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Delays are Good

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Path of Exile II Three Week Delay Announcement

The community had noticed that recently GGG was curiously radio silent regarding the upcoming early access launch for Path of Exile 2 and the plans for the 3.26 Path of Exile 1 league. Yesterday we found out why when this video dropped informing us that there would be a three-week delay in the start of early access from November 15th to December 6th. There has been a spectrum of reactions from content creators, but I think for the most part the majority have been relatively positive. Sure there is a certain amount of disappointment and a modicum of frustration around changed plans, but clearly it seems like they understand the scope of what is about to be released into the world and how popular it is likely to be. I personally suffer from an abundance of things vying for my time, so I will not lament having a few more weeks before I am pulled in by the sirens song of Path of Exile II.

New World

What I want to talk about this morning however is how game delays are generally always a positive thing. Last week I groused about how I struggle to find unbridled joy in gaming anymore, and I’ve come to the realization that in large part this is due to the fact that games keep releasing in an unfinished state. There are so many games that I have played where given an additional year of reworking the game, are actually in a pretty great state. I have my issues with the recent rebranding of New World but had that game been delayed six months to a year… I think it would be a far more successful game than it is currently. The game that I played when they launched Fresh Start servers, was a completely different experience than the buggy mess of a game that I played on launch. It almost hit a million concurrent players at launch and has never managed to attract more than a small fraction of that number after that point. You only get a single chance to make your first impression with players, and it becomes a massive uphill battle to convince them that the game is worth trying again.

Mass Effect Andromeda

Similarly, the poor performance of the game and the weird graphic glitches of Mass Effect Andromeda during press previews and early access effectively turned what was a pretty good offering into a constant meme. Within a week or so of the launch, every major issue with this game was fixed and I had a blast playing through the campaign. However, because of the poor rushed state, it was thrust out the door… it became the laughing stock of the internet and effectively killed the Mass Effect brand. Sure there is some attempt to continue the lineage of the original trilogy, but it will be once more an uphill battle to try and interest players in the franchise again. Had the game been delayed by a few months… we would probably be talking about the sequel or even a third game in the Andromeda series by now.

Diablo IV

More recently we have the tale of Diablo IV, which admittedly is probably a bit different. The core problem with the game was that the developers had a flawed vision of what ARPG players actually wanted in a game like this. “D4 Bad” has become a catchphrase that has been turned into countless AI Slop song parodies… but has legitimately infected at least the Twitch audience. You cannot watch a single YouTube video on the game without someone commenting that. The thing is the game is honestly in a pretty great state right now for core gameplay. I didn’t like the campaign for Vessel of Hatred, but have had a blast playing through the endgame content on the new Spiritborn class. Do I think another year would have helped the game? Potentially… because that is essentially what it has taken to rework all of the bad systems. However, I am not sure it would have made much difference because it was the extremely negative feedback that forced a change in direction.

Baldur’s Gate III

I think there are studios that have managed to balance the need for pushing a game out there and getting some revenue with wanting to make sure the final release of the game is a polished product. The early access incubation period certainly helped Baldur’s Gate III turn into the exceptionally polished product that we all enjoyed, and that broke concurrency records at the time for a single-player experience. I think had something like Diablo IV launched into early access and then later had a 1.0 release once the majority of the system changes were made, it might have been less of a meme. This is essentially the model that Grinding Gear Games is trying to follow with Path of Exile 2, and I am hoping it bears similar fruit. There already seem to be a number of significant shifts in the gameplay from the first game, and I am uncertain how those will shake out. I am hoping an extended early access period will give them time to react to player feedback and solidify the game experience. I know at least mentally I treat an early access game a bit differently than I would a AAA Game launch, and that extra bit of forgiveness gives a game the chance to potentially improve for the better.

Path of Exile II – Returning Uniques

So if Grinding Gear Games has come out and said that they need some more time to make sure the servers are stable, then I am of the mind to give it to them without grumbling. While this is an early access release, there are still going to be a heck of a lot of eyes on the game and expecting something playable. I know the Last Epoch 1.0 release was severely hampered by server problems, which has I think kept them from hitting anywhere near the same concurrent numbers of subsequent releases. Anyways I am good with the delay, and it seems like we have officially entered spoiler season for the upcoming POE2 Early Access. Yesterday they released the above image showing off some uniques that will be returning from POE1 and that have received a bit of a “glow up”. While I cannot think of a single build that would want all of these items, it has been interesting to see just how much better they look in the new client. There is a Reddit thread that compares the graphics of what a character in POE1 looks like wearing all of these versus the above image.

