Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Dracthyr Initial Thoughts

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Good Morning Friends! On the list of things that I thought I would be doing this week, I did not include “playing Dragonflight Alpha” but it seems fate has conspired to change that. While I have been in multiple alpha testing processes for World of Warcraft, I did not think I would be getting into this one. I’ve not exactly written the kindest posts about the game and Blizzard as a whole, but I have always tried to temper what I said because I still have several dozen friends who work for the company. I have had a lot of great years playing World of Warcraft, but before I talk about the alpha process there are a few caveats that I need to get out of the way. Firstly I have not actively played World of Warcraft in roughly eighteen months. I bounced pretty early in the Shadowlands cycle and never really looked back so I am out of touch with a lot of things about the game.

Secondly, you need to know that I have no real attachment to dragons. I tried to read some of the novels but bounced off them as well. I know roughly the shape of the story arc of the dragons and how at the time of the dragon soul raid they gave up some of their powers to protect us. However, I am not nearly as engaged with WoW Lore as a lot of people are in the community. I used to play a game called Horizon Empire of Istaria, later rebranded to Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted and it featured fully playable dragons. I had a friend or two who were super into this and stuck around playing a dead game for far longer than they probably should have, just because it fulfilled their player fantasy of getting to be a Dragon. I feel like the Dracthyr and the Dragon Isles, in general, are going to be heavily tailored to this player, the folks who love the dragon flights.

That said the dragons are really rather cool to build and I did my best to craft a character that makes visual sense. Essentially one of the things I have enjoyed about the dragons we have encountered is that when you see Alextrasza in “humanoid” form or in Dragon form… there is a visual sameness to it. You can absolutely see one turning into the other and still maintaining a certain number of visible traits, and this same design language carries through to ALL of the dragons we have encountered so far. So I was pleased that as I built my Dracthyr I was able to more or less carry this same concept forward. I do however wish that horn types for example were more similar between the dragon and humanoid forms. I went with something that matched about as close as I could but I would have liked little elements like that to carry over completely.

As far as the Alpha goes, Blizzard seems to be going about it a little differently than in my past experiences. Generally speaking there is usually some sort of forum post asking testers to focus on specific things, or at least tell us which areas of the world are open for testing and which are unpopulated. This time around they seem to be doing focus testing where currently until July 25th we will have access to The Forbidden Reach, which is the Dracthyr starter zone. You can create other characters, but none of the quest hooks are in place to allow you to start the expansion content. I spent a good twenty minutes on my dragon… only to immediately get hit by a game-breaking bug that forced me to delete it and start over.

My second dragon was purely random in order to actually get into the action just in case it happened again. I played through the entirety of the Forbidden Reach zone and now have deleted that character and did my best to recreate my original look and am now in the process of playing through it again. My only real complaint with the starter experience is that the zone is really large, and objectives are spread out from each other. In theory, you have dragon flight in order to get you between the destinations, but this is on a 5-minute cooldown timer. This means that if for some reason you are moving faster than five minutes between objectives… you are going to be spending a good deal of time walking around which feels bad.

My theory is that there should be some sort of zone-wide aura that lets the Dracthyr use their dragon flight as often as they want. This would allow for players to spend a bit more time getting used to the mechanics because right now it feels like you pretty much have to nail it immediately or suffer the experience of running everywhere. The other thing that I have noticed is that I feel very weak as a Dracthyr. There are several mob types on the island that are just a bit overturned for my character. I am very much used to starter experiences being something that you can pretty much sleepwalk through, and so far this island requires me to spend a lot of time healing myself.

The other thing that is somewhat awkward is the Evoker class itself. It has been announced as a hybrid between a caster DPS and a healer, and it does in fact do both things. However, remember how awkward druids are for the first twenty levels or so? That is how Evoker feels to me right now. You have a bunch of different abilities that do different things, but there doesn’t really seem to be much synergy between most of them. Living Flame for example is both your primary nuke and primary heal, and it is fine at both of them. Disintegrate is your standard channeled ability that slightly slows things as they head towards you. The most interesting ability you get early on is Fire Breath, which allows you to charge the ability before releasing it… and it deals more damage the longer you charge it. However to get the maximum amount of benefit you need to charge it for quite a while, and it has a 30-second cooldown… so it mostly just feels bad to use.

