Diablo IV

What they Got Right

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Good Morning Folks! I railed on Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred both in Friday’s blog post and during the podcast on Saturday. So you are probably thinking, Bel… why in the hell are you still playing this game? Truth be told while they completely botched the story in my estimation, the game itself from a mechanical standpoint is in a pretty great state. The new class is extremely fun, and while I might keep referring to it by the pejorative of “Green Monk” I am having a ton of fun playing it. I thought this morning I should probably spend a bit of time talking about the good parts of the game. One of the traps of being a blogger and honestly an internet denizen in general… is that it is way easier to talk about the bad things when you are frustrated than it is to stop yourself from having fun long enough to share the fun bits with others.

One of the key aspects of the Diablo franchise in general, is that it is really fun to play with your friends. Path of Exile oftentimes makes it a liability to have other players on the same map as you, and you feel it when someone screws up and eats a portal. Diablo on the other hand has generally been way more forgiving of other players with the ability since Diablo 3 to resurrect folks when they drop without any real penalty towards the overall progress of the encounter. This weekend I spent a lot of time with my friend Ace and we ran through a good deal of the content types. Thing is… there was never a moment where it felt bad to have another person along for the ride. In fact it always felt like having more people was a force multiplier to both the loot gained and the fun that we were having.

We got together and did all three wings of the new “raid” encounter, and while there were things I would change about the overall format I still had a lot of fun figuring out the mechanics. Sunday afternoon we got together and chained a bunch of bosses on Torment II and the sheer amount of loot that we got as a result was staggering. Basically, each time we would summon a boss, using the materials that one of us had spent time collecting, the other person would get their own copy of randomized loot as well. So that means from this point forward I will not be spending any resources to summon anything on my own because it is just too valuable to do it as a group. I largely view this as a positive because it is way more efficient and also gives me a strong reason to make time to hang out with a friend.

The other big positive of where we are currently in Vessel of Hatred is that there is a huge variety of activities. Some of these feel less rewarding than others, but they still give you a variety of activities that you can do. When the game launched you essentially had World Bosses, Nightmare Dungeons, a scuffed version of Helltide compared to the current version, and the ability to take on Lilith. Here are some of the content types that just feel amazing, either to run alone or with friends.

  • The Pit – Really fun and way more linear version of Greater Rifts from Diablo III. You essentially MUST run this content to level up your Glyphs as they removed that functionality from Nightmare Dungeons entirely. I like doing these, but my only real complaint is that the rewards feel pretty bad at least at lower levels.
  • Infernal Hordes – These got longer and it seems like it is way more common to get an 8 or 10-wave Hordes than the 4 or 6-wave ones. These first went into the game in Season 5, and unfortunately in Season 6, we seem to have lost the ability to craft them. This means you basically are stuck running whatever happens to drop. However if you can get 200 Aether the rewards from this feel insanely good, and running this with a friend means you just speed through the waves much faster.
  • Black Citadel – This is a three-wing “raid” that you can complete once a week for a big cache of rewards. This requires at least two players and can be done with random players. However, I would not have wanted to figure out how these mechanics worked without voice chat. Ace and I are probably going to run this as a weekly thing at least for a while because it was very rewarding in spite of the first wing being complete butts to get through.
  • Undercity – This is sort of like another version of Greater Rifts from Diablo 3, but this time instead of filling a bar to summon a boss, you are going through a fixed circuit of three dungeon floors with a boss at the end. When you enter the bosses floor the timer stops, meaning that you really do have ALL of the timer, not needing to factor in also fighting a boss. I really like that the mobs that give you bonus time are clearly marked, and I would love to see them do something like that with The Pit to more clearly mark which mobs you should absolutely kill along the way.
  • Helltide – This is still great and was improved by adding some of the functionality of the Season 2 “Bloodtide”. Basically, it is up 100% of the time and is now up in both the old world and in Nahantu at the same time, giving you two areas to farm Tree of Whispers rewards from. Very rewarding especially if you can find a group that is running the summoned boss over and over. This feels like the best way to throw some initial levels on and get to 60.
  • Summoned Bosses: Varshan, Grigoire, Beast, Lord Zir, Andariel, Duriel – These feel fine and are especially cool if you can find someone to run them with. Mostly being able to summon five or six in a row feels great and will have you swimming in uniques. Like I said above this is going to be something I save resources for so that Ace and I can run them together.

