Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Going North

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I played some more Dune Awakening and spent a good chunk of the evening running from Sandworms. I’ve crossed the gap from Hagga Basin South into the Eastern Vermillius Gap, signifying a shift from Copper-based crafting to Iron-based crafting. I am not sure if this is true, but every time I have ever crossed the gap… I end up summoning a worm. Since I made several crosses yesterday to truck resources to the north, that means I spent quite a bit of time running like hell from sandworms. I also had the bad luck of triggering a sandworm when coming back from the Anvil as well, and then on one of my runs, got clipped by a Sardaukar stun beam thingy, thankfully did not have a worm on my ass… and was able to just run like hell once it unfroze me. I tried the build base from template thing, but it was a bit too fiddly for my tastes, and I just built a new design.

I am way happier with the placement of my Vermillius base than I was with the previous start at the launch of the game, and I have ready access to plenty of Iron just within easy distance of my base. The big problem once you cross the gap, however, becomes that every bandit camp has folks with a Holtzman shield and seems to deal way the hell more damage than before. I find myself constantly struggling to get enough water, because once you move into the Iron tier… refinding metal starts to take copious amounts of water. There is a small bandit camp across the way from my base, and I kept going over there to bleed them dry so I could keep my water reserves stocked. I desperately need a dew reaper, but I have no way of getting flour sand other than randomly looting it off baddies. I have gotten enough to craft one block of silicon, but I need four to make my reaper. I might just go over to The Anvil and see if they have one for sale.

One of the things that annoys me about Dune Awakening is how strictly you have to align with the quests. For example, when I got the quest to cross into the Vermillius gap, I had to craft bike parts… even though I already had a bike. I also had to demolish part of my base so that I could place down an advanced doohickey. It also forced me to abandon my base in the south… but I did so by going back down there, demolishing the base gadget, and then placing another one right back there. I have been maintaining that base so that Ace can come raid my stores and use it as a temporary location when they get to the point where they have to do the Imperial Testing facility. I just hate how much the main quest sequence is dictating my actions, and I wish there were a way to opt out of specific steps. However, you can’t really do that because the crafting sequence is hard-gated based on your progression. There was a bunch of useful stuff gated behind abandoning that base… so I had to do it in spite of not wanting to in the least. The south is still way easier to farm fremen materials than anything up in the north.

I was able to make a bunch of upgrades, including my first Holtzman Shield, which is wild because I swear last time playing this game, I had an MK1 one much earlier. It makes me wonder what quest I unintentionally skipped. I also outfitted myself in a full Kirab Stillsuit, which I prefer to use over the more protective armors. As part of this, I upgraded my power pack again and cutterray, and crafted my very first handheld resource scanner. I did not make one of these the last time I was playing, and ultimately waited until I had a dune buggy with a scanner before even playing with this functionality. Seeing how limited the range is… I question if this is even worth researching. I can easily see all of the resources it is pointing out for me, so I am not really sure what the idea behind this gadget is. Maybe it is for folks who are bad at discerning what a resource is from what is just a set decoration greeble?

I might hold off a bit from playing and let Ace catch up with me. I think a lot of the larger camps in Vermillius Gap would be way more enjoyable to farm with another person. Hopefully, I can connect up with them this weekend or one of the other AggroChat folks playing on this server. There is also supposedly a Welcome Back cache, and I sent a note to support about that, and they asked me a bunch of questions. My character seems to have poofed from the last time I played, so I am going to have to feed them the information about that character. Apparently, with Tam, they flooded him in resources, so here is hoping that I can get a similar carepackage because if nothing else, it will ease the transition for some of the other folks just starting out. I was harvesting Cobalt when I last played, so if I can get some of those resources, it would be amazing.

