Dune Awakening Thoughts

by

Good Morning Folks. This past Thursday dropped the head start for Dune Awakening, a Survival MMO set in the Dune Universe. Essentially this falls along the lines of something like Valheim but set in the Dune Universe, with really high quality environment graphics and an interesting twist to the story. This is a universe where Paul Atreides was never born and Duke Leto Atreides was never successfully assassinated leading to the downfall of that house. The Fremen were wiped out by the Sardaukar in a mass genocide… and the planet of Arakkis is actively in play with the Harkonnens, Atreides, and other minor houses of the Landsraad vying for control. You can choose to join forces with either Great House, or carve out your own path in between them pitting each against the other. At least that is the pitch for the game… and I can neither verify nor disprove any of it… because I am not terribly far in the overall progression of the game. At this very moment I am level 24 and barely progressed in the main story… because I am prone to fits of being a murder hobo and ignoring quest chains.

I saw some early advice that greatly tweaked my initial plans with the game. Namely that it was very easy to specialize in Trooper because there is an NPC trainer at the first town… but much harder to subclass in other things. I had read that Mentat was a really solid early start because you got access to the very powerful turret ability, and I leaned on this heavily during the early game. Combat is rather challenging at least until you get some decent weapons and gear under your belt, and a lot of my early experiences were me sneaking into a camp… deploying my turret which would fire off 3-4 shots before exploding but was highly capable of dispatching the few scavengers that were in each camp. From there I would mop up whatever was left off… drain all of the corpses of their precious precious moisture and then loot whatever I could and rush back to base to dump it into storage.

You can build up to two bases at a time, and very early you will probably end up creating a box like I did that only served as enough of a base to get you in out of the weather and protect you from the real dangers of Arakkis… the Sun and the Sandstorms. The game does something really interesting in that when you have to abandon a base… it still exists in the world and any other player can claim it by plunking down one of the control beacons. Additionally all of the stuff that you had in your base sticks around in the same way that you left it, and you can trek back to loot it later… but relinquishing control of a base essentially opens up all of that stuff for free for all looting. This has to be really interesting on a public server because I fully expect the entire zone to be littered with little hidey holes created by players… full of random smatterings of loot.

That is the first part of why this experience has been so enjoyable. I am not playing on a public server. Funcom in their infinite wisdom opened the game up so that third party server providers could sell private servers that players could rent. Tam opted to rent a server for the AggroChat crew to play on, which allowed us to play from Thursday all the way through the weekend without a single connection issue. I heard in passing that there were some significant lag and connection problems playing on the public servers, but for us… everything was calm and peachy and allowed for an interesting leveling experience as we could pool resources and share bases. Right now there are just two of us playing on the server, but I believe there will be another batch joining us when the game officially launches for everyone that did not pay the early access tax on Tuesday. You can also see that I tried to lean into the whole Mentat thing with my character appearance.

There are essentially three vectors of progression in the game that I have seen thusfar. The first being your character level and spending skill points in the trees that are available to you. Essentially a build is a combination of points spent, three active abilities, and three passive buffs called techniques. I do not know when my third active ability unlocks but right now I am running my ever faithful turret from Mentat, and the Shigawire Claw from Trooper that allows me to rapidly ascend cliff faces and honestly fly around the battlefield if I need to. When combined with a suspensor belt that allows me to float slightly or more often fall gracefully… I can mimic flight for short periods of time. I’ve unlocked the Trooper class tree and have spent points related to gunplay there and reduced weapon durability loss. Through a quest chain I also gained access to the Planetologist tree which has a Mechanic branch that makes it so that I use less fuel and my sandtrike takes less wear and tear.

A slightly more important progression system is the tech tree gained through researching. Roaming around the map and uncovering new areas, and scouting camps and bandit settlements rewards a currency known as Intel. You can then turn around and spend that Intel researching various patterns that you can then craft. This is going to be a significant hurdle in your progression because not only do you need to research the crafting machines, but you will need to research individual patterns. For example I am not currently using the most efficient mining laser, because I have prioritized combat resources above it… and at some point in the future when I am flush with Intel I might upgrade it for efficiency… or will become a higher priority when I actually need to harvest carbon. Early on it is pretty easy to research everything… but now that I am in the second region of the game I am having to pick and choose what I want to research. Were Tam and I actually doing this game efficiently… we probably should have tag teamed this and focused on different things so that we could have access to everything easily.

