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Exploring Undecember

December 5, 2022 by Belghast

Hey Folks! This weekend I spent some time exploring the ARPG called Undecember. I was completely unaware of this game until the launch of Diablo Immortal, and shortly after that point, the folks behind this title started doing some sponsored videos. However similar to Diablo Immortal, discussion of the game also came with a discussion of its cash shop and pay-to-win elements. After going through what we went through with Diablo Immortal and being so egregiously monetized… I decided that I would just give this game a hard pass.

I had largely put it entirely out of my mind when this weekend on a whim I decided to go through steam recommendations. One of the things I greatly appreciate about the Steam interface is the recommendations by friends section because in truth… I care way more about the opinion of my friends than I do any gaming pundit. So I noticed that Teufelaffe had left a review and honestly… it was enough to spark my curiosity and get me to install the game. His stance largely aligns with mine… that I don’t care if there is a way to shortcut the process by spending money so long as it isn’t required to do so. That was the problem I had with Diablo Immortal is that you could not get a fully geared-out character without spending literally tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This created a hard wall that blocked my progression where I could not function in Hell 2 because I lacked the “gear score” to make it viable because the game was actively debuffing me for not having spent enough money.

As Teufelaffe said in his review, the game really does feel like a blending of the best parts of Diablo III and some of the better parts of Path of Exile. It is a game where you have no classes and that you get to create your own character and choose their appearance. Then the spell gems that you equip and attribute points that you spend, determine what sorts of builds you can do. I opted to go for a largely Dexterity-based character, trying to replicate something like the Diablo III demon hunter so I am wearing leather armor, spending most of my points in Dex, and using ranged bow abilities. The hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you do not have full control over all of your keybinds… left click is your movement key and there seems to be no way to change that. However, if you hold down your left click you can steer with your mouse cursor which is functionally what I do with putting “force move” on W in the games that will support it. It took some getting used to but now feels comfortable enough.

Instead of relying on getting gear with specific sockets on it, in order to make your build like Path of Exile you have a hex grid that you lay gems on. Each gem has six sides and each side can have one of three colors on it or be completely empty without any colors. Essentially you can use these special helper gems to link other abilities or buff specific things about it. For example, my main attack right now is a spread shot and I have it linked to cast the ability Chain Lightning on hit. That means I fire off this spread of arrows and the first time it makes contact with any enemy, that triggers a lightning bolt to course and spread through surrounding enemies. Spread Shot also has a green gem that increases the number of projectiles… and I am sharing that with another ability called Flame Shot. Essentially it becomes this puzzle game of trying to figure out how best to place your gems in order to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit.

One thing of note is that Undecember is also a mobile game, and is available on Android and iOS and with it… comes a number of very mobile mechanics. Every time you do anything in the game, you are going to see a dozen teal arrows light up on your interface drawing your attention to various systems. This means spending a lot of time clicking through various menus in order to get various “rewards” that are largely meaningless at the moment because I am not entirely certain what anything does yet. The same is true with the cash shop in general. There are things that the game would like me to buy there, but all of it largely seems like nonsense. The only thing that I did notice is that it would cost you about $40 to buy a full cosmetic skin because skins are broken up into 4 chunks: armor, helm, mainhand, offhand… and each of those costs around $10 in cash shop currency.

For those who have played Path of Exile, the crafting system will be very familiar. In fact, there are a number of items that you will simply recognize as their Path of Exile equivalents… like I got my first Chaos Orb and Exalted Orb the other day and the icons feel similar enough. You can do some basic crafting through the enchant system at the blacksmith, or more hardcore crafting recipes at the alchemy table… aka the crafting bench. One thing that takes a bit to get used to is the fact that you have to manually level your gems by feeding them magic shards. That means at some point in the future you will be grinding random stuff trying to get magic shard drops so that you can catch your gems up. Right now I have not really struggled but at 30… I am starting to notice that I simply don’t have enough magical dust to level everything up at the same time.

