Jedi Survivor Early Thoughts

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Good Morning Friends! I hope this week is excellent. Last week was a kick in the teeth as far as weeks go, so by the time I reached Friday evening I was just too exhausted to start anything new and unfamiliar. So as a result I did not get engaged in Star Wars Jedi Survivor until Saturday morning, as I wanted to start the game with fresh eyes and a good perspective on life. I am playing on PC and I had a really good experience playing at 1440p and at the default settings which are a mix of High and Epic. I did not have any significant instances of slowdown other than one place on the first real planet where there is just a massive volume of particle effects.

That is absolutely not the case for everyone. Digital Foundry who obsesses about PC detail and performance has decreed this the worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023. When we recorded the show on Saturday night I found out that Tam was bit by this problem. My system is fairly beefy with an 11th gen Intel i7, RTX 3080, and 16 GB of ram… but so is his with a Ryzen 7, RTX 3070, and 128 GB of ram. Both are systems that should have run the game at 60 fps at 1440p without any issues. It did on my machine but it absolutely did not on Tam’s which led him to refund the game on Steam and pick it up on the PlayStation 5. Basically, I am throwing this out there so if you are on the fence… maybe wait a bit on the PC version of the game.

When you boot up the game, it is going to give you a warning message stating that the game is best played with a Controller. If you are most comfortable with a keyboard and mouse, then I would ignore this completely. I remember the first game having this warning as well, and I took its advice and bounced off the game pretty quickly. It was not until I stuck to my guns and played the game with my more greatly preferred mouse and keyboard input that I made it all the way through the game. Essentially I am telling you to take this with a grain of salt. There is one thing that frustrates me greatly though. While you technically can change some of your keybindings on the PC, you can’t change all of them. For example, I want to change dodge to something other than tab… because that feels like a keybinding decided upon by Joe in Accounting. So if you play with Mouse and Keyboard there are going to be some things you are just stuck with.

At this point, I don’t want to talk a ton about anything that would venture into the territory of spoilers. The game is gorgeous and manages to do something that so few games do. It allows you to pick up effectively where you left off without having some narrative device that caused you to forget everything you learned in the previous game. You effectively start with all of the movement and traversal abilities that you had at the end of Fallen Order and rapidly add a few new tricks to your repertoire including apparently the Jedi Mind Trick. The last bit I have admittedly only used once so far, and it was during a speech dialog, but I can influence animals with the force to either calm them or agitate them and get them to attack baddies.

The Tutorial Planet takes place on Coruscant, giving us an amazing romp through the lower levels of the machine city. After completing that mission arc and refreshing yourself on all of the movement, you are set loose on a much more open planet allowing you to explore fairly freely. This gives the game a bit of a Breath of the Wild feeling, though the exploration is not quite THAT free but you do eventually unlock the use of animals as gliders. You also open up a new lightsaber stance which is the ability to break apart your lightsaber into two sabers and fight dual-wielding style. This has absolutely been my jam so far and I am investing heavily in the ability to throw my sabers at enemies.

There are way more friendly folks scattered throughout the world that you can help out. There is also the introduction of Boglings, which serve a similar function to the golden birds from Ghost of Tsushima in that they occasionally lead you to the next objective. You can of course pet the Boglings which is super pure. The detail of the world is so much better than in the previous game. Fallen Order suffered from the problem of several tunnels and areas of work looking pretty similar to other areas. I know this was really bad on Kashyyyk, and caused me to get completely turned round at several points. Navigating here by visual landmark seems to work much better for me at least, but they have also improved the 3D mapping system if you need to lean on that instead.

Over the weekend I played all of the way through the Tutorial planet and unlocked everything that I think I can currently from the second planet. This led me onto the third planet… which frustrated me to the point of shutting down the game and going back to Path of Exile for a while. This third planet is “the floor is lava” the planet, and is comprised of shale piles that you can’t walk up without sliding down… and some sort of sandworm-like creature that can detect your movement and jumps up from the ground to eat you. Which means you have to do a series of annoying wall runs and duck from shelter to shelter while traversing the early areas. I opted to bail out because I did not want to tarnish the great experience of that second planet. I am sure I will return to it at some point this week and deal with the frustrations.

