Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have almost too many topics, which is odd because normally this only happens when we skip a week. We start off with a discussion about Paradise Killer, the first game from the folks who created Promise Mascot Agency. From there, we talk a bit about the current round of Hugo Award Nominations since Thalen gets to vote. Ash talks about the existence of Beat Weaver, but is NDA bound and cannot go into much detail. This is essentially a spiritual successor to Frequency and Amplitude from Harmonix. We talk a bit about Vampire Crawlers and its shifting the Vampire Survivors formula to turn-based Might and Magic style combat. Bel has been playing Space Dad Simulator in the form of Pragmata, and it is delightful. Final Fantasy XIV had its Anaheim Fanfest, and we talked about all of the announcements that came out surrounding the upcoming Evercold expansion. Diablo IV Lord of Hatred launches on Monday and seems to be fixing most of the issues with the game, and Bel is looking forward to playing a SRS Warlock. We talk a bit about Crunchyroll and the recent anime trends, and then devolve into a bunch of us just suggesting various anime. Finally, Ace and Bel geek out about Eurovision because it is coming up in a few weeks, and they are pumped.
Good Morning, folks. I had to deal with labwork and a doctor’s visit this morning, so I am getting a bit of a late start on the whole blogging thing. Over the last few days, I have gone from not really being interested in Diablo IV Lord of Hatred to legitimately being pumped to play next Monday evening when it drops. Yesterday we got a Campfire Chat, but I have to admit it was a much better version of this construct than we have had previously. Generally, these have been deeply tone deaf and smarmy with a constant refrain of “we hear you”, but also not actually significantly changing the game. Lord of Hatred to Diablo IV feels like Reaper of Souls was to Diablo III, where they effectively changed everything about the game for the better. Of course, there were some weird product placements like some sort of collaboration with a guitar manufacturer, Korn writing a song for the soundtrack, and an inexplicable crossover with Trolli gummy worms. This is just a Blizzard thing, and sadly, we are not getting back the Horde flavor of Mountain Dew, which was fucking amazing.
I highly suggest watching the entire campfire chat, or at least something like the summary that Raxx released, because there is a lot of information there. I am going to talk through a couple of the things that really stood out to me. Probably the biggest is the fact that we are ACTUALLY getting crafting in the game with the addition of the Horadric Cube. This has been a problem-solving plot device many times in the Diablo franchise, and this time around, it seems to be replacing something like the crafting bench, harvest crafting, and crafting currency from Path of Exile. You can, in theory, take an item from blue to yellow, to unique, all while crafting additional affixes onto it to eventually roll something interesting. One of the big things that I noticed going back for Midnight is how much Blizzard has seemingly learned from other MMORPGs, and it feels like FINALLY Diablo admits that they exist in a genre… and should look to the exemplars of that genre for inspiration. Blizz has always had a bit of an ego that they were innovators, and should blaze a new trail… but at least in the case of Diablo, it just felt like they were providing a game void of expected “basic” features.
The other thing that really excites me is the introduction of War Plans. Diablo has had a bunch of relatively uninteresting activities, and not a lot of pressing reason for you to be doing any of them. Some of these are actually pretty fun, like Nightmare Dungeons, but it always sort of felt like there was nothing really pushing you to do them other than occasionally the open world objectives. War Plans, in theory, will be that guiding force that rewards you for doing a certain number of things in a row, with fixed rewards for doing them. This reminds me far less of Path of Exile mapping and more of Echo Chains that just introduced into Last Epoch. Still having any sort of guiding force in this game is a massive positive in my book, especially since they are also giving us a way to throw our thumb on the scale and determine what sorts of activities and rewards we receive. While this is not the Breach or Expedition or Blight style reusable content that grows season after season that I really hope they start creating, it is at least a massive leap in a better direction.
The other big takeaway from yesterday is that it looks like there has been a complete changing of the guard from the Campfire Chats that I found so grating. I hope everything that we are seeing is a sign that we have some fresh ideas feeding into the game and trying to actually make it competitive with the other franchises. Right now, as an ARPG player, I care about when Path of Exile 1 Leagues start, Path of Exile 2 Leagues, and Last Epoch leagues… but Diablo IV has never factored into that calculus of how I plan my gaming. I would love there to be some pressure that makes me want to choose a Diablo season over some other game. I think that would be pretty freaking cool because it will continue to push ALL of the games in this pack forward to try and create more interesting stuff. What makes this genre so different from MMORPGs is that they are ultimately designed for short bursts of massive engagement… and then folks fade away until the next exciting release. Thing is, so long as you keep giving us good shit…. we will keep showing up for our infusion of crack.