All told I have been enjoying myself quite a bit and if you also were looking for a happy midpoint between Diablo III and Path of Exile you might check it out. I will let you know as I progress through the game if I hit any hard paywalls. That will be the point at which I check out, because while I am not afraid of spending money on a game… I don’t want it to be a requirement to progress. We tried some of the groupings over the weekend and unfortunately, there is no level-scaling, so you can drag someone along like you can in Diablo III but if you want grouping to be meaningful… you will have to stay within the level range of your friends. I am hoping that when I reach the endgame the content will be fun for grouping because right now the normal leveling content isn’t terribly exciting with other players.

So now to finish up with a bit of housekeeping. Last Friday I posted a note as a bit of a teaser stating that I was involved in the rollout of a gaming-focused Mastodon Instance. It rolled out on Sunday but I regret to inform you that I am no longer involved with it, nor can I suggest that anyone migrate to it. My yesterday was honestly pretty awful and it involved a sequence of events that led to me getting ejected from the planning discord, moderator status, and ultimately losing my account on the server. Granted I am being told that my account and the account of Scopique were not deleted… but they disappeared in sequence with me being shut out of the project so I drew what felt like obvious conclusions because neither account exists anymore. It was a bad situation but I am not going to go into details publicly, suffice it to say I am withdrawing my support in any capacity from the project. If you do migrate be cautious I guess that is all I would say.

I hope you all have a great day and a phenomenal week… and I am hoping my mental health improves because yesterday was a massive blow to it.

The Good Grind

February 19, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have been thinking about where Monster Hunter World has succeeded and Destiny 2 has failed. I know this is probably a strange way to start off a post, but I am playing MHW the way that I fully expected to still be playing Destiny 2. If you add up the total time I have spent with the Destiny franchise across different platforms you wind up with 741 hours. Given that sort of track record I fully expected to be playing that game currently. That said I have missed two faction rallies, two iron banners and have not really even logged in during the current crimson doubles event. Sure I could be getting all manner of cosmetic gear from them… but the weapon and gear system just feels hollow given that I have collected most everything I am interested in using.

While I love the token loot system, Destiny 2 has a problem with not giving us a meaningful grind to be focused on. Doing event after event hoping to get a Masterwork Weapon or Piece of armor doesn’t really count. When I say meaningful grind I mean something that I can do on a nightly basis that is fun, but also feels like I am making progress towards some larger objective. In many ways the fickle nature of loot in Destiny 1 and the existence of things like the Court of Oryx and Archon’s Forge gave me something I could do… that felt like I was potentially moving in the direction of something that I wanted from the game. As it stands there are too few interesting weapon options and the watered down version of exotics no longer really make them worth chasing in the way we used to before.

It may simply be because I am playing on the PS4 with friends that I am drawing the conclusion… but as I play Monster Hunter World I think about the ways that it has given me this path to madness paved with little incremental rewards. When you kill or trap a Monster you are hunting you are showered with a bunch of monster parts… some of which are useful and some of which are not as useful. The thing is, regardless if I have 50 of an item… I am still sorta excited to see them because I know that eventually I might need to use them to craft some new weapon that I then have to upgrade up to the final version. I might suddenly decide that Hammer is awesome and then have to start building up my collection of weapons much the same as I do for my beloved Longsword.

I know that every thing I kill, and every object in the world that I loot is taking me towards some bigger goal. The number of times that I have had to go out lately and farm herbs… one of literally the first items you encounter in the game… is shocking given that I am dealing with a completely different set of monsters than I did back then. However it doesn’t seem like tedium because they have placed value on almost everything you can encounter out in the wilds and while you may not need it today… there is likely going to be a time at some point in the future where you will be wishing you had more of it. While literally every moment I am not hunting a big epic monster is busywork… none of it feels like it because it feels valuable to the larger mission of the game.

While Destiny has never really had something close to this grind, I am thinking maybe it should. The central focus of all of this for me personally is the Smithy, which is a menu driven crafting system that allows me to turn all of these bits and pieces of critters I have taken down… and meld them into usable gear with interesting stat combinations. I’ve spent a good deal of time farming up Odogoron, which is a giant hairless blind hell hound looking thing. I personally really like its armor set and I want to be able to wield the full thing a a potential replacement for my mishmash of gear I am currently wearing. This gives me a goal, and the grind itself is slow enough that each kill feels like meaningful progress without ever giving me that landfall moment of getting everything I possibly need in a single round.