For me… I am hoping to be able to wrap up Final Fantasy XVI either tonight or tomorrow night and then likely start on Dragon Age Veilguard after that. I might take a break from all of this to play through the new Alan Wake II DLC on Halloween night in honor of the “spooposicty”. I also still want to return to Wayfinder at some point with Ace, but our schedules have not just lined up recently. Mostly the point of this morning’s post is to say… Delays are generally a good idea if a studio thinks it needs one. I am almost always going to be in support of this.

Wayfinder 1.0 Launched

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Wayfinder is an interesting game. Back in March of 2023, I got into beta testing, which was under a strict NDA, so as a result I never talked about it publicly. I played the game quite a bit at the time and even managed to get into some multiplayer testing with my friend Ace and I think maybe even Ashgar. It was a perfectly cromulent experience, but also a deeply flawed and buggy one. I thought given enough time this might turn into a really great game. However, when August rolled around it was suddenly launching with a premium “Founders” pack price tag associated with it… I noped the hell out. I had just done beta testing prior to this launch announcement and the game was still in what felt like a relatively sorry state. Early Access is launching your game, regardless of what you think about that process or how much you claim it is still “in testing”. Launching a broken game is launching a broken game.

Wayfinder was an interesting combination of being developed by Airship Syndicate (Battle Chasers, Darksiders Genesis, Ruined King) and being published and hosted by Digital Extremes (Warframe). However in November Digital Extremes cut their publishing wing, and with it Airship Syndicate was suddenly floating in the wind. What was not necessarily expected was that the game was pulled from Steam, and effectively retooled to change it from being a lobby-based MMORPG, to a peer to peer based Co-Optional and largely single-player experience. It returned to Steam early access earlier this year and started the uphill process of attempting to earn back players. On Monday the game launched its 1.0 version and I started playing it some over the weekend on Sunday, just ahead of this rework.

There is a lot to like about the game, just like I felt when I beta-tested it… but this time it is extremely polished and ready for players. Essentially the best comparisons I can give it are what if you took Monster Hunter but made it a Dropped-Loot-Based Dungeon Crawler, or what if you took a Hero-Shooter… but made it an Action-Combat-RPG. It also very much lives in a space adjacent to something like Genshin Impact but instead of being cash shop-based Gacha nonsense, everything unlocks over time while playing through the campaign. You start the game by choosing one of three heroes and then pretty quickly after that point you unlock the ability to play as the other two. Then over the course of the main story quest the remaining five “Wayfinders” are then unlocked when you reach specific milestones.

Honestly switching from Lobby based to Peer to Peer has been a pretty seamless swap. The only time you encountered players organically in the previous incarnation was in town, so having to manually party up before going on adventures does not really feel that different. I’ve not done much testing but it appears that you can invite people through an invite code system, through posting a public party listing in an in-game party finder, through your Steam/PlayStation friends, or through a discord integration. The 1.0 version also adds cross-play so that console and PC players can both group up together. Right now the only console that the game is available on is the PlayStation 5, but there is apparently an Xbox Series X/S version and an Epic Game Store version in the works.

There is no cash shop and currently, the game is the low low price of $23 on Steam, or $25 on the PlayStation store. They have a single DLC pack available for the game right now which is a collaboration with Critical Role which gives you some themed skins for various Wayfinder characters. I am fully on board with selling additional skins as a way of expanding the purchase of the game and doing this through one-time purchase packs instead of an in-game microtransaction shop with a contorted third currency system. Founders apparently got a bunch of exclusive stuff when the business model changed, which I don’t love… but they had to do something to make it right for the folks who plunked down $100 to play their early access game.

I am only around seven hours into the gameplay, but am having quite a bit of fun. Essentially it is a blend of open-world exploration in the Genshin/BOTW style with respawning mobs and treasures to find, combined with dungeon instances that have semi-randomized objectives. So far I have ventured forth into the Gloom and fought void monsters and also explored these weird frozen-in-time “lost sectors” of how the world was before whatever calamity befell it. In both cases, there are a bunch of hidden objectives to find and loot to be gained, while fighting a bunch of baddy archetypes with differing attack patterns.