One thing that is a bit interesting is the inclusion of Unique patterns. These are essentially what good drops would be in any other game. You often get these from the chest at the end of more difficult content, and they grant you access to craft a single instance of the item. These are HIGHLY relevant items and are a power level that even in the second zone of the game I cannot quite hit by crafting normal items. I focused on crafting the Way of the Fallen Pistol and Kaleff’s Drinker Knife and they hard carried me through the first chunk of the game. The emperor’s wings gave me early access to the ability to float… well before I would be able to research that on my own, and the unique literjon is a massive upgrade given it comes with six pips worth of storage instead of the normal four. I got all of these items way earlier than the main story quest would have given them to me… because again… I have a tendency to go murder hobo and ignore the story. In truth I would absolutely do this again even though it led to me having to do certain chunks of content two or three times as a result.

The third and arguably most important vector of progression… is the main story quest. This is unfortunately where I have fallen down in this game, because generally speaking when you give me an open world experience… I don’t want to be chained to someone else’s timeline. If you look up at the research screenshot, there are a few items that have a lock icon on them. This is effectively locking progression behind some step in the story that you have not reached. I smarter person than I appear to be… would focus fire the story and churn through the progression steps to fully unlock the tech tree more quickly. Tam as a result is way further along in the progression than I am, because he has the proper mindset for this sort of game. Personally I feel like it would be a much BETTER game if you unlocked various tech trees when you first encounter the materials that are used for them. One of the things that I love about Path of Exile for example is that you can completely ignore the story and if you know what you are doing you can short cut all of the quest steps just by obtaining the final items required for them. I have an inventory full of items that I am certain will be used for quests later in the progression… but cannot really do anything with them for the moment because I went somewhere too early.

It admittedly took awhile before the game got into my blood. I think when I last spoke about it at the tail end of the week… I was neither a for or against it… but It has won me over. First off it is just really gorgeous and you have some truly haunting vistas like this guild heighliner floating impossibly silent above the world amidst all of these auroras at night. The true dangerous of the world of Dune are the sun which saps you of moisture, the sandstorms which shred bone… and will absolutely straight up kill you quickly if you are out in one when it happens, and the sandworms which will swallow you whole and cause you to lose everything that was on your body. Pretty much everything else is recoverable by running back to the sight of your death and picking up some of the random stuff that you dropped. I’ve not experienced it but apparently running over top of quicksand is another instant death with 100% loss of everything on you.

Technically I survived a sandstorm, but it involve me chain resurrecting myself… and then blowing through all of the bandages that I had crafted in order to just barely keep alive. I would not recommend it in the least. The game generally gives you one to two minutes of warning, and when you hear the automated voice… you better be booking it to some area that is showing up as “sheltered” or better. Otherwise you too will be doing the resurrection dance trying to stay alive until it blows over. Thankfully they seem to be fairly quickly moving… so you don’t have to stay sheltered for terribly long but so far… it is absolutely the thing I am the most terrified of. The sandworms themselves… seem to travel in patterns and if you just saw one pass then it is probably safe for you to venture forth towards that next rock outcropping. I think of Dune as an ocean game… with the sand being the water, and the rock outcroppings being the islands. Every step that I make… even now that I have transportation is about minimizing my time out in the open so I plot my moves carefully from island to island as I get to my final destination.

I spend a lot of time moving around at night, because at least then you are removing one of the risk vectors from the equation. I do a lot of short trips out to destinations and then ferry back my resources to my base. Essentially I am worried about carrying too much in the open for too long, and it also becomes very important for you to create a garage of sorts to store your vehicles in because if you leave them out during a sandstorm… they will essentially get disintegrated. I’ve not reached the point where I can begin to repair my gear which is extremely nice. However I also feel like I have fallen behind the tech tree as I moved into the second area. Tam has a base near mine that I absolutely used for a bit just because he had more machines available than I did. You can share out your base with your friends, and as a result it has been useful to sort of leap frog our way around the map. I just saw that Tam built a new base to the far north… so I might chose to build something in a different region just to give us more access to safe spots to hole up for awhile.