Imagine for a second if you had gear and weapons in Destiny based on a similar concept. Each time you took down the Fallen example, there was a chance of getting an item that could be used in the crafting of Fallen themed weapons or armor. The common items would drop from Dregs, medium rarity items from Vandals and the rare bits from Servitors and Walkers. Then say you wanted to craft the Vex Mythoclast you would need to maybe take down a Gate Lord to get the focusing lens, and a bunch of Minotaurs to get the armored housing. All of this is more meaningful than collect 40 of token Z and hope the RNG gods smile upon your en devour as you may or may not get the item you want from a relatively deep loot table. It also turns Banshee-44 into more than the Gachapon machine that he currently is, by giving him the actual ability to craft specific items for you.

What Monster Hunter World does better than almost anything is that it gives me a target for my nightly nonsense. Granted right now I cannot craft the Chrome Slicer I because I lack the zenny to do so…. but I know where every single piece that it requires drops from. I know that I can run loops around High Rank Wildspire Wastes for most if it, but to get the Fucium Ore I am going to have to make my way down into the Elder’s Recess. If I notice a weapon requires parts off of a specific monster I am given a bunch of different ways to target that one specific encounter and run it over and over if I so choose. In my case what I personally tend to do is answer SOS beacons for that specific encounter, feeling like I am actually helping out someone else in the community take down that critter for fun and profit as well.

More than anything what I think Monster Hunter World does so well is that it eases you into all of this. You quickly learn the value of the items you can grab out in the world as new patterns start showing up that you can craft. You notice that items have ??? beside some of the materials and it drives you to go out and explore until you find them. All of this creates a feedback loop of take down epic feeling monsters, get items, craft interesting gear… so you can take down even bigger monsters. Sure a lot of the gear is not strictly required… but for someone who is very gear focused it certainly makes the journey feel a lot more meaningful. The monster battle portion being fun enough that while I am actively engaged in fighting… I am not even thinking about what might drop which is not the case in most MMORPGs.

When they first started talking about Destiny 2 being a much more open world and quest driven game… this is honestly the sort of experience I had been envisioning. What if you could fight a Destiny boss the same way you do a Monster in Monster Hunter World? What if getting every player to focus on taking out a Gatelord’s weapon arm caused it to no longer be able to fire that weapon… and instead forced it to change up tactics and start engaging in melee attacks. What if the way you fought a boss mattered just as much as the weapons you took into the fight? When we got Destiny 2 and it was a stripped down version of what we had in Destiny 1… I was disappointed, but the mechanical loop of the game kept me engaged for way longer than the game itself probably deserved. I had enough hype built up to carry me through the console launch and restarting with the PC launch… but now I just don’t ever feel like even logging in.

What I want is a good grind. That doesn’t necessarily mean running Omnigul hundreds of times hoping that maybe just maybe you will get that one in a million perfectly stated Grasp of Malok. What that means for me personally is something that I can do on a nightly basis that feels like I am eventually heading towards some goal down the road. Maybe at some point in the near future I will feel like I am out of grinds in Monster Hunter World, but I can at least see a road map in front of me that seems like it is going to be an interesting ride. Right now I am almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of objectives that I could be chasing, and as I move up… it feels like the world keeps expanding out rather than narrowing down to a pin point like the raid cycle does in an MMORPG. Monster Hunter World is a really great grind, that is attached to a really fun experience of taking down giant monsters that fight in a fluid and believably organic manner. Maybe Bungie will find its footing at some point, but for the moment I am enjoying discovering the Monster Hunter franchise.

Wolcen Alpha Thoughts

February 5, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was a largely chill en devour that focused on lots of gaming while either upstairs in my warm warm office, or downstairs snuggled into a blanket on the sofa. It was my original intent to spend lots of time hunting monsters with friends, and I did in fact manage that for a bit Sunday afternoon. I also managed another goal which was to craft the Horizon Zero Dawn set of Palico gear which Kenzie is currently wearing. It admittedly feels a little weird at times to talk about Kenzie in game versus Kenzie the real life cat, but I still feel like if you didn’t name your Palico friend after an actual cat you are a monster. The other big happening of the weekend is that I dove head first into a game that I had been wanting to try for a bit.