Sibling Time

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Good Morning Folks. Tuesday nights are often what we refer to as “Sibling Time,” where my sib Ace and I get together and either play Destiny Rising or just hang out and chat while doing our own thing. Since we are both somewhat down on Destiny Rising at the moment, we are trying to branch out and play some other things. Initially, I thought we might be able to do Dune Awakening, but they were just too new, and if I carried them… they would likely bounce from the game entirely. I did, however, figure out that I can easily retrofit my sandbike to have a booster seat on the back instead of storage. So when the time comes for them to go do some of the stuff in the area of Hagga South, I have built my base, I can zip over and pick them up. Hopefully, a weekend of piddling around in-game will give them the basis of being able to do group content together. I’ve largely finished Hagga South, and am about ready to transition to the zone just North, but I plan on leaving the base largely intact so that Ace can potentially claim it when they are ready to start doing stuff in the northern area of the zone. That is one thing that I wish you could do more easily: transition a base to another player rather than demolishing the control panel and then letting them place one instead.

We have been loosely shopping for other games to play, and one of them that we both enjoyed greatly is Enshrouded. So last night I logged into my level 25 geared out character that I have not played since launch… and tried to figure out how the hell to join a game with each other. Hint… you must be online in Steam in order to see each other in the game, so as two perpetually “Show as Offline” introverted goblins… we had to both show online for a moment while we joined up on Ace’s world. It was at this point that I saw their highly optimized base layout… and also might have given them more than a little bit of shit about not having walls. One of these days we will join my world, and they can give me abundant crap over the severe level of overbuilding that I do on my bases… which are extremely NOT optimized. Real talk, though, coming back last night has made me want to play more, and I am probably going to do so on the level 25 character since I don’t really feel like gearing out another one. Guild Wars 2 has kind of made me wish all games allowed you to reach a point of “forever gear” quickly and then just get to do the fun stuff.

For a while now, Ace had been telling me about all of the updates in-game, in part trying to coax me back to wanting to play it again. One of the feature drops specifically was something called Hollow Halls. These are a series of what can best be described as “Raids” in the MMORPG context, that were patched in with 0.7.1.0 from March 2024. I had done plenty of the more dungeon-like content in Enshrouded, and they were really fun, but also really short, and mostly focused around rushing to a boss and then taking it down and collecting the trophy. Hollow Halls are way more detailed than this, and to start off you have to begin a quest which grants you your key to the first one, and then completing each one unlocks the next Hollow Hall in sequence. Last night we did the Nomad Highlands one, which is the third of four Hollow Halls in sequence.

There are technically mini-boss style encounters scattered throughout the large sweeping dungeon, but the real challenge is the environmental effects, mob spawners buried in frustrating to get to places, and this whole mini game that focuses on finding a bunch of runestones, which then unlock the door to the next area of the place. The huge positive about this place is that effectively each “floor” has a spawner, so that if you die, you can get right back into the action rather quickly. There were a lot of puzzles that involved very careful gliding, and I happened to die on the lava… which was unfortunate because even though Ace was able to resurrect me, I died again before I got control over my character. Due to the spawners, though, I was able to bip right back down to where we were in a matter of seconds. We were playing on their world at the lowest difficulty settings, and even then, it still took us about two hours to complete this place.

One of the really neat things about these massive dungeons is that they have special block types that you can only get by finding chests in them. What was nice, though, was that just by looting the chest, it unlocked the block for everyone in the party. They also had their world set so that each boss dropped a trophy for every party member, which meant that we walked away with multiple trophies by defeating all of the mini-bosses contained within. I dinged level 26 while I was in the dungeon, and I believe when I last played this game, the level cap was 25… so it will be interesting to see how much deeper this rabbit hole goes. I am probably going to run around on my geared character for a while and then build out a world from the start so that I can see all of the content I might have missed along the way. I had a freaking blast last night, and I figure we will probably be doing more of these Enshrouded nights.

