Good Morning Folks. I hope you had a most wonderful extended holiday weekend. I had to work on Friday, which interrupted an otherwise solid weekend. My neighbor down the street also lost their mother and I have been helping out with some photo editing and stuff to prepare for the eventual memorial service. As far as gaming goes I spent a good chunk of Saturday grinding out things in Destiny Rising. We had a large cluster of potential strongholds and I ran all three accounts trying to utilize their map turns to unlock them. We got three and then ran them as a group on Sunday morning. The other focus of grinding was to finish out the sparrow event so that I would be caught up and ready for the next New Years event that starts in a few days. I unlocked the special sparrow and discovered that you can put stickers on your sparrows… and decorated my snowmobile with a sticker of the cutest couple Beleaguered Gwynn and a very sleepy Attal.
Other than that I have worked on my Jaren a bit and unlocked Gold Medal Certification, pushing him up into the hierarchy of my characters. This is one of those characters that grew on me the longer that I had him. Effectively for me he is sort of a better version of Ning Fei, because he has the same speed boost tech but then a whole kit that makes body shots behave like precision shots. This means I can take him into any encounter with precision shinkas without having to play a fiddly sniper character. Other than that I also finally got off my ass and ran a Legendary Mission with Wolf so that I could push him up to gold medal certification as well, which has now officially unlocked the last two ranks of perks. Any ascension points after this is just gravy because everything is now unlocked that can be unlocked currently.
The next banner has been announced and it is a bit of a dud. They are introducing an alternate universe version of Kabr, likely the one that dies in the Vault of Glass in the Destiny 1/2 timeline. As a result he has a completely different kit which I believe is Scout Rifle and Linear Fusion rifle. The thing is… I already have precision characters that I like… namely Umeko and more importantly Helhest. We are supposed to be getting a free copy of this character, so as a result it is HIGHLY unlikely that I spend any pulls on this banner. I will just bank them up and save them for a future banner. There is also nothing particularly special about the 4 stars on this banner either. Why they keep putting Ikora on these banners is beyond me, because feels like four in a row or something dumb like that. I wouldn’t mind more copies of Attal, but very much not a priority for me since she also comes from the blue perm banner.
I am not sure if I talked about it here or not, but I now have all four ascendancies unlocked on the Bear Shaman. Instead of going down the Furious Wellspring path, I opted instead just to pick up two nodes that were useful on their own right, but did not significantly tweak the way the character performed. If I had gone down the furious wellspring path, I would have likely needed to do way more gear swapping to include a Crown of Eyes to make the Druidic Champion ascendancy notable pay off. I’ve already struggled with resistances a bit and the thought of losing another slot and with it even more armor… is a bit rough. What makes it even worse though is that the Crown has -10% Fire Resistance that I do not believe can be removed by any method. It is probably the more powerful path but I like Turning of the Seasons for free exposure in presence range, and Wisdom of the Maji for essentially extra life and mana on all of my sockets.
I did do a bunch of gear swapping though to fit in a Defiance of Destiny. I picked up a cheap one with only 21% life recovery on it… which I then boosted to 25% with catalysts. This tiny bit of defiance effect was more than enough to effectively make my build feel immortal now for mapping. When you combine this with the physical damage shifting of Cloak of Flame and then combine that with Elemental Damage soaked by armor… it feels like no amount of damage is really that big of a deal for long. I am now putting more points into life regeneration on the tree since I feel like I deal more than enough damage when I go try hard and push all of my buttons. Simply bouncing around the map with molten crash is more than enough damage to comfortable clear all t15 waystones and I am sure t16s even thought I have yet to do one of those. I think really the only upgrade that I might focus on now is trying to get a new version of Fury of the King with a level 19 or 20 copy of Molten Crash in it.