Then there are a handful of arguably melee abilities with Azure Strike and Tail Swipe, that doesn’t really seem to fit in terribly well into the kit. Sure you can rapidly hit multiple targets in front of you with Azure Strike but you are dealing so much less damage than you would if you were casting a spell. Tail Swipe serves as a knock-up… but everything recovers so quickly that it doesn’t really do much to buy you enough time to cast something in the meantime. The lack of active dodge in World of Warcraft also limits its usefulness as well, because I could see hitting it and then rolling out of the way in a game like Guild Wars 2. Similarly, Wing Buffet can be used to knock a target away, but it is on a 1.5-minute cooldown means it is a one-shot ability. I think the problem with coming up with a new class this late in the life cycle of the game is that essentially everything I am seeing from the Evoker is done better in another class that feels more focused.

The real highlight for me however is seeing the early functionality of the new UI. I think over the course of the alpha and beta we will see more of this roll in, but right now we have a new cast bar and the ability to edit hotbars. Currently, I have a layout with one large Hotbar, with two small ones stacked across the top of it, and then to 3 column wide blocks on the right side. Admittedly MOST of why I continued to use mods in World of Warcraft is because I could not stand the default hotbars. Another huge reason why I installed addons is that I prefer a single large bag as compared to multiple small bags, and that is now also just in the default UI as something you can configure.

The other thing that I am interested in is the new talent system. Like I said I rolled a Death Knight and while I can not actually start the new campaign, I did spend some time playing around with talents. I really like that the tree is split between having a more generic class-specific tree that everyone has access to, and a tree specifically for your specialization. More than this I like that they have seemingly put abilities that you would want in both trees, some of which previously defined a specialization like Icy Talons being in the general tree. I think the purpose of a Talent tree is to leave you with the feeling that you wish you had more talents because you could not take everything you wanted. This means there is a reason to ACTUALLY run multiple specs for different reasons and will make it a bit harder for the “one true spec” to arise.

I need to create a Warrior and play around with those talents since I miss the days of hybrid tank specs that spend most of their points in fury or arms rather than just everything in protection. Some final thoughts about my experience. I did not get into it as much as I thought I might. Sure there is some nostalgia for World of Warcraft, but it just feels like a really old game design at this point. It might be that I have spent so much time lately playing more action-oriented games, but essentially mentally I am lumping it in the same mind space as I keep Everquest. What I find interesting is that Final Fantasy XIV does not feel nearly as old of a design to me, and I think the key difference is that everything in that game feels tightly designed to work together. Whereas World of Warcraft has always felt like making the best of a bad situation. All of that said after bouncing off both Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands, I am curious if the campaign will ultimately pull me in when we get to test that.

Fun with Brands

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Good Morning Friends. I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile, or at least the part of the weekend I was functional. I ended up getting some generic crud that started on Wednesday and then knocked me out of commission for most of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was only on Sunday that I started to feel much better and even now I am not feeling amazing. We took a number of covid tests throughout this so we are pretty certain it is not that. My wife started getting sick on Friday, so whatever it appears to be contagious but the strange thing is… I was not really around anyone for the last two weeks.

I think since we last talked I have finished the main campaign of Path of Exile and my Explosive Arrow Champion is now level 73. I’ve begun dipping my toes into maps and I have to say… I feel super freaking squishy right now. I think the core problem I am having with Path of Exile is that the gear is nowhere near as straightforward as my beloved Diablo III. I know in D3 that in order to make X build work I need these ten items in these specific slots. The collection of specific items grants me the ability to get progress further with the build, and subsequent fine-tuning and acquiring better versions of said items… also then make the build more efficient. I understand none of these levers in Path of Exile. My gear is effectively a pile of stats that I do not fully understand the interactions with, and as such I do not know how to make myself feel less squishy.

In part, due to this sudden friction… and also in part because I have not felt well enough to engage with my friend Grace who is also at the maps phase… I have been spending some time trying other classes. I have a mess of a character that I built without a guide that mostly works but it is also deeply inefficient, and then I have the Inquisitor that I am building towards Righteous Fire. One thing of note… for whatever reason at the time of writing this POE Vault seems to be down so that link may or may not work. Wintertide Brand is ridiculously fun and does some really dumb things. Essentially I cast this spell and it spreads throughout the map of NPCs and kills them with a frost disease sort of thing. The only problem here is that wintertide brand is not the final form of this build, so we will see if I also like running through things while self-immolating.

I think the ultimate problem I have with Path of Exile is also one of its strengths. You have these mechanics stacked on top of other mechanics, and if you have been around you maybe learned them all individually. However today a new player trying to unpack everything is not only having to understand core concepts but also learn the remainder of thirty-seven, soon to be thirty-eight league mechanics. This means that the game has grown significantly and is constantly changing, but also has just layer after layer of madness stacked loosely on top of the layers below it. The seasoned players understand how to solve the problems that I am running into with survival, but it is much harder to grok than “equip Aquila Cuirass”. That is not to say that eventually, Path of Exile won’t feel the same to me… just that I have a large lift to get there. There are times when I feel like I need a guide to reading the guide I am trying to follow.

