Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning Folks! This week we had one topic dangling from the previous week so we started out with some discussion about Ravenswatch and their interesting take on the action roguelike genre. From there Bel and Grace share their thoughts about Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred and how Blizzard largely missed the mark with the story, but that the game is in a pretty good mechanical state otherwise. From there Tam shares his experiences with the new Rogue Trader CRPG DLC Void Shadows. Then we wrap things up by talking about UFO 50 a game about a video console from an alternate reality… and how interesting some of the takes on 8-bit gaming are. We also talked a bit about the creativity of that era and how it had not really returned until the Indie explosion enabled by Steam.
Good Morning Folks. I am naming my blog post this because I want to make sure that everyone is clear that I am going to talk about some deep spoilers regarding the Diablo IV storyline in this post. You have been warned. Also if you are really vibing with the storyline you might want to just check out of this blog post, and potentially any of my Diablo IV posts until Season 7. I did not blog yesterday because I was angry at the game, so much so that I had essentially ragequit out Wednesday night after getting a crash in the middle of a long drawn out quest chain… that had zero checkpointing… requiring me to start back at the start of the previous thirty minutes. The game continues to be weirdly buggy and perform poorly, and it isn’t just me… I’m hearing similar comments from friends playing.
We are not going to talk about poor performance today. Instead, we are going to talk about the hamfisted nature of Blizzard and storytelling. One of the problems that I have had with Blizzard over the last decade is that they seem to desire to tell stories with deep emotional payload, but are unwilling to put in the legwork required to give the players those feelings legitimately. So you have the problem that I had with the Star Wars Prequels where you are told about the deep friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin… but are given no evidence of this in the actual runtime of any of the movies. You don’t get any of that supplemental material until years later during the Clone Wars cartoon series. Blizzard has this problem with telling us as the player what we are supposed to be feeling, without creating the scenarios leading up to that which would produce those actual feelings.
Let’s take for example the character of Neyrelle. Playing through the very short campaign in the initial release of Diablo IV, I viewed her as largely this bratty kid hanger-on, that was helpful to the quest but made some poor decisions. I felt bad for what she went through and for what ultimately happened to her at the end of the story… but I did not necessarily feel some deep emotional connection to the character. We zoom forward to the expansion content and it is being presented like Neyrelle was our best friend, and that we had this deep emotional connection and the entirety of this mission is to “save her”. I will be honest… my entire mission is because she fucked up and I have to make sure that Mephisto is really taken care of since she ran the fuck off and decided to do this dumb shit on her own. I am being TOLD by Blizzard that I feel a specific way about this character that I do not feel in the least.
Let’s contrast this with Yshtola, a character that I genuinely care about, and any time something happens to her it is like a punch in the gut. Why do I feel so differently about this character? We’ve had face time together for a decade and gone through what feels like hundreds of different adventures. As a Lominsan, she was literally the first Scion that I met and Square has put in the groundwork to build her up and flesh her out as a character that we genuinely care about. I am not saying that Neyrelle is a bad character, just a character that we barely know. We’ve only been together for what feels like a half dozen quests at the end of the release content, and now we are supposedly motivated to chase her to the ends of the earth because we care about her. That is an unearned emotional that they did not do any of the legwork to genuinely evoke, and it feels awkward as fuck to have a game telling me why and how I should feel about them.
Then there is the Jesus problem. I warned you ahead of time that this is a deep spoiler post. So as we have interacted with Akarat, which we are seeing for the very first time in this game after decades of hearing about him in other games, he is represented as this golden lion with three eyes. That is not necessarily unique imagery to Christianity, so I thought nothing about it. We are in a realm with Spirit Beasts so it made sense that we had one representing the side of good wearing the guise of a Lion. However, I started having “oh god please don’t do this” vibes when we arrived at this tomb and there was a lily-white blonde dude with long hair wearing a diaper laying on a bench essentially the avatar of the American Christian ideal of what Jesus “looks like”. In the final battle, Akarat sacrifices himself to save us which if it stopped there… would have been fine. Sure there was a bit of weird pseudo-Christian mixed messages going on, but I could have forgiven it.
