Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we sit down to record a show… with multiple topics but wind up only actually talking about one. Shadowlands, the latest World of Warcraft expansion released this past week and Bel and Grace have been playing it. We take a dive into all things afterlife as we talk about the vague sense of not being quite certain if we like it or not. There might be some minor story spoilers so please be warned. For the most part we limit revelations to the things that are talked about in the Afterlives series of videos, but Bel has finished the main story quest and Grace is about halfway through. We share our feelings about what appears to be Blizzard trying to create a Final Fantasy XIV expansion.
Good Morning Friends. I am not sure how long this mornings post is going to be because I want to try and walk a thin line between talking about events happening in Shadowlands and not really spoiling things for anyone who isn’t quite as progressed yet. Yesterday I hit somewhere in the vicinity of 57.5 and am a little bit into Ardenweald. When I talked about my experiences yesterday I focused mostly on the smooth launch, but I was a bit down on the whole storyline and experience of playing thorugh Bastion. I think the spirituality and “trust in the path” sort of narrative just didn’t land with me. I am not a religious person, and the zone while beautiful… also sorta felt barren and bland. This is making my start to rethink my original goal of aligning my Paladin with them for access to that ability.
Maldraxxus however, I loved every single minute of the experience of running through that zone. This is where Shadowlands really starts to kick in and the story feels important. Bastion is a bit of a slow burn and by the end of that zone the events are starting to click into place setting up for an amazing romp across the true land of the dead. I can’t say before now I have ever really had a “page turner” moment in World of Warcraft, where I just wanted to keep getting to the next main story quest so I could see exactly what was happening. Side note… they are actually marking what is and is not a main story quest with a unique icon and I thoroughly approve of this. I am starting to feel like Maldraxxus might be my true calling as far as covenants go.
Then Ardenweald comes along and starts sucker punching you straight in the feels. Like I don’t love the design aesthetic of Night Elves and by connection zones like Ashenvale, Val’Sharah and now Ardenweald. That said however the story in Ardenweald keeps the intrigue going in a way that also makes me really want to find out where things are going. Like I THINK I know where things are going, but I am not entirely certain what is up with the Winter Queen. Through Maldraxxus and now Ardenweald you are starting to see the first signs of the larger cosmology of the Shadowlands and I approve. Essentially the drought has impacted each area differently, and it is interesting to see that being played out in the way that the denizens react to it.
Right now the main thing that Bastion still has going for it are the little Swolekin friends you can get… who will follow you around and play music for you. I am a fan of this and I could see getting used to bringing birb friend out on missions. I specifically chose one that was fully armored for their own safety. The first night of gameplay left me a little iffy on Shadowlands as an expansion, but those fears are being pushed aside by the really cool content that took place in Maldraxxus and now Ardenweald. I would have preferred to have gotten a choose your own adventure style start, where I got to pick which faction I would venture into first but I get why they didn’t do that because the storyline needs to flow in a specific way.
My only long term concerns however are as to how exactly playing alts through this content is going to feel. If you have to do everything in the same order a couple of dozen times it is going to feel pretty grindy. So my impressions have improved, but I am curious where you are right now on your feelings as to this expansion. Drop me a line in the comments with your thoughts so far.
Good morning everyone and welcome to the land of the dead. Yesterday at 5 pm my time the gates swung wide letting players into the next World of Warcraft expansion. I have to admit it was a little odd and uneventful the way the expansion launched. At 5 pm on the dot I got a message from Thassarian granting the starting quest for the expansion. This lead to the introduction event happening at Icecrown Citadel that I had experienced in alpha and shortly thereafter I was up and running in the Maw and tackling the introductory quests.
All in all it was one of the smoother launches I have experienced. I of course did get hung up for it bit with some challenges, but they were resolved reasonably quickly. There is a quest that asks you to open the portal to your capitol city and then teleport right back to the new Shattrath style city. I got disconnected on the port back and that lead me to spend quite a bit of time with a “character with that name already exists” error. I tried several things but ultimately what seemed to unjam things was logging into a character on another server and then back out again. Immediately following that I was able to load back into Belgrace and continue questing.
I dig the art design of the Shadowlands. It feels sufficiently different from the sort of things that we normally see on Azeroth, but also familiar enough to make you question how the land of the dead has ultimately influenced the things we are more familiar with. You don’t spend a lot of time in the new hub, but you do find out that something happened to the Arbiter that judges and divides the souls into the various afterlives. When this entity was taken offline for lack of a better term, all souls started flowing straight down into the Maw, and I now have my theories as to what event caused this. The problem is we have no gauge on how time flows in the Shadowlands versus how time flows in the Mortal realm. That could have been millennia ago… or something that has taken place within the lifespan of our characters.
