Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Fun With Infinite Climbing

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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

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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.

Tower of Fantasy Thoughts

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Yesterday was the launch of a new game that has been referred to as the “Genshin Killer”, Tower of Fantasy. After spending an evening playing it, I sincerely doubt it will do anything to the diehard Genshin Impact fanbase, but I do think it will flake some folks off who might not have been playing lately. My initial thoughts are that the game as a whole reminds me if you took Phantasy Star Online 2 and blended it with Genshin Impact to create a weird hybrid experience. This is honestly the game that I think I wished PSO2: New Genesis would have been. I think after spending so much time playing Genshin… New Genesis felt instantly dated to me.

The first key difference from Genshin, is that you actually get to control the look of your character. While you have to choose from either a collection of waifu or husband appearances… and there is not a beard to be seen among them… I managed to cobble together something that I was fine with. One of the nice things about the way that this game launched is that you could preload the client and mess around with your character appearance so that was all set and saved before the game launched properly. What feels super freaking weird though… is even though you have saved an appearance you still start the game as a generic white-haired anime girl or guy until you reach the first town and can transform into your chosen appearance.

The second key difference from Genshin is that instead of collecting a stable of characters that you swap between, you instead create a build-out of three weapons. You can swap freely between them at any time, or you can build up a gauge on the weapons and swap to them when this has filled to create a combo attack. The starter weapons so far are my favorite with it being a Longsword, Dual Daggers, and a Bow. New weapons can be pulled through the gacha system either through collecting items in the world or by paying for additional pulls.

Purple or Legendary weapons come attached to a Simulacrum, which leads us to the third major difference from Genshin. Going into this game I think we all knew it would be a chase for new Waifus from the gacha system, and instead of collecting them in your party… you transform yourself into one of them and gain their abilities. Everyone gets Echo first who comes equipped with the Thunderous Halberd. This weapon is effectively a lightning damage spear, which comes into play almost immediately in the game as you encounter a lightning elemental damage barrier. Like Genshin you can combo specific elemental attacks in the world in order to clear specific puzzle requirements. Hitting the lightning barrier with your halberd causes it to dissipate and allows you to move forward.

The Gacha pulls work effectively like any other Gacha game, where they are seemingly best spent 10 at a time, and doing so guarantees you a purple or higher quality item in that pull. There is a pitty system that moves as you increase pulling, with your first pitty happening at 50 pulls on a specific banner. Essentially you have three currencies for pulling, golden orbs, red orbs, and purple orbs and I am not going to bother learning the proper name of any of them. The Golden and Red orbs are premium currency and the Purple orbs are pretty easy to get while clearing the map and opening chests. As a result, the purple orb “banner” seems to mostly reward blue-quality weapons and upgrade materials. With a purple simulacrum/weapon coming from them EXTREMELY rarely.

In the confusion of launch, yesterday and various servers overflowing and getting locked… I ended up going for a second choice of Observer where some friends were rolling, and missed that a different batch of friends ended up on “The World Between”. Yet another batch of friends managed to roll late enough that they were able to get back on Solaris the originally intended destination. So essentially we are sorta fucked. With no cross-server play, and no availability of server transfers yet… I could reroll but that would mean a completely different set of pulls. Seeing that I lucked into a very early SSR/Legendary I am really hesitant to move from where I am currently. That means I am ultimately hoping that transfers open up so we can sort out a final destination at some point. Once again I am struck by how awful the server mechanic is and how games need to move away from having them.

Similar to Genshin and honestly EVERY one of these KMMO/CMMO gacha games… you have a small companion. This time it is a robot named Mi-a… who still talks funny but is significantly less annoying than Paimon. I am not entirely certain what its purpose is… other than it follows you around in the open world. I am sure there will be a story reason behind having Mi-a but I am not sure yet if there is a mechanical reason. Again every single one of these games seems to have a random fairy or another companion that follows you around and serves as comic relief, so I am guessing it wouldn’t be the same without them.

All told combat feels really fluid and I had fun running around. However, I have to say it does not feel anywhere near as magical as exploring the world of Genshin did. There is definitely a been there done that feeling to finding random chests or killing random bosses. The mechanics of the world and how you open things up… feels exactly the same as playing Genshin Impact. It is a more science fiction version of the world, but if you collected a bajillion chests in Genshin… it is going to feel the same collecting them here. It is at this point that I question how engaged I am ultimately going to get with this game. Genshin was new and fresh and something that felt like I was constantly breaking new ground… and Tower of Fantasy feels very much like the clone that it ultimately is.

Since I have World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha, Guild Wars 2, New World, and soon the opening of the next league in Path of Exile… Tower of Fantasy is very much going to likely be the third rung “if I happen to be in the mood” sort of game. If it was launching at a time when I was burnt out on all of the above, things might have been different. I played Genshin Impact hard and heavy for about three months and then have never really returned to it. I think this is partially why I am not overly concerned about being on the same server that the maximum number of friends because I am not sure just how active I am going to be in the long run. I don’t really love the anime stylings… so the gameplay really has to shine to capture my attention. Genshin did because it was so new and unique at the time, but this very much feels like I am traveling down a path I have already seen before. The addition of PVP is new to the genre, but also not something I am the least bit interested in.

