Tower of Fantasy Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition

October 26, 2022 by Belghast

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.

Blaugust and the Grand Experiment

September 2, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! How is your day going? I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out why ShareX was not working… only to realize that it is no longer August and I should be looking in the September folder instead. My wife is a teacher and we are pretty sure she brought home some generic crud to us. She is a few days ahead of me but I am very much starting to feel awful. We’ve been playing the “is it allergies or something worse” game for a bit, but so far neither of us has run a fever or had the traditional Covid symptoms. Regardless I am more than a bit mentally lagged at the moment and I am just very thankful that I made it through “Blaugust Hell Day”, or the day that I have to tabulate everything and post the final tallies. So far it appears that I have mostly been okay on my counts, but I had minor stress out yesterday when I thought all of my graphics were posted in a non-transparent mode.

The truth about Blaugust is I am floored that it is still as big of a thing as it is. The entire idea behind it was somewhat dumb. At this point, I think my blog is known more for the frequency of my posts rather than if any of them are good. However, that was not always the case. In the first several years of the blog I would go months between posts, and each time I did… I found it harder to get up the confidence to post again. So on April 26th of 2013, I set forth on my “Grand Experiment” and decided that I was going to be posting every single day. Why April 26th? I legitimately have no clue other than that was just the day that I started posting… and kept posting for several years in this fashion. After a year of doing this nonsense, I somehow got it in my head that everyone should just hit the post button and challenged folks to a month of posting.

It cracks me up a little when I catch hell for not making it to 31 posts during a contest I started in 2014. It is all in good fun, but after doing the daily posting thing for 1120 days in a row… I decided that it probably was not healthy for me. I dropped my streak on May 21st of 2016 when I took both Saturday and Sunday off from posting. For me, at least the whole daily posting routine had become such a concrete part of my life that I was constantly in fear of failing. Even though Blaugust is just a month-long event, for 2018-2022 I have taken Saturdays off just like I do in my normal posting routine. Now I allow myself the leverage to just not post whenever I am “not feeling it”. This weekend for example is Labor Day weekend here in the United States and it is probably a crap shoot if I am actually going to post or not. I called Blaugust a “dumb idea” earlier because in part I think I thought I had figured out the formula for how to blog post… and the contest was pure hubris. Now I am more in line with the thinking that you have to figure out whatever pattern works for you and then stick to that rather than some dogmatic requirement.

I am not making a ton of traction in Path of Exile at the moment in part because I have generally felt like crap and the content that I am doing requires entirely too much concentration and reaction time for me to succeed. I did clear a few more maps to add to my total of 60 out of 115 cleared. I managed to pick up a few more uniques from Kirac’s quest and failed miserably at a third. I’m in this awkward phase of not quite having the survival to just run amok killing everything, and I am not entirely certain which knobs I need to turn in order to get there. Right now I am at the default cap of 75% on all elemental resists, 20% chaos resist, and 5% spell suppression… which seems really hard to get. I need to get through my 4th ascension honestly and have a couple of tokens saved up now. That is probably going to be my next major focus. I got through to the final boss phase and died to his slam, but have upgraded a few pieces of gear since then.

Because it requires so much less focus, I am spending more time playing Diablo 3 at the moment and have a mostly viable Whirlrend Barbarian build. I can comfortably clear T13 content and uncomfortably clear t16. Mostly my core problem right now is survival… which is admittedly always the problem with an early whirlrend build. I have all of the components to make a functional build, I just need to start upgrading things to ancient and finish upgrading my gems. I think my next push is to get my GR75 out of the way so I can start getting a chance at primal ancient legendary drops. I was able to do a GR66 without much issue other than having to be careful of stray projectiles, so I am certain I will be able to do it without much concern. I am back to being stalled on my old friend the Set Dungeon, so another focus soon will be getting one of those mastered so I can clear the way for other objectives.

I am also spending a minimum amount of time playing Tower of Fantasy each day. Essentially I knock out my bounties and then move on to other things. The biggest problem that I am seeing is that since I am no longer farming content… my character level is not keeping up with the requirements material-wise to keep leveling things up. I can technically level my main three weapons from 90 to 100 but I am lacking all of the materials that I would need to do this. My account still seems “lucky” as I have already pulled the new rate-up banner character/weapon called Balmung which is a matched pair of frost swords. All told it seems pretty cool. I will likely continue to dump free summons into the limited-time banners as I have everyone on the standard banner that I care about.

Other than all of this nonsense, if you are in the United States I wish you all a great extended weekend. For the rest of the world… sorry that Monday is going to be oddly quiet. I will likely take the day off unless I have a burning passion to get something out of my system and into a blog post.