I spent a decent chunk of last night trying to unlock these two mansions that are showing on the map. I think these nodes might be bugged because while I found what feels like more than enough stones in the surrounding maps, the pathways to either of these never seem to unlock. I did find a weird bug though, where because I failed one of the maps with a stone in it… it made EVERY subsequent map that unlocked by clearing one of the other maps… show up as though I had failed it, and not allow me to use tablets on it. Essentially when you are doing this thing where you are chasing stones, it can cause new nodes to appear on your atlas until you eventually uncover three stones and unlock the hidden pathway into the mansions. These nodes however appear to be imprinted based on the first one, so failing one, means you fail all of them. There are still a handful of nodes that MIGHT have stones in them, so I might as well burn through those and see if I can unlock both of these.
I’m also finally starting to try and care about the Vaal Temple. Apparently if you set it up correctly you can use it to print currency, but as Mathil says in a video that he released this morning… that is just the path to disappointment. Trying to compare your own drops, to an edited demo reel of the highest juiced content is always going to feel bad. Ultimately I arrive at this point every league where I have more than enough currency to do anything that I actually care to do with it. I’ve had decked out “Mageblood” characters and I did not enjoy them any more than I do my characters that I push just to the point of being functional. Sure having a headhunter for example is a lot of fun, but only if you also have a character build that can make the best use of it. I’ve learned that I don’t really love the blaster archetype character templates and instead like the quirkier builds that are way more tanky.
By not desensitizing myself… I can also still enjoy drops like this. Sure those exalted orbs have little value against he Divine Orb but it still feels nice when you see a bunch drop at once. Path of Exile 1 and 2 are the sort of games where you have to make your own fun. I am having a lot of fun with my Demon Fire Bear that runs amok bouncing all over the place, and that is good enough for me. However at some point today I need to stop avoiding the things that I don’t want to deal with… like the filament jam that I have in my AMS unit. I also need to spend some time properly setting up the hobby area in the other office now that I have most of the parts either printed or delivered and ready to go. I got a big self healing cutting mat yesterday so I need to clean off the existing area and start setting things up, and then figure out if I want to order one of those magnifying lamps or not.
Anyways. I hope you have a most wonderful week. I have to work today and tomorrow before being off weds… and having to work thurs and friday. Hopefully you were wiser and took most of the time off.
Good Morning Folks. This is going to be a bit of an academic topic, that stems out of a brief conversation that I had with a friend of mine about Path of Exile II and why mapping in that game just isn’t as fun. I am having a similar conversation with another friend about why the campaign feels worse for them in particular, but that is something that I am not going to dive into really. Basically there is a minimum bar of functionality that is required to get through the campaign, but once you have achieved it… the campaign is honestly one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. I landed on the term “Progress Engine” to describe what is missing in Path of Exile II. Essentially video games for me, or at least the best ones… are really adept at answering the question “what should I do next?”. They have a natural flow and set up a series of short term, medium term, and long term goals for the player and accomplishing any of them feels really good, like ticking something off a list. Path of Exile II is missing this lattice of things to do that provide a clear answer as to what you should be doing with your time. This exists through the campaign, but largely falls apart once you reach maps, and I believe is also why the attach rate at the end game is seemingly so low. Folks either roll a new character and experience the part of the game that works… the campaign… or they are so profit minded that all they care about is exalts/chaos/divines per hour and provide their own internal motivation.
Path of Exile 1 – Atlas of Worlds
So lets start off with talking about the Atlas of Worlds, which really feels like a pinnacle of progress engine design. This screen might be incomprehensible for a new player, but once you understand it… you see a bunch of carefully structured tick marks. The base atlas is made up of 115 individual maps, 100 normal maps and 15 unique maps and progressing through this rewards you with an Atlas Passive point for each new map that you run under the requirements for that tier of mapping. Early in Atlas Progression it feels like every single map that you finish is contributing towards some broader goal, and then later you start structuring your maps in such a way as to try and produce the maps that you are missing. Additionally you have 12 Favored Map slots which allow you to skew the drop chance towards dropping specific maps, and there is a sequence of boss encounters that unlock Voidstones, which allow you to increase the level almost all map drops so that eventually you reach a point where you are only getting T16s and almost always getting the maps that you want to run. This is in itself a massive reward of being able to do exactly the thing that you want to do over and over for rewards, and it is achieved through a bunch of micro objectives, that in themselves feel good to accomplish.
