exile 1, and even when it is not crashing… there are weird hitches and stutters happening all the time. Supposedly most of this is because I have an intel processor… but still it makes the entire thing eventually not worth fighting with.

In another completely different news… on a whim yesterday afternoon I decided to record myself telling the tale of when I saw a Bigfoot in 1986 and 1995 and then turn this into a video. I’ve written about it here before on the blog, but it always feels like the written versions never really do it justice, because I feel like I am having to go into way too much background information. I did not script this take and as a result it is about 25 minutes of me talking through the story and how it relates to some other sightings in my neck of the woods. I also attempting to illustrate the tale a bit with some google maps shots and various other related images. This will not be everyone’s thing, and it does not fit the rest of my YouTube channel but for some reason I felt like I needed to say it all.

Steam Go Boom

by

Good Morning Folks. Happy Day After Silksong launched, if you celebrate it. So for those who were confused as to why pretty much every digital storefront died around 9 am CDT… Silksong the sequel to Hollow Knight was released and it was exceptionally anticipated by many. I enjoyed what I played of the first game and as such I had planned on picking up this release if for no reason to support its particular brand of indie development. Also they could have charged way the hell more for the game but are instead charging $20 for the game… $32 if you want to be fancy and also get the soundtrack. Essentially all digital storefronts cratered as the game released. I intermittently tried to complete my purchase and did not succeed until 12:30… and even then it errored out a few times before it finally went through. While I did not see it with my own eyes, I heard from friends that the Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation stores all were struggling as well under the weight of users. Why they did not have this up for pre-order ahead of time… is beyond me.

I think it is safe to assume that they sold several million copies when you factor in all of the platforms it is available on. We have zero data from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, or GOG… but at least on Steam it held the top seller slot for most of yesterday. This is pretty freaking impressive for a $20 title, because the Steam sales charts are based on dollar amount of sales not volume of purchases which is why the Steam Deck is habitually listed near the top, and this morning Borderlands 4 reclaimed that spot with its $70 base version and $120 super deluxe version. Additionally it hit a peak concurrency of over a half million players. There are a couple of dozen folks on my Steams friends list who have purchased the game and quite a few spent most of yesterday playing it. Basically this is an instant hit, and will probably be the game of the year for many people.

I played a tiny bit yesterday just because I could, but I did not make it terribly far. I failed the first boss I encountered and will have to dedicate some time to get used to the diagonal slash instead of the down slash. I have to admit, this is not my favorite style of Metroidvania. I greatly prefer the games that are way more about exploration and gear acquisition, than the ones that are purely about mechanical aptitude. This is why I greatly preferred Bloodstained to Hollow Knight, but most of my friends are the exact opposite. My old man reflexes struggle anymore with some of the movement in these games. I love the artwork and the vibes though, so at some point I want to finish Hollow Knight and then play my way through Silksong. I think both are exceptionally cool, but also are not necessarily the thing I was dying to play like so many were. I did however want to join the zeitgeist at least partially, so threw them my $20. I also thought it was an interesting cultural moment because I cannot remember a time when a single game brought multiple storefronts to their knees.

I spent most of last night playing Path of Exile II, but I have also been noodling around with a mobile game. I am not sure when Destiny Rising officially launched, but I was briefly an alpha tester for it some time ago. Playing it on the phone was perfect cromulet, but also not really my jam. With the full release of the game comes a lightweight emulator option that offers some pretty good mouse and keyboard PC performance, as well as the option to play it with a controller if that is more of your jam. If you have not been around this blog for very long… you would potentially not know just how much of these pages I devoted to both Destiny and Destiny 2 until Bungie pissed me off with all of their content vaulting. When I saw that some of the more diehard Destiny streamers were picking up this game, I had to give it another shot, and honestly I am pretty surprised by just how good it plays.

