Games Archives - Page 327 of 690 - Tales of the Aggronaut

E3 2019 Rundown – Part 1

June 10, 2019 by Belghast

Hey folks, I am writing this up ahead of time because there is way the hell too much to cover in a normal morning post. Essentially at this point I have watched the Google Stadia, EA Play and Microsoft event. Tonight we have Bethesda and pending how much time I have to digest that before the morning… aka when you are actually reading this post it might be included. I am not going to be covering everything, but instead cherry picking the specific things that interested me from each of the shows. My interests are certain to be different from yours.

E3 for years has been the equivalent of the Christmas Catalog or the Toys R Us Big Toy Book depending on your age bracket. However things appear to be changing a bit in both format and who is in attendance.

Google Stadia Show

Now I have already talked at length about this show, but there was one specific game that I have not really talked much about that came out of it. If you want further commentary on Google Stadia we talk at length about it on the recent AggroChat episode as well.

Darksiders Genesis seems to be taking the Darksiders franchise in yet another direction, this time in the Diablo-esc Action RPG loot crawler. I am very intrigued and given my love of all things Diablo I am always interested in playing another take on that style of gameplay. What I wonder is if we will be limited to only playing Strife or if we will be able to play the other Horsemen. Looking forward to seeing more about this game as we go.

EA Play Show

EA seemed to be experimenting with changing up their format, and I am not yet certain if it actually worked. Normally speaking the shows all seem to have a similar style and this time around it feels like EA is trying to take notes from Nintendo Direct, but also at the same time failing to really capture the same spirit. Instead of a polished presentation with a bunch of trailers we are presented with a Twitch TV/YouTube E3 Coverage style with trailers intermingled with sit down chats and an awkward amount of video game hype men that come off as exceedingly fake. All of this seems to be disguising the fact that EA had a pretty weak showing.

Essentially they showed off six things at during the course of the afternoon… three of which were DLC addons to existing games, two of them were formulaic yearly sports titles, and the only thing really new or interesting was the game we once assumed was Vaporware… Jedi Fallen Order. It seems to be a bad year for EA, either that or everything they have in the works is targeting the next gen consoles.

I am not yet sure how I feel about this game. It looks very much in the same style as Force Unleashed, and I have seen a bunch of comparisons to Tomb Raider or Uncharted. Right now there is a lot of gameplay that feels awkward in the scenes that we are seeing. I am not sure how I feel about this new supposedly cannon hero using a lightsaber as a flashlight. I am also not sure what his fighting style is because it most certainly is not fluid. I am guessing we are going to find out that he was maybe a young padawan when the events of Order 66 came down and that he has more or less had to train himself. I feel like they missed an opportunity to reboot and reshape the character of Kyle Katarn. This pretty much represents the only thing worth really paying attention to on the EA front for me at least.

Microsoft Show

Going into this show we had a high suspicion that we would at least get a formal announcement of the supposed next gen Xbox console. We did in fact get this and some information about that Halo Infinite is a launch title. We don’t know a ton of information however other than the general flashy industry buzzwordology of better, faster, and more detailed. That should not distract from the fact that I feel Microsoft had a really good showing.

They have also had a phenomenal year of largely proving out the value of the Xbox Game Pass and its delivery of first day exclusives ready to download and play without having to make an additional purchase. They hinted some at XCloud, but again did not go into much in the way of information. They did however present a ton of titles, several of which interested me. So I am going to try and do a rapid fire run down of my thoughts.

I am fully on board with this title and looking forward to playing it now that we have an October 25th release date for this year. Fallout 3/5/New Vegas style gameplay set on a Firefly esc steam punk space opera setting? Sign me the hell up. It seems like you can choose your pay and be the savior of the colony or be the scourge.

Another really interesting title that was shown is 12 Minutes by Anna Purina. Essentially you are caught in a 12 minute time loop and are trying to figure out how to solve some sort of a mystery as your life resets back to the starting point Russian Dolls style, each time in theory learning more information on how to stop whatever it is from happening. I largely bounced off of the Sexy Brutale, but this for whatever reason seems more interesting because of the weird top down view.

We got another cinematic trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, that gives us a glimpse into the story a bit and reveals that Keanu Reeves is tied to the project now. We also got a release date of April 2020, so folks can stop hoping it would drop this year. The setting is gorgeous if you think the urban decay of a Shadowrun-esc sprawl is gorgeous. I am totally on board with the way that the augmentations feel, and I am very much looking forward to this title.