Is this game the best thing ever? Absolutely not. Am I enjoying myself? Very much so. It is a survival game, much like any other survival game with the added bonus of being Dune themed. If you are looking for the best possible version of this sort of game, I highly suggest checking out Enshrouded. For the moment I am having fun and I am interested to see where this adventure goes. I think I will essentially peter out when the next Path of Exile league drops at the end of the week, or if I high the Landsraad segment of the game…. because we are not a big enough guild to matter there. I kind of hate that the Deep Desert is shared between all of the private servers, and will still be PVP enabled. I was hoping that by renting a server we were skirting that functionality and could just have our big chill player versus environment game-play. Thing is… the environment really is terrifying at times… that was enough for me without having to deal with other players in the mix.

If you were ever a huge Dune nerd then this game is probably something you would want to check out. If you are also a big survival game fan, and have reached a point where some of the other offerings in this genre are stale for you personally… then again it might be worth a shot. However I do not think that this is revolutionary enough to really be a massive hit on its own right. I am not interested in the PVP and Guild Combat aspect of the game, because I am just not wired in that manner. If you are, then it might be a thing you care about far more than I do. I think it is a mid to interesting game experience that comes flavored in a science fiction universe that I care about… and for me personally that is an enjoyable offering. I do not think this is going to be a game that most people are going to care about however. Right now it is a strong six out of ten for me.

Are you playing Dune? What are your thoughts? Over the weekend I saw Scopique made his post like this… but I purposefully skipped reading it until I had written my own thoughts this morning. Now I will be heading over there to hear his experience.

AggroChat #526 – Fear the Sun

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

Hey Folks! We are down a Grace this week, but still end up filling up more than our normal slot full of nonsense.  There is a big sale going on right now for Guild Wars 2, and if you have ever thought about checking it out, now is the time. The Nintendo Switch 2 was released, and we are all pretty happy with it so far, and was at least a MASSIVE upgrade over the OG launch Switch. We talk a bit about the Summer Games Fest… which we only found out this week was not plural… thanks to LRR.  Tam and Bel have been playing the Dune headstart, and it is a wild gaming experience. Tam talks a short bit about TMNT Splintered Fate and Bel gives a heads up that Path of Exile 3.26 is coming next week.

Topics Discussed:

  • Big Guild Wars 2 Sale
  • Nintendo Switch 2
  • Summer Game(s) Fest
  • Dune: Awakening
  • Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate
  • Path of Exile 3.26 Next Week

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Wilds is Cursed

by

Hey Folks! Last night instead of our usual Guild Wars 2 nonsense on Thursday nights… I attempted to do some Monster Hunter Wilds again with Ammo and Sita. We have tried to do this a few times… but something always ends up causing problems. The first time Ammo chain crashed until I lost power… and then when the power came back… I lost internet. Last night the entire time we were playing Sita sounded like a robot… and every time we engaged anything one or more of us would get dropped from the linked party. Dealing with Capcom multiplayer is a very specific realm of hell. Then we realized the thing we were trying to unlock and group up for… is a Solo Arena quest. So we had a lot of us all hanging out on voice and being frustrated together as we attempted to “Akuma”. But hey… Barrel bowling is still fun as heck.

Over in Guild Wars 2… I am back on that World vs World grind and so is Sita. Specifically we both bought Legendary Weapon Kits and I am chasing the very dumb goal of making Sunrise. This however is only a means to an end, because it will in turn allow me to make the Voltron of Guild Wars 2 weapons… Eternity. We even managed to drag Ammo along for this nonsense… but in truth… grouping with friends in WvW is pretty much pointless because it is not like you can actually see each other in the giant “Zerg” huddle. The key trait that you need to learn to succeed in this game mode is find the tag and stand on the tag… and then move only when the tag moves. We had a good commander that was flanked by some really freaking phenomenal healers and were able to “OutZerg” the other teams as we captured their stuff.

