New World

Suspicious Dongle

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Good Morning Folks. For awhile now I have used a wireless headset downstairs with my laptop, and I have come to love it. The only real problem with it is that I wish it were semi-open like the Superlux headphones that I use upstairs. When led me down the path of wishing there was a way to convert a normal wired headset to a wireless one. After a bit of back and forth on mastodon, I found an option that is pretty tiny and weighs almost nothing. There are a bunch of versions of this, but the one that I purchased is from MIPEACE and it essentially hangs off the short cord directly from the headphones as seen in the image above. I thought I would need to attach it somehow to the outside of my headset, but since it is so lightweight it seems to be able to just hang there comfortably. I charged it up last night, and now I am curious if it can get through the entire day on a single charge. I will of course report back how well this works out. I am keeping music running in the background so I know when it cuts out.

I am still a bit all over the place right now, spending time in Diablo IV, New World, and Destiny Rising. If I had to claim a main game right now, it would probably be Diablo IV since I am trying to level up and push into the end game. I am taking it super chill right now. I am sure I could grind up in a single afternoon if I really focused on it, but I do that during Path of Exile leagues… and since I don’t take Diablo near as seriously there is no point not to just slow roll this. The Druid felt sort of awful for the first few levels but now it feels pretty solid. Namely when I got some sort of spirit recovery I have been able to mostly just run around pulverizing things. I have enough defenses that I can largely just gather things up in a big pack and them smash them to bits with my beary goodness.

One of the things that I always wish I did…. while leveling, was focus on the various strongholds. This is one of those things that are nice to have unlocked… but also something that I never really want to go back and do later. So this time around I finally smartened up and that has essentially been my focus. As of this morning prior to sitting down to write this blog post, I have now opened every single stronghold and it got me to level 46. Now I just need to find some other activity to grind out the rest of the levels and start the endgame proper. Other than Strongholds, I have also popped around the map unlocking the various waypoints so that when I do hit the endgame, I won’t be hamstrung by not having a port open while doing events.

Between lunch breaks and this evening, I am going to see if I can hit level 60 and start working on Paragon levels. In theory if I hang out in the hellfire areas it should go quickly enough. I’ve done a world boss and a legions event, but the experience gain there seemed pretty slow. At some point I should probably bump up the difficulty, but really since the same gear drops on the first two difficulties there has not been much of a reason to do it. I think I am tanky enough to handle it without much issue, but I am also exceptionally lazy. I need to probably start running some content that reliably drops legendaries so I can collect the necessary affixes needed for my eventual build. I need to look at the maxroll guide I have been following and seeing which affixes come from dungeons, and then get those knocked out while I am still leveling.

I connected up with Ace again last night. We had not really been planning on doing so, but I just happened to notice that they were online when I was starting to grind out my pinnacle rewards for the day. We ran a handful of strikes and mostly it was just a good excuse to hang out on voice and chat while doing activities. I promise I am not super vain… but I still have to screenshot any time I get MVP at the end of a match, especially if it is as Jolder. Generally speaking MVPs tend to favor those characters that deal large amounts of damage, and/or provides some sort of support benefit. I do find it hilarious that “Damage Taken” is a thing that the game is tracking as something that is good. My job as a defensive character though is to get up in the bosses face and try and get it to focus on me… since I have my health bar and a full over-shield bar most of the time.

I’ve been doing the planetary dailies on Finnala, and while I do not really love the character… It has still been fun. Essentially each of the champions has some sort of activities in their lore panel that it asks you to do. For Nala it is do 10 days worth of the destination daily quests in the Red Sea Rift area. Jolder had the same quest chain and I have already completed hers, so I figured I might as well be knocking them out for another character since I am going to do a set of these every day regardless. At some point though I really need to shift focus on the Jiangshi Metro area because my faction level there is pretty pitiful. That first zone is just nowhere near as well designed as the second zone, so it is way less enjoyable just to run around killing stuff in. When I need to do a bounty… I tend to pop down to Red Sea Rift instead.

I went through the process of setting up Overwolf last night, so that I could start running Aeternum Map on the second monitor. Essentially this allows me to keep up a map that tracks my progress through the world, and also shows me the locations of all of the resource spawn points. I have some zones in the game memorized just from running them so much… for example there is a loop in Brightwood that I can run in my sleep. However they have added a lot of higher tier resources into zones like Edengrove, and I figured I might as well have the map up so I can see if there is something that I want to make a beeline for. I hate Overwolf… so I only keep it running so long as I need it for the purpose of this map. Overwolf is essentially keeping track of your location in the world, and all of the tools seem to rely on it to make the maps interactive.