Bastion is really pretty but also sort of dead feeling… which makes sense given that it is one of the various afterlives that we are going to be visiting. I think part of this experience is enhanced by the fact that there is apparently some sort of new phasing technology that limits the other players you see out in the world. Rather intentional or not, it gives the entire experience a very isolating feel… which I am mostly okay with. I didn’t feel like a lot of human interaction last night as I wandered around the deadlands questing for the strange blue people. The positive is that it meant I never really had much in the way of contention for other mobs… the negative is that it maybe became a bit harder to take down group encounters.
The only negative of the night is that I am not sure if I am still sickly and sort of out of it… but for a lot of the evening I mostly just felt like I was going through the motions. The expansion did not grab me in the same way that Legion did for example, or to be honest even Battle for Azeroth. There is one thing that I wish would die in a fire… this expansion is full of NPCs that like to dole out text a single message at a time in your text box. I would far rather have this as a single block of readable text because I read WAY faster than the timing of these messages. This ends up making a lot of the story content feel like it is dragging because I am constantly waiting on the NPC to spit out the next line. I feel like this is probably a way of forcing players to read the quest text…. but it ends up almost having the opposite of effect of wanting to alt tab while I wait for the NPC to finish yammering so I can read it all at once.
All in all I consider it to be a very successful launch night. I ended up throwing in the towel around 10 pm and heading on to bed giving me a pretty solid four or so hours of leveling. I managed to get to 53 and some change and I am guessing I am maybe a little past the midpoint of Bastion. I am enjoying myself but I am not as into this as I expected to be. Maybe it will grow on me over time… but I have to admit there were moments last night where I contemplated logging out and just playing some more Diablo 3. Not sure if that is the content I am playing or just my mental state right now and being deluged with too many options. Whatever the case I will keep an eye on it as I keep moving through the content.
Did you play through the Shadowlands launch last night? What are your thoughts of the expansion so far? Drop me a line below and let me know your feelings.
Well friends, I find myself in the odd position of having way more things right now that I want to play than I can possibly find hours in the day to play them. To be fair I am notorious for trying to juggle two or three games at a time, but I find myself in truly anxiety ridden territory right now. With the blog in theory behaving properly and me getting back in the swing of daily posting, lets delve into what happens when everything gets pushed off to the end of the year.
Destiny 2
This is the game that has been getting the majority of my attention since the launch of Beyond Light. I wrote the other day about the frustrations that came with the weapon sunset and the removal of content, and those frustrations still exist but have lessened a bit. Firstly with the beginning of the Season of the Hunt we have a new method to target specific drops, which helps to fill out that weapon vault once again. Additionally the content seems to have a longer tail than a traditional D2 expansion and I am still seemingly unlocking content long after finishing the story. Lastly I have found out that I can just kill roaming rares on Europa to get a shot at the entire weapon pool from that destination and as such have picked up several options including a new functional legendary Machinegun.
Now the thing that makes ZERO sense to me… and I wish someone could explain is that each time I have run a strike and a legendary has dropped… it has been this legendary. I have looted so many copies of this weapon, but the original roll that I have been holding onto seems to still be the best. Not saying this isn’t a solid weapon, but I would love to see more of the loot pool than just this one shotgun.
Genshin Impact
Genshin Impact is the game that is suffering the most right now due to my many distractions. There are a few events happening and I am failing to participate in them. The challenge with Genshin Impact is that it feels like this game really wants it to be your ONLY game right now. We went from the challenge of not having enough to do in a day to having WAY MORE to do than you can possibly get done. This is awesome for those who are still mainlining this experience, but for me who has pushed it to the back burner I feel like I am getting further and further behind. Grace and I are now no longer on the same world level which limits what we can do together… which is frustrating.
Diablo 3
Diablo 3 Season 22 starts on Friday, and originally I had contemplated just giving this one a skip. The conquests are not super enjoyable looking, but the book pet is sorta adorable. Grace was planning on doing this one solo even if I decided to skip, and as a result I have decided I am going to do the thing as well. More than anything I think I could just use the chill hang time that a Diablo seasonal grind always represents. In truth it doesn’t really take all that much time, and I plan on going easymode demon hunter in order to complete things quickly. May the luck be in my favor that I get a primal ancient yangs or something like that to help push this along faster. The 4th cube slot is going to provide some really odd builds.
