Tales of the Aggronaut

More ARPGs

September 19, 2022November 8, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I talked about a few ARPGs I had been playing as an attempt to get the Diablo Immortal thing out of my system. Since then a handful of you have suggested other games to me, and I thought I would take a moment this morning to talk about a few competitors for the “next great ARPG” crown that I have spent some time playing. This has always been a genre that appealed to me, so as something new comes down the pipe I tend to check it out at least for a bit. These projects seem especially popular on Kickstarter because everyone seems to have loved Diablo 2 and wants to build a better version of it. That can be a positive or a negative, especially considering post Diablo 3 I found it almost impossible to go back and play Diablo 2 again.

Victor Vran

We will start off with the weirdest entry in the list first, largely because it does a lot of things… not like other games. First off this is primarily a WASD game with your primary attack being on Left Mouse click and Q and E being secondary attacks and Right Mouse serving to spin the camera around. It takes some getting used to, and a lot of people prefer to play this with a controller as a result. However I found it to be an interesting blend of movement that really landed well for me personally. I wrote a more proper review of this back in 2016, but honestly it is still worth checking out. I do not currently have this installed but that might be changing soon as it is a good option to dig back into.

Steam Link but also available on several consoles

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr

One of the core problems with Games Workshop licensed games is they vary greatly in quality. As a result when I see a new one pop up I am immediately suspicious and throwing more than a little side-eye. However occasionally my curiosity gets the best of me and I try one of them. This one however was really fun… up until a point which unfortunately for me happens to be the fifth mission. I have always hated “protect the idiots” missions and in general I hate the tower defense mechanic. This mission unfortunately incorporates both elements, where not only do you have to survive a wave of assaulting chaos forces and defend a point… but you also have to keep your idiot guardsmen alive in the process. If I can get over this frustrating hurdle the game will probably go right back to being a really fun amalgam of Diablo and the Warhammer 40,000 universe that I love.

Steam Link

Grim Dawn

This is probably the best ARPG that is not Diablo 3 if I am going to be completely honest with myself. The setting is interesting because effectively you are roaming a world after what is effectively a demonic invasion. It feels as though you are running around a post apocalyptic version of our world, and they get big points with me for including shotguns as a viable and balanced weapon choice option. This was I believe initially built upon the Titan Quest engine… which is another really awesome but aging APRG. However the game feels like it has long moved past that and is now sort of its own thing. I’ve never made it terribly far into the game because it feels very slow paced, which is a lot of the problem I have with most of the “we remember Diablo 2 and wanted to create a better version” games.

Steam Link

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

Now we enter the realm of the “still in alpha” competitors, with Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. This is probably my favorite of the modern ARPGs but it is still very much rooted into the “lots of things are broken” range of games. It is fun enough to play around with but the last I really played this seriously… there were moments where the difficulty seemed to be stacked against melee characters. Other than playing a Demon Hunter to rapidly unlock seasonal content occasionally… if an ARPG doesn’t feel good in melee then it probably isn’t something I am going to stick around for long. That however was back in February and I am sure they have tweaked a lot of things in the meantime. I should give it another proper look and see how it feels now.

Steam Link

Last Epoch

Another game from the “super alpha” territory is Last Epoch. This is one of the ones that Ashgar specifically has suggested a few times, because it does look really interesting. As a result I took the $50 hit so you don’t have to, because right now that is the cheapest supporter package that grants you instant alpha access. I played around for a very short time last night, largely because it has two key flaws in my mind… that admittedly may change over time. Firstly the classes appear to be gender locked, and while that is a super common thing in asian arpgs… it pisses me the fuck off. Yes I realize both Diablo and Diablo 2 had gendered characters, but we should have moved past that. Granted again this might just be something they have done before there is not a proper character creator in place yet so I am letting this one slide for the moment. The other major issue is the fact that movement and basic attack are not the same key… so as it is set up right now you move with left click and attack with right click… leading for a really goofy feeling experience. This is going to be one of those games like Wolcen that I pop my head into periodically to see how it has improved.