The positive of the map though is it has led me to explore some areas I probably never would have been. For example there is a cave up near Shattered Mountain in Edengrove that is chock full of Mithril nodes. Sure you have to find waves of the exploding blight mobs… and have to keep waiting on your blight bar to tick down, but I think I pulled almost 1000 ore just from this one location last night in a single pass. Similarly I have made beelines off the path to find other precious nodes while exploring things. One cool thing is that since the level cap is now 65… things like Shattered Mountain are no longer as scary as they once were. I need to get out there and explore a bit more, and maybe take down some of the bosses out there for funsies. Every major boss spawn point… seems to always have a group at it. Over the weekend I did a bunch of kills of Baines at the top of a tower in Edengrove, just because I happened to stumble upon a full party hanging out there. Boss farming was one of my favorite things in this game.

Hades 2 is also leaving Early Access today, so at some point I will probably give that a spin. I am installing it currently so I have it at the ready when I am in the mood to give it a go. I know tonight we will be doing our normal Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. I am hoping the crew is further along in the quest chain so that we can knock out some of the things that you cannot get through running quick play. I already have my Legendary Gloves, so mostly I just want to do whatever I can to help push the others through the process. I feel like I am all over the place right now and having trouble focusing on any one thing in particular. That is probably okay, given how much I hyper fixate on a single thing at a time for weeks.

Bears and Blunderbusses

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Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.

The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.

My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.

Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.

I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.

New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.

All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death.

Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap.

Froggy Woggy

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Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning because I had to do a fasting blood draw. Nothing serious, just one of those things that I have to do every year to keep from having to pay a $60 per month surcharge on our corporate insurance plan. I took the day off because there are a bunch of things I should be doing around the house today… namely because I got new glasses and can now properly see how dirty everything is. As I was rushing out the door this morning, this lil fella was hanging out on the inside of my glass storm door. He did not seem to be terribly intimidated by me, and when I got home from the blood draw appointment he was gone. Hopefully he is off living his best life, because I have zero clue what sort of frog this is. Guessing some sort of a tree frog, but given that I have never seen one in my life… I am hoping he did not hitch a ride on a thunderstorm and get rained down. Was a very smol fella, maybe the size of a fifty cent piece.

Over the weekend, specifically during the AggroChat podcast… it rained in my living room… which is a thing that has happened before, but not since we put a new roof on. Thankfully the roofers came out and resealed the top of my roofline, which is where we have generally thought the water comes in through, because it has only ever leaked when we are getting a torrential downpour combined with wind… leading to horizontal rain. It has been raining all morning which is adversely effecting my desire to do anything, but so far no sign of leakage. Due to the pitch of our roof and the odd late 70s architectural decisions, there is a lip of flashing that wind over time will push up… and then the water gets under there and eventually runs down under the shingles until it finds a point of entry. This is generally smack dab in the enter of our living room. The roofers essentially resealed this area and put in longer screws which will hopefully keep it from coming up again. We’ve had the house since 1999… and fought this dumb design flaw many times, but hopefully this will be the trick that finally solves it.

In gaming news, with the roll over of the weekly reset in Guild Wars 2 it allowed me to get my pair of legendary gloves. This is honestly really cool and way easier than I expected it to be in the long run, because essentially you mostly have to just grind out 500 dust which will complete all of the required achievements and then talk to the Mist Stranger, at which point they will reveal who they actually are and give you a choice box for gloves. You get one armor weight for free and then for the other two you have to grind out 300 more dust which will give you 2 Fractalline Spark (150 each), one for each of the remaining weights. You then combine each with a Gift of Magical Prosperity, Gift of Mighty Prosperity, and 200g worth of Icy Runestones to get another pair of gloves. These are permanent additions to the game and not something that you necessarily have to compete before the event ends in October. I am however planning on grinding out a few more sparks so that I can bank them because they are also used for coloring the weapon glow effects granted by the gloves.

Over in Destiny Rising, I have set my sights on knocking out some of the lore achievements. Namely right now I am working on the achievement where you have to get 5 cats to give you a reward back while playing Umeko. The whole feeding the cats thing is a big maddening, namely because the indication of what fish the cats want each day is not great. I need to start fishing up some new areas in the game since I appear to have unlocked a few other locations. However even if the cat does not give you a carepackage, it does seem to count as getting a reward because you get some fishing currency for the first time you attempt it each day. I think tonight Ace and I are going to run amok, so that should be quite a bit of fun. I need to hang out on voice with various groups of people more often, because quite honestly I can get stuck in my head a bit.

