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Riding the Astral Rails

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Friends… I have been playing an excessive amount of Honkai Star Rail. I realize that I am about a month late to this particular party… but at least I eventually made it here. I’ve talked a bit about this game in another post, but one of the points that I want to underline again is how much better of a game Star Rail is than Genshin was at launch. I mean it makes sense, at this point Hoyoverse has more than one major hit under their belt… but everything about this game really shows the lessons that they have learned. The narrative is extremely solid, and I would put it up there with other greats of the RPG genre. I made the hot take the other day that this is at least as good as Final Fantasy VII with zero digs meant towards either game in that equation.

Right now I have landed on a primary party of the fire incarnation of the Traveller, March 7th and Dan Heng… largely because I have become attached to both of them as characters, and Natasha is another character that I really love… but I’m mostly using her because she is a healer. All of these characters are given to you by the game as you wind your way through the story. I have a handful of characters that I have pulled through the Gacha system, but I wound my way around to just using this four-star team and I don’t really feel like I am missing out on anything. It feels like there is a really strong synergy between abilities, and wide enough elemental coverage to get weakness breaks in most fights. I did not feel nearly this strong while using only stock characters in Genshin Impact for example, and honestly think the free characters there were fairly awful compared to what you could get through pulling.

That said I feel like it is also important to talk a bit about how generous this game is. Right now I would be what you would term a “low spender” in Gacha games. I bought the $5 monthly pass because those generally give you a ton of pull currency over time and other side benefits. However, the game itself seems to just be constantly throwing pull currency at me and I’ve pulled the slot machine enough times to get three pity five stars. At the moment I am saving up my currency because I know a new banner is coming soon that is probably going to have a few characters I might want on it. I picked up the chase 5-star Jin Yuan seen above, while also picking Tingyun and Sushang while getting enough dupes to take them to 3 and 5 eidolons respectively. This just feels WAY different than Genshin Impact did, which makes me wonder what other lessons they learned from that game. At least as an outsider, it certainly seemed like they had trouble sustaining widespread interest in it.

The other thing that I think is interesting about Honkai Star Rail is that it is honestly much more mobile-friendly than Genshin ever was. Touch controls are not great at replicating a controller and doing complicated combat, but they are really good at letting you complete turn-based actions. This puts Star Rail in this weird hybrid category of allowing you to move around freely but when the action really matters… you are able to strategically work your way through combat in a strict turn-based system. A lot of the reason why I never played Genshin on mobile is that I just did not feel that I could trust the touch controls to get me through anything other than the most simplistic of combat scenarios. With Star Rail I can happily play this while sitting in the backyard on my phone because it isn’t like I am concerned about the limited range of motion of touch controls will screw me over.

The first two acts of the story so far have been phenomenal. Essentially your tutorial takes place on a Space Station and after you resolve that core conflict, there is a constant dribble of side missions that let you get to know those characters far more over time. The second planet Belobog is equally rich and has this whole… Firefly meets Wildarms meets Frostpunk. This also serves as the planet that lets you see the dire consequences of a Stellaron gone out of control and brings you further into the central conflict. It also introduces this wide cast of characters that you legitimately come to love, even though they are largely just playing bit parts in the tale. This makes it all the more rewarding when one of these characters reaches out to you over the in-game “text message” system asking for your help again.

I am working my way through the third area of the game, and it is effectively “Space China”. So far I am not the biggest fan. Generally speaking much like Liyue it is a grossly inefficient bureaucracy filled with a lot of annoyingly self-important people who care way more about appearances than they do about doing the thing that needs to be done. After seeing this setting effectively playing out in two different Hoyoverse games… it does make me wonder if there is a bit of a thinly veiled political statement being made here. I’m hoping that the deeper I get into this story, the more engaged I will become with these characters… because at the moment I would be fine with pushing them all off a pier into the sea. If you have a game about planet hopping… they can’t all be winners and so far the first two were amazing so I guess they are due for a stinker.