Fun With Infinite Climbing

August 16, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I am going to start out this post with a reminder to submit questions for the 400th episode of AggroChat Q&A show this weekend. I’ve been spending most of my gaming time playing Tower of Fantasy and I have to say I am more than sufficiently hooked. For the most part, it seems to have an answer to all of the things that used to bother me about Genshin Impact. Namely, with that game, it felt like I only had about thirty minutes of gameplay that was enjoyable each day, before ultimately waiting for the next reset when I got more resin to do things with. Tower of Fantasy on the other hand seems to have plenty of activities that are actually meaningful without spending “vitality” which is the equivalent of resin in the game.

Most recently I have been obsessed with farming Behemoths. Ultimately there are three spawns in the world that I know of, and they respawn on roughly a 3-minute timer. They have the extremely rare chance of dropping “Omnium Beast Right Arm” which is the last piece I am missing to craft the Omnium Beast VII Mount. Why do I want this so badly? Well, it looks like one of the Magitek walkers from the Final Fantasy series and if I am going to start pouring resources into a vehicle, I would love it to be this one. The first two parts are extremely easy and are obtained through hidden quests involving talking to members of the NPC Hyenas faction… aka the dudes that look like they were pulled straight out of the Borderlands series. This last part, however, requires a certain amount of brute force farming and as such, I’ve mostly stalled out on trying to get this item.

What I should be doing instead is working on world completion, and farming up even more Orbs for doing openings. According to one of their maps, there are roughly 100 gold orbs and 500 black orbs out in the world, and it is honestly sorta relaxing to just do the assorted mini-games required to unlock them. For example, this involves finding a colored spore laying on the ground that matches the center of this flower and then tossing it into the center. The flower will close up tight as a result and an orb will spawn nearby for you to collect. Genshin had a lot of puzzles that involved matching various elemental attacks, but Tower of Fantasy seems to have a much wider variety of these things that involve specific attacks or even using a specific relic at the right time.

I contemplated trying to create a guide to all of them… but this seemed like a daunting task considering there are ones in later levels that I have yet to even encounter. Instead, if you are struggling with figuring out how these puzzles work, the above video seems to have recorded footage of how each of them functions. My two favorites are the mushrooms and the musical notes, in both cases if you are doing them correctly there is audio and graphical feedback. In the case of the mushrooms, you essentially have to hop on them in the correct order, causing them to light up. The musical platforms puzzle is similar but hopping on a platform will cause another platform to start glowing… and you essentially have to follow the sequence of always going to the next glowing platform until the treasure spawns.

The most useful tip that I have seen that I feel like I need to share with anyone who will listen… is Infinite climbing. Tower of Fantasy has a number of movement abilities that can be chained together in unexpected ways. For example, if you have a cybernetic arm relic (grappling hook), you can use that while gliding to pull you up to higher destinations. Infinite climbing uses an interaction between the double jump and the normal climbing mechanic. Essentially you push off the wall (the default key is Control) and then immediately double tap your jump button (spacebar) and then push forward to move back into a climbing position (W). The end result is that you essentially double jump up on the face of the wall without it consuming any stamina. Now you want to reserve some stamina because there were points on some walls that have to be climbed over because you can’t fully attach until you are over a lip. Using this technique though, you can essentially scale anything in the game without worrying about your stamina bar.

There are also some interesting interactions with jetboards that effectively allow you to get out of combat quickly. For example, as part of the titan farm that I am doing for the mount piece, there are times I want to get out of combat quickly so that I can teleport again to the next spawn destination. If you hop on the jetboard and take to the water, it seems to instantly reset your combat status flag. I think that is honestly one of the things that I am digging the most is all of the interactions that the various relics have. The way that they have designed the game… it feels like the sky is the limit to the sorts of unique things that they can design in the future. Everything feels very open-ended, especially when it comes to combat and the different sorts of weapons they might be able to create in the future.

The one thing that I wish is that it was more reasonable to effectively level up every weapon. Right now I have mostly had to choose four weapons that I use the most: Scythe, Dual Pistols, Greatsword, and whatever the heck thing Nemesis uses. However, I sort of wish that I had enough currency to level up everything… including all of the purple weapons that I have gotten enough duplicates of to max their stars. None of the weapons feel like copies of something else in the game, so for example the Ice Hammer just doesn’t really have a legendary equivalent that feels quite as good as it does. Then there is the big cannon thing that you can effectively turn into a turret… which still feels great even as you get technically better weapons. Maybe that is something that you can work on during content droughts, but I sorta wish there was a way to upgrade the rarity of some of those purple options to make them mechanically viable long term.