We were exceptionally successful and in a single average I managed to do half of a Gift of Battle reward track. I believe Sita who had started this grind before me came within a fraction of finishing his up. I am really looking for the WvW Rush event in July and will probably just bank a bunch of Gift of Battles because they are always useful… and also the track in general is a decent way to get Mystic Clovers. More importantly… I passed rank 100 in World Vs World and got the new title of Veteran… which seems weird that this is higher than General was. Why do I care about WvW ranks? Well I kind of want to make the backpack… which itself will require that I have rank 350. Only 248 left to go. I am hoping I can make a massive dent in this during the WvW Rush and hopefully finish that off… and will absolutely probably just be living in WvW during that time. Thankfully I find that whole nonsense shockingly enjoyable… for someone who is traditionally a massive CareBear.

Dune is out… or at least the headstart is out and I played a bit of it last night. Enough to get through the very beginning of the tutorial and out into Hagga Basin which is the first real zone. I watched a video about how limited the Trooper ends up being and how I should probably just play a Mentat which has a turret… so I did that thing. It really probably is the correct decision because very early you can get a bunch of “makes guns better” abilities. The turret unfortunately is kind of shit. I expected something more akin to the pop up turrets in The Division. What it is instead is a grenade that you throw… and then when you “detonate” it, it turns into a turret that maybe fires off three bolts before exploding and if you are standing near it… you take damage. I am not extremely sold on this game yet. I like the vibe and I am a massive Dune geek… but also the gameplay feels more extreme than I like my survival games. Dealing with lack of water is a massive problem… but I have a thing that lets me drain my victims of blood and convert that to water so hopefully that will make things easier. What I really need though is a Literjon so that I can carry water with me.

I am very much in the bumblefucking my way around the desert mode right now, but at least I have a crappy shelter. I strategically set up my shelter in a valley that stays almost entirely in shade no matter what time of day it is, that happens to be right beside one of the vacuum sealed caves. Given that things respawn in the world pretty regularly, this gives me a pretty decent source of scrap metal as well as some lootable chests that have a few materials that I do not have any use for right now… but are flagged as orange in color which makes me think at some point they will be useful. For the moment I am stumbling up the tech tree and the entire game will probably feel much better once I have a way to carry around water, and a way to traverse between the assorted rock outcroppings more easily. I have “walked without rhythm” my way to another outcropping… found a much larger scavenger camp than I am used to…and died without remembering to set down a respawn beacon. Tonight I will probably make my way back over there and try and retrieve whatever I dropped in my backpack.

The other huge benefit of where I decided to set up my base is that on the other side of the sealed cave… is a small scavenger camp. Essentially when it respawns… I can set down my turret, unseal the cave door… and let the turret kill the two Scavengers without me having to lift a finger. This gives me a somewhat reasonable renewable source of blood to then convert into water with my purification machine. There are various lootables around the camp as well, but I am not sure how much value a handful of Solari will have in the grand scheme of things. I have a contract to deliver scrap metal to someone, but it is also way across another open stretch of desert which terrifies me at the moment. I will probably wait until nightfall to cross so that I won’t have to also worry about the impact of direct sunlight. I am in this weird state of equilibrium with the game where I don’t love it and I don’t hate it… I just feel like I need to push through the awkward first steps that any survival game has.

Yesterday was also the content reveal stream for the Secrets of the Atlas expansion for Path of Exile and it looks amazing. However if I were to sit down and start talking about it… it would be a whole other blog post. I will probably save that for Monday. I hope you all have a phenomenal weekend and if you too are venturing forth into Arrakis, drop me a line and let me know what you are thinking about the game so far.

Temu Dragon Stand

by

Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the drop of the last part of the Janthir Wilds story called Absolution. It was quite a hefty patch, but not one without some issues. The biggest one that I personally experienced is that for whatever reason they did not successfully reset purchases on the wizards vault, meaning that while I could see a new Legendary Weapon Kit was available… it showed that I had already purchased it. This was fixed early in the evening with an additional patch that required a restart, and from that point forward things seemed to be fine. I have pretty mixed emotions about this patch and there are some things that were phenomenal, others that were pretty disappointing, and then some that was just plain bad. Fair warning, as I get into the new map meta, there are going to be complete spoilers over what is going on there. I will warn you again because at least at the start I have some pretty surface level stuff to talk about.