The character that I am mostly playing is Wargrave, which starts the game out as a Sword-and-Board style tank with an almost paladin kit. I heal myself by completing automatic swing combos and have a battery of abilities to deal damage and also shield the party. I can also seemingly swap what type of weapon I am using to change up this playstyle. I’ve gotten Shotguns, Rifles, and Daggers so far as drops but know there is also some big Two-Handed options from my limited-time beta testing. The only thing that annoys me a bit is that the loot seems totally randomized and can be for any of the Wayfinders you have unlocked. This means I am a bit starved for items that I can actually use for the tanky gameplay style that I have focused on. There is a gear vendor in town that appears to upgrade every time you ding a level, so I have mostly been having to buy a new sword/shield combo there to keep pushing up my power.

A lot of the expeditions that you go on center around taking out specific boss monsters. These often unlock crafting abilities, but I have not dabbled heavily into any of those systems. Mostly the main story quest will occasionally tell you to go kill X boss and then walk you through the process of crafting your next upgrade that is required to progress forward. I know in beta crafting played a much bigger role in the upgrade of gear, but so far this does not seem to be the case. Gear appears to mostly be acquired through loot drops, which is both good and bad. However, so long as I can keep buying reasonable upgrades from the NPC vendors I won’t complain much about it.

On top of ALL of this… there is a fairly robust housing system in the game. Exploring the world is constantly giving me items to put in my house. For example, I found this adorable little Hermit Crab pet that I now have roaming around my house. I can stop and pet it… which will cause it to pinch me… which I find both adorable and hilarious. There are a whole slew of items that I appear to be able to craft as well, but I do not think I have made it far enough into the game to fully unlock the crafting system. I have however picked up a bunch of random items in my journey, and the Housing system itself unlocked right before I went to the first big boss dungeon, so plenty early enough for you to keep unburdening yourself of items you found by dumping them in your rather large mansion.

All in all, it grew into the really cool game that I thought it could be when I first beta-tested it. The business model has shifted entirely to a buy-the-box, no cash-shop thing… which is honestly always welcome. However, that means folks need to buy in… and I really want this game to succeed. I was honestly shocked it was as cheap as it was, so if anything I have talked about this morning has interested you… maybe head over to Steam or the PlayStation store and pick it up. This is not a sponsored post in any way, I just genuinely want the games that I think are cool and a good value proposition to succeed. If you end up checking it out, drop me a line and tell me what your thoughts are.

Fears for Next Season

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Good Morning Folks! It has taken a while for Diablo IV to reach the point of feeling amazing, but it truly is there. I should take a step back… it feels amazing if you are playing the new class Spiritborn. My Barbarian that I power leveled through Whispers Caches feels like complete ass comparatively. It is slower and clunkier, and mobs just don’t die anywhere near as fast as they should. Diablo IV feels amazing because Blizzard has done the thing that they do time and time again… release a wildly overpowered class. They did this in World of Warcraft with both the Deathknight and Demon Hunter, where playing literally anything else during that patch cycle felt awful compared to the new hotness. I was a Warrior tank in Wrath of the Lich King and eventually switched over to Deathknight just because it felt so much better and honestly had more tools to play with. I did this again during Legion where I started out on tried and true Warrior but eventually swapped to Demon Hunter tanking because it just felt so much better.

Maxroll just updated their Endgame Tier list and had to create a new ranking called “S+” to isolate how much different the good Spiritborn builds are as compared to the other available builds in the game. There are Spiritborn builds right now capable of doing legitimate quadrillions of damage. Even when you drop down to “S” rank, there are two Necromancer builds and one Warrior build… and at least in the case of the Warrior build I know it is mostly exploiting a bugged mechanic to be able to place that high. Essentially if you are playing Diablo IV and not playing the shiny new hotness… you are playing a different game than I am playing. The game I am playing feels amazing… the clunky mess when I drop down to playing my Dual Swing Twisters Barbarian… does not feel amazing. I lack the unique required to swap over to the broken Mighty Throw build so I cannot judge how that feels.

It is reaching the point where some of the player base is demanding nerfs… and I get it honestly. Were I playing the wrong class during this patch I would probably feel the same. However, the gameplay that Spiritborn has should be the benchmark for how the rest of the game should feel. This is an ARPG… a game about blasting your way through thousands of demons while chasing loot. The game I am playing is what Diablo IV should have been from the very start. These games are entirely centered around the joy of building up a character to the point where they can crush everything in seconds. That is the end goal of every good build regardless of which ARPG you happen to be playing. Season Six feels amazing… and I fear that as a result, Season Seven is going to feel awful. It is going to be the hangover we are left with after the bender this season has been.