Yesterday was the first day that I fell behind the daily curve. Essentially each day the level cap has increased and more story has been released. I finished the story but because I spent so much time grinding the Behemoths for drops, I did not finish leveling. The truth is I am largely okay with this because I am certain that there will come a point where I just simply cannot keep up. Especially with the new Path of Exile season starting on Friday and then Diablo 3 season starting the Friday after that. This game is going to fall by the wayside a bit as I get my footing in both of those games. However, I think it is going to be something that I have been in the rotation for a long while. I really enjoy the group content as well, even though it would be far better if I actually got to run it with some friends.

That is honestly my core complaint right now. The game does not make it easy for you to play with your friends. The servers once again get in the way of the experience and there needs to be a way to either do cross-server UID-based grouping, or the ability to transfer your character to a new server. I mean we all have this unique identifier associated with our accounts. There should be a way for us to friend each other based on that idea and then invite each other to groups, with the group existing on the leader’s server. The game makes it relatively trivial to reroll, and you effectively get all of the starter currency on every character you create. However with the luck that I have had in snagging six legendary SSR weapons… there is no way I am restarting somewhere else. If your weapon progress was account based, then in theory I would be fine completing all of the content again on another server.

Ultimately it is a problem I hope they can come up with a solution for in the future. I am over on Observer if anyone is interested in checking out the game. Originally I was targeting Solaris, but that appears to be where all of the streamers ended up so I am more than happy NOT being there.

Generous Gacha

August 12, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I have to admit that yesterday I might have been a little early to judge this game as being an uninspired Genshin clone. The more I play this game the more I enjoy it and see how it in many ways has learned lessons from the success of Genshin. Admittedly at this point, I have had an extreme string of luck and have what the “kids” would call a very “cracked” account. Currently, I am running three legendary weapons and have lucked my way into two of the weapons that I had been chasing… namely the frost greatsword and the lightning dual pistols. While I never would have gone after it… I’ve also fallen in love with the fire cube thingy… which essentially turns me into a fire mage.

I realize that I am probably experiencing what my friends call “Bel Luck” but at this point, I have done somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 pulls and have managed to get four of the legendary SSR weapons/simulacra. The game is exceedingly generous with currency so just by playing the game and knocking out objectives, you are going to be earning a large number of the purple and orange orbs. Red orbs from what I can tell seem to be the exclusive cash shop currency, or at least can only be gained by spending money or converting free currency into them rather than getting them as rewards. Red orbs seem to be used exclusively for the 50/50 banner where you have a 50% chance of getting a specific champion each time you manage to pull an SSR weapon.

There are a few things at work here. Firstly Tower of Fortune is just slightly more generous in the odds than Genshin Impact. The odds of pulling an SSR Weapon is 0.75% and the equivalent odds of pulling a 5 Star Champion in Genshin is roughly 0.6%. Then there is a significant difference in the way that the pity system works. In Genshin you got a 5-star every 90 pulls, and if you lucked into an early 5-star it reset your pity counter back to 90. This pity timer was not clearly tracked in the UI but instead something you sort of had to figure out on your own or go through the results log to calculate. In Tower of Fortune, you get a guaranteed SSR every 80 pulls, with the key difference being that if you get an early SSR it does not reset your pity. So in my case, I lucked into 3 SSRs and then still hit my pity at 80 and got another SSR. Then there is the quality of life change in that each banner clearly shows where you are in the pity progression, so for example on the matrix banner I am 12 draws in of my initial 40 pity.

On top of those improvements, there is another system working in my favor that will ultimately let me choose whatever SSR Weapon I want. As you complete various micro-objectives in the game you are earning a point total. Currently, I am sitting at 460, and ticking these off might be running a certain number of ruins or opening a certain number of chests. Every 100 points you gain some sort of perk, and at 700 points you get a box that will essentially allow you to choose any SSR Weapon/Simulacra that you want out of everything currently available in the game. So all of those folks who have been chasing Diluc in Genshin Impact since day one… in this game, you can just choose this game’s equivalent of Diluc the Fire Scythe dude. Granted I am sure at some point I will start needing duplicates of these weapons, but I did notice there is a shop in-game with some currency that I am slowly collecting… that allows me to buy duplicate weapons when I unlock each SSR.

Another huge change from the Genshin model is that you could end up in a situation where you had nothing left that you could do in a day. The World Bosses in that game allowed you to spend “Original Resin” only if you wanted to get rewards but that did not trickle down to every activity. Even then it wasn’t super enjoyable to run things without much benefit. In Tower of Fantasy, it appears that there are a lot of activities like ruins that are not gated by spending some currency to go into them. Instead, this resource gating comes into play when you run the group content in the game. I ran through a Joint Operation last night and there were 3 chests that dropped, each of them costing 30 of the resource to open. However they all seemed to have their own drop table, so if you wanted a specific item you could in theory target opening only one chest, and then that same 90 resource cost could be applied to three individual runs.

