Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Brimstone Sands Drop Day

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Good Morning Friends! Today begins either the redemption story for New World or the ultimate demise and the next few weeks will determine which direction it progresses. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the release of the Brimstone Sands content expansions that come along with it a brand-new player experience. As a result, several of us have been amped by the thought of a new start with brand-new characters and seeing this game with fresh eyes. However, this is also going to underline what lessons if any the Amazon Game Studios team has learned over the last year. The server population is going to precipitously increase, and it is important to see how they handle this. Since I am going to be re-rolling today, I am wishing for the best.

Everyone loves a comeback story, and New World is on the cusp of exactly that. You can notice that starting in August the game saw significant increases in player population. We have essentially rolled back the clock to the sort of numbers we saw last around February, and erased a good chunk of damage from the last year. The game really is in a great state right now and the team has made so many correct calls lately in tailoring the game experience to be less punitive to the player. I am still deeply concerned by the fixed server sizes, but I think that is a core design decision of the game and not something that they can easily resolve.

In the lead-up to the launch of this content expansion, they have added a handful of servers. I find it funny that they are recycling names from servers that were originally merged into other servers. I remember Frislandia which just showed up again was the server that Minda got merged into, and was then later merged into Valhalla. Right now we have banked on Themiscyra for re-rolls which will ultimately roll up into Eden more than likely when the next round of mergers happens. I’ve now set the machine in motion and many of us have stubbed out characters on that server. Had I waited just a bit longer to make my decision, I might have banked on Heliopolis instead. I still think the whole one character per server cluster nonsense is a bad idea and is ultimately going to limit how successful countermeasures to overpopulation are.

The patch is currently available in steam and the patch notes have dropped as well so you can read all of the detailed changes. That said this team is notorious for having undocumented changes as well, so you might watch Reddit later today for a thread of those to show up. Here is hoping that the New World team can pull this off. They have been granted a second chance, and I hope they do not squander it. The game is deeply enjoyable and I am hoping that maybe they can start to win back the legion of PVE-only players that they lost during the tumultuous launch. For me, my plan is to largely focus on trade skills at least until I run up Armorcrafting and Weaponsmithing. My hope is this is going to buy time for the rest of my retinue to catch up to me in levels, as just by my nature alone… I am probably going to be putting in way more hours in total.

I guess that begs the question then. Are you planning on returning to New World? Are you planning on doing the nonsense thing we are and rolling a brand new character? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Farming the Fixers

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I am still very much in a holding pattern until the drop of the New World patch on the 18th, but I’ve also gotten rather invested in Cyberpunk 2077 again. I did not realize the amount of content that I had never seen on my original playthrough and subsequent jaunts back into the game. I am not sure what has changed but it seems to be much easier to find side missions as they are now showing up on my minimap. Maybe this was always a thing that existed and I just was too engaged in the story to notice it, but as I start to wind down the main story elements… the game seems to be presenting more and more side content to consume me.

Right now I am in this mode of farming down the blue exclamation points on the map, which represent gigs from fixers. As I complete a set, another set will show up… and I am guessing this is ultimately how you can reach those lofty numbers being tracked on each of the fixers. I never understood how you could run 22 missions for Wakako for example, because I never seemed to get that many. I must have simply missed doing enough side quests to “uncloak” the next set of missions. Last night for example I stumbled onto one where I helped my Aldecado buds on a deal gone south and through sheer intimidation kept it from ending up in bloodshed. I think at launch there were a lot of glitchy behaviors that I just took for granted as the game rolled out in an unpolished state, and maybe assumed those mission counters were bugged as well.

The single greatest change for me personally however remains the wardrobe. I cannot fully explain how much this improves my play experience to be running around the world as a cool-looking “V” rather than one that looks like a burning-crusade-era fury warrior. I shifted up my style last night as I had acquired a few new items and I am very on board with this. I love the jacket with the bumpy spikey bits. Last night I picked up Johnny’s pants which are sorta copper colored and go nicely with the blue accents on the jacket and the boots. One cool feature is there is a menu open when you go to a clothing vendor that will show you appearances that you have not collected yet.