There are significant differences in the way that this game works. Namely from a story perspective this is essentially an alternate universe version of the tried and true tale of the Traveler. More importantly however this is a hero shooter, and that means instead of playing a character that you create for yourself.. you are playing the character of wolf, a newly resurrected character where you can choose the gender and appearance for similar to many other Gacha main characters. The key difference here however is that this is a fully fleshed out character and seems exceptionally well rounded and not something you will immediately toss aside the first time you succumb to the lure of chasing a 5 star banner. Every character has a loadout with a specific set of super abilities, and a weapon pairing. This means that there are going to be characters that you might like the weapons for but hate the super and vice versa. The combo of hunter double jump, auto rifle, grenade launcher, and this big damned anime robot sword slash attack seem like a solid combo for a base character.

Because it is a mobile gacha game there are of course reward tracks and banners, but I have not made it far enough into the game to unlock the latter. In fact it has not really asked me for any money so far. I’ve essentially only been through the first few missions, but it seems like there is a challenge track that will unlock one of two premium characters. There is a training room that lets you test all of the characters and I am pretty much going to choose Xuan Wei because he is essentially what we would refer to as a Striker Titan. It is heavily Chinese influenced as are pretty much all Gacha games, and it also has chase Waifu characters that everyone seems to want. There is a Hot Goth girl with a Scythe attack that everyone seems to be talking about chasing in the online discourse.

What is impressive however is just how good the performance is for what is essentially an emulated android game. It feels like Destiny. They have nailed the gunplay and you can also pet the cats, which is the most important bit. Actually the whole cat thing seems to be a mini game in that each one you encounter wants some sort of food. I have no clue what you get for collecting the food and correctly delivering them to the right cats, but I am sure I will evetually do this thing. If you loved Destiny at any point and faded away from the mainline game for various reasons, I highly suggest you check out this particular brand of nonsense. It is pretty solid. I need to get used to the phone client though so I can add this to my late night daily chores gaming while waiting on falling to sleep. Right now I play a minimal amount of Pokemon, and AFK Journey… and could at least pick up the daily login rewards for this game if I did not play any of it on the computer.

Anyways. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will see you again on Sunday when I post the new AggroChat show.

What Happened to Last Epoch?

by

Good Morning Folks. If you have been reading this blog lately you might have had a bit of whiplash as I went from having a blast in Last Epoch… to suddenly diving headlong into Path of Exile II. So you might be asking yourself… Hey Bel… What happened to Last Epoch? This is one of the challenges of both the seasonal model of ARPGs and the fact that a new game launched over an extended United States Holiday weekend. Kodra and Ash are still very much 100% engaged with Last Epoch, and I think I maybe just burned through the process a bit faster than they did. Ultimately I built two fairly successful characters with my Fire Minions Necromancer and then later my Thorns Forge Guard. More than that though I think I just accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish in a very short amount of time… far shorter than I thought it would be.

On Saturday, Ace and I spent the day pushing through corruption levels. I was a bit further progressed than they were and thanks to these temporal token things, you can force a boss pretty fast in a given timeline to help catch corruption up. So before lunch we burned through all of the Harbingers that they were missing that I had completed, and then after a lunch break we pushed through all of the remaining Harbingers. The unfortunate part about this story is that when you are pushing corruption with a friend… your own corruption levels are not updating at all. This feels like something that really needs to change because I think above anything else this kill momentum for Ace. They were sub 200 when we started the day and to push up to 300+ is hours worth of work. I really feel like Eleventh Hour Games needs to rethink the way that corruption works, and that it should be something akin to how pushing Greater Rifts worked in Diablo 3, that once you achieve a rank in any timeline… you can select the corruption that you want to farm from a slider or drop down.

We made an attempt on Aberroth together but had both completely forgotten the mechanics. We took a break to go off and do things before the podcast and I returned managing to take down Aberroth after a few tries. The problem with this however is that it how feels like I have effectively beaten the game. Pushing corruption for the sake of pushing corruption never really feels like a meaningful goal. Before you hit corruption levels you have honestly unlocked most of the content you will ever be engaging with, and doing the harbingers sort of feels like a last hurrah for your build. Sure Uber Aberroth exists, but I am not nearly “tryhard” enough to care about taking it down. At this point I would probably swap builds and try running something else up through the paces. There are more woven echoes that I could unlock for more points in the weavers tree… but I sort of just feel like I finished on a good place.