Now that we have talked about just a few of the ways that Tower of Fantasy is more generous than Genshin Impact, let’s dive into a few other differences. One of the biggest ones is that ToF has mounts that you can use to zip around the map. This does mean that there are fewer fast travel waypoints that you can teleport to, with it largely limited to specific teleporters. For me, it honestly feels more enjoyable to traverse the map on the mount as opposed to “bamphing” all over the place. You unlock your first mount through the main story quest, which is this slick-looking motorcycle. I am not sure where I got it, but I also have this wholly irrational looking rubiks cube sort of mount as well, so I am guessing there will be a large number of options for you to ride around on over time.

On top of mounts, you have a series of relics that also provide travel benefits. For example, the first relic that you get is your glider and for the most part, it will permanently take up your first relic slot. Then over time, you unlock a series of other relics that you can swap between based on your current situation. The jet board for example essentially lets you surf across the water and serves as your way of unlocking the second island in the game. Then there are relics that solve specific problems that you might encounter in the world. For example, Missile Barrage can be used to break down cracked walls in dungeons and in the open world and Omnium Handcannon fires out a beam that serves as a temporary platform. The Handcannon specifically reminds me of the ice ability from Breath of the Wild and you can use it to block laser beams for example or give yourself something that you can actually climb in areas without climbable walls.

You unlock the first few relics through the main story quest as you explore various ruins. The thing that I have noticed upon multiple trips back to these areas… is that there are many ways to solve each of the puzzles that you are presented with. So while the Missile Barrage is the most obvious way of breaking down these walls, that same ruin also had exploding barrels which serve the same purpose. Most of the areas that might require you to climb, can also be carefully accessed through gliding. One of the things that were really missing from Genshin Impact in the whole “Breath of the Wild” comparison, is that you were lacking all of the curious inventions that link gained over time to help him traverse the world. The addition of Relics really opens up the door to new kinds of gameplay and makes it extremely easy for them to add more devious puzzles down the road that require something more than just casting the right elemental spell at the right time.

The other thing that I am noticing the further I go into the game is how much more Western-influenced Tower of Fantasy is. There are absolutely parts of the game that feel like they have been pulled straight from the Borderlands series. There are other aspects that give me an almost Wildstar vibe, especially when it comes to the way that Exile faction areas felt. So while I referred to this as the lovechild of Genshin Impact and Phantasy Star Online, and that is still largely correct… the world is so much more nuanced than that. Granted I have only seen two areas of the game and I have no clue what sorts of things I might encounter the further that I go in. Genshin also has expanded significantly since I last played it, but nothing that I did encounter really felt like it was borrowing heavily from Western game genres.

Yesterday I managed to fire up a Crew, which is this game’s version of a Guild. There is so much nonsense going on with this screen that I do not understand in the least. It seems like there are four quests a week that guild members can do, and there is a unique currency that you earn from doing them that can be spent for various things on the storefront. Additionally, there is a process of upgrading your guild base, but I don’t yet understand how to gain any of the currencies that seem to be involved with that. At the moment there are only three of us and none of us are terribly advanced yet. I only mentioned this system to show that there is some sort of guild construct and that it appears to be sufficiently detailed.

All said, the longer I spend with this game the more I enjoy it more than Genshin. I realize that come August 19th I am going to be pouring my heart and soul into the launch of the Lake of Kalandra league starting in Path of Exile, but for now, I am having some fun. There is a concept called Anchoring Bias that mobile/gacha games rely on heavily to get you to spend money. This ultimately is what led players to feel like Genshin was a reasonable game experience and by reference why Diablo Immortal felt so extremely predatory in comparison. Tower of Fantasy so far feels like it has taken lessons from Genshin in so many ways, including pricing strategy. Everything about the cash shop is just ever so slightly a better deal than the same item would be in Genshin and it feels very intentional.

While it is unlikely that this brings in near the amount of cash… it will probably also prompt players who spent nothing on Genshin to spend on this game. I know I have spent a few bucks on the daily month-long rewards track since those tend to be a phenomenal deal. I’m also contemplating buying into the Battle Pass because I have already gotten $20 of enjoyment out of the game. This game feels like it was very much designed for the spending habits of Western and Japanese gamers, whereas Genshin was absolutely designed to cater to the Chinese mobile spending habits. If this really is the case and this stays true… I am honestly happy to support this notion.