So I will definitely be throwing Tower of Fantasy in that wait-and-see bucket. I think it is a great game, especially if this is your first time doing the Genshin Impact style of gameplay. It has full cross-play and cross-save between platforms and I managed to play a little bit on Android as well as my default PC client. Though I do wonder if this is too active of a game to really be super enjoyable for bedtime gaming. Anyways, if you make it over to Observer at any point you can find me at UID 1201110645. If you are also playing the game, I would be curious about your impressions. Right now you have to download the launcher directly from the Tower of Fantasy website, but apparently, at some point, it will be coming to Steam.

Exploring Ohn’ahran Plains

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It is quickly becoming a regular thing for me to log into Dragonflight Alpha on Tuesday nights and play the brand new build. You can read the full patch notes here, but this week’s test focuses on the Dracthyr Starter zone and Ohn’ahran Plains. Since I have already played my way through the Dracthyr “all casters all the time” zone twice now… It was onwards to Ohn’ahran Plains for me! Unfortunately, I could not take either of my already level 62 characters into the zone and instead had to create a brand new character and then let the NPC level me and transport me to the appropriate zone. Since I played through as a human I figured I would rock out on my normal Orc Femme Horde Warrior.

The zone itself is very Nagrand adjacent with flourishes of the Draenor version of Shadowmoon Valley. Wild and gorgeous and has some really interesting elements thrown through it. I got to experience the ducks for the first time, and thankfully the quest did not involve me killing them… but instead yanking tail feathers out of them which causes them to run away. This zone also has some of the coolest-looking bears that I think every hunter will probably rush out to go tame as soon as possible.

The best feature however is the phenomenal work that has been done with the zone’s skybox. This is legitimately one of the most painterly zones I have played through since maybe Grizzly Hills? There is nothing about the zone that reminds me of Northrend however and it is basically a blending of some of the better elements from Draenor. Again everything feels a little spartan for my tastes, however, I am greatly missing all of the micro objectives that we had in Legion. I am hoping that we are just seeing an early version of the zone that has yet to be populated with those things. I would really hate to have this expansion be absent of all of the interesting world objectives from the last several expansions. For me, at least those greatly improved the exploration aspect of those zones because I was constantly on the lookout for things to interact with. Once again the named gold and silver elites seem not to have drop tables yet, which I hope is remedied before launch.

We got yet another update to the UI, and while there are some massive LUA errors happening at the moment that require the use of “/console scriptErrors 0” to hide, it seems to be coming along nicely. This time around we were able to move our minimap. I hope that over time each of the different UI elements maybe gets a few more options, like the ability to detach the world buffs window from the map and move it around freely. the only negative is that the UI changes were different enough this time that it wiped my saved UI preset from before. It took me a few minutes to juggle things around back into the orientation I prefer. Legitimately we are on the trail of me not needing to run addons anymore. Again it could use a few more features… but it is getting there and I give massive credit to the team working on this.

The central story of the zone centers around the Centaur packs, but unlike Desolace… they actually seem to be genuinely good people. Like in the previous “friendly Centaurs” scenario… they only really liked us because we were actively killing their enemies. The version we get in Dragonflight is much more akin to the story of the various Highmountain Tauren Tribes from Legion. I did not get anywhere near finished with the story, but so far I am enjoying it greatly. Kudos to the folks who worked on the new models because they are pretty phenomenal. I realize it would be way too much to ask to get them as a playable race… but I am going to ask it anyway. They really are extremely cool, and there is even some subtle variation in the way each of the clans looks.
I’ve said it before… but there is potential greatness in Dragonflight. So far I’ve adventures in four zones, and while they are all in a rough state… the only one that I did not really enjoy was the Dracthyr starter area. The other three I would put up against some of the better World of Warcraft zones from history. It is going to be interesting to see how relevant these zones remain once you reach the new level cap. There is not a single one that I would mind spending more time in, and the design of each feels sufficiently unique while at the same time retaining a sort of general visual language for the Dragon Isles as a whole.

I feel like I am beating a dead horse at this point… but my only concern right now is the fact that we have less than four months left in 2022. If this is going to meet a release date in December of this year, then it will need a lot more work. I am concerned that the zones that feel relatively bare-bones currently… will remain feeling that way at launch. The look, feel, and quest structure is great… but it is missing the little details that made Legion questing feel so freaking good. I hope that given time these details can be added to really flesh things out. If they can’t… then I legitimately hope this release date gets bounced into 2023 because it might need it. I hate to think about the level of crunch that would be required to reasonably get this out the door before the end of the year.