Supporter Page Link

Hellgate: London

Now we are going to take a jaunt into the territory of my favorite Diablo game that is not Diablo… and that is Hellgate: London. I am one of a handful of people who still carry around a bright glowing torch for this game, largely because I love both what it was… and am wistful about what it might have been. There are ways to still play the original game, and there is even a modding community to make it look better… but the above screenshot is from the Hanbitsoft version of the game released in South Korea and occasionally has been available for english speaking players. This is relevant because on November 15th this game is returning and will be available on Steam. I really don’t know much about what that is going to entail, other than the fact that we are supposedly getting the base game and all of the expansions that were released in South Korea. I’ve talked about this so many times, but here is a specific post from 2015 about trying to get back into the game. Even though this coincides with the launch of Fallout 76… you can damned well bet I will be checking this out on the 15th of this month.

Steam Link

So the only problem is… that I have rattled off a list of alternatives to Diablo 3… but none of them really fully cover the things I like about it. I love the fast paced and frenetic gameplay that comes when you get together with a bunch of your friends and run things like Rifts or in the case of this screenshot… consume a ring and go fight Greed. It does a very specific thing that no other game really is doing, that is largely because I love Diablo 3… not in a begrudging way like so many fans of the franchise have over the years… but I legitimately love all of the changes that were made. While I loved Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 at the time… I wholeheartedly love what Diablo 3 became. Granted that is love of a post seasonal Diablo 3, long after the RMT auction house bullshit was removed and the legendary drop rates greatly fixed. However it just does a thing that none of the games above are really doing for me, and as a result… I will still be depressed and disappointed that we didn’t get that Diablo 4 announcement.

That said I am absolutely not one of those people who is going to refuse to play Diablo Immortal. I am going to try it out but I have huge fingers and mobile screens are tiny… so I might need to try and figure out a reasonable android tablet option to make it feel not horrible. I am already running into this issue with Dragalia Lost and some of the other mobile games that I have been dipping my toes into in order to sort of prepare my Psyche for the existence of this thing. I am still disappointed and still think it was a poor time to make this announcement, but I am not going to rage against it existing… because there is plenty of room for games that aren’t for me to exist in the world. However it also doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.

Kulve Farming

November 7, 2018 by Belghast

This morning we return you to your regularly scheduled posts, instead of whatever yesterday’s post happened to be. I started typing in Google Docs… and it just sort of kept going on and on. Yesterday was of course election day, and a lot of my staging a post ahead of time was due to the fact that I was trying to get in and out of the polls in the morning quickly. As far as gaming goes I am still very much all over the place. Right now as it stands Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter World tend to be the staples that I play at least some of every single night. Over in Monster Hunter this largely involves getting into a Kulve Taroth group and trying to farm weapons and tickets for the layered armor set. At this point I still have a ton of pieces left to collect but this is way more of a goal for me than collecting gear, given that I already have enough glimstones for a full set of crafted gear. I am simply missing the various elder dragon gems needed to craft most of the pieces. That however can be done after the event.

As far as weapons go… I have been nowhere near as lucky as I was on the Playstation 4 version. I have literal pages of blue weapons which are fine… and can provide a specific element if I need one. However the above image shows off some of the weapons I thought were generally worth keeping around for the long haul. Probably the weapon that interests me the most right now is the Taroth Blaze “Numb” because it has nonsense Affinity, plus a Defense bonus… plus 450 Paralysis… and from the look of it it might have some white sharpness if I equip handicraft items. The other item that I am probably going to wind up using is the Taroth Sword “Mire” just because there are occasionally fights where decent water elemental damage are useful. I think the Sleep daggers might be useful to play with given how fast you can build up elements with that weapon type. The Water damage Lance is decent, especially with the level three gem on it. One positive is it does give me a Charge blade to play with… which is not a weapon type I have crafted any or messed with on the PC.