Farming content is enjoyable, and I am sure I will play some more Last Epoch before the next season. There are a few builds that I want to try, but there is just something missing in this game that Path of Exile has that keeps me engaged. I am not entirely certain how to quantify it. Last Epoch is a game about farming multiple copies of the same thing trying to get ever more perfect versions… but you can essentially reach a point of good enough to do all of the content extremely quickly. There are fewer endgame systems to engage with, and as a result it starts to feel stale more quickly. Whereas Path of Exile has a decades worth of content that is all super detailed enough to be its own game… and I wind up going down rabbit holes trying to farm this super rare item or that. The only thing of equivalent rarity here is the Red Ring… which I have never seen, nor do I think I will ever actually see. It is like trying to farm a mageblood or mirror… and effectively unobtainium.

I legitimately expected to only play enough Path of Exile II to farm up the MTX for clearing Act 1 and then move on with my life. However I wound up rerolling and found out that Minion Internalist is still a pretty freaking solid build. More than that I am actually enjoying myself and wanting to see how deep I can push this time around. The gearing process also feels like it takes way longer here, which is a double edged sword. You have to engage with the trade system to really build a functional character, or you need a PHD in the crafting system in order to build your own gear. I managed to mostly get a stable character with stuff off the ground, but now I am largely in currency acquisition mode so that I can eventually afford nicer stuff. Last Epoch doesn’t really have that currency acquisition mode feeling… because even in a trade economy they are using the boring resource of gold… and not the exciting tink of getting a Divine Orb to drop in a map. Gold will never feel as individually special as getting that rare currency item to drop for you.

There are also these “Difficult Boss” nodes that I want to check out, but have not pushed my map tiers up high enough to be able to farm them yet. I did figure out how to unlock them and I figured I would post an infographic for anyone who follows after me. Essentially when you see a blocked node covered in fog, there will be nodes that show up with blue swirlies around them. Inside of each of them there will be a Draiocht Hengestone in the boss chamber of that map, and clicking on this will cause another node to show up. Once you have cleared a few of these the swirlies will move to the blocked node and uncloak the fog of war around it. There is a similar Temporal Sandstorm and Eye of the Storm mechanic on the map but I have not figured out the on map tell for either of those. I know for the Temporal Sandstorm I have started to find hourglasses in the boss rooms of the surrounding maps, and I assume like the hengestones that if I click on enough of these a path will show up.

The biggest problem that I am having right now is with map sustain. It used to be that running a map with a boss guaranteed an upgrade to the next tier higher. This seems to no longer be the case and I am struggling to keep upgrading my map tiers and pushing things higher. I am heading towards a corrupted area now, desperately trying to spawn a T6 map drop… so that I can complete the corruption nexus and get more skill points. I really do not like this method for unlocking atlas points, and in truth I hope they rethink the whole design of this endgame system. This is a perfectly fine endgame system, but I don’t feel like it is a good replacement for mapping from Path of Exile. I loved Delve, but that was not a game mode for everyone. This is honestly a complaint I have with the game is that it feels like they have doubled down on specific mechanics and are now forcing everyone to do them. Sanctum and Ultimatum were perfectly fine mechanics if you enjoyed them, and so long as they were optional… life was great… same for Delve. However now that all three are required mechanics to progress in the game… players are not enjoying it.

We had a big patch yesterday and so far my build seems to have survived it just fine. That has not been the case with other Spectre builds, and it makes me really glad that I have not chased the trend of hopping on the latest and greatest spectre combination. The unique spectres that gave specific buffs ate the nerfbat, and unfortunately one of the new hotness spectres that everyone has been switching to also got impacted. The last bit is supposedly a mistake, but I am glad that I have more or less stuck with Vaal Guards in spite of the visual noise. I could run more but I feel like a mix of Arsonists and Vaal Guards helps clear significantly because the Arsonists do nice instant damage and the Guards have a delayed grenade impact effect.

I have a few gear upgrades that I snagged cheaply, but unfortunately both require level 80… so I am mostly head down farming mode until then. It looks like the Frozen Mandibles were restored in a patch this morning so when I get that additional spirit I might try swapping over to them at that point.