They could not leave it there. Instead, we are treated to this cutscene of what happened with the body of the NotChrist that was stolen by another character we are supposed to be emotionally connected to but also just met. Mephisto resurrects the body of NotChrist using nameless black ooze at which point it begins to levitate about melting disciples forming a literal crown of thorns. Wtf yall? Like I am not a Christian in the least, and even I find this some fucked up imagery. I grew up Catholic and am very familiar with weird usages of Jesus, but this one just is bizarre. Like I know that Diablo has long played with Christian imagery of Angels and Demons, but I always felt like it took those roots and made its own thing out of this. This time around it felt like the team thought “Well, we’ve never had a Jesus in Diablo” and decided it was a good idea to go there.
Then there is the third sin. After all of this nonsense… we don’t even get to fight Mephisto. Instead, we fight a fragment of Mephisto and are told that our princess is in another castle. The initial release already played the “betrayed by a friend” card with Neyrelle and it feels super fucking annoying that they had to lean on that trope once again with Eru. However, the fact that we did not even get to take down a big bad at all, in any part of this expansion… just feels like a slap in the face. I mean shit you can say whatever you want about the Reaper of Souls expansion for Diablo 3, but we fought Urzael, Adria, and Malthael and it felt satisfying to down each of them. This entire expansion feels like it could have just been a seasonal storyline for all the resolutions that we got from it.
All of this said, there were some really cool visuals in the game, and for the most part, I like the Nahantu region. I am also enjoying the Spiritborn way more than I thought I would. Mechanically Diablo IV is in a pretty good state. I have problems with some of the mechanics. I still hate tempering and think it should be fixed to just be bench crafting from Path of Exile… but I can overlook that. I am nearing level 60 and I am interested to see what the actual endgame feels like. I am thoroughly annoyed at the Main Story Quest, but then again… I have come to realize that I should not expect much from the current state of Blizzard. They are still trying to tell the same stories they were always telling in the 90s… it is just that the art form of game creation and game storytelling has grown up and evolved and they have not.
I am not entirely certain how long I will stick around. For now, I am pushing forward and will be trying to sort out my gear and work on progressing through the endgame systems. I know there are some things that Ace and I want to try out when they push into the endgame this evening. As I said at the top of this post, if you love Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred more power to you. You should never let the ramblings of a jaded asshole like myself impact your joy. I did not love it, I did not find joy in it. However, my opinion really does not matter much when thrown up against your own happiness. I am sure I will find something else that brings me joy again on the near horizon. I hate being the bitter blogger, but sometimes you just have to commit your truth to the page.
So after the dramatic delays for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred that I talked about yesterday, I finally was able to get in and get some game time last night. The only problem with that is that I have had a massive amount of issues playing the game since it was updated. I am not entirely certain what has changed in the game since the roll-out of Vessel of Hatred but I am seeing way more hitching and rubberbanding in game than I originally did playing the base game. Namely, this happens when I load into a new area or zone out of the sanctuary bubble surrounding a town. This tells me that it is a loading asset or network throughput problem more than anything else. When you transition zones you are essentially loading into a new “map” with a variable number of new players loading into it with you.
This prompted me to run some actual tests on the two “fast” drives in my system. For years I thought my “T drive” aka the drive that I put into this stock system was the faster of the two drives. It turns out that is absolutely not the case. In fact, it is pretty slow, or slower than I thought. The maximum throughput of a SATA III SSD is around 600 MB/s and my drive is running around 556 MB/s which admittedly is not that much slower than the maximum. Considering I have not spent much time inside my own machine since I bought it as a prebuilt… I assumed BOTH of my drives were SSDs when in truth apparently my “C Drive” is an NVME. So all of this time I have been favoring the worst drive. I guess I need to figure out if I have the room to add one of those PCIE to NVME interface cards to add some more fast storage at some point.
Moving Diablo IV to the faster drive helped quite a bit, but it did not remove all of the problems. I still am constantly dealing with freezes whenever I cross zone boundaries and it is frustrating as heck. I don’t think it is a network throughput problem because I am connected directly to my router with a 1-gigabit connection and per speed test I am seeing roughly 360 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up… which is pretty much the maximum rating of my internet connection. If I could play this game offline… I feel like it would probably clear all of these issues up. Whenever I am in a dungeon or other instanced area, I experience zero hitching and freezes, which tells me the problem is the other players. Hell really is other people.