Path of Exile 1 – Atlas Passive Tree
The payoff for atlas progression is the Atlas Passive tree, which allows you to shape the content that you are running so that over time you can slowly focus things in on exactly the endgame that you want to be doing, and then do it ALL the time. Effectively you can reach a point where you are sustaining map drops for exactly the maps that you want to be running, and then forcing exactly the content that you want to be running on those maps. This has allowed me to deep dive into specific atlas mechanics and really learn them at a meaningful level. Atlas progression also gives you access to more Atlas Passive trees, with a new one unlocking at 50 and at 100 maps completed so that you can quickly shift up your strategies as your mood shifts. These new atlas tree unlocks are themselves medium scale objectives that feel amazing when you accomplish one. Path of Exile 1 is all about running ONLY the content that you want to run, and giving you a bunch of tools that allow you to force exactly that. If you don’t like Ultimatum, then you can literally block it from ever appearing on any map that you run. As a picky eater… that gets squicked out by specific things in my food… I will always appreciate systems that allow me to granularly exclude the parts of a game that I do not want to participate in.
Path of Exile 1 – Challenge Screen
Then once all of this progression is finished, you have the final lap… of really long term goals which are made up by the Challenge system. Each league there are 40 challenges that vary from things you are always going to accomplish by just completing the campaign, to really edge case things like aggressively running whatever the new league mechanic is, and fully exploring it. Gear Grinding Goals or whatever the final one is called in a given league is almost always going to include things like leveling all the way to 100, and running a bajillion invitations or similar really long ranged goals. They give you an optional set of rewards to gather up, usually with some MTX associated with it and a Totem Pole that grows in size each time you get to specific numerical milestones. These are great reasons to keep engaged after you have effectively arrived at and conquered general mapping. Getting 40 of 40 is a massive commitment and often times requires you to start being focused on knocking these out as soon as possible. Many of them the longer you wait the harder they become to accomplish, because the trade economy means there are fewer copies of any given thing once folks check out and stop playing. However at its core Path of Exile 1 is really good at presenting a series of objectives for you to knock down and giving you a reason for doing all of them.
Path of Exile II – Atlas of Worlds
So now let’s compare the systems in Path of Exile II, and we will start with their version of the Atlas of Worlds. Instead of a fixed series of maps that drop and needing to complete each of them, you have an endlessly generating sprawl of procedurally generated nodes that effectively sprawl out forever in any given direction. Mixed in among these nodes are unique maps that provide rewards for completing them the first time, as well as specific mechanics that you can only find in these nodes. The core progression system involves bumping up your map tiers by fighting boss maps, which guarantee you a waystone drop of one higher tier, and finding corruption nexus nodes and then cleansing them on higher map difficulties. The reward for doing so is 5 Atlas Passives, but the time between Corruption Nexus nodes varies wildly based on luck of the draw. You could spawn into an area with three corrupted areas next to each other, and be able to rip through your early atlas progression really quickly. Or you could be unlock and spend hours roaming around the random grid trying to find the next area. This delayed progression ends up making each individual map feel less important, and more of a chore when you run them. Additionally you can never reach a point where you are ONLY running the maps you want, and there are going to be specific layouts that you hate, and inevitably they seem to always be gating your progress towards the nodes that you need… forcing you to run them.