Probably my favorite aspect of the new game is that I can finally have a beard. Look this is important to me. I also can fiddle a bit with different styles of gear and assign some basic color options. My hope is as the game continues there are some really cool-looking options. What I really want is something akin to Obi-Wan’s Jedi Battle Armor from the prequel series. I have a few pieces of tactical armor that I have picked up but nothing quite that grand. As far as the story goes, it isn’t terribly interesting as of yet but does seem like it is going to bridge the gap between the Kenobi Series/Rogue One era of Star Wars and the burgeoning High Republic era. Nothing really has grasped me though story wise other than the desire to “get the band back together”, as all of the characters went their separate ways at the end of the first game.

I think that is probably all I will talk about for now. Expect more attempts at spoiler-free updates on my progress. If you were going to play this on PC… maybe wait for a patch for two until someone like Digital Foundry calls the all-clear.

AggroChat #432 – Breath of the Jedi

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

This show was one of those times when random discussions that we did not plan happened.  Firstly we had a bit of an impromptu discussion about the Dungeons and Dragons movie which also led to some non-movie discussion.  From there Bel talks about his life as a Path of Exile Vendor as he has become increasingly immersed in the trade market as a seller.  Tam and Bel talk quite a bit about Jedi Survivor and how it is a more open game and might even draw some connections to Breath of the Wild.  Kodra talks about Lone Fungus and Ash about Everspace 2.  From there we fall into some unplanned discussions about how games seem to be moving away from Holiday Season release schedules, and then we get off on this tangent about the Gameboy.

Topics Discussed:

  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Bel’s Life as a Path of Exile Vendor
  • Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
  • Lone Fungus
  • Everspace 2
  • Games Moving Away from Holiday Releases
  • Arguing about the Gameboy

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Ghosts of Leagues Past

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I got to thinking about my past experience with Path of Exile and the assorted leagues that I played in and then the ones that I actually took seriously. Largely this was spawned by the comfortable spot that I have arrived at in this league having two extremely strong characters, which led me down a path of exploring some of my past mistakes with this game. There is something about the complexity of Path of Exile that makes you forget entirely what it was like to play the game when you were first starting out. As a result, there are a lot of build makers that assume everyone will be engaging with the trade league and that low investment is anything under 10 Divine Orbs. Granted I am starting to reach that point myself in my journey as this league I have spent probably at least 10 Divines gearing out two characters.

The overwhelming success that I have had with Toxic Rain Pathfinder, has led me to start questioning some things. Namely, whether or not the state of the league is just exceptionally good, Toxic Rain is simply a great build, or I am just much better at the game now than in the past. It could be all of the three but the Toxic Rain build specifically has led me down this path because mechanically it is not that mechanically different from the Explosive Arrow Champion build that I tried back in Sentinel League and did not really enjoy. I’ve seriously played Path of Exile for the last four leagues and for both Sentinel and Kalandra, I had some significant issues with the game, which has now led me to objectively evaluate the state of those characters when I left them. Of note, I do not really play Standard, so any character from a past league is effectively in exactly the same condition I stopped playing when the league ended.

Before that, we are going to talk a little bit about the early murky time spent playing Path of Exile with no clue what was going on. One of the things I never really could figure out is why exactly I did not play Path of Exile before 2016. Sure the passive tree was daunting, but I figured that there had to be another reason. Yesterday I watched the original trailer and then immediately understood why I turned my nose up at this game. The prominent placement of Player Vs Player combat in the game’s features would have been enough for me to chuck the game in the bin. So it wasn’t really until April of 2016 that I gave the game a chance, and only then because I was really coming into a grove of playing Diablo III which made me want to branch out and try other prominent ARPGs. I’ve always loved this style of game but prior to Diablo III, the MMORPG had always been my primary game type, and like so many people I got trapped in the orbit of World of Warcraft for over a decade.

Sadly I have none of my original characters because, during the Sanctum league, I decided to purge them to free up their names. However, none of them were even vaguely close to playable or had anything resembling a “build”. I technically started playing during the Perandus League and I know Breach was active at the same time as I remember doing one of those and dying horribly to it. They used to do this weird cycle of challenge leagues where two events were happening at the same time. I did not manage to make it terribly far on my first attempt and I think I ended up stopping somewhere in Act II. It was not until 2018 and the “Don’t You Guys Have Phones” debacle that I really revisited the game, and at that point, it was during the Delve League. Basically, it was at that point that I started seriously diving into other ARPGs because I felt like Diablo IV was not actually going to happen. From that point forward I sort of picked at the game, never really making serious traction. I remember specifically playing during the Heist League, Expedition League, and Scourge League before finally taking the advice of following a build guide for Sentinel League.