Another game that I have been wanting to play again is No Man’s Sky, and it turns out they have also been playing around a bit. So after concluding our Enshrouded time together, I popped over into NMS and started a new, relaxed character. I made it through the initial sequence of getting my ship up and running and am on the second planet. There are tons of games that we both enjoy playing; we just need to set the focus on actually playing them together. I also think that I might have convinced Ace to give Path of Exile another shot with the upcoming 3.28 league, so that will be fun as well. Sibling Time is one of those sacred rituals in my life, and especially after the passing of my partner, I have needed it more and more as a stabilizing force. A few hours doing dumb things with Ace, cures many ills… and there is so much of me that wishes that we had actually gotten the chance to grow up together, rather than being adopted siblings.

If you’ve not played Enshrouded in a while, I highly suggest checking in on the game again.

Return to Arrakis

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Sometimes things happen really quickly. We had been commenting recently that, at some point, we wanted to give Dune Awakening another go. For me, it landed at exactly the wrong time… right before a Path of Exile league. One of the big turn-offs was the real-world upkeep aspect of the game, and the fact that I needed to log in periodically to refill the power packs on my base so that it would not deteriorate. All of that said, I had a lot of fun while I was playing it and learned a lot of things about the game itself that would make a restart feel so much better. Saturday night, after the podcast, I logged pretty quickly, and then when I got up Sunday morning to edit said podcast… I noticed a chain of messages in our games of the moment channel. Essentially, Tam had made good on the plans and reactivated our private server, and as such, Sunday morning after posting the show, I was back in the character creator building a new desert dweller.

This time around, I went with a Swordmaster and landed on a look that felt more “me”. While I generally play fairly lily-white characters in games, I can’t bring myself to do so in the Dune universe. It is just too unrealistic that anyone who has spent any amount of time in the desert would not have a lovely bronze complexion. I went Swordmaster because it has this bum rush type ability that seemed like it might be really useful early in the game. I was a Mentat previously, and the whole floating turret thing was cool, but felt like it took too much planning and setup for it to really be useful for very long. Swordmaster, on the other hand, has a ton of perks that improve how well you can survive in harsh conditions, which seemed like something I care way more about. Ironically, though I find myself using a rifle way more often than I am using a blade, because if I can keep things at ranged I can generally whittle them down pretty quickly. I desperately need a shield belt, though, so I need to stop stalling and do the quests that I believe unlock it.

One of the huge benefits of playing this already… is that I understand the flow of the early game a bit better. Nothing that I do in the first two zones is likely to have any permanence. I am already on base number three, and instead of building grand constructions… I am building essentially what is needed. I am also not too torn up about leaving resources behind, and carrying only the things that are actually more challenging to acquire, like the fremen materials. Right now, I have a small base situated vaguely between the Imperial Testing Station and the shipwreck, so that I can comfortably farm both of those. My first goal was to gather up enough blue materials to craft a Sandbike, because ultimately, I will need that to transition up into the next zone and start mining iron. I do want to finish doing the various contracts I have before moving upwards, though, because it is not like I am in an extreme rush. Thinking about Dune Awakening characters like Minecraft, or even ARPG characters, helps immensely because I know I will probably reroll again at some point in the future and wipe the slate clean again.

Another thing that I have noticed this time around is that I am way more willing to move around during the daytime. I think during my first playthrough, I was scared to death of being stranded out in the sun for any length of time, and as such, I spent too much time waiting for nightfall, where I felt like I could move around more freely. There are always shadows about, and you can get to the safety of them pretty quickly. It is highly unlikely that you will ever truly be stranded, and in a worst-case scenario, you build a temp base. I’ve even gotten way more comfortable crossing expanses of open desert during the day if I can figure out a way to hop between shadows. Daytime has become the time I farm resources that are easy to get, and Nighttime is when I set out on more serious adventures, like crossing between complexes of rock. When I play next, I plan on heading over to the ship wreck and farming some materials there, and maybe pushing past that to knock out the kill quest for the Trooper at the first city.

