Torchlight Infinite Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about.

Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.

While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.

I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.

Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.

If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.

I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.

I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.

I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.

World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC

I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again.

As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.

Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out.

Good Morning Friends! Last night I had a wild ride of bouncing around in several ARPGs before finally settling into the grind in Diablo III. This season there is an item that drops called an Angelic Crucible that can turn any item into a Primal Ancient, but it also gives the item a special ability. The problem with this system however is that you get one of three random enchants each time you use it. I think I have gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen of these items so far and out of those I have gotten 1 Wrath of the Berserker power, 1 Whirlwind power, and all of the others have been for Hammer of the Ancients. However last night on my final run before going to bed I finally pulled the Whirlwind power I was hunting for.

I’ve been contemplating stockpiling them and running up a Demon Hunter so I can play with those powers as well. I am hoping that the items persist after the season for non-seasonal play, and if so… then I have the desire to build out a set for each of the powers on Barbarian and maybe Demon Hunter. I’ve heard the Crusader abilities are not that great, so I might take a pass on those. Essentially those are the three classes that I spend more time playing than any others. It would have been awesome if one of the Crusader sets buffed my favorite thorns build, but alas it is not to be. The whirlwind power is really nice because it is a much stronger pull than we have ever had in the game before, and you can just sorta drag things along with you as you spin to win.

In other news, Torchlight Infinite is now up on Steam, and you can request access to the playtest. I’ve had access to the android version of the game for some time now, and it was pretty solid. Unfortunately, the PC version seems to be the most “mobile port” game I have seen. There are very few configuration options and you are stuck to using the default keybindings which are Left Click to move, Right Click to attack, Q to heal, and WERF for special attacks. My default setup for ARPGs is to set Force Move to W, and then steer with my mouse. I find it so much easier than the constant repetitive clicking required for click to move and I am hoping given time that they add in some keybindings.

The main reason why I did not play more on Android is the fact that it currently does not have controller support. I attempted to use a controller through steam last night and this appears to still be the case. I am very interested in this game, but only if either the controller support is solid or they add some keybinding options. Until then it might as well not exist. Your mileage may vary however and if you are interested in checking the game out, it appears that they are just letting people into the playtest immediately. I clicked the “Request Access” button and got instant access to download the game and try it out.

I’m starting to fall into a funk with Path of Exile. Have you ever played a game where it feels like you missed the golden era when it was amazing? That is how I am feeling about Path of Exile. I’ve seen so many videos of people flying through maps and getting explosions of loot left and right, and I can’t seem to ever reach that level. I am in the doldrums of red maps which vacillate wildly between extremely easy to clear to being painful deathfests. I ran into a boss last night in one of the Vaal Corruption Rifts, that had 8 ArchNemesis modifiers on it… and it legitimately took me over twenty deaths before I finally downed it. The only thing that I could do was kite the mob while dropping Storm Brand behind me. I eventually drug it to the start of the Rift so that I could at least resurrect and get back into the action quickly.

I could roll something else and try another build… but there is no guarantee that will work any differently. At this point, I have tried Explosive Arrow and Wintertide Brand last league, and went with a supposedly tried and true Storm Brand build this league… and found both lacking. Maybe lacking is the wrong word, but would require so much currency investment to bring them to the level that would allow me to run content in a carefree manner. I just don’t think that Path of Exile is ever going to be that game for me, and as a result may never replace Diablo III. I love chain-running content over and over in Diablo and picking up loot, then resetting things and going again. In Path… everything feels like it has a cost associated with it… either opportunity cost or a very real cost. I don’t love that feeling.

In Diablo III there is this virtuous cycle of running Nephelem Rifts to get Keystones, and then running Greater Rifts for levels and rewards. It feels good and continues to feel good the deeper you go into the gameplay. You earn gear that helps you move faster through the Nephilim Rifts and go higher in difficulty level in the Greater Rifts… which causes you to earn more rewards and level your gems higher. All the while allowing for easy drop-in gameplay so you can hang out with your friends while doing this, or better yet help them get gear in the process. In Path of Exile, the cycle seems to be focused on making “currency”, and then using that to fund buying better gear on the trade league instead of just doing things for the sake of doing them.

Then there is the problem that I have to effectively make a decision if I care about progress on the atlas or if I care about making levels. I sacrifice levels for the sake of grinding out progress, or I sacrifice any forward momentum for the sake of farming experience. Then there is the hope that I will gain enough currency and map drops through doing the content that I can sustain continuing to do the content. I am always teetering on the edge of not having enough Alchemy or Scouring orbs, with the latter pretty easy to buy from vendors… but the conversion rate is somewhat painful and I feel like I don’t get enough of the feeder currency to make up for it. Then there are chisels… which have a fixed Chaos cost on the vendor and I don’t feel like I get near enough drops.

Essentially while mapping I always feel like I am on the verge of not having enough of something to keep sustaining that activity. In Diablo III it is not very far into the season that I feel like I have either more resources than I could ever spend or easy access to acquire those resources. I am not sure I will ever reach that point with Path of Exile. There will always be subtle friction of not quite having whatever it is that you need, in order to do the things you want to do. The answer is to engage with the trade economy… but I don’t find ANY of that fun. Accumulation of wealth has never been a key goal in my life and once my bills were paid in real life, I stopped caring about making more money. I just think mentally I am not wired to succeed in Path of Exile, and I am concerned that I will keep trying to make it into Diablo III.

I am rapidly losing hope after getting engaged with Path of Exile, that the “sequel” is going to really be a game for me in the long run. With the Torchlight Infinite PC test having its own levels of frustration, I guess I now pin my hopes on Diablo IV giving me a happy medium between the type of gameplay that I do enjoy in Path of Exile, and the virtuous cycle of fun grinding that I have in Diablo III. I am hoping that luck shines upon me and that I get into the Diablo IV testing process. I am not holding my breath, as the person who threw their thumb on the scale and apparently got me into Dragonflight Alpha/Beta is no longer with the company.

Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition

Whirlwind Powers Activate