I’ve dabbled with a few mods and I think I am at the point where I either need to stop using them or try and figure out how to make them work properly. Nexus Mods and Vortex are not quite ready for primetime when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, and it does not do a good job of making sure you have prerequisites installed. It all started because I wanted to try using the flying cars mod showcased in the above video… and the failed state that the mod was installed in caused another quest involving stealing a car to completely bug out last night. After pulling my hair out and reloading past saves I finally disabled a slew of mods and realized those were the problem. Normally I am extremely pro-mods in games, but maybe wait until the vortex client does a reasonable job of sorting things out for you before dabbling in Cyberpunk modding.

All said I figure I will probably be playing Cyberpunk 2077 right up until the point that I do my reroll in New World. This game has rapidly joined a list of “favorite games” for screwing around in when nothing else quite sounds right. For years I have booted up Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, or more recently Witcher 3 when I had a doldrum in gaming. Cyberpunk has the same sort of feel for me, of letting me roam aimlessly until something catches my eye… and they focus in on questing until I get distracted again. I really WANT Red Dead Redemption II to be that sort of game as well, and in theory, it should be… but the Rockstar brand of open-world questing just chafes me. It is too on rails and too focused on specific objectives, and doesn’t let me roam off the path easy enough. I need a game that lets me follow my whims, which reminds me the next time I go into the doldrums… I am probably going to revisit Dying Light 2.

Hopefully, you are all having a most excellent week out there. What games do you find yourself returning to over and over when you don’t have another game in mind? Drop me a line below in the comments.

Brimstone Sands is Soon

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We have an official date for the New World Brimstone Sands update and with it, we have been sorting out our thoughts regarding the planned reroll. I thought I would update you fine folks that read my blog in case you also want to join along in this nonsense. Essentially Brimstone Sands includes an entire new endgame region of the map, the new Greatsword weapon, a brand new starter experience, and significant improvements to the questing, leveling, and crafting processes. I spent quite a bit of time on the PTR and got to around level 45 before backing off and deciding to wait for the patch to drop.

One of the things that I feel like you need to understand going into this is that I do not take my planned re-roll lightly. At present, I have 868.9 total hours of gameplay in New World with 767.3 on the live server and 101.6 on the PTR. I have three trade skills leveled all of the ways up to 200 and all of my harvesting and refining professions have gone past 200 and are into the aptitude cache levels. I have every strength-based weapon capped at level 20 and every piece of armor at 600 expertise or higher and every strength-based weapon at 600 expertise or higher. I’ve also crafted myself a full set of Heavy Void Bent armor and could pretty much tackle any content in the game. Essentially I will be walking away from a lot of work.

The new player experience for the game has improved so much, that I am actually giddy at the thought of walking away from all of that… and starting over from scratch. I had so much fun playing around on the PTR and experiencing the new quest lines and the flow of the content, that it really does present the game in a completely different light. I know my early focus is going to be getting my crafting up, specifically armoring and weapon crafting so I can start making end-game gear. Essentially it is a do-over because I now understand how a lot of the systems work and can be a bit more efficient in my processes. Additionally, there is the chance for all of us to finally end up on the same server… which was a huge reason why so many bounced at launch. The fragmentation of communities was awful.

There have been a staggering number of changes that have gone into the game since launch, and if you have not been playing through them… it honestly might be shocking just how much has changed. I am not going to cover them all, especially when one of my favorite New World creators has done an excellent job doing it for me. However the quality of life and flow of the game is much improved, and little things like dungeon keys or quests requiring you to run with a group of players on that step of the chain gating your process are a thing of the past. Additionally, storage and travel are largely not a problem either, meaning you can get out into the world and freely explore rather than feeling chained to either Everfall or Windsward.

Contemplating a return has caused me to put in a lot of thought regarding WHERE to return. You can only have one character on each World Set, and since a large number of us are now on Valhalla due to server mergers that lockout Arkadia Eta pending we don’t delete characters. While I am amped about a reroll, I don’t want to go so far as to delete my OG main. Additionally, there are new servers being created that don’t allow for transfers but given that there might be people who want to join in the fun later and transfer a character… I don’t want to lock out that possibility. This has me eyeing the Arkadia Zeta World Set and more specifically Themiscyra. It is currently the smallest in that world set, and as such, I am hoping will be able to survive relatively queueless any returning and new players looking for a home.

When mergers do happen it will also mean we will be collapsed more than likely into Eden, which is the largest server in that world set. I figure while leveling trades and such we would do better to be on a server with less competition. There isn’t going to be a lot that you can’t simply go out into the world and get for yourself, and given how prevalent reagents are these days and that you start collecting your endgame reagents at level 1… you should not need to hit the market boards too terribly hard. Since leveling no longer relies solely on the town board quests, that is less of an issue as well. Towns in general seem to be easier to upgrade and maintain so I feel by the time we need them, there will be plenty of Tier 5 crafting machines available and the cross-town storage will allow you to move wherever you need to for those combines.

