Action RPGs

Action RPGs along the lines of the Diablo Franchise

A Not-So-Small Delay

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Good Morning Folks. When last we spoke I was excited and preparing for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion. More than anything I was excited that the launch was happening at a reasonable hour so that both myself who is in Central Time Zone and Ace who is in Eastern Time Zone could actually participate in the game together. Throughout the day we made plans to hang out and chitchat while making our way through the campaign that evening. It is really moments like this that we both look forward to when we are both reasonably excited about something at the same time and can do nonsense together. So often we are playing totally different things, but the stars seemed like they were aligning to give us a new game launch to dig our teeth into in a manner that was going to be enjoyable and not trying to stay up until midnight.

Then roughly thirty minutes before the game was set to go live at 6 PM CDT, the bomb was dropped that the launch was going to be delayed. In what has become one of the least correct posts in a while, they stated that there was a “small technical issue” that would lead to a “small delay” to the launch of the game. In true Blizzard fashion, they gave us no real information to work with, and as a result, the rumor mill started filling in the gaps. PC players were stating that it was a problem with one of the console releases that was to blame for the delay, Console players were stating that it was something to do with Steam’s rigid update schedule… and in the vacuum, we were left without any facts to go on. The rest of the evening was dictated by 2-hour blocks… of just needing a few more hours… which ultimately led to the game launching roughly six hours late.

Diablo IV has had a fraught history since its launch last year. So much so that “D4 Bad” has become a prevalent meme in the ARPG community with countless music videos released on the theme of it being “dogshit”. Admittedly some of these are bangers and largely feature a cast of characters from the ARPG streaming scene. The Vessel of Hatred expansion launch was a grand coming out for the game again, a cotillion where it was being presented to the world to show how much it had improved. Last night’s botched launch pretty much destroyed that goodwill in an instant. Pretty much every streamer to some extent had to deal with the return of the “D4 Bad” crew to their chats, and honestly… they weren’t wrong. How many games has Blizzard launched throughout the years, and how many of them have they bungled at the finish line?

What is even worse is that Streamers were left holding the bag for the botched communications surrounding this situation. Blizzard was simply not giving any real information about what is going on. Contrast this with the way in which Eleventh Hour Games communicated at the launch of Last Epoch when it had so many server issues. I was way more willing to show forgiveness towards a group of developers that were sharing what was actually going on, and how they were trying to resolve it… rather than last night’s refrain of “just a few hours more”. Raxx spent the evening playing various games with his stream, doing a bracket of games for him to play and eventually falling into chess.

Darth Microtransaction attempted to keep the attention of the crowd by giving away copies of the expansion, handing out battle passes, and then playing a betting game with his audience. He would bet that the game would launch within the next thirty minutes, and then when that time had passed he would give another five subscriptions away to his viewers. At one point I know he had over three thousand folks tuned in and watching his stream, in which he was playing a video he had recorded of Vessel of Hatred in the background while playing Old School Runescape in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and attempting to keep chat engaged.

Pohx who is quite possibly the sweetest person in all of the Path of Exile community, decided to give the launch of the expansion a go. He spent the evening playing Warcraft 3 custom maps and then eventually said fuck it and went to bed. I ultimately gave up around 9 pm and went to bed, I am not sure when Ace did but I don’t think they stayed up that late. I am glad that I gave up because the game did not roll out until after 11 PM my time and with it came a 23 gig patch… essentially negating the whole process of preloading the game that we did earlier this week. This is a massive black eye towards the game and towards the team behind it.

I was clearly annoyed enough to devote an entire blog post to that fact this morning, but in truth I was mostly having a chill night. I kept various Streams open in the background throughout the night so I could find out tidbits of information as they trickled out. The majority of the evening I spent in Path of Exile slowly chipping away at challenges, ultimately knocking two of them out. My map runners also brought about four divines last night so it was a pretty great time all around. I think my biggest frustration about this whole situation is the complete and total communications fail from Blizzard. I am not sure what they were thinking by trying to constantly diminish the impact of this outage because clearly, it backfired. Had they just been honest and set reasonable expectations… folks would have gone about their night and done other things rather than feverishly waiting for the launch of a game that was not coming… or at least that was arriving almost six hours late.

This morning I got in briefly and created a Spiritborn because I figured I might as well try the class while it was likely to have some grossly overpowered builds. I was happy to see that there was the option to create a character and start with the new campaign without also having to complete the original campaign. I’ve created a seasonal character because essentially my stable of standard characters is dead to me. I am probably going to go the whole poison Centipede build with it because it looks wild. I used to like playing the Monk in Diablo III, and I figure this is going to feel a bit like that based on the video footage I have seen.