Godfall
I feel like in another world and another time this game and me might have had something. However given its relatively lifeless state and the fact that I have so many other things on my plate right now… I am mostly okay watching it whiz by. To be honest I think the only reason why this game is getting any notice is the fact that it is one of the next gen experiences available for the PlayStation 5 right now. I have it on the PC and it has some significant performance issues on my 1080 ti, which admittedly is part of the reason why I am fine not playing it. I hope it gets some tuning passes, but the bigger problem is that the game as a whole feels like it doesn’t really have a soul to bind you to it. It reminds me of all of the story problems that Destiny 1 had of making you feel like you are dropped in the middle of something that was already happening and giving you zero explanation of what the hell is going on. The problem there however is that Destiny 1 had compelling enough gameplay to make me overlook that but Godfall does not.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands
I was more than happy to largely ignore that World of Warcraft existed for the last few weeks. I spent some time doing the Icecrown rares with my guild and managed to gear up my Paladin and even got the much coveted 34 slot bag. However without realizing it… we are now on the cusp of a new expansion launch. Monday night at 5pm my time I will be venturing forth into the Shadowlands and as a result I am preparing for this to suddenly take all of my focus. I’m even contemplating cooking up something in the crock pot during the day so we have a hot and ready meal waiting on us that I can just fix a plate of whenever I get hungry. That way I can focus all of my attention on being frustrated as the servers burn down around me. Given the state of this year I am expecting anything but a smooth launch, but have a glimmer of hope that I will be pleasantly surprised. Regardless it is leveling in a new expansion time and that is a rare and precious thing that I am going to cherish.
Demon’s Souls
I have no idea why I suddenly find this game so damned compelling. It might be that I Just bought a $500 console and I feel like I need to justify that purchase and this is the only truly next generation game available for it. It might also be that I have always been intrigued by the Souls game genre but never really allow myself to get into it, and there is something oddly compelling about the gameplay. I rerolled last night as a Temple Knight, so that I could start out with a decent twohanded option or at least one that can switch hit between one and two. The two handed no block style is definitely more of my jam, and as a result I made it quite a bit further last night before dinner arrived and I got distracted by the comfy sofa. I realize I live in opposite land where my consoles are all hooked up in my office and my sofa is where I do chill laptop gaming. I still have no clue what I am doing but I am enjoying myself so I guess that is the first step?
Ghost of Tsushima
I finally have my PS5 and you are so damned gorgeous and play so incredibly smoothly. Now I just need to figure out a way to duplicate myself so I can enjoy all of these experiences at once without feeling like I am leaving anything on the table. Hold tight my sweet… we will have our time eventually once I stop being so damned distracted.
Bugsnax
In another time and another place we could have been friends weird muppet pokemon skyrim. You just aren’t compelling enough when compared against all of the other things on my plate. I am glad you were given to me freely by the good folks that set up the PlayStation Now games, because I would have felt awkward ignoring you. I know Tam is your friend, and I am sure I am going to feel pangs of regret this weekend as he tells me how wonderful you are. Seriously though… just can’t right now.
Watch Dogs Legion
Legion is a really interesting game, but there is just something about it that never really grabbed me. I love how rich the world is… but it also feels like there isn’t a lot to do in it other than walk around. I feel like this is a game that Grand Theft Auto players would really be into, given that it is mostly a cycle of steal a car, drive to the mission, do the mission and then try and escape and lay low until the heat has dissipated. That has never really been a super enjoyable format for me, because firstly I don’t love driving cars in these sort of games. Secondly I found myself wanting something to do in the points in between the missions. At least in a game like Division where society has fallen… there are random combat encounters as I wind my way across a painfully detailed landscape. Here you just have a bunch of civilians and occasionally one of them might be interesting enough to want to recruit, but mostly you are traversing large spaces to get to small bits of micro content. I want to return to it someday but I am very glad that I chose to go the Ubisoft subscription route rather than plunk down a large wad of cash on this given how distracted I am right now.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
This one I feel real sad about because I have it installed… but have not even booted it up. Too many other things pulling my attention in too many other directions. I also know that since the way I play this game is in a purely single player fashion, that I will get just as much enjoyment from playing it in 2022 as I will in 2020. Someday I will visit it and roam around in its Norse goodness. This is also another situation where I am real glad I opted for the monthly sub rather than buying it outright.
There we have it friends… my very first world problem that I am lucky to have. On the other side of the coin I am still regularly playing caretaker for my parents, and more of my family has contracted covid so there are stressors there as well. I am thankful that I am so lucky as to be constantly distracted by my hobbies, because this is a year where I am clung to them like a safety blanket. They have been what has allowed me to stay sane through all of this, and while I am in sort of overload mode right now it will give me plenty to focus on as we go into 2021 and realize that things are not going to be magically better. I fully expect that 2021 will feel an awful lot like 2020, minus one major factor… that we will have a change in the oval office. The plague will still be out there and even though vaccines are on the cusp of release it is going to take a significant amount of time to distribute them far and wide enough to make a dent in the numbers. I am very thankful to have many other worlds that I can escape into when this one is just too much to handle.