Unfortunately, much of the new and improved content has made some of the other stuff in the game feel worse for the wear. Here are some of the elements that I feel need to be improved upon.

  • Tree of Whispers – Still a cool mechanic, but I have to admit this is starting to feel a bit old compared to some of the other methods for acquiring loot. Largely I just wish that ALL of the activities gave you some amount of whispers progress each time you completed anything. For example, if a Pit run gave you 4 whispers you could keep raking in additional rewards rather than having to wait for that particular dungeon/boss to be flagged for rewards.
  • World Bosses – These honestly feel awful in their current state. They are not fun, and given that I have farmed most of the unique cosmetics from them… don’t really feel worth running unless your timing just so happens to line up with one of these spawning. I think this entire system needs to be re-evaluated because it just isn’t really keeping up.
  • Legion Events – These feel really bad now, which is a bit sad because I used to love doing these whenever they were up. Essentially they are outshined by pretty much every other piece of content in the game. I would like to see these be repeatable where you click on a portal and zone into the area or queue and are thrown into a random group of people. The whole open-world thing doesn’t really work in quite the way that I think they wanted it to. Anything they could repurpose to be instanced would just improve the content as a whole.
  • Nightmare Dungeons – Why do these still exist? I am not trying to be hyperbolic here, but by moving leveling your glyphs over to The Pit took away the reason for this content to exist. You might run the occasional Nightmare Dungeon in an effort to unlock a Legendary Aspect that you have not found in the world, but past that, there just isn’t much reason to ever do these. Initially I would say put Glyph leveling back in Nightmare Dungeons so that you had two different paths you could take to level up. Past that I would love to see them make it so repeated running of a Nightmare Dungeon each time increments your saved Aspect by one step, so that given enough time you could eventually upgrade everything to the maximum tier.

In addition to all of these methods of play, Season 6 introduced the Realmwalker and Seething realms. Essentially at fixed intervals in the world, a Realmwalker will spawn, which is a critter that we first encountered in Diablo III. When we make it sufficiently angry, it will stop and fight us, and after death summons a portal to the Seething Realm. I have mixed feelings about this event type because I really like the Seething Realms but the whole following the Realmwalker as it moves slowly to a fixed destination in the world feels bad. I would like to see this changed significantly so that you can power through the event, burn it down faster, and get your portal faster. Even if it relied upon intermissions where it summons the three large adds, have that maybe happen every 1/3rd of its health bar or something like that.

The Seething Realms themselves are amazing and I would not change anything about them. Essentially you have one short dungeon, a prompt to choose a reward type, and then a bit longer dungeon that ends in a boss fight. Quite honestly if I would do anything with Seething Realms, it would be to modify the Nightmare Dungeons to function EXACTLY like this. Nothing about Nightmare Dungeons was ever fun or novel, and they just felt like copypasta of the same design and bosses over and over with only the names really changing. If I could run Seething Realms without the whole faffing about with the Realmwalker I would do this constantly. The Open World portion feels like it is completely extraneous to this content.

What I would completely change and honestly nuke from orbit are the Seething Opals of various types. I like the concept where you can choose the types of rewards that you want to see in all of the other content in the game, but I hate the methodology that they deployed this with. Nothing is less fun than juggling 30-minute-long buffs, and all weekend while Ace and I were playing we were having to constantly remind each other to throw back up another set of buffs. I honestly hate using consumables in every game, but these feel especially egregious. Make them stack up to two hours long, persist through logouts, and drop more of them at a time so you are not feeling the press of time to try and make sure you hit every Realmwalker that spawns to stay stocked up.