Path of Exile II – Atlas Passives
Then there is the Atlas Passive system where each individual node feels less significant than the nodes in the POE1 passive tree. Additionally you are limited to only the most generic mechanics on the base atlas, and each of the individual league mechanics have their own atlas with their own progression system, that only moves the needle forward by doing increasingly more difficult boss encounters in each of those league mechanics. Traditionally bossing and mapping have been considered to be different objectives on Path of Exile 1, but in Path of Exile II you have to do both with your build in order to sufficiently progress your Atlas of Worlds and making mapping feel more rewarding… requires you to also fight a bunch of escalating boss fights in order to achieve it. In practice it just feels like there are large periods of time where you are setting up for your next burst of progression, but not really seeing much benefit from it. There are no favored map slots, no equivalent to void stones, and no challenges… so it feels like there is less progress to be had that feels tangible and provides a meaningful difference in the way you interact with the game.
Path of Exile II – Currency Drops
Then there is the general problem that Waystone drops feel like they are super rare. On average I see one waystone drop per map, so I am almost always just barely replenishing the resources that I spent to engage with mapping in the first place. I have invested in every single waystone drop node in the Atlas Passive tree, and it has not made a meaningful difference in the rate at which I find them. Then there is the problem where mapping in POE2 just has more friction in general, since you no longer get a default six portals per map, but instead get a limited amount of portals based on how many mods a given map has. If you run a juicy 8 mod map, you get a single attempt at it… which makes death feel awful when it happens. It rapidly becomes a scenario where the only thing that matters about mapping is currency acquisition, so that you can either afford to buy more waystones and tablets to make up for any of your failures. There is no real progression for the sake of progression system that is guiding you, and once you finish the campaign it largely feels like you are dumped out into a shapeless abyss without many guard rails to guide you. I think in its current state, the only players that really stick around for long are the financially motivated ones that care the most about divines per hour, because the motiviation to keep pushing to knock out objectives is truly lacking.
There are a bunch of different ways that games generate these progression engines. Probably my favorite example to drop upon is Guild Wars 2, which is the game for people who like focusing on various objectives. You have the Wizards Vault which is essentially what that game refers to as daily quests, which has daily, weekly, and seasonal objectives. Then when you are roaming around the maps there are constantly events firing off which provide micro objectives allowing a player to ping pong between them, feeling fullfilled while accomplishing little bursts of activity. Then the achievements section of the hero panel is filled with various objectives, many of which are made up of smaller multi part objectives giving you various sundry things that take hours, tens of hours, and even hundreds of hours to accomplish. For the “number goes up” players there is a global achievement score for your account that unlocks various minor reward chests each time you hit a new milestone.
Guild Wars 2 – Crafting Legendary Armor
Then for the folks who want really long term grinds… there are Legendary Weapons and Legendary Armor pieces that are shared account wide and give you more flexibility in the way you build your characters. Even these come in various flavors that will dicate just how much effort they require. The legendary starter kits give you a massive boost in this progress and shave hundreds of hours off the process. Then there are things like the Gen 2 legendary weapons where you have to jump through a long series of hoops to craft the precursor weapon before factoring in all of the resources required to turn that then into a legendary weapon. All these serve as mile markers on your account and ways of visually being able to show and track your progression as a player. Any time I am faced with not knowing what to do next, I dive into the various legendaries that I have started and see what sort of progress I can make towards them. There are also really low effort things like world boss or meta trains that you can hop on to feel like you are making incremental but generally non-specific progression.
Destiny Rising – Events Screen Fighting for Attention
I would be remiss if I did not talk at least a bit about the other end of the spectrum… namely mobile games with the sort of progression engines that they have. Namely they are all about deluging you with a bunch of required systems that themselves only require a few minutes of your time… but have so many stacked on top of each other that you feel like you need to spend a few hours a day working on them or your risk falling behind. These are all games with largely micro objectives, with limited medium term… and some really long and financially egregious long term objectives. Completing any one gacha character is unobtainium without a multiple hundred dollar financial outlay. Then there is the challenge where both the amount of time that you can commit to something, and the amount of progress that time will earn you are hard gated… so that they will keep driving you towards the cash shop. Some of these are worse than others, and I rather enjoy Destiny Rising that I am using as an example. However it can be exhausting to log in and see thirty windows lit up waiting on your attention that all require just a few moments of your time. This is esssentially progression engines stretched to the point of breaking and is maybe a bridge too far for most players.