Wolcen Lords of Mayhem is an Action Roleplaying Game that draws its inspiration from Diablo 2, Path of Exile and to some extent Diablo 3. It’s funny how a genre that largely spawned from a single came can branch and wind up fairly divisive. There is an entire community that feels like Diablo 2 was the ideal version of the game, another that feels like Path of Exile is the true successor to the throne… and a whole other group of people that care nothing about that noise and happily play Diablo 3. Wolcen is this weird amalgam in which I can see some of the best traits of each of those camps, as well as pulling in some other games in the genre like Titans Quest and its eventual successor Grim Dawn. Essentially it is a good start at trying to build a brand new modern ARPG.

The game itself is completely gorgeous, which admittedly was the first thing that I noticed about it. I stumbled onto this game when D3 community YouTuber Rhykker did a video talking about it. I have been trying very hard to avoid playing alpha/beta/early access games because they tend to sour my impression and excitement when the final product is released. However when I saw the game play I promptly threw that rule out the window and slammed my $19.95 on the table to join the testing. Firstly please note the game is very much an alpha build and in my short time playing it I have encountered all sorts of bugs including being hit by a monster a few times and having it teleport me back to base without actually dying.

This is absolutely a buyer beware sort of experience, but for me at least I felt like I wanted to help fund the games development because they have some pretty big plans. They are even brave enough to post their long term roadmap in the form of a Trello board for the backers to look at and comment on. Similarly there is a community Discord available as well so folks can leave bug reports, comment on game play and leave feature requests. The little bit of time I have spent roaming around the chat channels have made me realize that the game already has a super devoted following. As far as the lineage of this game goes… it is my understanding that it originally started out as a mod for the game Crysis designed to allow folks to create an ARPG on the CryEngine. From there it turned into a Kickstarter project called Umbra, and then at some point the name shifted to Wolcen which I find insanely awkward to pronounce.

What makes the game extremely interesting to me is the fact that there are no classes. You start as either a Male or a Female character with pretty robust sliders and character creation options. From there your character becomes whatever you want it to be in the form that everything is treated like a spell… be it a melee attack or an orb of lighting being hurled at the target. How you begin to spec out your character determines how effective you are going to be in your goals. Not surprisingly I have largely focused on melee with a sword and shield build designed to get in… dish out a bunch of damage then use the games active dodge system represented by the green pips above the skill bar to get out safely.

Admittedly it does not always work because the monsters in this game hit super hard and involve a lot of movement to be able to take them down successfully. I spent some time streaming Sunday morning and died over and over to all sorts of silly situations, and with no difficulty slider currently… it could get frustrating if you are not willing to keep throwing your face against this game. As far as speccing your character you are given a combination of the traditional stat based system that allows you to allocate points each level into the core areas that you want to be improving. On top of that each individual skill has its own tree of sorts that largely involves you choosing one of two options… with one focused on efficiency and another focused on either dealing more damage or increasing the effect of your attacks.

Lastly you have the “Gate of Fates” or what I tend to call it the Sphere Grid, which is a sequence of thematic choices you make as a character in how you want to build it out. Now when I said there were no classes in this game… in theory that is probably a lie because you could think of the skill trees presented on this grid as classes. On the inner ring you have Arcanist, Guardian, Legionary, Thief and Hunter. On the second ring you have Elementalist, Warden, Maleficent, Gladiator and Trickster. Then on the third ring they have a single tree so far called Assassin, but I fully expect that their goal is to keep expanding outwards. What makes this interesting is there is an NPC in town that allows you to rotate the rings connecting up any first tier tree to any second tier tree. So as a result right now my Legionary tree is rotated to meet up with Gladiator and in theory your “Class” becomes the combination of which trees you choose to mash together.

