Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we start off with a topic about in-game events, and how wildly different they can be between various games. Specifically, this topic was inspired by the Star Citizen IAE 2953 event but we give into many different game events. Ash gets around to playing Armored Core 6 and talks about how awful the intro to the game is. Bel laments how sometimes maybe being a more Open World experience makes a game worse. Specifically, this is inspired by Jedi Survivor and how it is a much less tight game than Fallen Order. Shocking to no one we dive into another Path of Exile topic and more specifically how Kodra and Bel completed some dumb Trial of the Ancestors’ achievements. Bel has finished Alan Wake II and gives the game another hard plug and then talks a bit about how Guild Wars 2 Secrets of the Obscure is really good.
One of the problems with finishing up a truly phenomenal game… is that it is occasionally hard to move past it. I had decided that I would be in a bit of a narrative phase given that I am mostly done with the Trials of the Ancestor league in Path of Exile and that I have a few weeks until the launch of the next league on December 8th. I have a list of games I wanted to play this year… but never quite got around to it. Top of the list was Alan Wake II of course, and I have now finished it… but last night I had some trouble easing into the next adventure.
Another game this year that I was deeply looking forward to was Jedi Survivor. However much like Fallen Order… I floundered a bit when I first started playing it. I decided that I would go after this as my next game to finish, and I went back and forth about whether or not it was a good idea to start from scratch. I only made it a few planets into the game and I think it would have been easy enough to retrace my steps, but instead, I decided to essentially wing it and just keep pushing forward. Thankfully I had never actually uninstalled the game and didn’t need to bother with trying to track down my save games.
I apparently had left off on a phase where I was forced to do a lot of platforming and careful gliding between platforms over a giant pit of magma. Luckily my muscle memory came back pretty quickly and the puzzle I was being asked to solve involved something brand new to me so I could learn on the go. The first thing I did was rebind a number of keys because hitting 2 and 3 on the Hotbar was a bit awkward while also having to navigate myself with WASD. I moved them down to 7 and 8 which are way more comfortable for me to hit on the keypad on the side of my g600 MMO mouse. There are probably a few other things that I want to shift around a bit. I know that this is a game designed for a controller but I fought through playing it with a mouse and keyboard for the first game and I will struggle forth again because the actual combat feels way more comfortable for me with a mouse.
I did not make it terribly far last night, but I did complete the series of puzzles that involved the gaping chasms… collected some data and am now about to face off against some Imperials as I attempt to buy folks time to evacuate a safe house. I did manage to pick up some gun parts and crafted something a bit more to my taste as far as blasters go. That is probably my favorite part about these games is collecting bits and bobs and crafting my own lightsaber and now blaster. I am hoping as I go forward with the game I will begin to feel it. At the moment I am nowhere near as connected to this particular story as I was the first one.
I am sure I will get into the swing of things as I go… but honestly, I feel like this game might be too open-ended. I know that is ironic considering how much I have praised other games for having a big explorable world… but I am not sure it really serves the story here. The set pieces are wonderful, but I gotta say I enjoyed the opening scenes on Coruscant far more than I have these wide-open planets. I think Fallen Order benefited by having a fairly linear story that was being told. Sure there were hidden places to find along the golden path… but there was still a very clear golden path to follow. It feels a bit like a Ubisoft collect all the things game… which I can’t say is necessarily a good thing. I’m hoping once I get engaged in the plot thread I will ignore this and just push forward.
The other big game that I am hoping to make a dent in during this break is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. If I manage to wrap these two up I will be pretty happy, but if I do and have room left over… I am probably going to play some more Zelda or maybe actually finally try and get into Final Fantasy XVI. The tail end of the year tends to be when I have the mental power to focus on story-driven adventures.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off with a topic that has been bumped for time a few weeks in row as we discuss how complex video games can stick the landing with their denouement. Bel has been playing Alan Wake 2 and talks about how Remedy finally has achieved seamless integration of FMV and rendered gameplay. We talked a bit about Risk of Rain 2 and the buildcraft surrounding the game. Kodra has officially gone further in Path of Exile than the rest of us and talks about his adventures in bossing. We wrap up the show discussing how Path of Exile does a poor job of telling its story in spite of actually having a very good one compared to other ARPGs.
Morning Folks! Yesterday we got the name reveal, teaser trailer, full reveal date, and league start information for the next Path of Exile league. It is going to be called Affliction and seems to have some sort of a curse-based theme. This morning I am going to kick my navel-gazing into high gear and spout some speculative nonsense as I overanalyze way too few frames of animation. The concrete details that we have so far are that on the 30th of November, we will be getting the full reveal stream that will go over all of the features of this league. Then on December 8th, the league will start for PC players and for console folks on the 13th. If you want to watch the full teaser trailer before I obsess over possibly made-up details… you can check out the link here.
First of all… I have screwed with the images a bit to lighten them but unfortunately, the sheer amount of darkness somewhat crushes the detail. I’ve seen folks stating that they think this is the delve, but I can’t really follow that thread. Sure everything is bluish-black like you see while delving, but it also very clearly seems to be in a forest at night, and the delve forest biomes look totally different than this. You also don’t really see the swirling shadows that you normally do at the far corners of Delve.
Next, we are going to skip to a scene a bit later in the video when the supplicant seems to be devolving into a swarm of insects. These are Wetas, and I only know this because the Weta is already in the game as a pet… and is a New Zealand thing. It is essentially a giant nocturnal insect… and if you want some nightmare fuel take a gander at this image. I looked so you don’t have to. To me at least that very clearly looks like a Ritual totem from the Ritual League mechanic. This makes me think that the Affliction League is somehow tied to Ritual either as the existing mechanic or something that reworks, expands, and ultimately replaces Ritual. Since we just participated in the Blast from the Past League which featured Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra… I’ve wondered if the insect swarm could work similarly to how Sentinels buff minions around you and also increase the loot chances.
This isn’t a character that I recognize, but they do sorta remind me of the way Einhar is dressed. Einhar is an Ezomyte and his people worship beast gods known as the first ones. It makes me wonder if this could be some sort of Ezomyte shaman that we are seeing in front of this Ritual totem. Another possibility that I have wondered about is if this league will feature updates and changes to the way that Talismans work, as right now they are mostly a quirk of the past and not something that players really purposefully seek out. In Crucible we saw GGG reworking Breach and Abyss and I feel like that is something that they are going to keep doing. So I could see that this league is tied to a revamp of Ritual and maybe a revamp of Talismans and maybe some skill changes focused on the way that curses work and are applied in the game. Of course, this is all me grasping at straws and could be nothing.
I would love to see the Sentinel League mechanic return in some form… and I feel like the Blast from the Past event had to be purposeful in some way. I don’t even really care that much about the recombinators, but I have loved being able to pop sentinels to get juicy bursts of loot. Lake of Kalandra being revisited has made me realize that that mechanic while cool… really needs to be reworked completely before it would feel good. The wildly variable difficulty level of the maps just feels bad… and I think I would rather see something along the lines of how the nodes in Expedition work so that each tile you place gives you boon/debuff to everything in the finally crafted map. I think it would be also cool to see some sort of return of the Crucible mechanic. I thought skill trees on items made for some really interesting build possibilities. I think everyone would love to see Tattoos from this league go Standard as well, but I feel similar to Kalandra… the actual Trial of the Ancestors mechanic needs some work. There is just too rapid of a transition from cakewalk to impossible without cheating by abusing crowd control mechanics.
Anyways! Happy Friday! Happy almost Thanksgiving week! What would you like to see in the upcoming Affliction League in Path of Exile? Drop me a line below.