The highlight of yesterday was that I have my sandbike ready to roll, which is going to make finishing up everything that I want to do in Hagga South that much easier. Essentially, once I get ready to make the migration to the next area, I will load up some basic materials and then find a safe place to cross the gap. I really should have put in a proper two-wide door into this base instead of having to try to navigate my bike out of a normal door. It works for now, but is more fiddly than I would have liked it. Oh well, these are things that I can fix in the next base, because I know I will be starting over once again just around the corner. Essentailly I am building these 2×3 foundation block huts that have a second story. It gives me plenty of room to put a few power generators down on the bottom floor and all of the necessary machines on the top floor. They are not architectural marvels, but they are efficient… which feels like is way more important while you are still roaming around the map prior to getting your ornithopter. I know Tam already has a decent base in Aluminum territory, so once I get up there, I can rely on that somewhat. I think it will be important that we build bases in decent spots so that we can each utilize the other bases as a bit of a network.

The thing that I marvel at most about this game is its sound design. Moving around the desert feels amazing because you are constantly aware of the sounds and movement of the worms below you. Additionally, combat noises feel really good, and the ever-present threat of the Sardaukar at night keeps you on your toes. It feels like the world is the real enemy that you are fighting against, though, and it is living and breathing and always waiting for you to slip up. All of that said… I am starting to get to the point where I am willing to take more risks because the worst thing that can happen is that I have to start over. Progression goes much faster once you know what you are doing, so the idea of losing everything is no longer as daunting as it once was. Sure, there are some key progression moments… first sandbike, first dune buggy, first ornithopter… but those are also things that other players can help you with. I am sure if I got desperate, I could get someone to craft me Sandbike bits again.

The other big thing that I noticed is that it feels like the world has way more resources than it used to. Even the patch that just dropped seems to have added a bunch of nodes that were not there yesterday. For example, my current base did not really have much copper around it, but this morning when I logged in, there were four nodes in the same valley that I built the base in. Essentially, it seems like the game is way more forgiving than it was at launch, which only serves to make me willing to be a bit more reckless with resources. It felt like, at launch, I spent a lot more time struggling to reach a point of sustainability, and I am not having any of those issues now. So I am not sure if they eased up on how fast you lose water, but that definitely feels a bit easier than it was before. Maybe I just rushed my way to the stillsuit faster this time.

Essentially, I am enjoying my time back in Dune Awakening, and we will see how far I can get before Path of Exile 3.28 drops.

Demonology for Fun and Profit

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Good Morning Folks. I have to be blazingly honest here… I did not have it on my punch card that we would be getting an expansion for Diablo II this year. However, we got exactly that as part of the Diablo anniversary celebration, and it was a shadow drop, meaning I have already played a bit of the brand new class in Diablo II, the Warlock. I have to say it is pretty freaking awesome, at least in the early levels, it feels wildly overpowered. Granted, you can only really have one minion so far, but I am sure that changes over time. You summon up your demon goat buddy, and he proceeds to lay waste to everything around you, while you bop things over the head with your floating weapon. I think the floating weapon thing is honestly a really nice touch because it differentiates this class from other classes that start out feeling like they are shittier versions of the Barbarian… looking at you, Druid.

What is wild about this is that the Warlock class is coming to three games in the Diablo franchise. It’s a bit of a bummer that Diablo III is left out of the love here… but I feel like probably it and Diablo 1 both got dropped for the same reason, they do not have a shiny new client built with modern development technology. We already have the Warlock in Diablo II, but it is coming to Diablo IV at the end of April and to Diablo Immortal in June. Not that I give much of a shit about Diablo Immortal, but I will probably be playing whatever season coincides with the April 28th start date of the Warlock drop in Diablo IV. I will always be down for more Minion gameplay coming to games. So far, at least it feels pretty solid, and it has actually made me want to play some more Diablo II Resurrected. Generally speaking, D2R gameplay is way too slow for my tastes these days, but it might be fun to do at least a full playthrough on the Warlock.