For Sentinel League, I decided to follow a build guide from Zizaran as he was and still is probably one of the most “noob-friendly” guide creators. That said… there is still a huge gulf between his understanding of the game and what he takes for common knowledge and what a brand-new player understands about the game. So I legitimately thought I was playing along as expected and when I hit maps… I ground to a halt and struggled significantly. I think I made it to yellow maps before giving up on the league and trying another character for a while… getting both to 73 and thinking I had “made it to the end game”. However rough it was, it was enough to get this game into my bloodstream and make me want to take a much more serious look at it with the Lake of Kalandra league, when most of AggroChat tried the game out.

However, after four leagues of playing Path of Exile, I look at this character and cringe. Firstly notice that I didn’t have anything higher than a four-link on any of my gear. Like today I wouldn’t even begin mapping without at least a five-link… and out of sheer lack of understanding I was throwing myself into the gristmill with not having anything better than a four-link. Additionally, there was a massive problem with my resists… not a single one of them was at the natural level cap of 75% and my Chaos Resistance was negative 52%. Then defensively I am sort of all over the place with relatively low evasion, armor, and no life recovery to speak of. No wonder I struggled with this build. Yesterday I grabbed a 3.21 equivalent to Explosive Arrow Ballista and tried mapping… and shockingly I did okay. I had to ride my health potion a bit more than I would have liked, but there is a certain layer of muscle memory that has built up now where I am actively dodging attacks before I even register that I am doing it.

After moving away from Explosive Arrow I had dinked around with what started out as a Righteous Fire Inquisitor and then got stuck playing Wintertide Brand because I enjoyed that gameplay so much. So with Lake of Kalandra, I wanted to play something Brand based and it seemed like Stormbrand was going to be a good option. So I followed a guide from Velyna and again… something got lost in translation. At this point when I look back on this character, I am shocked that I managed to make it all of the way through unlocking the Atlas. I remember a number of the red maps being exceptionally painful to complete but just assumed that Stormbrand was a far weaker build than the comfy gameplay that I would eventually find with Righteous Fire Juggernaut in the Forbidden Sanctum League.

Once again however looking back at this character makes me cringe in ways that I find hard to explain fully. I thought I knew what I was doing during the Kalandra League, and I very clearly did not. First of all, once again I was not even close to sitting at the natural resistance cap of 75% in each elemental resistance and still had a negative Chaos Resistance. For Crucible League this was “day one” stuff, or at least day one from when I reached the end of the Acts. Then again I didn’t have anything resembling a plan when it came to defenses. I had too little Armor to be an armor build, too little Energy Shield to be an Energy Shield build… and a completely insignificant amount of Evasion and Life Recovery. Once again I thought I was doing what the guide told me to do, but clearly missing something in translation.

Last night I pulled out the most recent copy of this build and reset my passive tree. I was able to do several maps relatively comfortably and was amazed at just how good this did at the clearing. It even did a reasonable job at killing bosses, but once again struggled to stay alive and it was only through constantly dodging attacks that I reached anything resembling comfortable gameplay. If I got hit… I had to ride the flask. I also noticed that NONE of these characters have anything resembling a flask strategy… but I guess that was a lesson I did not fully learn until playing the Juggernaut, last league.

One of the problems with Path of Exile that really plagues new players is the extreme level of complexity. For a while, I legitimately thought maybe that Zizaran and Velyna were just bad guide creators, but looking back I realize that no… they did a relatively good job but just simply were missing steps that they assumed everyone understood. They are creating guides for folks who are already engaged with Path of Exile and understand the concepts. However, no one really understands Path of Exile until they have lived with it for a while and failed miserably enough to fully understand why they were failing. Knowing what I know today, I could go back and fix my Sentinel and Kalandra characters and could have had a much better time in both Leagues had I understood what I do now.

However I have only arrived at that knowledge through almost a thousand hours of gameplay, and multiple hundreds of hours of regularly consuming content about the game. Almost every single day I learn something new about Path of Exile, and there are still game mechanics that I have not really engaged with at all. The cliff of knowledge is so brutal to climb that it makes sense that after ascending to a plateau… these creators forget what the climb felt like because they know they still have another sheer face to ascend in front of them. For example… Subtractem has an hour-and-a-half-long guide on the Betrayal League mechanic… and it only covers “the basics”. Grasping anything more than the most basic understanding of many of the league mechanics requires a similar dive into the abyss of Path of Exile knowledge.