We got another trailer with some gameplay for Ori and the Will of the Wisps and we finally have a release date. Again folks can stop hoping it will release this year, because it is going to be launching February 2020. I need to go back and finish the first one, but what I did play of it was pretty great. It just had a level of difficulty that I was not ready for at the time in which I played it.

Game I was absolutely not expecting to see was a remaster of Age of Empires II. I guess if Blizzard can remaster Warcraft 3 then anything is possible right? I am not super nostalgic about this game but nonetheless it is worth mentioning. The gameplay footage looked gorgeous, so there is that.

So Minecraft is now a franchise and not necessarily a game I guess, because originally I was expecting this title to be an addon of sorts of the base game. However instead it just seems to be borrowing the theme and the look and instead seemingly represents a brand new four player dungeon crawling co-op experience. It looks like a cross between Zelda and Diablo, and it might be interesting to watch as it progresses.

Mixer chat seemed not to be into this game, and it also represents the point at which I disabled chat during the show. Way to the Woods reminds me so much of Tokyo Jungle…. but just seemingly way less violent? You play a stag that is trying to guide your faun across a seemingly Japanese city, foraging for food and using your antlers as some sort of a magical flashlight? I am on board with this largely because it looked really cool and seemed extremely sweet. Also giant mama cat!

I am not exactly certain what this game is… but it seems to be something along the lines of Stardew Valley on a boat, that you can build as you travel and that you pick up various people to join in your journey. I am not sure what is going on at all other than it involves building and exploration and adorable animal friends and I think I am mostly on board for all of this.

State of Decay has been a favorite franchise of mine for a long while, since it initially released on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360. The infatuation only got worse once I was able to meet and hang out with some of the Undead Labs team at my very first Pax South. I played quite a bit of State of Decay 2 when it first released and they announced a stealth drop DLC called Heartland that is in theory playable as of the show. You either like the game series or you don’t, and I happen to so it made me happy and want to install and replay.

I have no clue what this game is about other than the pedigree of coming from the creator of Dark Souls franchise and George RR Martin. I am not necessarily a fan of the Dark Souls series, but I am intrigued to see what this game turns into.

We got another trailer for Psychonauts 2… sadly no release date. What is more interesting however is the fact that Doublefine is apparently now a satellite studio owned by Microsoft? I am not sure how to react to that given that Tim Schafer was one of the very first creators to break out and use Kickstarter to fund game development. I feel like those early days of Kickstarter were much like the early days of Image Comics… and maybe reality has set in and it is way harder to fund a studio than they maybe thought it would be? Microsoft seems to be snapping up a bunch of studios that I care about so I hope they take good care of them.

So… I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for Battletoads because I never owned a copy. I was always way more into Double Dragon because I played the hell out of it in the Arcade as well. I am interested to see how this game plays and feels. I think the artwork and colors are way different than the original, but also seem fun. I mean ultimately this franchise is a bit of a parody of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that weirdly developed a devoted fanbase of its own.

I backed Wasteland 2 but the end result wasn’t really for me. I am however watching this game to see if it maybe improves upon the base gameplay of the original. Wasteland 2 was likely very true to the style of gameplay… but it felt very stiff and not super responsive. I would love to see them evolve the genre a bit and offer some voice acted characters, because I never realized how much I have gotten used to that until I go to try and play a text only game these days.

I cannot fully explain how damned happy this makes me. If you have read my blog for some time you will know that I jumped through a bunch of hoops to be able to play the Japanese version. There even was a fan subtitled patch that allowed you to play MOST of the game in English. However were a bunch of places where the subtitles just stopped… and also there was the core problem that the game started you in Chapter 4 of the story. At which point they basically expect you to know a whole cast of characters that you have no clue about… which made the entire process of playing super confusing.

I will be a day one hour one person when this game officially launches especially if they start us at the beginning of the story. I consider the original Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast to be my very first MMORPG, and I still carry a pretty big torch for the franchise. So excited to see this coming.

I am not a big fan of Halo because I completely missed the franchise at the point at which it would have bonded me to it. I did not have an Xbox and by the time a crappy port existed on the PC, I already had far better shooters to be playing. Quite honestly my Halo is probably one of the Unreal games that released around the same time with a very similar theme. This is of note because this is supposedly footage from the Xbox Scarlett using the AMD based Raytracing engine. I didn’t really see anything super special with the footage that was shown, but I guess this is one to watch.

Bethesda Show

Going into the show we were expecting it to be a down year for Bethesda, and I greatly appreciate them announcing beforehand that we would not be seeing news about either Starfield or Elder Scrolls VI… aka the two big titles we have been waiting on. So I personally more or less went into the show expecting to see a bunch of news about Doom Eternal given that they had told us essentially to expect that. What I saw instead was a bunch of stuff that I am personally interested in, but still as a whole probably accounts for a somehow slow year.