POE2DB Player Fall-off in Path of Exile II by League
Fate of the Vaal has so far had the fastest drop off of any Path of Exile II league. POE1 Leagues tend to have more of a slowly declining plateau that they reach quickly that slides slowly as the player count drops off as we get closer to the next league. POE2 on the other hand tends to be pretty rapid and pretty constant, not really starting to plateau until you are a few months into the league. My guess behind this is that as folks get into maps, they tend to drop out of the game because there really isn’t much connective tissue there to keep them engaged. The game is missing a progression engine to keep them invested in the long term. The currency aquisition folks stick around because they are self motivated by their own version of “number goes up”, but I think they tend to be a much smaller portion of the larger pie, especially with Path of Exile II. Completing the campaign feels like it represents a larger part of the game. Not only does a full campaign run take much longer, but it also is much more meaningful than anything that comes after it.
Path of Exile 1 – Delve Endless Grid
I love Delve in Path of Exile, and for the most part the POE2 atlas system seems inspired by this system of endless progression. The problem is however that Delve is a bunch of micro objectives, with any given delve path taking a few minutes, whereas even the fastest maps are at least 5 minutes because the layouts are not as clean as they were in Path of Exile 1. Bad nodes feel more damning when it takes longer to clear them. In Delve you can pretty quickly rush to the next objective node, and as a result none of them feel that bad. You chase the nodes that you care about, which are more clearly marked on the map, and each of them feel super rewarding because the is a tiny bit of effort to clear any of them. It isn’t so much that I want Path of Exile II to just copy the homework of the Atlas Progression system from Path of Exile 1, and more a case that the Delve Atlas just does not feel good. I am open to other solutions, but whatever the case I think they need to rework the entire atlas progression system to give us more bursts of short term progression, rather than the aimless wandering nature of trying to find the next bit of progression that we have right now.
Anyways. Like I said this is more of an academic ramble than anything else. Did I completely miss the point? Drop me a line below.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off the show with a discussion about the hidden episode of this season’s Game Changers over on Dropout TV. Bel regales the group with his adventures in the endgame of Destiny Rising and how it really is a better Destiny game than anything we have gotten in years. Grace instantly sells us on Star Birds just by telling us its from the folks behind Dorfromantik. More than that, it has the art style of Kurzgesagt so you adventure the galaxy with adorable birbs. There is currently an event going on in Guild Wars 2 where you can run random fractals with complete strangers, and it is delightful and stupidly rewarding. Bel talks a bit about Borderlands 4, and while it is probably the best Borderlands since the second game… it has some massive performance issues on PC. Kodra talks about the recent board game A Place for My Books, and most of the crew dives into further discussion about Silksong.
Good Morning Folks. Happy Day After Silksong launched, if you celebrate it. So for those who were confused as to why pretty much every digital storefront died around 9 am CDT… Silksong the sequel to Hollow Knight was released and it was exceptionally anticipated by many. I enjoyed what I played of the first game and as such I had planned on picking up this release if for no reason to support its particular brand of indie development. Also they could have charged way the hell more for the game but are instead charging $20 for the game… $32 if you want to be fancy and also get the soundtrack. Essentially all digital storefronts cratered as the game released. I intermittently tried to complete my purchase and did not succeed until 12:30… and even then it errored out a few times before it finally went through. While I did not see it with my own eyes, I heard from friends that the Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation stores all were struggling as well under the weight of users. Why they did not have this up for pre-order ahead of time… is beyond me.
I think it is safe to assume that they sold several million copies when you factor in all of the platforms it is available on. We have zero data from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, or GOG… but at least on Steam it held the top seller slot for most of yesterday. This is pretty freaking impressive for a $20 title, because the Steam sales charts are based on dollar amount of sales not volume of purchases which is why the Steam Deck is habitually listed near the top, and this morning Borderlands 4 reclaimed that spot with its $70 base version and $120 super deluxe version. Additionally it hit a peak concurrency of over a half million players. There are a couple of dozen folks on my Steams friends list who have purchased the game and quite a few spent most of yesterday playing it. Basically this is an instant hit, and will probably be the game of the year for many people.