I think what has impressed me more than anything, is that I am still having fun with the game when I have effectively bumped up several times against hard barriers. Like Genshin Impact or Tower of Fantasy, there are some hard daily progression caps where you can only really make so much progress in a single play session. I’ve been bumping up against this barrier of needing to increase my Trailblaze Level in order to be doled out the next chunk of the story. If you played Genshin you would be familiar with this quandary of needing to keep increasing your Adventure Level. The thing is… even though I have been stalled for a few days, I am still finding things that I want to pop into the game and do, and there is enough fun to be had in activities that don’t have some sort of daily limiter on them. I am not certain how long that will hold, but for the moment it seems to have more staying power for me personally than Genshin did at launch.

I realize that I am coming into this game a month late, but my hope is that I can catch up in time for the first update. Last week there was a bit stream that announced the 1.1 Patch called Galactic Roaming which will be launching on June 7th. Essentially it adds new storylines to both Jarilo-VI and the Xianzhou Luofu. Then there will be two different sets of banners, one for Silver Wolf the hacker you meet very very early into your story, and Luocha that you meet during the Xianzhou area during a side story with Dan Heng. I have no real interest in the second character, but I am absolutely stockpiling currency now in a vague attempt to pull Silver Wolf. I dig the retro arcade-looking effects that they showed of her attacks.

Mostly I am hoping to get caught up enough to be able to participate in all of the new events. I’m also hoping that the team that I have chosen will effectively be good enough to get me through all of the content. So far the only thing I struggle with are the challenges that require you to kill things within a certain number of turns. My team is extraordinarily tanky… but not necessarily the fastest at destroying things unless wildly over leveling the enemies.

A Simulated World

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Hey Folks! Since today is the Memorial Day holiday I opted not to do a traditional blog post. However, I did decide to record a video. This is another of my bits of nonsense where I talk about some aspect of a video game I am playing. In this case, I have been playing a lot of Honkai Star Rail and I thought I would talk a bit about Simulated Worlds. This Rogue-Lite mini-game within a game does not require any of the limited daily “activity currency”, which means you can effectively farm it forever for at least some amount of resources per run.

Unfortunately, it just takes a significant amount of time to run through a Simulated World, which means this is clocking in at roughly 24 minutes long. If you are curious about the game and have not given it a shot, feel free to watch the video. I am running on autopilot largely because I was trying to keep the size of this video down, and the NPCs can complete battles much faster than I can when I am being more strategic.

Last Epoch 0.9.1 Patch Review

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the drop of the latest Last Epoch patch, and as a result, it meant that Ace and I spent a chunk of last night hanging out while we both explored the changes. Since a big part of the content drop was a completely reworked leveling experience. This received mixed feedback when this news was dropped on Monday, but I absolutely understand why the focus was on the early game. Essentially you really need to grab the player in the opening minutes to an hour of the game if you really want to keep them engaged, and the previous starter experience was a little odd and uneven. It also was some of the very earliest content that had been released and was starting to show its age. If you want to see all of the features you can check out the highlight reel trailer below.

I used the patch as an opportunity to reboot my Rogue character that I never leveled far enough to actually specialize. That is the first major positive change is the flow of the content makes it so that you arrive at the “End of Time” zone which is the gate for specialization… at about the time when you would normally be needing to choose a specialization. The previous flow of the game made it so that you were usually wildly over-leveled by the time you reached the core hub of the game and could choose which specialization you wanted to go into. On almost every character up until this point, it meant that at about level 20 I just had to stop choosing passives because I could not put them into the specialization trees. On this latest character, I reached the End of Time at roughly level 16 and that felt pretty freaking solid.

The start of the campaign attempts to actually give you a reason for some of the things that you are doing and spends some time setting up a few of the core conflicts lore-wise. Previously you sort of just stumbled into bad things happening and rolled with the punches, now you are introduced to some conflict, get introduced to a bad faction doing bad things, and then are introduced to a plot MacGuffin that said bad people are after, and that you need to get to first. It flows so much better and a number of the content blocks and zones and been reordered in a manner that makes much more sense. It is still very much an “ARPG Story” which is to say it is pretty light on details and largely talks about things in broad terms… but I more or less find this as sufficient motivation to kill lots of things and chase loot. Someone on the team also learned how to draw women’s faces that do not all look like they are 10 years old, so that is a huge positive as well.