I personally am a fan of Elder Scrolls Blades. I think it does a good job of representing the Elder Scrolls feel on a mobile platform. There are issues with the whole chest timer mechanic, but I expect that sort of thing from a mobile game. There doesn’t seem to be a single mobile game on the market that does not have at least one bitter pill that you have to swallow. I am however super excited to see that the game is coming to the Switch and will feature cross-save and cross-play with the mobile version. I enjoy playing this on my tablet, and I like the idea of being able to pick up my switch and have a more immersive experience. I think this will do well… and I really want Nintendo to take this idea to heart and finally give me Dragalia Lost on the Switch.

Fallout 76 – Wastelanders and Nuclear Winter

Fallout 76 was not well received but the AggroChat crew enjoyed it greatly and spent a significant amount of time exploring the world together. I think it is beneficial that during the show Bethesda effectively admitted as much to the struggles, but also to spending a good deal of time trying to improve the game. With that in mind they announced to additions to the game, the first of which being Wastelanders… which are effectively storylines and NPCs making their way into the game for the players to interact with. The second major change is that they are adding a game mode called Nuclear Winter which is a PVPVE Battle Royale mode which involves a shrinking ring of fire as players are tested by the automated systems of Vault 51 with the position of Overseer on the line. That doesn’t interest me much, but I am super amped to see proper NPCs with quests and an overarching storyline making it into Fallout 76.

First off can we talk about how damned adorable Ikumi Nakamura is? She does such a great job with this presentation and is so insanely excited to be showing us this game. This is from the team that brought us the Evil Within series and serves as a bit of a departure. Supposedly this is not going to be a survival horror game, but still involves supernatural elements. I got a little bit of an Onimusha vibe but it isn’t like we see any real gameplay so will have to watch and see what this turns into. You seem to be a Shinobi like ninja character that does battle with evil spirits, and probably I am on board with this concept especially since a lot of the character designs look badass.

Elder Scrolls Online – Dragonhold and Scalebreaker

Since Elsweyr just launched I was not expecting much from Elder Scrolls Online, but they did show off a really cool cinematic trailer for the next bit of story content in an upcoming expansion called Dragonhold. Additionally they teased an upcoming Dungeon DLC hitting before then called Scalebreaker but they didn’t give any real information about that. At this point I am so far behind that I will continue to plod along at my own speed and ignore the fact that the content is stacking up on top of me.

I am shocked beyond shocked to see a Commander Keen game showing up at the Bethesda Show. So lets stop for a moment and revel in the fact that this is indeed happening and that Zenimax is apparently in the drivers seat instead of ID. The only gotcha unfortunately is this is a mobile game, which in itself is not a death sentence given that I am actually finding myself playing a ton of mobile games. Mario Run for example does a pretty damned good of emulating everything that is right about a platformer. This game however is not a platformer… and is instead a sort of puzzle game where you lay traps and create inventions to solve obstacles. I am sure it is probably going to be enjoyable, but wow do I wish I we were getting a true Commander Keen game in the same style as the previous classics. I will give it a shot, but I am hoping that this isn’t the only Commander Keen project.

I gotta say I love the 80s sitcom video that went along with the announcement of the Rise of the Ghosts expansion. Mostly it looks like we are getting a bunch more stuff added to the game including a slew of interesting looking vehicles and weapons including a mini-mech. This game is just stupidly fun so I am not expecting a lot out of it. I just find it fun to roam around and kill stuff, and this appears to be more of the same.

This one came from out of nowhere, but Arkane studios is working on a new shooter of sorts called Deathloop. It seems like you are stranded on an island as one of two assassins, and you are stuck in a timeloop that resets periodically. One assassin is there to stop the loop and one is there to make sure nothing happens to the loop. It has a really cool 70s grindhouse feel, so I am interested to see how this shakes out in the end. I am a huge fan of Arkane Studios so I will give them an awful lot of leverage when it comes to trying something completely different from them.

So this is an interesting announcement that goes a long way with a lot of the other announcements we have been seeing. Apparently ID has developed a tech they call Orion that improves game streaming and they purport to be able to use less bandwidth to stream back flawless 60 fps gameplay. There is a demo going on that I have been trying to sign up for… but apparently the site is being slashdotted and does nothing but 500 error out. Supposedly this tech is an SDK that developers can include into their games to make them capable of working better with cloud services regardless of what the end platform actually is. Worth watching and I am hoping to get a beta copy to play with it. They showed someone streaming Doom to a mobile phone with a controller attached and it looked super fluid.