I’ve also been fiddling around with New World again and holy crap has it changed significantly, at least in the new player onboarding process. I have a max level character, but also have zero clue what I need to be doing. So I instead decided to roll another new character just so I could play through the early levels and get my feet under me again. Now when you start a character you are asked to choose an archetype, which guarantees a combo of abilities and gives you a bit of a boost to specific tradeskills. I opted for Greatsword and Blunderbuss because it gave me a pretty solid early combo, but have long since abandoned the shotgun like weapon for more twohanders… leveling both Two Handed Axe and Two Handed Hammer. I really like flail for tanking, so I might also start working on that, but more than anything. I am not really sure how long I will end up playing this baby character before moving back to my maxed out character.

The other thing that is wild is just how much more story there is, and it appears to be fully voiced. Like the graphical style of New World is a bit janky, but this does feel like a significantly more enjoyable onboarding process. I know this is essentially the third time I have rerolled from scratch. The leveling process seems to have been sped up considerably, but the tradeskill leveling process is still a bit of a slog. I also remember now that I do not love how much of a nesting doll the entire process is where Tier 1 is needed to make Tier 2 which is also needed to make Tier 3 and so on. I had hoped that maybe they would have streamlined this process a bit, but it seems like that is not the case. I leveled up enough to craft a full set of level 60 armor on both characters, and in theory one should probably not do this thing and just live off drops. I need to figure out how the heck you upgrade items now, because I have not figured that out. I know 700 is the baseline and I think you can go up to 750 item level… but I have no clue how to upgrade my uniques to those tiers.

The introductory mission is way cooler looking, so I will give the game that. Additionally the flow of the quests seems to be a bit more thought out. There seems to be a fairly thriving community, but also it appears to be mostly console based. The number of random strangers talking in the world through proximity chat is very much still a thing. I know Destiny Rising has some of that going on, and I also experienced that while playing EVE Vanguard. Maybe I should get over my aversion to talking to strangers over voice chat… but seriously it still wigs me out. Does no one type anymore? I will always prefer reading the written word to talking over voice unless I am talking to friends. I know this is contradictory to what I said earlier, in that I need to hang out with friends on voice… but the friends bit is the key differentiator there.

Today is also the start of the next Diablo IV season, so I am probably going to get off here and scurry around the house attempting to take care of some business so I can potentially have time to start a new character when that begins.

The Rebranding of New World

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On the 15th of October, New World is launching the latest version of itself as Aeternum. There has been a heap of confusing marketing surrounding this event, and quite honestly a bit of weasel wording when it comes to what is actually about to transpire. Essentially Aeternum is the attempt to launch New World on consoles with a clean slate, in order to wipe a bit of the bad taste of the dwindling PC player numbers out of the collective mouths of an audience that may have not actually played the game. Treating this as though it were a new and fresh gameplay experience, is what feels like a last-ditch effort to make this game succeed. The hard truth however is that PC players have not received any substantive updates since the launch of Angry Earth in October 2023.

The truth is that New World has struggled since its just slightly under 1 million concurrent player launch, and has never quite found a large enough player base to keep the game successful. It is very obvious that Amazon does not really consider this to have been a success, because while they often laud the achievements of Lost Ark… you never quite hear the same rhetoric surrounding their other MMO New World. Steam Charts paints the picture clearly of never quite getting a critical mass of players interested for the long haul. I feel like the console launch is essentially the last lifeline that the game has before Amazon ultimately shutters it. For that reason, I legitimately hope that this awkward rebranding is what the game needed in order to sell the notion of it to a new group of players.

I’ve loved this game deeply since its release three years ago. Over the course of that time I have dedicated 92 blog posts to the game, including this one… and probably would have had more except due to the fact that I spent a lot of time playing the game when it was under NDA. Unfortunately, New World is also a game with deep systemic problems due to the awkward way that this game was built. It is a game that needs about 1200-2000 players on a single server in order to make the game feel alive but was crafted in a manner that limits the total population of a server. It was designed more in the manner of a Rust private server than a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. We struggled at the release of the game to get everyone on the same server at the same time, and ultimately that is the core requirement of an MMORPG… the ability to play with your friends. This fresh coat of paint and renaming does nothing to solve this fundamental issue that exists at the core of the game.

At launch, there were one hundred and seventy-seven servers available, and it was simply not enough capacity to contain the millions of players attempting to play the game. Within days they spun up a number of servers at least doubling the total number, and quite honestly… I cannot remember how many servers that number eventually ballooned to. As the influx of players waned quickly, you were left with a ton of servers with little to no population and no way of those players migrating elsewhere. The game has been plagued with a long history of server migrations as we have now shrunk to twelve servers serving the global population. This gives players no real identity for what server they play on. I’ve not played in almost a year at this point and I could not tell you off the top of my head what server I was playing on. This makes it extremely hard to link up with friends wanting to play the game, which again is the most important requirement of an MMORPG.