Probably the worst part about the seasonal mechanics is the way that you gain faction with the Zakarum Remnants. For the most part every season has a copypaste faction system that unlocks various rewards at various steps, and each pushes you to interact with the specific mechanics for that season. This time around however you do not reliably get faction increases unless you are running a Seething Opal. This means I am way behind the curve on unlocking rewards, because I cannot remember to make sure I have a these “potions” going 100% of the time. All of the problems that I have with the Seasion 6 mechanics are fixable. Just shorting the walking time for Realmwalkers would improve it greatly. Increasing the length that an Opal lasts and giving you some visual warning that you are not running one would also go a long ways towards making it feel better. This is far from their best season, but it is in the “fun enough” category and I am hoping Seething Realms stick around in some form of another.

The game feels best when I am focused on running specific content either solo or with a specific group of friends. The game feels worst when I am needing to interact with strangers on the open world. I still have issues where the entire game freezes as new players show up on the scene of some open world event, which feels awful and can honestly be deadly if it happens to hitch at exactly the wrong moment. What I want most for Diablo IV is for them to quit trying to push the MMORPG aspect of this game, because every time they do… it feels bad. What I want instead is something akin to the Hideout system from Path of Exile that gives me easy and instant access to all of the instanced content in the game. I want to be able to stay in one place with the necessarily resources and be able to run content back to back with friends without needing to pop around the world and wait for superfluous loading screens.

Diablo IV does a damned good job when it focuses on Core-ARPG content… aka blasting through a map, killing lots of demons, and getting loot at the end. However there are still moments when I feel like the team does not understand the type of content that Core-ARPG players are looking for. Anything that destroys the efficiency of the grind is just something that players are going to look for the fastest way of shortcutting possible. I feel like the team that build this game really envisioned Diablo the MMORPG, and refuses to completely let go of that notion, in spite of everything that has pushed the game in that direction largley being shunned by the player base. Even if they don’t want to give us the ability to queue directly for things, there are still a lot more steps that could be improved to make navigating the forced world interaction a bit more smoothly. Clicking on one of the items required to summon a boss, should at a minimum highlight that location on your map similar to how a Nightmare Dungeon sigil does.

The game in its current state is honestly quite a bit of fun, once you get past the bad storytelling and the few systems that have not aged well. It is honestly probably one of the better ARPG grouping experiences and feels a lot like running content with friends did in Diablo III. I don’t think I will necessarily last terribly long when a new season rolls around, but I could definitely see Diablo IV being a bit like Diablo III was for me and Ace where it gave us a fun week of engagement before we wandered off to do other things. At the end of the day I am probably fine with that, because anything that gives us an excuse for shenaningans is a good thing in my book.

So yeah… I tore Diablo IV apart on Friday, but I feel like I spun out a bit of a more even handed discussion this morning. Are you playing Diablo IV? What are some of the things that you enjoy, and what are some of the things that you do not? Drop me a line below.

Realmwalkers

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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.

A Not-So-Small Delay

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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.

A Cup of Hatred

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern this week. I have a very long post kicking around in my skull but have not quite committed to writing it yet, or honestly even know how to approach it. However tonight the Vessel of Hatred expansion launches for Diablo IV and I am planning on giving that a go. I did not last terribly long in Season 5, but I am interested to see how things sort out for all of the changes that they are making to the game to make it a bit more Diablo III-ish. Remember I was a D3 seasonal player for over a decade so that is not necessarily a bad thing for me. I am trying to decide if I am going to try out the new Spiritborn class or do my normal Barbarian run. If I go Spiritborn I will probably go the nonsensical-sounding centipede poison build, because might as well play it before it gets nerfed.

In other weekend news, my Minecraft nether tunneling project has finally paid off. Essentially I had been branching out of my main portal in every direction looking for the Warpwood biome, so that I could collect some resources from it and be able to grow the blue-green trees in my base. I really need to plant down some sign posts because my tunnel network is getting a little hard to navigate by memory. The thing I forgot about the Warpwood Biome though, is that Endermen spawn there so I might have to create some structures to be able to farm them for Ender Pearls. I doubt I have a dedicated post to the nonsense I have been up to, because quite honestly… digging tunnels is a big boring, but I find it relaxing.