The other thing making me excited is that it looks like Warlock might support one of my favorite minion playstyles. Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons short-term minions, and you can give them something called Minion Instability Support to make them explode. This also exists in Last Epoch in the form of Volatile Zombies, and I really like the spammy playstyle of summoning minions and then making them prematurely explode when I oversummon to the limit. Command Fallen for the Warlock appears to be this sort of short-term, exploding minions gameplay, and I am all here for it. I think I have mostly cobbled together something that looks like a build. Granted, this is all based on the Maxroll D4 Planner, and I have no clue how up-to-date this information is, but I expect at least the shell of this build to survive. I am sure I will tweak and adjust as I go, but I think this more or less represents a reasonable template of abilities. I can’t honestly remember how many ability picks we get, but there is a ritual ability that I will add if I have more slots. This is pretty much what I am going to yolo come Monday evening, and we will see if I can make something stick.
One parting shot across the bow. This is a screenshot from the presentation that shows the release schedule. It looks like the game is dropping at 6 pm my time, and I expect to be there with bells on. There will also be Twitch drops and all the normal fanfare. Reportedly, the game was available for preloading yesterday, so you can have everything ready to go come Monday. I admit, this is the first time I have been legitimately amped to play Diablo IV since release. I hope to see at least some of you doing the nonsense with me.
Good Morning, Folks. Yesterday, we got the teaser trailer dropped for the next Path of Exile II league/expansion, and it was extremely brief. More importantly, though, the community has been clamoring for some sort of notice as to when it was dropping. Folks take off work for these things, and in many cases need a decent amount of notice to get the time off. The good news is we are getting a reveal stream on May 7th. The bad is that the league itself is not dropping until May 29th, which is a significant delay from the original intended “every four months” pace of a POE1 and POE2 league. There will be gnashing of teeth, especially among the folks who only play Path of Exile II about this delay. For the Path of Exile diehards, SirGog announced yesterday that he was going to do some sort of a private league, and those are usually interesting. I’ve participated in one of these leagues before, and in that case, everything dropped scoured so you were forced to craft your own gear. It was interesting in an academic sense, but if that ends up being the case again, I am likely going to skip it.
The trailer shows a giant megastructure rising up out of the ground, and I personally think what we are seeing is somehow representative of the new atlas. This has been a feature that has been promised for a while, because the Delve-like Endless Atlas has generally been poorly received by the playerbase. As someone who loves Delve… I have to say that for whatever reason, when you apply this same concept to mapping, it just does not work. At least based on player behaviors in Path of Exile 1, folks tend to gravitate to a few map layouts that they really like and then run them over and over. Truth be told, the new way that the Atlas works in POE1 is brilliant, and I would love to see something like that translated over to POE2. I think the concept of Endless Atlas is cool, but I would love to see it as a side content. The reason why Delve works so well is that any given node only takes a few minutes to run, whereas every map in POE2 feels like it takes an eternity. It would be cool if they translated the Endless Atlas over to a sequence of micro objectives, building a sort of Delve 2.0 in the game with clearly marked rewards on each of the nodes.
Since POE2 is so far out, that has pretty much cemented the idea that I am going to be diving into Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred when it drops on April 28th. Yesterday Blizz released the opening cinematic, and I am maybe more interested than any of the Akarat nonsense has given me to this point. Right now, unless something drastic changes, I plan to try out the new Warlock class when the expansion drops next Tuesday. That is a chemo day for me, but generally speaking, I feel okay for the first few days after the poison is delivered… and then go downhill drastically as I approach the weekend. If, for whatever reason, I do not vibe with the Warlock’s particular form of summoning minions, then I will probably fall back on playing a Paladin. I think I will dig this expansion more than previous ones because I have figured out how to macro multiple abilities to the same button on my G600 mouse, given that D4 tends to be “spam every button on cooldown” gameplay, and I can reduce that madness to a single click. I did this with the most recent Last Epoch season and it worked swimmingly.
I am honestly vaguely excited about Lord of Hatred, because it seems like Blizzard has made some significant steps in the right direction to turning this game into something that has some lasting draw. The big problem that I have had up until this point with D4 is that leveling is generally pretty fun, but once you hit the end game… it feels boring and repetitive, and they ruined the one thing that was actually fun. Ace and I used to group up together and pool our resources and do a bajillion boss summons for drops… and they recently made it so that you only get loot if you are providing materials. The force multiplier of playing with friends stopped functioning, and as a result… we mostly just stopped playing together. Wudijo is pretty much one of the diehard Diablo creators, and he has released a bunch of information once the press embargo was lifted. He released another short video this morning showing off the new map overlay, which is pretty huge. That was one of the things that annoyed me the most about D4. You could not simply toggle the map overlay to stay on, rather than having to keep manually popping it up.
In the meantime, nothing has really been hitting gamewise for me, so I am back to playing Last Epoch. I contemplated rolling a Warpath Void Knight, but instead have gone back to leveling my Fire Aura Spellblade. I keep chasing slightly better gear, so that hopefully I can improve my survival. Ward feels way squishier than Health and Regeneration/Leech. It just seems like all of my ward evaporates at exactly the wrong time, and Omen windows seem to be the hardest content for me. Essentially, I have gotten to the point where I clear everything else in the echo but the Omen, and then do that last so that if I die, I have at least completed the echo and can move on with my life. Right now, I am farming the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline in an attempt to get a better pair of Frostbite Shackles. I love the new corruption system, but I refuse to “yolo corrupt” items and risk not having a copy… so I want multiple copies to play with. I could also use more copies of Last Steps of the Living for the same reason.
