Hey Folks! We are down basically the front half of the alphabet for this show, but the remaining four of us end up recording a deceptively long episode. Path of Exile revealed the details of the Affliction League and we had an awful lot to say about that. We talk through one of the biggest meta-shakeups in the game’s history. Bel also picks a fight with Kodra apparently when he called Guild Wars 2 more of an ARPG than an MMO. It all resolves peacefully however as we realize those judgments are based on different points of reference. We close out the show with Tam talking about some of the interesting choices being forced in Star Citizen.
This is one of those blog posts that I am not highly likely to syndicate widely. There are essentially two reasons why I do this… the first is that the content is of a deeply personal nature and the second is that I am writing about something that I don’t think anyone is really going to care about. This blog post is the later because I don’t have a ton of import to discuss, but also sort of feel obligated to make a post given the whole weekly blog posts schedule thing. Firstly I wish Henry Kissinger a long well deserved stay in the deepest levels of hell. Last night was the first time Mastodon/Fediverse felt like Twitter as everyone came out of the woodwork to dance on his grave. I know it is generally thought poorly to speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose truly awful policies are responsible for roughly four million deaths and throwing several countries into decades’ worth of turmoil is excluded from that statement. Congratz to the Grim Reaper for finally getting that epic pull.
Next up on today’s wild ride of topics… I finally left the Hinterlands. For anyone who does not understand that reference… in Dragon Age Inquisition, the Hinterlands is this massive nigh endless zone full of busywork that has stalled out many a playthrough. I know for me it personally wrecked at least two attempts to actually get through that game. Act 1 in Baldur’s Gate feels like a similar experience. That first area of the game is so packed full of content that you feel like you have to complete everything before just moving on with the damned story. I have graduated into Act II, and have now officially made it further in this playthrough than I have before. My previous run stalled out in the middle of the Underdark segment, and last night I crossed that barrier and finally met “Not-Gandalf”.
I have to admit that I have really mixed feelings about Baldur’s Gate III thus far. I love the story, and I love the dialog options… and the truly stupid level of detail brought on by the smallest changes in the way you approach things. However, I still feel like combat in the game is a deeply tedious process. There are times I realize that my tastes have changed and while I loved Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 back in the day… and ravenously played them… my tastes have changed. I would kill to have a version of this game with action combat, because I get so overwhelmingly bored while waiting on combat to resolve. Were this more akin to something like Mass Effect, it would easily be my game of the year. I’ve realized this is a “me” problem and not a game problem because I find 4x games similarly tedious when I used to lose entire weekends playing them.
Nick aka WithoutAGout replaced Bex as the community manager for Grinding Gear Games. If his tweet yesterday is to be believed… the theories surrounding a return of Sentinel are wrong. That is not to say that they could have simply not renamed that mechanic or this tweet could be a troll… but I guess we will find out in a short enough period of time. I think this does however indicate that we are likely to get a full patch notes drop shortly after the reveal. I am still banking on there being some sort of a Ritual rework coming with the Affliction League. What I however am most interested in is knowing when I can set up the “Bel League” private league and get that ball rolling.
This is your reminder to make sure your Twitch account is connected to your Grinding Gear Games account and that if you watch 45 minutes between 12:30 PST and 21:30 PST you can earn a set of cosmetic wings. I can’t say that I am terribly interested in insect wings, but I am going to try and watch this regardless so I might as well get some free mtx? You will of course have to redeem them from your Twitch Drops Inventory before getting them in game. I am sure tomorrow I will be making a post talking about my thoughts about the announcement as a whole, and as such today is this awkward middle ground of almost being there but not quite knowing much.