First up, given that it is June now and Pride Month there are some new wings available this year. Initially I thought that they might be a re-offering of the wings from last year, but nope these are entirely new and pretty freaking amazing. The default rainbow pattern on these wings are significantly more vibrant than the previous macaw wings. Both the wings and the glider are patterned after the existing White or Black wings sets. For me it showed up untextured and brown, but I had to go use the dye eraser tool in order to show the default rainbow colors. I like that they are a much fuller wing than the macaw set and looks way more natural on a “girthy” model like that of the Norn and Char.

What is really cool about these wings however is that they have four dye channels. So you can of course use them in the default red, yellow, green, purple blended configuration. However you can also dye them to match ANY color scheme you might want. So this means you can effectively recreate any pride flag or simply dye them to match your outfit of choice. I turned mine into a recreation of the Bisexual Flag, since that is ultimately what represents me personally. No they don’t really match my outfit in the least but are freaking cool and I am really thankful that they are giving these away for free. The only caveat is that you have to have purchased the game. I tried to claim a set of these wings on my free-to-play account and they were not available.

Another really cool thing that they released on the cash shop is this Shimmering Aurora Homestead Sky. They absolutely got $10 in gems from me to pick this up, because one of my complaints about the existing sky is that I could not permanently set it to either night or day. I don’t like the lighting in the homestead during the day, and greatly preferred the night sky… and it would stick until I logged out and then when I logged in again everything would be back to the default day settings. With the Aurora sky it seems to stick permanently and also gives everything a beautiful lighting overlay. This makes me actually want to start building something properly in my homestead. Part of me wants to tear down everything that exists by default and create something from scratch.

Now for the disappointing. I think a lot of the failures that I am going to talk about in this post, come down to over-hyping and poorly marketing changes. One of the big quality of life changes that was announced was the addition of a universal teleportation tome, that in theory would collect all of your teleportation devices into a single item allowing you to free up a bunch of inventory slots. I don’t have mine fully unlocked yet because it is a long quest chain… but I have collected all of the scrolls that would fit into it and while it will free up a few slots… it does absolutely nothing for the cash shop lounge scrolls. So essentially I still will have multiple slots taken up by portal devices. The gobbler is also somewhat disappointing if only because it costs 100 Gold to buy it… which seems like a big chunk of change for something we have already gone through a lot of hassle to unlock.

Now we are entering the spoiler territory of this blog post, so if you care about such things… maybe stop reading.

The new story was pretty enjoyable, but felt extremely short… and also like nothing much happened. The true resolution of the expansion happens inside of the Bava Nisos meta event, and I will talk about that in a few. Essentially it is going between a bunch of locations, including some of Core Tyria searching for artifacts of the White Mantle. If you did not play through Bloodstone Fen or Lake Doric… most of this would largely feel non sequitur. Essentially the quest chain is effectively this heartfelt goodbye to Mabon… a character who does not really feel like earned the place he holds in the canon of this game. Secrets of the Obscure did not really flesh the character out enough to make me feel much of anything as a player about him. It isn’t like Aurene, a character that we learned to love over the course of several expansions worth of content. Mabon is just this character we are told is important and we are told is meaningful… and then is taken away and are told we should feel something about it. The story does however give us one of the best achievements ever that comes with the title of True Introvert… which I am absolutely using from this point forward… so it is not like I can be super harsh about it.

Where things start to fall apart however is when you approach Bava Nisos as a map. It is essentially a map that only exists to serve as a staging place for the meta event associated with it. The entire place is either monster guts or old crumbling buildings… often times a mixture of both as we are essentially fighting inside of a giant titan named Saevus Saxum. The entire map largely centers around killing the titan by damaging its vital organs. There is a staging area that is sealed off from the rest of the map by a Mursaat Mirror, but weirdly… if you are standing in this area when the map resets… you still die which feels thoroughly dumb. There just is not much going on in this map apart from the meta, and there are areas you cannot reach… until the meta has opened them up. All of the marketing going into this made it seem like this was going to be a rich map with multiple lanes… which of course made us all think we were getting another Dragon’s Stand which is quite possibly one of the best maps ever created.