Another game that I have been poking my head into is The Division, largely because I wanted to see what it looked like on the new graphics card. However I noticed that I am really damned close to level 30 which I believe is the level cap. I really want to see what the game becomes when I finally reach that plateau and somewhere along the line I picked up a handful of set pieces ready to be equipped at that level. For now I am casually roaming around and killing stuff out in the world, and I find that relaxing and enjoyable. Previously I was focused on TRYING to level… and getting frustrated that it was going so slowly. Now I am just sort of running amok in the town and not paying attention to anything past that. It seems to be working and I have been spending a few hours here and there on it.

With the Diablo kerfuffle, I have also been exploring some other ARPGs just in case Diablo 4 really isn’t in the cards… or at least to have options to tide me over until it releases in a few years. The most obvious game directly competing with the Diablo franchise is Path of Exile, but I have never really been able to get into it. Coming back however it does feel considerably better, apart from the fact that you are given showers of loot… most of it not useful… and nowhere near enough inventory space to ferry it back to town. As such the loot itself feels a little frustrating, as does combat at time since it seems to vacillate back and forth between “nothing is attacking me” and “an entire screen of things is overwhelming me”. Right now however the biggest problem with the game… happens to be its community. In trying to settle in I started looking up the answers to a handful of questions and for the most part the community answer seems to be some derivation of “go back to diablo noob”. That is not helpful, nor is it making people want to stick around for very long. It has really interesting mechanics but a much slower pace, which can be both positive and negative. The lack of a forward walk button without giving up an ability slot… is also a little frustrating.

The game that appears to be more my speed when it comes to methadone for Diablo 4… is Torchlight II which admittedly is an aging game at this point. However it is also serving to prepare me for Torchlight Frontiers which looks extremely interesting and fun. Hey Perfect World folks… if any of you happen to be reading my blog… hook me up with a key? I love the setting of Torchlight, for example last night I was going through this awesome clockwork dungeon and since I play an engineer it felt really cool to be busting up mechs with a giant hammer. This also has the shower you with loot, most of it useless problem… but at the very least you can keep sending your pet back to town to sell it. This is another high point for this game is it allows me to run around with a Ferret friend. Super glad I installed it and definitely enjoying poking around in it again… even though I am largely confused as to where I left off in the story the last time I was playing.

Mythical Blizzard Gamer

November 6, 2018 by Belghast

This is going to probably be a bit of an odd post, and additionally I am typing it up the night before I intend to post it. It also went significantly longer than I had intended… but once it started rolling I just kinda went with it. May god have mercy on your souls. However there has been a topic that I have been kicking around in my head for some time now and I am not sure quite how to pull it out. To say this post is inspired by the Diablo Immortal reveal by Blizzard is true, but I feel like I am going to go off in a different direction, more specifically about the culture surrounding Blizzcon in general.

I can’t claim to have been a Blizzard fan forever. I am pretty certain that I played Lost Vikings, Blackthorne and Rock and Roll Racing… but in truth none of them really imprinted hard on my psyche. I was aware of the existence of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans but did not really buy into Blizzard games as a whole until I picked up a copy of the Warcraft Battle Chest. In fact I remember exactly when and where I purchased it… it was at the now defunct Sam’s Club in Springdale Arkansas.

Playing through the campaign of Warcraft II was really fun, but honestly that game probably would not have imprinted so hard on my psyche were it not for the fact that the college computer lab effectively had a copy installed on every computer with a CD Crack applied so we could have massive LAN battles. At home I even crafted my very first network to play the game, connecting two PCs together with Coax and running the native windows NetBEUI protocol to get them talking to each other.

Blizzard really got a seemingly lifelong fan in me when Starcraft was released, and with it I finally had the way to play a simulacrum of my beloved Warhammer 40,000 on my PC. Essentially each time Blizzard released a game I got into it, and I remember being in the beta test for Diablo and playing it connected to the campus network on one of the desktops in the very small and very fast Fine Arts building computer lab that I managed.

I was completely hooked… much like Starcraft is Warhammer 40k… Diablo was essentially the D&D game I always wanted to play, since I tend to be a “roll player” not a “role player”. I remember when Diablo 2 released I had to make the choice… do I get it… or did I get Icewind Dale since they released on exactly the same day in 2000. I followed my real passion to Diablo 2 and was once again amazed at just how cool the game was in its second outing. Years later we were still playing it in a lan environment and keeping a computer running at friends house just to serve as a way of keeping the game open… and preserving our makeshift guild stash.