The final thing shown was Doom Eternal and they did in fact spend a lot of time on it. From what I can tell it seems like the Doom mythos follows similar to the Diablo 3 mythods… where we as the Doom Slayer end up running afoul of both Hell and Heaven, and by fighting back we are apparently going against what is prophesied. It looks like an over the top game like Doom games should be, and I feel like it is probably going to be every bit as good as Doom 2016. Lots of impressive visuals and what looks to be much larger battles.

Next Up

Monday we have PC Gaming Show, Ubisoft and Square Enix. It might take me a bit longer to watch all of these because unlike Sat/Sun I have to work and will not likely be able to tune into any of the shows as they are actually being broadcast. Then on Tuesday we have another Nintendo Direct to look forward to. The lack of Sony really feels weird especially since there isn’t anything that I am aware of scheduled on the horizon. I am not exactly sure when they will make their own next gen console announcement. Regardless this is my quick summary of the shows I have seen so far. Hands down the thing I am the most excited for is a Westernized Phantasy Star Online 2.

What has been your “best in show” so far, and what are you looking forward to?

Season of Opulence

June 5, 2019 by Belghast

There has been a sequence of events that has happened recently that were a bunch of things that were totally out of my control. One of those occurred again yesterday. I was about to go into a 1 pm meeting that I could not miss or else a project was likely going to fail… and I got a call from my father saying my mother had been taken to the Emergency Room. The meeting wrapped early thankfully and I rushed up the highway to the hospital roughly an hour away. The short version is that she has a blood clot restricting blood flow to her lungs.

The prognosis thankfully seems to be good and they are pumping blood thinners into her expecting that to clear the clot within 24 hours. However it is a scary situation because so much could go wrong. I ultimately came home last night in part because I had to take my own meds and in part because she was not sleeping with us in her room and needed some rest. The goal right now is to head up once I finish my morning activities. I’ve texted both mom and dad but given that my dad also went home to take his meds I am wondering if he is still sound asleep.

I obviously did not get much game time yesterday, but I did poke my head into Destiny 2 for a bit since the season of opulence has started. This morning I am going to give you a fairly fragmented view at some of the changes that I noticed. First off when you get into game you will get a quest leading you to Nessus and to visit what appears to be Emperor Callus’s party barge hovering near a cliff face. There is an intermediary step where you have to go visit Benedict the reprogrammed sweeper bot, but quickly you wind up planet side working through a series of quests to refill a chalice. This serves as the progression system for the season and unlocking various talents on the cup give you various in game boosts.

The first interesting thing is that as you are completing steps in the quest you are being given 690 gear as a way of artificially boosting your light level enough to be able to start doing higher level content. Sadly I did not have a stockpile of infusion materials, and as a result I am mostly stuck using the blues in place of the purples that I greatly prefer. It is nice however to see that Bungie built in some sort of a catch up mechanic this time that does not involve auto completing content.

Another interesting thing is that we now have a pursuits tab in the director that has all of those annoying doodads that took up inventory space and effectively this becomes something approaching a proper quest log. I am not sure if you are limited to the number of items you can have in it like you were with bounties. It is however really nice to see an at a glance view of everything you are currently working on and what step in the quest chain you are.

Another thing that i noticed is that they changed the engine for displaying the shaders… which in theory tries to give you a more appropriate display of what they might look like on gear. It still isn’t perfect but it does seem to do a more reasonable job of faking out what the shader looks like actually applied.

The place with the biggest changes is the in game shop… aka the Eververse where they have swapped up a bunch of things. Namely while engrams still exist they are now seemingly removed from priority in advertising them. Right now they have “best of year one” engram that allows you to obtain items from anything that happened during year one. What is more interesting however is that they have a bunch of items that are now available as direct purchases for both Silver and Bright Dust.

For example they have a new seemingly exclusive sparrow with nifty animation effects called The Calypso that is purchasable for 800 silver. The minimum purchase needed to get enough silver is $9.99 for 1100 silver… you can do whatever math you want to dilute the amount of the cost of a single silver because like all cash shops the more you buy the cheaper it gets. However if you have no silver right now and you want this ride you are going to have to spend a minimum of $10 to get it. It is nice however to have a fixed price point rather than the previous answer of opening gachapon engrams until you got whatever it was that you wanted.

There is also a rotating inventory of things available for bright dust which can be obtained by breaking down items from previously opened engrams or from completing engrams. Among these is an exotic sparrow that looks like you are riding a single pod-racer engine. This should in theory give access to a different batch of new stuff rotating every seven days through a fixed stock of hopefully all of the items available during this season.