I played a tiny bit yesterday just because I could, but I did not make it terribly far. I failed the first boss I encountered and will have to dedicate some time to get used to the diagonal slash instead of the down slash. I have to admit, this is not my favorite style of Metroidvania. I greatly prefer the games that are way more about exploration and gear acquisition, than the ones that are purely about mechanical aptitude. This is why I greatly preferred Bloodstained to Hollow Knight, but most of my friends are the exact opposite. My old man reflexes struggle anymore with some of the movement in these games. I love the artwork and the vibes though, so at some point I want to finish Hollow Knight and then play my way through Silksong. I think both are exceptionally cool, but also are not necessarily the thing I was dying to play like so many were. I did however want to join the zeitgeist at least partially, so threw them my $20. I also thought it was an interesting cultural moment because I cannot remember a time when a single game brought multiple storefronts to their knees.
I spent most of last night playing Path of Exile II, but I have also been noodling around with a mobile game. I am not sure when Destiny Rising officially launched, but I was briefly an alpha tester for it some time ago. Playing it on the phone was perfect cromulet, but also not really my jam. With the full release of the game comes a lightweight emulator option that offers some pretty good mouse and keyboard PC performance, as well as the option to play it with a controller if that is more of your jam. If you have not been around this blog for very long… you would potentially not know just how much of these pages I devoted to both Destiny and Destiny 2 until Bungie pissed me off with all of their content vaulting. When I saw that some of the more diehard Destiny streamers were picking up this game, I had to give it another shot, and honestly I am pretty surprised by just how good it plays.
There are significant differences in the way that this game works. Namely from a story perspective this is essentially an alternate universe version of the tried and true tale of the Traveler. More importantly however this is a hero shooter, and that means instead of playing a character that you create for yourself.. you are playing the character of wolf, a newly resurrected character where you can choose the gender and appearance for similar to many other Gacha main characters. The key difference here however is that this is a fully fleshed out character and seems exceptionally well rounded and not something you will immediately toss aside the first time you succumb to the lure of chasing a 5 star banner. Every character has a loadout with a specific set of super abilities, and a weapon pairing. This means that there are going to be characters that you might like the weapons for but hate the super and vice versa. The combo of hunter double jump, auto rifle, grenade launcher, and this big damned anime robot sword slash attack seem like a solid combo for a base character.
Because it is a mobile gacha game there are of course reward tracks and banners, but I have not made it far enough into the game to unlock the latter. In fact it has not really asked me for any money so far. I’ve essentially only been through the first few missions, but it seems like there is a challenge track that will unlock one of two premium characters. There is a training room that lets you test all of the characters and I am pretty much going to choose Xuan Wei because he is essentially what we would refer to as a Striker Titan. It is heavily Chinese influenced as are pretty much all Gacha games, and it also has chase Waifu characters that everyone seems to want. There is a Hot Goth girl with a Scythe attack that everyone seems to be talking about chasing in the online discourse.
What is impressive however is just how good the performance is for what is essentially an emulated android game. It feels like Destiny. They have nailed the gunplay and you can also pet the cats, which is the most important bit. Actually the whole cat thing seems to be a mini game in that each one you encounter wants some sort of food. I have no clue what you get for collecting the food and correctly delivering them to the right cats, but I am sure I will evetually do this thing. If you loved Destiny at any point and faded away from the mainline game for various reasons, I highly suggest you check out this particular brand of nonsense. It is pretty solid. I need to get used to the phone client though so I can add this to my late night daily chores gaming while waiting on falling to sleep. Right now I play a minimal amount of Pokemon, and AFK Journey… and could at least pick up the daily login rewards for this game if I did not play any of it on the computer.
Anyways. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will see you again on Sunday when I post the new AggroChat show.