So there you have it… on October 18th when the new patch drops I will be re-rolling on Themiscyra aka the Wonder Woman server… though DC spells the island name differently. If you want to join in the nonsense, hit me up and let me know. We have no aspirations of holding territory and largely plan on being entirely focused on the PVE game. I think the hardest-core shenanigans we will get up to are some dungeons, especially now that they don’t cost anything to run. Our biggest hope is just to be able to hang out and play with a group of people reliably on the same server. New World appears to be on a rebound trajectory and I am hoping that they can pull this off.

The Edgerunner Life

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Good Morning Friends! It is Monday and as is often the case you are about to get a rundown of the nonsense I have been up to recently. What started out as me poking my head into Cyberpunk 2077 looking for something to hold my attention, has turned into a proper replay of the game. At this point, I am starting to get closer to the endgame, and combined with the very excellent Edgerunners anime I am deeply engaged with this world right now. In theory, this will be my second full playthrough of the game, but I have started it over several times in the past without really gaining traction. I can’t say I am making all that many different choices than I did the time before apart from the inherit options that change from playing a femme V.

I am extremely happy with the wardrobe options that were patched into the game with the most recent update. Essentially now I no longer have to choose between looking cool and being functional. In my previous playthroughs, a lot of my early focus was trying to find the decent-looking gear that I could just keep upgrading. Now I basically throw on whatever item is better and ignore what the hell it looks like because I am always wearing this wardrobe outfit. I also really like that you can now go to any ripperdoc and just change your appearance on the fly. I’ve not actually done this because I am pretty happy with my current V, but having the option is nice nonetheless because I really did not love my original V appearance after a while… and mostly wore a mask as a result.

I also made a bit of progress in Diablo III Season 27 this weekend. As always I am keeping my season tracker on D3Resources updated to show where I am in the process. Basically, I am down to the stuff that is less fun to do… aka complete 3 conquests, complete a set dungeon, and extract a bunch of cube powers. I cannot believe that so far I have found six cow sticks but not a single puzzle ring, which means I have yet to get a Greed kill for that achievement. I started farming bounty caches in case I want to do the dumb and easy method for getting Avarice. I need to sort out which of the other conquests I am going to go for. I really really hate set dungeons, but at some point, I need to buckle down and get that completed so I can move on with my life. Basically, I have enough crap in my stash to do the extractions because I tend to hold onto a bunch of crap until I have finished the set dungeon given that I am never quite certain what set I will be going for.

I continue to poke my head into Path of Exile, but my stays are shorter each time I do. Playing both Diablo III and Path of Exile at the same time… I have come to realize that I enjoy the gameplay of Diablo more and the loot chase of Path of Exile more. I hate the process of getting geared in Path of Exile, but once you are geared… the loot grind remains slightly more exciting. There are so many aspects of PoE loot that could be added to D3 to spice things up a bit. Like imagine that you had a chase item, that was the equivalent of a Chaos Orb that would take any item and turn it into an Ancient version, or a similar item that was like a Divine Orb that would turn any item into a Primal version. I also think D3 could benefit from officially having an SSF mode that you could turn on and get unique rewards from. We’ve seen seasonal items like the Angelic Crucibles that come in and change the way the game works and it would be cool if more of those stuck around and continued to flesh out the loot chase.

Finally, I am still playing some New World every day. Mostly I log in and farm enough resources or craft enough items in order to get 3 gypsum bags and the gypsum you get from an aptitude chest. Then I port out to Shattered Mountain and craft two gypsum casts for whatever gear I am working on leveling. In doing this gradually I have capped sword, shield, spear, hammer, great axe, hatchet, and all armor slots to 600 expertise and am now working on void gauntlet and blunderbuss. This feels a little pointless given that my intent is still to reroll as soon as the timetable for the launch of the Brimstone update is a bit more certain. Mostly I am fine with it taking a little bit because I am hoping my friend Ace finishes their move so they can join in the reroll nonsense properly. I think my goal in the reroll is to level up Armoring and Weaponsmithing up to 200 so that I can make another set of Voidbent armor, mostly because I like the look of it.