Blizzard is stuck in this position where they cannot really nerf the Spiritborn because it is this class that they have defended time and time again to the players. It is the new hotness and the entire reason for buying the expansion for many. What I fear for next season is that they are going to hammer down the nail that is sticking up, when instead they really should be buffing all of the other classes to where they feel as good as Spiritborn does currently. Even the gaming pundits that have called for more challenging content, seem to be having a blast on the Spiritborn and zipping through things at record speed. The truth is… ARPGs are a power fantasy and if you cannot get powerful… it is not fun. If I cannot clear the highest level content quickly… then I am playing a bad build.

There have been a lot of really fun and broken builds that have arisen during the course of Diablo IV’s short history and all of them have been beat back down into submission. I question when Blizzard is going to realize that this is the game that the player base actually wants. There would not be this constant chase for the most bugged and aggressively rewarding build if it were not so damned fun to play in that way. The Spiritborn family of builds is just the latest in a long line of “god builds” that have come along and captured the attention of the player base. What feels worse though is the fact that in order to have fun playing this game you have to play one of like three or four builds any given season. I would love to see them buffing the underperforming builds so that they are within the range of the highest-performing builds. As it stands currently, half of the classes in the game do not have a high-performing build.

Blizzard has created a scenario that is much like it is in other more hardcore ARPGs like Path of Exile, where if you are not following a guide strictly… you are playing the game incorrectly. Sure you can limp through the campaign on pretty much anything, in either game… but you will never be able to reach the heights of farming efficiency if you are not playing whatever broken mechanic is in vogue that season. I suffered through this for a bit when I switched over to my Quill Volley build that I am playing now, where a SINGLE talent point… made the difference between struggling to run T3 content to being able to dominate T4 content. What I really want is for the same feel of playing a current well-built Spiritborn build to trickle out into all of the content in the game and all of the classes and builds. I prefer playing Upheaval Barbarian because I like the mechanics of firing a bit of sweeping attack in front of me and nuking the entire screen… but that build has not been terribly viable ever. So instead playing what I wanted to play is needlessly tedious to get through when I could just play the “IWIN” build of the season.

I am still winding down from this season. I finished out the reputation in Nahantu, am about halfway through the last level of the seasonal reputation grind, and then have to do all of the remaining Tenets of Akarat. I feel pressure to get all of this done so that I don’t have to deal with it in a future season when I am playing a less fun character. I’ve been thinking a lot about how bad Season Seven is going to feel when Blizzard inevitably does what they always seem to do and nerf the fun out of the game. Diablo IV has had a few shining moments when it was really fun to play… this season, season two… but inevitably they keep trying to bring the game into line with some vision that they have for what the experience is supposed to be. I hope I am wrong. I hope we see a line of massive buffs to bring the other classes in line with the power levels of Spiritborn… but I don’t think that will happen.

Anyways if you have ever played Diablo IV in the past, you might want to pop in and give Spiritborn a spin before it is nerfed into oblivion. It is one of those magic moments when everything is just right, and I am afraid will be a fond memory we talk about around the campfire in the future as the “good ole days”.

Stupid Alt Tricks

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Good Morning Folks! I’m getting to the point where I think I am almost “done” with Diablo IV, at least until the next season rolls around. This is the inevitable place that I end up with seasonal model games like this and depending on how engaging they all have different cycles associated with them. In Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4 I pretty much get a few weeks out of them before deciding I have run out of things that I actually care to do. Path of Exile gives me at least a month, maybe two, before I start to lose interest. This is not a failing of the games mind you, this is just the way that I play them. I love fresh starts and I have a lot of fun during the gearing and leveling phase, and then progressively less fun as I accomplish whatever goals I set out for myself. Thankfully we have reached a point where there is almost always another ARPG just about to fire up so that I can hop into it with much glee.

There are a handful of items that I want to check off the list before I move on completely. Ace is far better at this sort of tedium gaming and has long since completed all of these. Essentially I need to finish grinding out Reputation for Nahantu so that I can permanently increase my Obol cap for all seasons from this point forward. I also want to finish gathering up the Tenets of Akarat so that these stay unlocked in future seasons as well. I had started down this path shortly after finishing the campaign, but many of them were bugged and could not be completed. Both of these are sort of the fodder for a lazy weekend afternoon, and I have plenty of time to knock them out before the next season starts in January.