Ultimately I am wanting to spend the remainder of 3.18 trying to figure out what exactly I want to do for 3.19. I like Explosive Arrow just fine, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as the original Splitting Steel build that I ran until I could switch over to Explosive Arrow. Similarly, right now I am loving the way running around with Wintertide Brand feels, but I am concerned that I won’t enjoy the final Righteous Fire form. I know there are pure Splitting Steel builds that exist, and pure Brand builds that exist, so I might also create some characters along those play styles at some point. Essentially my time spent in Path of Exile is more or less preparing for August when the new league starts. Ultimately we won’t know what 3.19 looks like until the live stream on August 4th, and at that point, I will probably consume a flurry of information and try and pick a path to go down then.

Gracie and the New Normal

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Good Morning Friends! It has been a few weeks and I thought I would give a proper blog update on Gracie and how she is settling in. For most of this week, she has been on “free roam” mode with the complete reign of the house. I am slightly sleep deprived because we have yet to learn when sleep time is supposed to happen, and occasionally have fits of activity overnight that wake us up. That said she tends to sleep snuggled between the covers between us, which is perfectly fine with me. In the grand scheme of things, it has been a pretty smooth transition and Mollie/Josie are doing a fair job of adjusting. Yesterday is really when things started to feel like normal again with far less cautious stalking around the house for fear of attracting the attention of the tiny terror.

Gracie herself is also way less likely to spend every moment of every day with a human being. So the negative means that I am not getting this sort of attention right now. It was fun while it lasted, but also extremely detrimental to actually getting anything done. Josie and Gracie appear to be developing a friendship, or at least there is more playing with each other that involves less hissing and puffed tails. Mollie has oddly been more stoic about this, which I thought was weird given that she is naturally the more skittish cat. However, then I realized that she has been through this before and realizes that “mommy and daddy” will still love her even though there is a new addition. Josie was the last new addition a few years ago, and as such, she is not sure what to think about any of this.

We are starting to settle into what feels like the new normal. Josie is back to sleeping on my legs overnight while Gracie sleeps up at the head of the bed between us. Mollie is back to spending almost all of every day with me in my office and requesting periodic pet breaks. Gracie alternates between sleeping downstairs in the hammock and screaming at the top of her lungs for attention because she doesn’t see any human beings around her. She has an exceptional set of lungs for someone so small, and she also seems to be completely fearless which makes any time we have to open the front or back door anxiety-ridden. All of this said though, I think we picked an exceptionally sweet kitten and are now batting two for two from rescuing animals from the local animal welfare. We’ve always gotten animals through third-party rescue organizations in the past, but I have to say our animal welfare seems to do a great job with their animals and socializing them.

Finally, in some gaming news, I have officially entered Act 10 but did not manage to get through it last night before sleep claimed me. I am going to need to spend some effort trying to sort out gearing because I am most definitely feeling much squishier all of a sudden. Additionally I checked my guide and I am no longer using the correct combination of skill gems. Basically, I am once again under some socket pressure and now need I believe an RRGGBB item to socket my preferred skill chain into. Mostly I just am trying to get up to maps because my friend Grace has managed to rocket past me… and finished the main story over lunch yesterday. I think we are ultimately trying to determine if the league start experience in Path of Exile can fully replace our traditional Diablo 3 fun time.

In another quick footnote… I am grinding away on Blaugust stuff and am hoping to make a big announcement soon.

Last Epoch Revisited

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So recently I have been on an ARPG kick and quite honestly… while I am most known for being an MMORPG player, I was an ARPG player first. I love Diablo and have loved it since getting my hands on the pre-release test of the first game back in college. When confronted with the decision of which game to buy… because Icewind Dale and Diablo II came out on the same day… I of course bought Diablo II. Years later I was STILL playing Diablo II as my primary reprieve from playing Everquest, and keeping a server running with friends. As such I have always bought and tried out pretty much every new ARPG that comes down the pipe, and Last Epoch was no exception. I did not like this game when I first tried it… but given that I also did not like Path of Exile when I first tried it I figured it might be worth a revisit.

Sometimes when you try out a new game there is one small thing that destroys the experience. If you search google on “Last epoch move and attack” you will find a litany of people who have requested the ability to bind move and attack to the same key, which is admittedly the post-Diablo ARPG standard. For whatever reason be it technical or philosophical… the Last Epoch team seems diametrically opposed to actually doing this. So when I found out that this was not a thing that I could do in this game, and that it did not have Controller support to fall back upon… I uninstalled it and moved on. Then I had a bit of a revelation last week while playing Path of Exile and on the podcast that changed my perspective a bit.