When Blizzard dipped its toes into the fledgling MMORPG genre I was also on board. At that point I was already an Everquest junkie, and had moved on to Dark Age of Camelot, Horizon and then was playing City of Heroes when I got into one of the stress tests. It was that first weekend somewhere during the summer of 2004 that I was completely smitten, and found myself unable to return to playing City of Heroes after experiencing what the MMO genre could be.

BlizzCon was the convention that World of Warcraft built, and it became the premiere event for WoW fans to attend each year. For those of us sitting on the sidelines it became the primary feed of information about what was coming down the pipe. Over the years I watched with bated breath as each new expansion was announced, and similarly watched as new products were released.

Not all of which were necessarily targeted towards me, but that was okay… because the primary focus of the convention seemed to focus on the things I was interested in… namely World of Warcraft and eventually Diablo 3 was added to that mix. Then somewhere along the way things started to shift focus, and events like the live raid were replaced with more competitive esports coverage. I was still completely on board for the release of StarCraft II, because it would pick up and continue the story of the first game. Then after beating the story mode… realized that I just didn’t quite like RTS games the way I used to.

I was largely on board with Hearthstone initially… but then I realized that I didn’t like it quite as much as I did Magic the Gathering. Overwatch seemed really cool, but apart from the cinematics… I realized that it was largely Blizzard does Team Fortress 2… and I never really played much of that game either. Heroes of the Storm seemed like a really cool take on League of Legends… but again I remembered that MOBAs never really hooked me.

However through all of it I had World of Warcraft and Diablo to care about, because those franchises always spoke to my beating heart. The problem there is that World of Warcraft is in a constant state of flux and chaos and there are expansion that I love… like Wrath and Legion… and expansions that I would rather forget like Cataclysm, Warlords and the current Battle for Azeroth. Once the spell was initially broken in 2011… my interest in the game purely depended on whether or not the content spoke to me.

Diablo on the other hand had become a ritual with some of my friends as we log in every new season and grind up a set of characters to collect the cosmetic rewards… only to disappear for another three months until the next seasonal launch. The Necromancer pack gave me a lot of hope that maybe just maybe they would start releasing class packs and give us the Assassin, Druid or Amazon along with lots of other potentially cool characters that I am certain they could dream up along the way.

However Diablo 3 has largely been in maintenance mode for a very long time, and the fan base has been running on fumes. During the 2017 Opening Ceremonies of Blizzcon they didn’t even acknowledge the existence of the game. It had been a long six years since the release of the game, and with so many people leaving that team… it felt more or less like the game that Blizzard forgot. For the past three years my Diablo friends and I have spent the weeks ahead of the convention daydreaming about what a possible announcement might look like… only to get our hopes dashed and eventually adopt a resigned attitude of “maybe next year”.

As far as the Diablo Immortal announcement… and the fan reaction… it comes from a place of desperation and heartache as we have watched the franchise we love, get ignored… in spite of having a super dedicated and passionate community. The core problem is that Blizzard never figured out how to itemize it… after the massive failure that was the real money auction house. Its like with that defeat they just stopped trying, and instead moved on to other games that they could easily shim in a regular stream of micro transactions to fill the coffers.

There is a similar thread running through the last three games that Blizzard released… Hearthstone in 2014, Heroes of the Storm in 2015, and Overwatch in 2016. Each of them has a heavy esports focus with lots of bite sized ways to spend money with Blizzard to acquire nifty ways to set yourself apart from the other players. Diablo doesn’t have this, and while I would love to literally throw money at my screen to help fund this game that I love… Blizzard has given us no way of doing this. Starcraft at least has a thriving esports scene which at a minimum keeps that game alive and kicking, or at least guarantees that fan base some air time when it comes to Blizzcon.

I think Diablo Immortal is an attempt to take a model that is well researched… microtransaction driven mobile games… and apply a design pattern that has already been copied in literally hundreds of diablo clones. I am sure it will be enjoyable enough, and I am sure I will likely play it… given that I have seemingly recently discovered that I don’t hate playing games on my phone. However it will never feel anywhere as good because the concept of controlling a game with a touch screen interface just feels awful.