Annoyances aside, I am really enjoying the Spiritborn. Sure I would have rather had a Paladin/Crusader just like every other Diablo player on the planet, but the new class is pretty fun. It feels like this blend between the Diablo III Monk and the World of Warcraft DPS Demon Hunter. I am loosely following this leveling build from Maxroll, and at some point, I will swap to their Deathtouch Centipede endgame build. The only annoyance that I have currently is that I keep having to swap weapon transmogs because there are three different types of weapons that they can use. I love that you can access transmogs at any point while you are out in the world, but I wish you could lock in your weapon appearance in a similar fashion to how you can do your armor.
I’ve legitimately made almost zero progress in the campaign. I made it over the border into Nahantu and unlocked the Mercenary system, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the evening unlocking all of the mercenaries. At this point, my favorite is Varyana the grump elderly cannibal. The Demon child seems like he is a model swap from the Tiefling kids in Baldur’s Gate III, but I am currently running with him so I can get at least one level of reputation. I remember reading something about wanting to get one rank in all of them so that you can unlock bartering at some point. Going forward though I will probably use a combination of Subo because he makes enemies and harvestable resources show up on your map. I am also using Varyana as my backup tied to my charge attack so that I am constantly proccing her to come cleave things.
One of the good at bad things about an expansion launching at the same time as a season is that the two mechanics often blend together. It turns out my favorite part of the expansion so far is in stead something associated with Season 6. Every so often a Realmwalker will spawn, if you remember from Diablo III these are giant demons that summon a portal to another realm when you beat them up. This time around they roam around the map spawning random baddies and if you kill enough of these baddies it will make the Realmwalker mad enough to fight you. At that point, you can beat it up and it will summon a portal to a dungeon.
Inside of the dungeon you can choose the type of rewards you want for completing it, which also determines the type of Opals that drop at the end. Opals essentially function as potions but stack with the rest of the consumables in the game. While you have the 30-minute effect active you gain experience towards the seasonal rewards track and also have a chance of spawning extra rewards out in the world. Essentially the ones I have encountered so far are Opals that give you extra gold, extra crafting materials, and extra gear drops. Seeing as I have gotten several legendaries after using one of the equipment potions, I am guessing this is going to be a good way to farm more gear. There are two higher tiers of Opals apparently available later, one that gives you gem fragments, and another that gives you bossing materials.
Ultimately these “seething realm” dungeons feel like what the Nightmare Dungeons should have been… just a quick boss rush with interesting side effects that feel rewarding for your time. All in all, I am enjoying the expansion but I’ve not really seen any of the story yet. I guess tonight I will spend my evening focused on that to see how well it grabs me. I’ve always been a “do the story last” type person when it comes to games because I like being able to just overpower it with levels and gear. If there is a way for me to trivialize content I will do so all the time. I also just like roaming around aimlessly way more than I like questing in general. When I am in a questing mood, I want to keep my head down and push through all the way to the end in effectively a single sitting.
One interesting side effect of the new class… is that they ACTUALLY know how to hold a fucking Halberd. When the Barbarian equips one of these they hold it so that the Axe blade is facing their head. It has driven me insane the entire time I have played this game. I checked and the Barbarian is still clueless so it appears that the Spiritborn just has better common sense. Anyway, I am hoping the hitching problems that I have been having lessen as the servers are a bit less crowded. There are drops available each week on Twitch so while you are doing other things, open a browser tab and farm them. I left Twitch running overnight and farmed up the drops from yesterday. Annoyingly you have to watch six hours… or in my case AFK six hours… to farm up a full set of the weekly drops.
Is Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred the best thing ever? No. Not even close. However, I am having quite a bit of fun and for now, I am calling that good enough.
Good Morning Folks. When last we spoke I was excited and preparing for the launch of Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred expansion. More than anything I was excited that the launch was happening at a reasonable hour so that both myself who is in Central Time Zone and Ace who is in Eastern Time Zone could actually participate in the game together. Throughout the day we made plans to hang out and chitchat while making our way through the campaign that evening. It is really moments like this that we both look forward to when we are both reasonably excited about something at the same time and can do nonsense together. So often we are playing totally different things, but the stars seemed like they were aligning to give us a new game launch to dig our teeth into in a manner that was going to be enjoyable and not trying to stay up until midnight.
