Fun With Infinite Climbing

by

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.

400th AggroChat Q&A

by

This is going to be a bit of an odd post, but we are pushing forward nonetheless. I really do not love asking things of my readers/listeners, because it always feels like I am imposing upon you. This coming Saturday, we will be recording our 400th episode of AggroChat. It seems like complete and total nonsense that we are this far along in our journey, but we have been recording for a little over eight years at this point. While we miss the occasional week, we are pretty reliably sending ourselves unvarnished for your podcast listening pleasure. I had been trying to figure out what exactly we should do to mark our 400th episode, and then… at the last minute, a decision was made.

The idea is pretty straightforward. We ask you, our readers/listeners to throw out some questions you are curious about. Then during the show this Saturday we will do our best to answer them, either individually or as a group. One of my favorite shows that we have recorded in the past was the 10 Years 10 Questions WoW show and it was really fun to listen to the varied responses we all gave. As is often the case… I have created a handy Google Form for submitting questions. Each form submission has room for 5 questions, and if you have more than that… then you can submit multiple forms. I will also be attempting to take questions through other means but the form is going to be the most reliable method for being heard, as it will allow me to share the questions ahead of time with my castmates. I’ve left the Google Form anonymous and you won’t be required to have a google account to submit it.

I have to admit I am sort of nervous throwing this out there. This will not work terribly well if I simply get zero questions. I guess in that case I will sorta wing it because I can absolutely see not a single question being submitted. One of the secrets to this blog and the podcast as well is that I sort of pretending that we don’t actually have an audience. That is not to diminish the impact you all have on my life, but more to get over the crushing self-doubt that I would probably experience if I realized that a bunch of people might consume something that I created. So I am now breaking that invisible wall I have put up… and asking for your help. Submit questions that you want to know the answers to. They can be super serious, but also completely frivolous as well. If they are too personal we do reserve the right to skip them, but generally speaking my interactions with our readers/listeners have been phenomenal.

I apologize ahead of time if you follow me on social media because I am probably going to be retweeting this a few times over the week. I hope you all have a great week out there and I appreciate your time and attention to this nonsense.

AggroChat #399 – Praise the Lamb

by
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Sometimes a big week happens where there is a collision of events leading us to all want to talk about a game.  We welcome Kodra back from GenCon 2022 and he talks about his experiences namely the LARPs he participated in and this leads to a discussion of Warmachine 4.0.  From there we spend some time talking about the Path of Exile 3.19 Lake of Kalandra league reveal stream and the changes it is ushering in.  Bel and Ammo talk a bit about Tower of Fantasy which seems to be a universally better version of Genshin Impact set in a science fiction Borderlands/Wildstar-like universe.  Finally, we wrap things up with some talk about Cult of the Lamb where you sacrifice your friends for fun and profit.

Topics Discussed

  • GenCon 2022
    • LARPs
  • Warmachine 4.0
    • What is going on?
  • Path of Exile
    • 3.19 Lake of Kalandra Stream
  • Tower of Fantasy
  • Cult of the Lamb

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Generous Gacha

by

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.