The other thing that I want to complete just for the sake of doing it… because there are probably seasonal titles associated with it… is completing the final level of the Zakarum Remnants grind. This has been the absolute worst reputational grind in any Diablo IV Season. What I think I will probably do is churn through a bunch of Nightmare Dungeons on T4 as I have an achievement for doing those that I have yet to complete. I believe I get another shard of “unobtainium” used to craft mythic from completing this reputation. I might grind out some Undercity Rune Tributes in an effort to compile six copies of every rune so that I can potentially target craft other mythics given that we ran over 100 bosses this weekend and saw zero as opposed to the five from the weekend before last.

You can tell that I am mostly done with a season because I started taking on stupid side projects. The Tree of Whispers is essentially the Bounties system for Diablo IV, and at any given time there are a bunch of objectives around the world that reward varying numbers of whispers. The best ones are the ones that reward five at a time, as you need ten in total to get a bounty cache. Interesting tidbit that my friend Eliyon pointed out, is that you can farm these caches on one character and then have another character benefit from opening them. I believe he was thinking in terms of passing gear, but it turns out you get quite a boost of experience from opening them as well.

So as I am likely to do… I set forth on a totally degenerate play pattern and spent good chunks of the weekend farming Whispers Caches, only to flip over to my baby Barbarian and have him open them. It is honestly shocking how fast you can amass a huge stack of Whispers Caches and in truth, it is pretty damned fun popping around the map completing various bounty objectives. I always used to like running bounties in Diablo III, and it turns out I still enjoy that same sort of gameplay in its newer sibling. I was even doing the PVP Objectives because in truth… no one is out there actually PVPing. No matter what the loud faction of PVPers say… ARPG players do not give a shit about PVP. I could kill the boss for 5 whispers and then cleanse the blood shards that I got for a few more… and make it back to town all without seeing another soul. I did this several times, so it was not like it was a fluke, literally no one cares about PVP.

I wish I had kept better count of the total number of caches that were required to go from around level 7 when I started all the way to level 60 at which point I inherited all of the Paragon points I had accumulated on the Spiritborn. Quick mental math would tell me that it was between 20 and 25 caches in total that I had to farm, which honestly was not that bad. The first few caches gave me ten levels or so per cache… then it settled into about a level per cache until 53… at which point I started getting slightly less than a level. At 53 I farmed up eight caches which took me to 59 1/3, and then I proceeded to farm two more caches just to make sure that it would push me over the line. The cool thing about this process is that by the time I hit 60, I had pretty much gathered up all of the aspects that I would need for the build. Were I smarter I would have specifically kept out the best legendaries while leveling, but I was not that smart and ran around in a bunch of random uniques for a bit until I got things straightened out.

The only annoyance with this method for leveling is that you have to unlock Torment levels on the new character. I assumed as soon as I dinged 60, I would be able to flip over to Torment 1 and start rolling. However, I had to complete a Pit 20 in order to unlock that difficulty level. While I was at it I went ahead and tried Pit 35, the gate for unlocking Torment 2 and was able to do that just fine. My build does not really feel stable enough to push on to Torment 3, and in truth my Double Swing Twisters build is mostly a transitional build. The new Barbarian hotness is Mighty Throw, but it requires a specific unique called The Third Blade in order to make it function, something I have not seen drop yet. For now, Twisters works well enough for any content I would want to do on T1 or T2.

So thanks to my degeneracy, I find myself with two characters at max level and geared this season. The challenge there is that I feel like it isn’t necessarily pushing me to play more. I still feel like I am winding things down significantly. There is one more thing that I would like to try, since we used to pull up alts for each other in Diablo III by running Greater Rifts, at some point I want to see how effective that is by running an alt along with a Pit Run. This is mostly kicking the tires at this point, because I can’t say that I actually want to play additional characters. There is an achievement for having a level sixty of every class, so depending on how fast this process works it might be worth doing just for that.

Anyways… all of that said. Diablo IV still has problems, but it has finally reached a point where I can universally recommend it for folks who enjoy the seasonal model of ARPG gaming. The story for the expansion is still sort of shit, but the endgame gameplay loop is great.