I also spent a little bit of time this weekend playing around with Tiny Glade. This game essentially is a diorama-building tool that lets you procedurally generate really cool-looking castles and cottages and then terraform the land surrounding it. I wish there was a bit more “game” here like the ability to have tiny NPCs inhabit your world akin to Sim Tower. I used to love that game and then watching the tiny pixel people going about their day. The game is gorgeous though and if you get the hankering to build some cottage-core palaces then this is probably the game you have been looking for. Players have already recreated Rivendell and other massive structures from fiction. One of the neat things about the game is that there is a daily theme to help you get started in your creations.

I’ve also played a bit more Soulframe, but honestly… one of my core complaints about the game thus far appears to be a feature. One of the plots of the game is that this group that you are fighting back against has destroyed knowledge in the world, and as a result, all of your quest objectives show up as this foreign language that you cannot read. Then as you recover knowledge, you begin to be able to translate things a letter or two at a time. This is a cool idea from a storytelling aspect, but it largely just leads to a frustrating in-game experience as you have no clue what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going. Even more frustrating is that it appears that objectives can be completed multiple times, so your sparrow friend who is supposed to show you the way to the next thing you should care about sometimes sends you back to things you have already completed before. It sure is pretty and combat feels fairly fun, but right now… I am struggling to attach to it due to the obtuse nature of the narrative. Souls players who love obtuse bullshit will probably be in their element here.

Instead of doing new things though, this weekend I fell back on the old and familiar and spent a lot of time playing Path of Exile. It is shocking how good the Currency Exchange system is and how well it works this late in the league. Normally speaking trade would be completely dead and it would be a chore to do any sort of large-volume currency swaps. However, the asynchronous nature of the Currency Exchange means that players are still actively putting things up for sale and creating open buy orders for things that they need. I sold so many Valdo’s Puzzle Boxes for 190 Chaos each, and they did not sit on the exchange for very long before getting snapped up each time.

I’ve been slowly chipping away at objectives and in theory, if I can get to 31 total challenges for the league I will be able to get the same sized totem as I had last league. I have a few candidates to get there, namely the two related to Scarabs that I am getting closer to finishing. I need to look at Sublime Starlight and see what the cheapest path to completing that is as well, given I have a pretty good backlog of the runes from the league mechanic. Arduous Atlas is easy enough, just requires a lot of brute force mapping and is only a matter of time not necessarily effort. I am slowly getting closer and closer to level 100 so the gear grinding goals or whatever that achievement is called might be within reach as well. I’m not super far from several o the ones un Unbelievable Undertakings, but those all for the most part will require me to spec into specific league mechanics to get through them.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend exploring The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and I am already a proud member of team Beds for life. I honestly have mixed feelings about the game. It is extremely well built and I think the idea of roaming around as Zelda, but so far combat feels fiddly. Legend of Zelda for me was always a combat experience first and foremost and a puzzle-solving experience as a fun secondary activity that blended along with the combat. I am not sure if Zelda gets better tools but right now killing anything feels a bit annoying so I find myself just avoiding combat whenever possible. Maybe that is the overarching theme that they were going for. I want to get deeper into the game but right now I am only a few hours in and not super far past the initial tutorial.

I have to admit I also don’t feel amazing giving Nintendo money right now. I had already bought Echoes of Wisdom, but their crusade against Switch emulation is a major bummer for me. Playing Switch games on PC has been my primary source of enjoying these games. I would buy the game on Switch and then play it on my PC via emulator because it was simply a more comfortable option than dealing with the short battery life and heft of the Switch console in handheld mode. Additionally playing via emulators allowed me to “patch” things out of games that annoyed me… for example, I ran mods to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom that removed durability from the game entirely. My guess is whatever the Switch 2 ends up being will be backward compatible and the current crop of emulators will likely successfully run all of the games on day one.

All that Nintendo will have done with their action is push the scene underground. They went from having three emulators that were open-source projects that they could easily keep tabs on… to having to deal with what will be countless unofficial forks that are being maintained by piracy distro groups. You can already buy the Miig Switch and Miig Dumper through AliExpress and the price of them keeps dropping. Basically, Nintendo has destroyed the methodology that allowed folks to buy legitimate copies and play them on legitimate Open Source emulators and will now force those folks to either play the inferior version on official hardware… or rely exclusively on distro groups and torrent sites to get the games.