While Click to Move is a concept I am deeply comfortable with and fall back upon… I don’t actually play games in that manner if I can help it. Some years ago my friend Grace got me hooked on another control scheme for Diablo III, where I bind “Force Move” to W and then essentially “steer” my character while moving my mouse cursor around the screen. When I got into Path of Exile recently, this is one of the first things that I did and I am annoyed at that game that I had to give up a functional skill slot in order to make this happen. It turns out that I can in fact do this same sort of mechanic in Last Epoch and after some careful keybind swaps I was able to land on a gameplay structure that more or less maps to what I am familiar with in Diablo III, where I hit Q for the potion, 7/8/9 for some of my abilities because they are comfortable to hit on my g600 mouse, and spacebar for my “charge” ability. Once the mechanical aspect of playing the game was solved… it is actually a pretty solid option.

Last night I created a fresh Sentinel because I had no clue what I was doing the last time I had attempted to play this game. Essentially you choose a base class and then that can morph over time into one of three masteries. For Sentinel, I get the choice of Paladin, Forge Guard, and Void Knight currently I am leaning heavily towards Forge Guard.

This is the class wheel from the wiki, and gives a pretty good representation of your options. The only traditional “Diablo” archetype that seems to be missing is that of the Barbarian/Brawler type character. While Sentinel looks like a Paladin/Crusader it does have a lot of the same tropes that you might find from a Barbarian including the very spin-to-win playstyle of “Whirlwind”. I noticed last night that a few of these mastery classes exist in the interface, but are not something you can choose. I am guessing since this game is still in active development that there just has not been time to complete them.

I think the thing that honestly impresses me the most so far is the fact that at level 7, I feel like I have a pretty complete package of abilities. I have a big single target attack, my default attack has been replaced by a three-hit combo, I have a ranged throw ability, I can charge at packs of mobs, and I can whirlwind down large packs of enemies. This is something that I would have expected to arrive at far later in the game, and quite honestly… reminds me a bit of how good Diablo Immortal felt at low levels. It seems like I am going to continue to get more abilities than I have room for, and as a result, will have to tailor my build looking for more direct synergies.

Please note that I have only the most shallow of understanding this game right now. However once I have arrived at a place where the controls felt playable, it is something I want to explore further. Essentially as far as I can tell character progression goes down two lines at the start. The first is a series of passive talent choices, with additional trees for the three master class choices. I greatly appreciate that it seems like I can just come in here and respec at will. That is deeply refreshing coming from Path of Exile where I am scared to death I am going to screw up and choose the wrong thing.

The next progression system seems to allow you to specialize in five different class abilities, with additional slots unlocking as you level. Right now I have spent some points specializing in my three-hit combo primary attack, and my lunging charge attack. I feel like no matter where I go skill-wise I am probably going to keep using these because they feel great. All in all the structure of this game feels something more closely related to Diablo III than the Diablo II roots that games like Path of Exile or Grimdawn have. I honestly appreciate the more hand-holding given in the talent trees and the ability to just respec everything at will. I always hated the need to roll a new character if you wanted to try something different in ARPGs and consider the freeform nature of Diablo III to be a benefit to the genre.

While I was able to get past the control scheme boss, many of my past complaints still exist. Classes are gender locked and there appears to be no manner of character customization. Mage is always going to be an old man with a book, which admittedly is better than the old man in a diaper look that Diablo III gives the male Barbarian. So depending upon your personal preferences here, you might end up having to play a character that does not suit your representation choices. Admittedly this is a problem in general with ARPGs, but one that I keep hoping someone realizes IS a problem. I cannot tell you just how refreshing the character creation system was in Diablo Immortal. Too bad that game is a dumpster fire for other reasons.

I’ve not spent much time honestly in Last Epoch but it is already something that I want to explore a bit further. The lack of multiplayer play was always a bit of a bummer as well with Last Epoch, but more of an “in development” thing than a willful omission. It seems that Multiplayer is currently in closed testing and planned to be opened up to all players “soon”. I think ultimately more than anything that is going to determine how engaged I become with this game, is whether or not it can scratch the same multiplayer fun itches that Diablo III has for many seasons. The design of the end game is extremely important for long-term replayability. In the meantime, however, I am preparing myself for the launch of the new Path of Exile league and getting in truly on the ground floor of that experience. It launches on a Friday night, which hopefully can give the same sort of vibes as a Diablo III seasonal launch.