I sincerely hope that the community did not devolve into death threats last night, but the Diablo IV team deserves some ire for their fumbling of this launch. More than anything they need to reassess how they communicate with players because what I saw last night was insufficient and sad.

A Cup of Hatred

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern this week. I have a very long post kicking around in my skull but have not quite committed to writing it yet, or honestly even know how to approach it. However tonight the Vessel of Hatred expansion launches for Diablo IV and I am planning on giving that a go. I did not last terribly long in Season 5, but I am interested to see how things sort out for all of the changes that they are making to the game to make it a bit more Diablo III-ish. Remember I was a D3 seasonal player for over a decade so that is not necessarily a bad thing for me. I am trying to decide if I am going to try out the new Spiritborn class or do my normal Barbarian run. If I go Spiritborn I will probably go the nonsensical-sounding centipede poison build, because might as well play it before it gets nerfed.

In other weekend news, my Minecraft nether tunneling project has finally paid off. Essentially I had been branching out of my main portal in every direction looking for the Warpwood biome, so that I could collect some resources from it and be able to grow the blue-green trees in my base. I really need to plant down some sign posts because my tunnel network is getting a little hard to navigate by memory. The thing I forgot about the Warpwood Biome though, is that Endermen spawn there so I might have to create some structures to be able to farm them for Ender Pearls. I doubt I have a dedicated post to the nonsense I have been up to, because quite honestly… digging tunnels is a big boring, but I find it relaxing.

I also spent a little bit of time this weekend playing around with Tiny Glade. This game essentially is a diorama-building tool that lets you procedurally generate really cool-looking castles and cottages and then terraform the land surrounding it. I wish there was a bit more “game” here like the ability to have tiny NPCs inhabit your world akin to Sim Tower. I used to love that game and then watching the tiny pixel people going about their day. The game is gorgeous though and if you get the hankering to build some cottage-core palaces then this is probably the game you have been looking for. Players have already recreated Rivendell and other massive structures from fiction. One of the neat things about the game is that there is a daily theme to help you get started in your creations.

I’ve also played a bit more Soulframe, but honestly… one of my core complaints about the game thus far appears to be a feature. One of the plots of the game is that this group that you are fighting back against has destroyed knowledge in the world, and as a result, all of your quest objectives show up as this foreign language that you cannot read. Then as you recover knowledge, you begin to be able to translate things a letter or two at a time. This is a cool idea from a storytelling aspect, but it largely just leads to a frustrating in-game experience as you have no clue what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going. Even more frustrating is that it appears that objectives can be completed multiple times, so your sparrow friend who is supposed to show you the way to the next thing you should care about sometimes sends you back to things you have already completed before. It sure is pretty and combat feels fairly fun, but right now… I am struggling to attach to it due to the obtuse nature of the narrative. Souls players who love obtuse bullshit will probably be in their element here.

Instead of doing new things though, this weekend I fell back on the old and familiar and spent a lot of time playing Path of Exile. It is shocking how good the Currency Exchange system is and how well it works this late in the league. Normally speaking trade would be completely dead and it would be a chore to do any sort of large-volume currency swaps. However, the asynchronous nature of the Currency Exchange means that players are still actively putting things up for sale and creating open buy orders for things that they need. I sold so many Valdo’s Puzzle Boxes for 190 Chaos each, and they did not sit on the exchange for very long before getting snapped up each time.

I’ve been slowly chipping away at objectives and in theory, if I can get to 31 total challenges for the league I will be able to get the same sized totem as I had last league. I have a few candidates to get there, namely the two related to Scarabs that I am getting closer to finishing. I need to look at Sublime Starlight and see what the cheapest path to completing that is as well, given I have a pretty good backlog of the runes from the league mechanic. Arduous Atlas is easy enough, just requires a lot of brute force mapping and is only a matter of time not necessarily effort. I am slowly getting closer and closer to level 100 so the gear grinding goals or whatever that achievement is called might be within reach as well. I’m not super far from several o the ones un Unbelievable Undertakings, but those all for the most part will require me to spec into specific league mechanics to get through them.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend exploring The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and I am already a proud member of team Beds for life. I honestly have mixed feelings about the game. It is extremely well built and I think the idea of roaming around as Zelda, but so far combat feels fiddly. Legend of Zelda for me was always a combat experience first and foremost and a puzzle-solving experience as a fun secondary activity that blended along with the combat. I am not sure if Zelda gets better tools but right now killing anything feels a bit annoying so I find myself just avoiding combat whenever possible. Maybe that is the overarching theme that they were going for. I want to get deeper into the game but right now I am only a few hours in and not super far past the initial tutorial.