Then roughly thirty minutes before the game was set to go live at 6 PM CDT, the bomb was dropped that the launch was going to be delayed. In what has become one of the least correct posts in a while, they stated that there was a “small technical issue” that would lead to a “small delay” to the launch of the game. In true Blizzard fashion, they gave us no real information to work with, and as a result, the rumor mill started filling in the gaps. PC players were stating that it was a problem with one of the console releases that was to blame for the delay, Console players were stating that it was something to do with Steam’s rigid update schedule… and in the vacuum, we were left without any facts to go on. The rest of the evening was dictated by 2-hour blocks… of just needing a few more hours… which ultimately led to the game launching roughly six hours late.
Diablo IV has had a fraught history since its launch last year. So much so that “D4 Bad” has become a prevalent meme in the ARPG community with countless music videos released on the theme of it being “dogshit”. Admittedly some of these are bangers and largely feature a cast of characters from the ARPG streaming scene. The Vessel of Hatred expansion launch was a grand coming out for the game again, a cotillion where it was being presented to the world to show how much it had improved. Last night’s botched launch pretty much destroyed that goodwill in an instant. Pretty much every streamer to some extent had to deal with the return of the “D4 Bad” crew to their chats, and honestly… they weren’t wrong. How many games has Blizzard launched throughout the years, and how many of them have they bungled at the finish line?
What is even worse is that Streamers were left holding the bag for the botched communications surrounding this situation. Blizzard was simply not giving any real information about what is going on. Contrast this with the way in which Eleventh Hour Games communicated at the launch of Last Epoch when it had so many server issues. I was way more willing to show forgiveness towards a group of developers that were sharing what was actually going on, and how they were trying to resolve it… rather than last night’s refrain of “just a few hours more”. Raxx spent the evening playing various games with his stream, doing a bracket of games for him to play and eventually falling into chess.
Darth Microtransaction attempted to keep the attention of the crowd by giving away copies of the expansion, handing out battle passes, and then playing a betting game with his audience. He would bet that the game would launch within the next thirty minutes, and then when that time had passed he would give another five subscriptions away to his viewers. At one point I know he had over three thousand folks tuned in and watching his stream, in which he was playing a video he had recorded of Vessel of Hatred in the background while playing Old School Runescape in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and attempting to keep chat engaged.
Pohx who is quite possibly the sweetest person in all of the Path of Exile community, decided to give the launch of the expansion a go. He spent the evening playing Warcraft 3 custom maps and then eventually said fuck it and went to bed. I ultimately gave up around 9 pm and went to bed, I am not sure when Ace did but I don’t think they stayed up that late. I am glad that I gave up because the game did not roll out until after 11 PM my time and with it came a 23 gig patch… essentially negating the whole process of preloading the game that we did earlier this week. This is a massive black eye towards the game and towards the team behind it.
I was clearly annoyed enough to devote an entire blog post to that fact this morning, but in truth I was mostly having a chill night. I kept various Streams open in the background throughout the night so I could find out tidbits of information as they trickled out. The majority of the evening I spent in Path of Exile slowly chipping away at challenges, ultimately knocking two of them out. My map runners also brought about four divines last night so it was a pretty great time all around. I think my biggest frustration about this whole situation is the complete and total communications fail from Blizzard. I am not sure what they were thinking by trying to constantly diminish the impact of this outage because clearly, it backfired. Had they just been honest and set reasonable expectations… folks would have gone about their night and done other things rather than feverishly waiting for the launch of a game that was not coming… or at least that was arriving almost six hours late.
This morning I got in briefly and created a Spiritborn because I figured I might as well try the class while it was likely to have some grossly overpowered builds. I was happy to see that there was the option to create a character and start with the new campaign without also having to complete the original campaign. I’ve created a seasonal character because essentially my stable of standard characters is dead to me. I am probably going to go the whole poison Centipede build with it because it looks wild. I used to like playing the Monk in Diablo III, and I figure this is going to feel a bit like that based on the video footage I have seen.
I sincerely hope that the community did not devolve into death threats last night, but the Diablo IV team deserves some ire for their fumbling of this launch. More than anything they need to reassess how they communicate with players because what I saw last night was insufficient and sad.