There are a few hilarious timing moments where an enemy swoops in to capture one of the NPCs… but there is this weird lag involved with it. You end up sitting there wondering what exactly is going on… and then suddenly someone flies away with the NPC and you are left to think “Oh, okay bye then”. This post is coming across as way more snarky than I intended it to. Maybe it is just that I have played so many of the early missions in this game that I am overanalyzing the changes. The biggest cool thing from the new content though is all of the really interesting enemy types. Ace and I talked last night about how much we are looking forward to seeing these new areas as endgame Monolith Echoes. Patch 0.9.1 was a good step forward, and I am hoping that also means that they plan on going back and smoothing out some of the other awkward transition points later in the campaign. For example how you rapidly go from being in frosty tundra land, and then extremely rapidly transitioning to adventuring on the literal ocean floor.

Another new feature of 0.9.1 is the introduction of “towns” as hubs that blend together random players who happen to be visiting an area. This is cool in theory, but also I have zero interest in grouping with a bunch of randos… but I guess maybe someone out there wants to do this. Right now unfortunately there is a bit of a performance hit every time you zone into areas that would be flagged as a town… so essentially any encampment that has a stash chest and vendors. I am sure they will iron this out over time, but for the moment it just takes a long while to load into any of these social hubs. As the game grows and has more activities that require you to group up with other players, I am sure this will become more relevant. For now, it feels more like they are laying the groundwork for something else and now have to solve the technical changes that come with it.

This patch also introduced the cosmetic shop and it largely seems fine. There was some gnashing of teeth over the pricing model when this was originally announced, and EHG has significantly watered down the cost since then. I have a bajillion fake shop currency points because I was a pretty early supporter of the game. Essentially everything is now priced in increments of 50 coins aka $5 and the highest items that I saw for sale were 150 coins each or $15. The options are pretty limited at the moment but we knew that going into this release. They are essentially just testing the waters and ironing out any problems with making purchases before adding what I am sure will be a steady drip of cosmetics at “priced to own” values.

The only problem that I have at the moment is with the way the supporter packs are being handled this time around. Traditionally Last Epoch supporter packs have been a tiered affair so that if you bought pack D you also got all of the benefits of pack A, B, and C. Now this might just be the challenges of working within the pricing structure of the Steam Store, but right now… you have four packs that each gives you a backpack, a generic colored-coded pet, and a portal. They all award you the same amount of cash shop currency, but each one is $10 more than the previous one… for “reasons”. It feels pretty bad, to be honest, and I am not sure if this is designed to engender some sort of elitist “I bought the most expensive pack” bullshit or FOMO… but whatever the case I do not like it. I did in fact buy the most expensive pack but largely to test this theory. I don’t mind giving EHG more money to support the development of the game, but it doesn’t make it feel any less shit.

I think another aspect of why it feels so bad is that I have gotten used to Path of Exile supporter packs which are admittedly more expensive, but have the structure I was expecting. So for example if you buy the $60 pack you get everything from the $30 pack, all the new stuff at the $60 tier… and the full face value of the pack in cash shop currency. So similarly I at least expected some sort of similar structure in Last Epoch where if you bought a $50 pack you got everything from the packs leading up to that tier as well as 500 cash shop coins aka the face value of the pack. In Path of Exile, the supporter packs feel like a phenomenal deal and there are folks… myself included, who tend to buy one every season even if we have zero need for more currency. They just feel like a value proposition that is worth partaking of and also has the side benefit of supporting more of the madness you are enjoying. My hope is that EHG goes back to the drawing board and at a minimum makes the packs additive. As they stand now they just seem like we are giving them more money out of the goodness of our hearts… which admittedly is a thing but when you are giving me back kitsch that has no real-world value… it seems like you should be generous.

The super fancy wings that you get from the $50 pack seem to be bugged as well and look nowhere near as large as are depicted in the artwork advertising the pack so I am hoping that is also a bug. Do I regret buying the pack? Not really. I was going to throw more money at the game regardless because I feel like EHG deserves it. That said… I want them to be better than the competition and that definitely means that they also need to be a better value proposition. So here is hoping that they rethink their pricing model a bit further and become a bit more generous with the swag.

At this point, I have spent zero time with endgame content changes, so I fully expect that to be the next thing I dive into as last night I finished up all of the new story. I know there are some tweaks and changes to the drop rate of uniques that drop from specific timelines, so here is hoping that maybe just maybe I can get that dang Herald of the Scurry.

Leaping Doggos

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Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.

When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.

Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.

I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.

Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.

I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.