I have to admit I also don’t feel amazing giving Nintendo money right now. I had already bought Echoes of Wisdom, but their crusade against Switch emulation is a major bummer for me. Playing Switch games on PC has been my primary source of enjoying these games. I would buy the game on Switch and then play it on my PC via emulator because it was simply a more comfortable option than dealing with the short battery life and heft of the Switch console in handheld mode. Additionally playing via emulators allowed me to “patch” things out of games that annoyed me… for example, I ran mods to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom that removed durability from the game entirely. My guess is whatever the Switch 2 ends up being will be backward compatible and the current crop of emulators will likely successfully run all of the games on day one.

All that Nintendo will have done with their action is push the scene underground. They went from having three emulators that were open-source projects that they could easily keep tabs on… to having to deal with what will be countless unofficial forks that are being maintained by piracy distro groups. You can already buy the Miig Switch and Miig Dumper through AliExpress and the price of them keeps dropping. Basically, Nintendo has destroyed the methodology that allowed folks to buy legitimate copies and play them on legitimate Open Source emulators and will now force those folks to either play the inferior version on official hardware… or rely exclusively on distro groups and torrent sites to get the games.

Weekend Recap with Frogs

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Good Morning Folks! It is another Monday and here comes another one of my semi-regular weekend recap posts. I am still in a really odd place gaming wise where I am not necessarily hardcore motivated by anything. I thought I might dive into Space Marine 2 or Final Fantasy XVI this weekend… but neither happened because I just did not feel like playing anything that “heavy”. I’m not sure how to explain it, but there are times when I don’t want to play anything that I cannot easily dip out of at a moment’s notice as my mood changes. As a result I am still playing quite a bit of Minecraft because it is easy to pop out of and return to, and one of the major things that I did is create a bunch of dog houses for all of my wolves that I have had hanging out in my base for ages. Of note… that is NOT lava in the back of their cage but instead, a shroom light to keep them warm and safe from baddies.

It has been ages since I made one of my dumb videos, and this weekend I decided to record a bit of a base tour in Minecraft. The Path of Exile league was fun, but didn’t necessarily inspire me to create any videos, similarly, Last Epoch has been more of the same but if I can ever get my build dialed in I might record one of it. This recent foray into Minecraft started by watching this video about a 14-year-old Minecraft mystery while convalescing from Covid. This then made me remember that I have videos from my very first Minecraft world over on another channel, which made me nostalgic for the game and the way in which I used to play it. It has been a lot of fun and while I have entered the “machine building” phase of the game, I am still enjoying myself because it does not ask a lot of me to play it.

Over in Last Epoch, my build is starting to come together and I have picked up a handful of really decent Legendary items. We are in a really weird state of the endgame meta for the game where you either want an item to drop with 2 or more Legendary Potential, or you want an item to drop with NO Legendary Potential so you can feed it to a Nemesis Egg and either get a Legendary or an item with hopefully 2 or more LP on it. Circle of Fortune however makes it so that most Uniques drop with at least 1LP… meaning that 99.9% of what drops for you is useless. What I find myself doing is picking up weapons off the ground and then rolling the dice with a Rune of Ascendance because it does not seem to take into account the Circle of Fortune bonuses and is way more likely to give me a raw zero LP version of the item if I luck my way into it.

There are also some weird growing pains around being in the endgame and crafting items. Last Epoch should be praised for how approachable crafting items is and how easy it is to make decent enough gear while running through the campaign. However, when you hit the endgame… it sort of stops being useful. Glyph of Envy is this really cool item that was recently introduced that lets you take a single good stat and then reroll everything else. I could see this actually being really useful for those items that have a Tier 7 roll of that one stat you care the most about. However, it does not work in this situation because you cannot use this unless an Affix can be upgraded, meaning that you cannot use this on T5, T6, or T7 items. I’ve tried this a few times and when you end up getting as a result is an item that would probably be hidden by your loot filter. There really is no way to craft perfect items in Last Epoch, meaning that after a point you just stop engaging with that system other than randomly trying to reroll a single stat on an item.