What will end up happening is that if I play it… I will play it through one of the many Android emulators like BlueStacks and try my best to map the touch screen controls to something that doesn’t feel awful to play with. I wish I could do this with Dragalia Lost to be honest, but unfortunately Nintendo is actively blocking access to the game when connecting through an emulator… and the only way you can make it work is to do a bunch of shenanigans that probably risk an account ban to make it happen.

The other thing that I have realized is that I am not a Blizzard Gamer anymore, and quite honestly I am not sure if anyone really is. There was a time when I legitimately felt like I was equally interested in everything coming out of Blizzard as a games studio. There is no denying the pedigree of quality, and I thought if they were doing it… I wanted in on the action. The problem being that I am just not that interested in a bunch of the games that they have in their active stable.

I love the setting of Overwatch… but would have loved the game as an MMO or story driven ARPG. The competitive nature of it just doesn’t appeal to me, nor does grinding bots… so it sits there as a game I am willing to play with a full group of friends but have zero interest at any other time. Heroes of the Storm is much the same way, where I like the concept and feel like they nailed the execution of the MOBA genre… but I would far rather have a dungeon crawler with MOBA character design. Similarly I am willing to play it with a full group of friends.

Hearthstone seemed like a game that I would really love, but I never really reached a point where I found my groove with it. I have Hunter and Warrior decks, and they are both tolerable, but nothing that game is doing ever feels anywhere near as good as Magic the Gathering did to me. Magic the Gathering Arena on the other hand is the game I always wanted to exist and with its release, any desire to play or follow Hearthstone eclipsed.

The diversity of product offering essentially precludes someone from deeply caring about literally everything in their stable of games. As a result it also makes BlizzCon feel really weird to watch. To listen to Blizzard they are addressing a group of people supposedly equally interested in every single thing they are making… and that facade has been crumbling over the last few years. I remember the first BlizzCon in which World of Warcraft was not center stage, and the generally negative reaction I saw among the community.

If you go to a PAX you know you are going to be seeing a lot of games that fit different demographics, and as such you have no reasonable expectation that they should ALL interest you. However for some reason BlizzCon feels a little different, and if you aren’t equally devoted to all things Blizzard it feels like you are somehow faking your fandom. Now if you are at the convention on the show floor it probably does not feel this way at all… but as a perineal viewer of the virtual ticket… the hardcore perky sales pitch being delivered by the announcers makes it seem like they expect everyone to care about everything.

I feel like Blizzard has maybe outgrown BlizzCon. It was originally the convention that World of Warcraft built, but that game is no longer the cash king that it once was and has been eclipsed by several other titles with significantly cheaper to produce content. I feel like maybe we would be better off with a sequence of smaller events with a more specific purpose. I feel like FFXIV and Fanfest maybe has it right… whereas they hold a sequence of events in the same year they are announcing a big expansion to the game. In this idea I would absolutely try my damnedest to travel to a DiabloCon if it existed.

Ultimately I think at this point Blizzard is no longer one cohesive group of gamers, aligned with similar goals and motivations. There are instead a group devoted to each one of their games with fairly limited crossover between them. The problem with this is that it sets up the feel of a zero sum game, where if one group of fans is getting content… then the other groups of fans aren’t. It is hard to see the children from the new marriage getting all of the attention, while the aging kids are largely left to fend for themselves.

So while I felt all of the outrage and frustration that the rest of the community did… I chose to take it in a different direction. Instead of writing a hateful post about how Blizzard has wronged me… I wound up writing this nonsensically long ballad of how I am just now realizing that I just am not the gamer Blizzard is really courting anymore. My blog is often my way of dealing with things… and this is me working through those frustrations in a written form. I sincerely doubt anyone will actually make it to end of this one… but if you did I thank you for indulging me.

Packed Weekend

November 5, 2018 by Belghast

I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.

Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.

I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.

I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.

Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.

Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.

As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.