SirGog has once again done a big ole video talking about his thoughts about 3.23 and what is likely going to be on the chopping block. Various other folks have thrown out a few ideas, for example, Ghazzy thinks it is time to nerf Righteous Fire. However as an “RF Enjoyer” I hope that this won’t be the case, and I honestly think it isn’t likely because it isn’t like that build is overpowered. It is widely played because it is the best new player experience and has hands down the best guide creator supporting that build. GGG desperately needs an approachable onramp to the game, and right now RF provides that… and I feel like they would be shooting themselves many times in several sets of feet if they did anything to damage that. The only thing that is going to pull me away from RF for Bel League is if Guardian moves forward completely untouched.
I hope you all are having a wonderful week. Tomorrow I am sure I will have more cogent things to say about both the Affliction League and whatever comes from the Diablo IV Campfire chat.
Morning Folks! Yesterday we got the name reveal, teaser trailer, full reveal date, and league start information for the next Path of Exile league. It is going to be called Affliction and seems to have some sort of a curse-based theme. This morning I am going to kick my navel-gazing into high gear and spout some speculative nonsense as I overanalyze way too few frames of animation. The concrete details that we have so far are that on the 30th of November, we will be getting the full reveal stream that will go over all of the features of this league. Then on December 8th, the league will start for PC players and for console folks on the 13th. If you want to watch the full teaser trailer before I obsess over possibly made-up details… you can check out the link here.
First of all… I have screwed with the images a bit to lighten them but unfortunately, the sheer amount of darkness somewhat crushes the detail. I’ve seen folks stating that they think this is the delve, but I can’t really follow that thread. Sure everything is bluish-black like you see while delving, but it also very clearly seems to be in a forest at night, and the delve forest biomes look totally different than this. You also don’t really see the swirling shadows that you normally do at the far corners of Delve.
Next, we are going to skip to a scene a bit later in the video when the supplicant seems to be devolving into a swarm of insects. These are Wetas, and I only know this because the Weta is already in the game as a pet… and is a New Zealand thing. It is essentially a giant nocturnal insect… and if you want some nightmare fuel take a gander at this image. I looked so you don’t have to. To me at least that very clearly looks like a Ritual totem from the Ritual League mechanic. This makes me think that the Affliction League is somehow tied to Ritual either as the existing mechanic or something that reworks, expands, and ultimately replaces Ritual. Since we just participated in the Blast from the Past League which featured Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra… I’ve wondered if the insect swarm could work similarly to how Sentinels buff minions around you and also increase the loot chances.
This isn’t a character that I recognize, but they do sorta remind me of the way Einhar is dressed. Einhar is an Ezomyte and his people worship beast gods known as the first ones. It makes me wonder if this could be some sort of Ezomyte shaman that we are seeing in front of this Ritual totem. Another possibility that I have wondered about is if this league will feature updates and changes to the way that Talismans work, as right now they are mostly a quirk of the past and not something that players really purposefully seek out. In Crucible we saw GGG reworking Breach and Abyss and I feel like that is something that they are going to keep doing. So I could see that this league is tied to a revamp of Ritual and maybe a revamp of Talismans and maybe some skill changes focused on the way that curses work and are applied in the game. Of course, this is all me grasping at straws and could be nothing.
I would love to see the Sentinel League mechanic return in some form… and I feel like the Blast from the Past event had to be purposeful in some way. I don’t even really care that much about the recombinators, but I have loved being able to pop sentinels to get juicy bursts of loot. Lake of Kalandra being revisited has made me realize that that mechanic while cool… really needs to be reworked completely before it would feel good. The wildly variable difficulty level of the maps just feels bad… and I think I would rather see something along the lines of how the nodes in Expedition work so that each tile you place gives you boon/debuff to everything in the finally crafted map. I think it would be also cool to see some sort of return of the Crucible mechanic. I thought skill trees on items made for some really interesting build possibilities. I think everyone would love to see Tattoos from this league go Standard as well, but I feel similar to Kalandra… the actual Trial of the Ancestors mechanic needs some work. There is just too rapid of a transition from cakewalk to impossible without cheating by abusing crowd control mechanics.
Anyways! Happy Friday! Happy almost Thanksgiving week! What would you like to see in the upcoming Affliction League in Path of Exile? Drop me a line below.