What we got instead is a meta that feels like they ran out of funding, time, or wandered away like a bored toddler in an ADHD fugue state. The entire thing feels unfinished, and like we have half of a meta. Essentially there are some waves of fight the nonsense leading up to a proper boss fight in the form of a Gorseval clone that feels a little overtuned for pugs. Then you enter the lanes phase, where the groups have to split up and each take out a vital organ. I went down the path for the lungs and it involved us breaking objectives while fighting off waves of titanspawn. I will have to do the other lanes to find out what happened there, but for the most part it felt pretty basic. Then you are told to collapse on the heart chamber and wait for Livia. The timer ticks down and then suddenly Livia gets some dialog options that show up… and the event is just over.

Map chat was legitimately mad about this event last night. We were all sitting there wondering if we fucked something up… did we somehow fail the event and got a bad ending. None of us seemed to get credit in the achievements for the kill, but also that appears to just be a bug. Then another timer started and the map reset with everyone dying after having said we did fatal damage to the titan. The entire thing feels like it was half finished and rushed out the door. Is this why the expansion got delayed? Because if so… maybe delay it again and finish the damned thing. The problem is that we are now stuck with another bad map… that no one is going to actually play other than those who are chasing the backpack or specific achievements. This could have been another epic map that folks play every day… instead we get a non-ending. I guess I just want to know what the folks creating this thought about it… because surely they knew this would not be terribly well received.

The other problem with Janthir Wilds as a whole… is that it was impacted by the current SAG-AFTRA Voice Actors strike. It feels exceptionally jarring that you will have multi-character dialogs happening with a handful of them voiced… and the others relying entirely upon reading fleeting dialog balloons popping up on your screen. I will absolutely look forward to hopefully playing through this content at some point in the future when we have voice lines for all of the actors that were on strike. I will be exceptionally frustrated if this never happens however… because holy shit does it feel bad right now. Like the highlight of having Countess Anise in any content… is experience the full on epic levels of sass provided by Catherine Taber. On one hand I am super proud of Arena Net for not replacing folks… but on the other hand it absolutely underlines the importance of these actors delivering the dialog to make the characters feel real. They were in a rough position… and I don’t think just delaying the content would have been viable. Here is hoping we can play through this with all of the proper audio at some point in the not too distant future.

Janthir Wilds as a whole has been a weird mixed bag of an expansion for me. I wholeheartedly love Lowland Shore and the Bearkin and deeply care about many of the new characters that were introduced through their coastal lives. I did not care for the Greer/Decima meta, and still feel like it needs some improvement to make it a big easier to pull off… because getting anyone to do it at all is pure hell. I like the maps overall for roaming around and doing events however, and really enjoyed Mistburned Barrens. The story is a bit hit or miss because quite frankly… I do not give a shit about the Wizards Court. I like some of the characters associated with it, but I just don’t much care about the whole super secret magical society, and as a result the highlight of this expansion has been when I was spending time with the loveable bears. I would fucking die for Pokey, because he is the Braham that actually works and is not an insufferable ass for large chunks of the content. With both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds however… they feel like unfinished content. They feel like the content we get, because the studio either no longer has the vision or the funding to create the best content they could be. They are a hollow shade of something like an End of Dragons, that really shows the best that Guild Wars 2 can possibly be.

Please do not take this as me saying that I will riot and want to rage against the crappy content we are getting. I got $25 worth of enjoyment out of Janthir Wilds. In truth I got way more enjoyment out of it… because I am still having a lot of fun with various aspects of that content. I think the Metas we were given are poorly designed and just not representative of the best that Arena Net can do… but the intricate details of the zones and certain aspects of the story make up for it. I think a lot of resources went into the creation of the Homestead, and I am really thankful for that. Hopefully without a big system like that looming and eating up development time… we will finally see what they are capable of with the third of these micro yearly expansions. What I want more than anything from whatever comes next… is more evergreen content that players actually WANT to do… rather than something that they feel compelled to do in order to check some box off in the achievement panel. You can do better Arena Net. I have seen it… countless times.