Friday while I was off my friend Ace gifted me a copy of Pesticide Not Required and I’ve had a blast playing some of it. Essentially this is a game in the same style as Vampire Survivors but instead you play a cute frog that has inherited a farm Stardew Valley style. You roam around doing chores, planting crops, watering them, and eventually growing new weapons… to help you clear out the bugs that are trying to attack you faster… so you can grow more crops and get more weapons. It has a really fun main gameplay loop and you get to throw a bunch of fun things as weapons like randomly sending lawnmowers off in various directions. Over time you get the ability to buy pets that take care of some of the tasks for you like an Elephant that waters your plants, or a Dog that retrieves loot for you. If you liked Vampire Survivors give it a go, because it is kind of stupidly fun. I do suggest you play it with a controller because originally I tried Keyboard and Mouse and completely missed that you could direct your attacks until I played with dual sticks.

Lastly, The Cure released a new single and it is brilliant. It is hard to explain how much this band means to me, and listening to this was like a visit from an old friend. Fair warning though it is 3 minutes or so into the song before the lyrics start because The Cure has reached a point where they just do not have to give a fuck about pop sensibilities. What is staggering about this track is how much like classical young Robert Smith this sounds like. Whatever he is doing to take care of his voice… it is phenomenal. If you also love The Cure and were not aware of this collaboration with Chvrches from a few years ago, I highly suggest you give it a listen as well.

Anyways! I hope you all have a most wonderful week. Mine is probably going to be busy, but I am had a great weekend.

Unlimited Chicken

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Good Morning Folks! Friends… I am swimming in cooked chicken. For years when I have played Minecraft the first thing that I have done is wrangle a bunch of cows… stuff them in a hole and then feed them wheat until they pass the entity cramming limits and start dying off giving me a stable supply of leather and beef. The thing is… I don’t really need much leather… and my chicken operation has been way more productive than I thought it would be. As such I am contemplating tearing down the cow station… and sending them all to that big farm upstate… to free up room for more shenanigans. I just do not need the beef in quite the way that I thought I would and chicken appears to be a perfectly cromulent option.

Chicken solves a lot of other problems like the ability to get a quick safe experience boost to repair items. In theory, if I cared more about it I would relocate the chickens to a place where I could reasonably use them to feed the egg-throwing machine directly. I could do some nonsense with minecart hoppers and bubble elevators, but that seems like “a lot”. Also, minecarts are super noisy, and I am already dealing with the din of a thousand clucks at all hours of the day. There is something primal that I enjoy about loading up a pitching machine and watching it birth chickens into my pen. I’ve created so many lanterns for the nether tunnels that I am going to need to find a more stable source of iron. I’ve gotten most of it from hollowing out areas under my base, but I might be trying to build a Villager breeder soon… and from there an Iron Golem farm since I have Pillagers nearby.

I am still playing quite a bit of Last Epoch and one of the things about Cycle 2.5 that I have to say… is that I don’t think dungeons are quite as much of a waste of time. This is in large part because mapping content that appears in Monoliths, can now appear and does so frequently in dungeons. Better than that, each floor of the dungeon seems to count as a new map meaning that you can find a Nemesis, Treasure Chest, and Exiled Mage on each floor giving you a way to burn through Nemesis so much faster than monoliths. I’ve only really spent much time doing Temporal Sanctum trying to create legendary gear, but then again that tends to be the only dungeon that I do consistently.

I had a dry streak of eggs that I complained about on the blog, and then grouped with Ace and immediately following that have gotten an egg for almost every single Nemesis. This is allowing me to start burning through my stockpile of non-LP copies of Palarus and Firestarter. This actually makes the whole Circle of Fortune thing making it super common to get 1LP uniques a bad thing. I wish you could throw LP uniques in the Eggs and then either get it turned into a completely random legendary or upgrade to higher LP levels. As it stands right now 1LP uniques… feel sorta awful to loot. I upgraded my Palarus this morning significantly keeping the 15 Health on Hit and adding 109% Melee Damage. I will keep trying for a 3 or 4 LP version, but for the time being, I am pretty happy with it.

I have to admit though, I feel like I am starting to wind down a bit on Last Epoch. This is the phase of the game where it always loses me. I am just not motivated by completing all of the bosses, and the worst thing about Last Epoch… is that it isn’t Path of Exile. What I mean by that is POE has quite possibly the most interesting endgame with a lot of player choice in what you want to focus on mechanic-wise. If I could take the player builds from Last Epoch and copy-paste in the Atlas of Worlds and all of the other endgame systems like Heist and Delve over top of the existing endgame… it would be my ultimate experience. The worst thing about Last Epoch is that it just doesn’t have a rich and varied endgame yet. I know over time they will get there, based on what we have seen so far, but it also means for the time being… every cycle has a shelf life.

Anyways Minecraft is giving me plenty of alternative shenanigans to enjoy, and at some point, I want to dive into Final Fantasy XVI now it is on PC, and Space Marine 2. I might try both of those out either today or this weekend.