Anyways, time for me to wrap this up and move on with life. Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV expansion when it drops next Tuesday? Are you looking forward to the Path of Exile II League and bummed by the delays? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Folks. I am bad at realizing what time of the year it is… and that my blog and podcast anniversaries are approaching. As a result, last Friday, aka April 17th, was the 17th anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut. The left side of the above image is one of the earliest revisions of the site as saved by the Wayback Machine. Then, of course, on the right side, you have what the site looks like now. I’ve not made any really significant revisions to the look and feel of the site in a very long time, other than to shim in more artwork from Ammo as I commission something else. There was a point where I cared about readership, but honestly, at this point, I view this blog as a sort of outsider art project. You either care about me and what I have to say, or you don’t, and I can’t be much bothered to tailor my writing to follow whatever trends might be happening. Many of you have been with me through the death of animals, the loss of my spouse of thirty years, and now, as I am dealing with cancer. I’ve tried to be as honest as I can be with my thoughts and feelings as I went through all of it. Without really intending to, I somehow built a community of folks who care about me, and I appreciate that so much when things get low.
I also completely forgot to talk about the Anniversary of AggroCha,t the podcast that I started in 2014. This past weekend, we recorded episode 656, and started this nonsense back on April 13th of 2014. Listening to the early episodes makes me cringe super hard, but I think it is more about how different human beings many of us were back then. A lot of stuff had not happened that shook the core of both our gaming roots and, honestly, American civilization, and it shows. Folks have come and gone from the roster, but the original core of Me, Ash, and Kodra has remained pretty rock solid through all of it. It’s only gotten better as we added everyone that represents our current core of Ace, Ammo, Ashgar, Kodra, Tam, and Thalen. At this point, it is way more about hanging out together at a fixed time and talking about discussions that we don’t necessarily make time for at other moments than anything else. For both the blog and the podcast, they are not money-making ventures, nor have I ever wanted them to be. However, I am still pretty proud of us sticking with this for as long as we have.
In gaming terms this weekend, I wrapped up my 36th challenge out of 40 and think that I am going to wind down Path of Exile for the moment. Mirage League was a lot of fun, but I have more or less accomplished everything that I care to accomplish. At this point, I would only be moving forward with the acquisition of currency for the sake of acquiring currency. We should be getting news on the Path of Exile II league pretty soon, and next Tuesday is the drop for the Diablo IV Lord of Hatred expansion. While I have not fallen in love with Diablo IV in the same way as I did Diablo III, it should still be fun to poke around and play with the new Warlock class a bit. I think I have also reached a point where I have wound down my interest in Last Epoch as well. Those seasons are great for a week or two, but I quickly run out of things that I actually care to do, at least much faster than I do in a Path of Exile league. All of the ARPGs are in a pretty great state, and they all become somewhat interchangible for my joy at any given moment.
On a complete whim, over the weekend, I picked up Crimson Desert and started playing that. I am honestly not sure what I think of this game yet. Combat is mostly pretty fun, but movement and the pace of the game in general are a bit on the slow end. The world is gorgeous, and there is a lot of interesting stuff going on. I was not sure what sort of game to really consider this, but after playing, I think it is more akin to something like Dragon’s Dogma. If I had my druthers, it would perform exactly like The Witcher 3, but I do not get what I want most of the time. I am not entirely certain how much I am going to play it, because I have already had moments where the slow pace was a bit too plodding for me. I was also immediately annoyed when Steam popped up the “you should play this with a controller” message, but the game itself performs perfectly fine with a mouse and keyboard. There is a rumor that we are just about to get another expansion for The Witcher 3, and if that happens, it means I am going to drop whatever I am doing and play that.
I have a backlog of a lot of recent titles that I really need to get around to playing. Greedfall: The Dying World moved out of early access to its final release version in March, and as a result, I am now interested in playing that. Greedfall was a deeply imperfect game, but it was doing a lot of things that I really liked. I am also somewhat interested in diving into Star Wars Outlaws and the next part of the Final Fantasy VII reimaginging trilogy. There is also Death Stranding 2, which might honestly be the right sort of game for the weird time that I am going through. I played the first one at the height of COVID isolation, and as a result, it felt deeply poignant. Since I am similarly greatly limiting my exposure to other human beings due to the chemotherapy wrecking my immune system, it might produce similar results. I have more games than I can ever play. If I am being perfectly honest, I just have to figure out something that lands right and brings me joy since I have wound down my old reliable partner in Path of Exile.
Anyways… I have been writing this post for several hours now. I need getting distracted by either work or chemo brain, and figure I should wrap things up. What are you playing right now that is bringing you joy? Drop me a line and let me know.