In other news, we got a new Lunar New Year event in Destiny Rising, so maybe it is not entirely out to pasture fully. I lack the cultural significance of all of the stuff that coincides with Lunar New Year events, but they often are big deals in Japanese and Chinese games, and so far, that seems to be the case here as well. Essentailly the normal Frontline events are being replaced with new encounters with the red and gold fireworks themes. Doing these earns points towards the larger event that is going on, and will ultimately also earn you pulls for the reworked version of Ikora. I played three rounds or so of Frontlines yesterday and had a reasonably good time doing it. This is mostly a pretty chill activity and is exclusive to Jiangshit Metro, aka Space China. Is it massive and new and exciting? Not really. However it is something and I have to give them credit for it.

Yesterday evening, we got a new State of Play event from Sony, and probably the biggest news for me personally was the upcoming release of Death Stranding 2 for the PC. Sure, I have a PS5 and could have played this game at any point I wanted to, but I greatly prefer playing open-world games with a mouse and keyboard whenever possible. The PC release of the first game dropped during the height of covid lockdown, and it was extremely poignant as we were all adjusting to a new way of life, much in the same way as the characters in the game were. I’ve never been a massive Kojima fan, but I did really enjoy the quirky lore of the world in this series and look forward to seeing more of it. I may have also developed a crush on Fragile, and am interested in seeing more of how things progress in this world. Troy Baker’s character in this series is also completely batshit crazy, and I am interested in seeing just how over the top he is in this version.

Next up, we have a really freaking cool-looking Castlevania game from some of the folks behind Dead Cells. Not that I necessarily have much to say about this, other than the fact that I will be playing it when it drops. At least based on the trailer, I would guess this is more in line with Castlevania 1 and 3, and not a more role-playing game experience like 2 and Symphony of the Night. I tend to prefer the Castlevania RPG games where you level up and collect gear and such, but it does not mean that I don’t appreciate the more standard platformer style games. It might be a bit more modern platformer than I would like, but we will have to see how it plays. Games like Silksong tend to require a level of manual dexterity that I no longer have with a controller.

We also got more gameplay of Control Resonant, and while I still mourn the fact that we are not playing as Jesse… I love this weird shared universe and will be here on day one regardless. I am really looking forward to just how kooky the world is going to be, given that we are apparently playing with gravity and surfaces. It seems like the corruption of the Oldest House has spilled out into the real world, and I guess New York is suffering as a result. I love the visuals, so this should be a heck of a lot of fun.

Lastly, we got another video update on Tokon Fighting Souls, and while I am not as big a fighting game player as I once was, this game looks like a lot of fun. I am all on board with playing Magik in a fighting game. I am super pumped that Steve Blum is doing the voice for Wolverine as well. I hope that means he will be doing the voice of Wolverine in the game that Insomniac has been working on as well. Anyways, it should be a lot of fun, and will likely look beautiful in blazing 4k on the 65-inch television that I picked up not too long ago. At some point, I really need to hang up a curtain rod so I can put up some blackout curtains over the awkward round window in the livingroom.

There was honestly a bunch of other interesting stuff announced yesterday, so if you have the time it might be worth watching it in the background while doing other things. Either that or, at a minimum, hitting the PlayStation YouTube channel to see if there are any trailers that stand out to you. After showings like this, it really hits home just how far Microsoft is falling behind in this race. They conceded the PlayStation 4 generation, and as a result, lost the generation when everyone shifted to digital purchases. It is going to be nigh impossible to claw their way back from this, especially when Sony keeps dropping banger exclusives left and right. I will probably never be a console-first player, but I doubt I buy another Microsoft console because I have barely used my Xbox. Going forward, I will probably have a Sony console, a Nintendo console, and then my PC for everything else.

Anyways. Was there anything you were super pumped for in the State of Play? Have you been playing the Warlock in Diablo II Resurrected? Drop me a line below.