I last played the game around the launch of Angry Earth and quite honestly… the game was in a pretty good state then. It was fun and the new story was pretty solid. The “new” zone was also pretty great, but I say new in quotation marks… because it wasn’t a new zone at all. It was taking the existing zone of First Light and changing everything about it to create a new endgame zone for the Angry Earth campaign. Similarly, the launch of Aeternum in 11 days is destroying the previous zone of Cutlass Keys to turn it into a new endgame zone that is half-dominated by full PVP. Instead of adding content to the game they are removing content by way of repurposing it. I didn’t care that much about First Light, but I loved Cutlass Keys and it was a destination that I went to regularly because I enjoyed the material farming loops there. the New World team has not actually “added” content to the game in the form of new open-world real estate since October 2022 when they introduced the Brimstone Sands region.

All of that said, I guess it should not shock me with what they are trying to do with Aeternum, but renaming something that has existed for four years at this point considering pre-release gameplay time, and treating it as though it were a brand new gameplay experience. They have attempted to put a shiny coat of paint on things several times with limited results. I get that this might be a team that is strapped for resources and might not have the time to devote to building entirely new zones out of whole cloth, but do have time to rearrange a bunch of chess pieces on the board in the form of a zone redesign. However, as a long-term player, it feels like I am losing content much in the same way I did with Destiny each time they vaulted a zone… instead of gaining content.

I have baggage, and I know that. I still have bitterness surrounding the patch where they effectively killed all of the player-created elite farm trains out in the world that were amazing. Bitterness aside though I really do want this game to succeed, if for no reason other than that they might get the resources required to fix some of the deeper fundamental flaws that the game has. The game keeps chasing the PVP player base, but time and time again the MMORPG market has proven that this is not a big enough community to ever support a game in its totality. PVE gamers are deeply social gamers by nature, and all of the flaws surrounding server limits and connectivity have always been a giant impediment for that style of player.

I feel like the healthiest thing for New World would be a change in server methodology to something akin to Guild Wars 2 where servers do not matter other than for WVW combat, and now there is a semi-regular process of matching up different guilds into groups to balance that. I could see something like that where companies are matched based on activity level and assigned to a relatively leveled playing field so that they are vying for control of the map against a similar group of players. Then remove all of the negative things that impact PVE players from other factions owning territory. This would lean into the fun PVE nature of the game while also serving the desires of the more bloodthirsty competitive minority in MMO players.

I think half of the revamped Cutlass Keys zone being devoted to full-open PVP is going to be a mistake in the long run, but I feel like it is probably a carrot being thrown to the players who have stuck around and are more PVP-focused. I imagine a few months from now, it is going to be a dead space with the same few people dueling each other. That said… I have no clue how you sell this game to PVE players in a way that does not exist currently. The thing that killed the game for me, was the fact that I was competing for harvesting resources constantly with a bunch of bots who were running a loop constantly. I feel like the game would be better served with longer node respawns, but having them flagged to your account so that if you go out into the woods looking for resources you are not actively competing with other players for them.

I’ve not had the game installed for a few months, and I last played in May. Even then I only played for a little bit to poke my head and see how things were going. I’ve not played a ton since the release of Angry Earth last year. I’ve seen nothing about this Aeternum rebranding that is really speaking to me. For the PC players… there really isn’t a lot of change. I think there is some new story, a new dungeon, and half of a revamped zone to explore. Aeternum is not for us, it is an attempt at luring a brand new audience of previously untouched console-first gamers. I think this is probably a make-or-break moment for New World. If on the 15th it fails to find a brand new audience, it is probably the eventual death of the franchise.

I think what I would have personally liked to see instead of this, is a shift in the model of the game as a whole. Instead of being a persistent forever game… focus on being a seasonal game like many of the ARPG Diablo-likes are. In that scenario, the crippling server constraints are not that big of a deal, because you are playing the game for a three to four-month shot at a time. They would need to amp everything up… experience, resources, gold… but honestly some of the most fun I ever had playing New World was rerolling fresh on a new server when they launched the story updates and fresh start servers in 2022. I could see having a heck of a lot of fun rolling fresh characters and going through all of the content again at an accelerated pace with a group of players doing the same thing. I think it could have worked, pending they came up with some gimmick for each season in the way that Path of Exile does its leagues.

As it stands, I will have a lot of happy memories from the time I played New World. I hope they find a new audience and get the resources to make this game the game it could have been. I hope they come up with a hook to earn back PC players who have felt abandoned by the staff. I legitimately hope this dangerous gambit works, because the alternative is that the game goes away. The stakes feel extremely high… but given everything else coming out this month, I can’t bring myself to join the folks who will be playing on the 15th. I wish them luck, but will be doing so more than likely from the sidelines.

Are you going to be checking out New World Aeternum? Did I completely miss the mark in my assessment of the game? Drop me a line below.