So we arrive at where I am today. I deeply love the game and wish more people did. However, I also know what a brutal climb it is to get to at least where I am today, knowing that I am but a “babe in the woods” before some of the folks who have been actively playing the game since launch. The problem with Path of Exile is a problem that I have seen in so many MMORPGs as well, in that the level of complexity required to really be efficient and good at the game… requires so much of the player and as a result most folks never really reach that point. I could ramble on about the madness of what group construction looks like in Guild Wars 2 for example, and how nothing in the game would ever lead you to a point of understanding it. This is also why I appreciate games like Last Epoch so much because you don’t need to have played 300 hours of the game to be able to grasp the concepts, and there is an in-game guide that legitimately tells you everything you really need to know. Knowing that however… doesn’t really make me love Path of Exile any less for its beautiful madness and complexity.

Automatic Screenshots

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about how I wished there was a tool out there that would just take screenshots at key moments for me. I get deeply engaged and in a focused state… and forget to mash the screenshot key. Then there are moments where I am actively fighting and think a screenshot might be cool… but it is inconvenient to break the action and try and capture it. So instead what I posited is something sitting there in the background snapping a screenshot every minute or so, and then later I could review these and cull the dross. I think largely I landed on something that works for me in this fashion and while I hinted at it yesterday, I am going to talk a bit more about it today after having played with it.

I’ve been using an open-source program called ShareX since 2020 to record my screenshots. I like its default structure of naming the files based on the program that is actively in use and then dumping them into monthly directories. This works well for me other than on the first of the next month… when I seem to forget that I will need to start looking in a new directory. It is extremely flexible and even offers the ability to upload screenshots as part of the capture process. I’ve turned all of that off and I largely just use the “Capture Active Window” task hotkey. However, I noticed that I had available to me a “Start Auto Capture Using Last Region” option which will turn on the auto capture dialog to the left and minimize it. In order to turn it off you have to click through to your system tray pop up that window and hit stop. However what it does amazingly well… is just start working and do so seamlessly in the background until I am ready for it to stop working.

I did have to configure some overrides specific to that hotkey, and you can access those by clicking on the gear next to the hotkey that I configured. Namely, I needed to change the file naming structure because the default option was simply not granular enough for my needs naming the files a sequence of letters: A, B, C, etc. The other thing that I needed to do was manually kick off the auto-capture functionality and set it to full screen. The default seemed to be “region capture” which was capturing both of my monitors at the same time which is not useful at all. I removed the %pn from the beginning of the file name because for fullscreen captures it is not able to determine what program it is capturing. I wish there was an option to have it capture the active window, but it works well enough for what it does do.

So last night while I was running maps and done delve, I had it sitting in the background quietly snapping a screenshot every minute. This allowed me to capture some really interesting screenshots of skill effects firing off. For example, I was getting attacked by some sort of lightning attack it seems like and you can see my Toxic Rain falling as well as I was clearing my way through a Crimson Temple map. I never could have captured a moment in time with quite so much clarity as I would have effectively had to stop what I was doing, hit the print screen key, and then go back to attempting combat.

It also captured a good number of completely useless screenshots of me futzing with my inventory. The normal process of me running content is to fill up my inventory, then port to my hideout and dump said inventory before diving back in again. This means that I have a fair number of photos of me showing my inventory in various states of being unloaded.

There were enough cool screenshots though that I think this is going to be how I handle this going forward. For example, it caught a pack in mid-explosion down in delve which looks freaking sweet. Really at the end of the day, this gave me what I really wanted. While it would be cool if it actively triggered specific events going on in the game, I am more than happy to just have random shots at regular intervals.

As far as gaming goes… I spent a good chunk of last night clearing out this massive Vaal City Complex with about a dozen city nodes and a Vaal boss. Then down to the left I found another smaller Abyssal City complex with five nodes and a Lich Boss encounter. I also ran a lot of maps on the Toxic Rain Pathfinder to fuel delve and while doing so I was swapping out at the end of each map to run Crucible with Righteous Fire which is just better at dealing with massive amounts of damage. This provided a truly ridiculous number of Heist missions which I burned through to get the quest items out of my inventory. It legitimately was an almost perfect night of hanging out on the sofa, playing Path of Exile, and snuggling with Josie and Gracie. Josie was curled up beside me and Gracie laying on my legs.

I am legitimately not sure if this auto-screenshot thing is going to be of use to anyone else, but I certainly think it works well for my purposes. If you go down this path I would certainly be interested in hearing about your exploits.