Admittedly it was in the sphere grid that Path of Exile largely lost me as a player because it kept expanding… and keep seeming more and more like nonsense. However with Wolcen it feels more manageable because essentially I am making one of five choices… each time I move outwards on the grid and can feel pretty happy to just stay within those lines. There are a lot of things not messaged well in the game… including this sphere grid. So for example I did not realize I could rotate it until I had already started putting some points into Guardian. That said it doesn’t necessarily feel like those points were wasted either because I am getting the blended effect of both trees at the same time. I would imagine late in the game you would have more than one tree fleshed out on each of the rings… and as such keep tweaking the subtle nuance of your character design.

Essentially I broke my no alphas rule… because I really want to see this game come to fruition. What is there right now… has an awful lot of potential and I can see how it could be turned into serious competition for the Diablo 4 throne. I will always love Diablo and the action rpgs that have spawned out of it. I’ve spent many an hour playing games like Titans Quest or even the MMO variants like Devilian. Already Wolcen has managed to capture the essence of what makes a Diablo style game good… all the while taking this raw material and blending it into something fresh feeling. They are taking the genre into an interesting direction that combines the accessibility of Diablo 3 with the madness of Path of Exile to produce something that I think will have staying power. I fully expect that this is going to be one of those games that I keep popping back into as new features are added. I am sure it is still a few years away from exiting early access, but the product that is there already feels good to play. If you are so inclined and are willing to deal with a slightly buggy product… I highly suggest checking it out.

Four Necros

July 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was the beginning of a brand new season in Diablo 3, and once again Grace and myself did our hang out and level new characters thing. Traditionally these season opens happen on a Friday night, so there is always the ability to stay up until we hit the level cap. Granted that has not actually happened in awhile with us usually crashing somewhere in range of 60. Yesterday was a bit of a weird situation with the season open happening on a “School Night” as it were, which curbed our play session around 10 pm my time. I finally called it because I was starting to drift off at the keyboard and when I did none of the other three players seemed to complain much about it. I’ve been on this odd kick of going to bed around 10/10:30 which is significantly earlier than my traditional midnight. Maybe my age is finally catching up with me? Whatever the case… we managed to hit somewhere in the range of 47 before calling it a night.

Considering this is the first season post Rise of the Necromancer… you can probably already imagine that we were a party of four… and an army of dozens and dozens of undead following us around. Can I just tell you how glorious it is to see four Necros doing their Necro thing? We ran a bunch of Neph Rifts as is the traditional best leveling practice… and we got some insane spawns out of the gate that wound up boosting our characters significantly in the few hours we actually played. There was one relatively small rift map that literally had almost nothing but yellow and blue packs which mean’t we had summoned the guardian well before we were actually prepared for it. Necromancers have a really weird power curve in that they still start out a little weak, at least when it comes to raw damage output. That Rift Guardian took forever for us to whittle down with our undergeared level 5 selves… but within a few levels we were easily breaking apart and churning through a full round of bounties solo style. At the point I left the seasonal content last night, I had reached effectively the same build of abilities that I was using on my level 70 necromancer.

Left Click – Bone Spike (Path of Bones)
Right Click – Blood Rush (Transfusion)
1 – Revive (Purgatory)
2 – Command Skeletons (Frenzy)
3 – Command Golem (Bone Golem)
4 – Skeletal Mage (Skeleton Archer)
Fueled By Death Passive
Commander of the Risen Dead Passive
Extended Servitude Passive

Path of Bones is my favorite builder in part because I can sit back a long ways from the targets and still be gaining essense while my bone army chews stuff apart. Transfuion is largely as a reasonable way of getting back some health while also providing an escape mechanism. There is rarely a time when I would need to use it… that I am not going to at least pass through a few enemies during the travel time. Bone Golem just makes for a really nice AOE damage dealer… and it was hilarious when the four of us needed to do a boss and unleashed that all at the same time. Revive becomes the bread and butter way of getting extra attackers and quickly becomes more useful than the meat firework option that is corpse explosion. What I like about purgatory is that it means I can keep recycling targets because when your revives die they turn back into corpses. Functionally what I do is play with Flesh Golem up until the point I get this ability and then thankfully you can switch over to Bone Golem without losing a source of corpses. The necromancer is insanely fun and if you have not played it yet, I highly suggest checking it out.