The gameplay itself feels different and I cannot quite put my finger on it. It might just be that I have been gone long enough that everything is starting to feel fresh again. My shotgun that I picked up from one of the boost packs however seems to be able to do things like one shot Vex Hydras… which is not something that I remember happening before. Additionally I seem to be able to one shot punch Vex Minotaurs… which again is not something that I remember being able to do. I am sure I will be playing more of this in the coming weeks but for now I am wrapping things up and heading to the hospital.

Keep my Mom in your thoughts if you don’t mind doing so. Hopefully everything works out okay but regardless it has been pretty scary.

Regularly Playing: June 2019 Edition

June 4, 2019June 4, 2019 by Belghast

For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!

To Those Remaining

I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.

If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.

While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.

While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.

To The New and Returning

I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.

With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.

I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.

To Those Departing

Grim Dawn

I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.

Marvel Future Fight

I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.

Mortal Kombat 11

Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.

Outward

This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.

Honorable Mentions

Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.

While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.

I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.

I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.

And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.

Flowerbabies and Bounty Caches

July 6, 2020June 3, 2019 by Belghast

This morning should be the beginning of a return to normality for me. The flood related stuff seems to have wrapped up for me and with it my weird alternating work schedule. I still feel somewhat jet lagged from the experience of having to rapidly shift around my schedule for a week and some change. I am sure as I return to my normal rhythm of getting up at 5:30 each morning and going to bed around 10-ish each night those effects will fade. Last night did not help since it was both the return of Fear the Walking Dead and a documentary series on a local murder mystery and we wanted to watch both.

This weekend also signaled the return of the “flowerbabies” in our back yard, as well as the return to having to add another step to my morning routine of watering them. We are getting a really late start to the season in part because our nursery of choice was flooded. We went by on Memorial Day but they seemed to be cleaning up and not actually open for business. Saturday however they were ready to go and we picked up a number of hanging baskets to go on the hooks that we set out around the pool. You never quite know what you are going to get until you go and then sorta pick out whatever happened to speak to you at the time. I am quite partial to the Purslane because those orange and magenta combination is stunning. Also a big fan of the white petunias with the eggplant centers. We have a mix of colors but they now need tending so I will have to start cutting my blog time a little short each morning.

As far as gaming goes I spent the vast majority of my weekend running bounties. I’ve reached the point where I can easily survive Torment XVI so I am now chaining my way through objectives. I finally realize how Grace always seems to know exactly where she is going in these levels, and I feel like once I have reached my final objective… I will have most of the semi-random map layouts nailed as well. At the very least I will hopefully stop going the opposite way given that for the most part the areas around the warp pads are somewhat static. This is not something that I had caught onto in all of my hundreds of hours playing this game. I am sometimes pretty dense.

At this point I have gathered up 25 bounty caches. The majority of these are from Torment 15 with some of the more recent additions to my pile from Torment 16. The caches apparently have a memory for what level you were on when you got the cache even though I can’t seem to see any external indicator of this. Ultimately I am working on knocking out the Conquest of Avarice which is to loot 50 million gold in a streak. Since I don’t want to have to do this insane amount of farming twice… I am probably going to significantly overshoot my target but i am loosely following this guide I found on the forums.

A T13 bounty cache contains 1,190,000 gold.
43 T13 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T14 bounty cache contains 1,440,000 gold.
35 T14 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T15 bounty cache contains 1,540,000 gold.
33 T15 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.
A T16 bounty cache contains 1,640,000 gold.
31 T16 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

So in theory right now if I figure everything I have looted at this point is a T15 even though I know some are not… it would get me to 38 million gold. I think my goal is going to be to farm up about a page and a half of caches in my vault and then do the mass open. Basically I don’t want to have to do this grind twice so I figure well overshooting my target is the best course of action. 52 caches would be roughly a page and a half and that should in theory net a minimum of 80 million gold… so MORE than enough to hit my target.

It was probably nonsense for me to pick this one as my first conquest… but in doing so it has given me a sense of purpose to grind out an incompatible number of items that have ultimately bolstered my ability to take down content. While I have only picked up a couple of primal ancients… they have seemingly made a difference. The weird thing about this season is that I have yet to see a single Ramaladni’s Gift. I have an ancient Pigsticker waiting in the bank for me to get one since I don’t want to have to re-roll to get a socket… although I guess I could just re-roll one of the stats that I would have re-rolled anyways and roll to something other than the socket when I finally find one.

Whatever the case… I am super into Diablo 3 this season and have been more driven to solo grind than I think I ever have. This somehow transitioned from a social game experience for me… to something that I am finding even more deeply relaxing than it previously was.