Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back but still down several members of our crew. This week we start off with some discussion about Diablo IV Season 2 and whether or not the game is good now. From there we talk a lot about the events of the Star Citizen CitizenCon. Super Mario Wonder has come out and we talk about the experiences with the game so far. Tam talks a bit about Endless Dungeon and how it might actually be fun in multiplayer. Kodra shares some news about an upcoming SudokuCon Fundraiser stream he is going to be part of this week. Finally, we talk a bit about Cities: Skylines 2 and the changes it brings to the genre.
I am exceptionally groggy this morning, which makes little sense considering how much I slept last night. Yesterday I got up around 3 a.m. so that I could run my wife to the airport. She is on business in the D.C. metro and was sending me photos from her adventures throughout the day. My personal favorites were some of the ones she sent me from one of the Smithsonian museums. There was a cool Rosie the Riveter Lego set but unfortunately, the glass was super polished and I did not feel like sharing a photo that had my wife’s reflection in it without her knowledge. Basically, yesterday was a bit of a blur. It is not often that I feel my age, but trying to survive on caffeine and very little sleep throughout the day is not something that I have done since my days in the Late Night Raiders in Vanilla WoW. I went to bed around 8 pm last night and as far as I am aware slept all the way through until 4 am ish and then even then managed to eek my way to 5:30 before actually getting up.
Before finally calling it a night, I did spend some time in Path of Exile and wrapped up the seasonal challenge associated with Ritual. I had completely respecced my Atlas to go hard into Ritual nodes, so now I have to figure out what I want to do instead. Getting 19 of 40 seasonal challenges rewards a stubby little totem and it has been a minor point of pride that I have managed to get one for the last three leagues. Granted this is not actually a major achievement, but it is one for me on a personal level. I went from completely floundering in Path of Exile, to being able to complete my Atlas, to being able to actually do enough achievements to get a totem for my hideout. I would have finished up sooner but unfortunately, the Vaal boss down in Delve did not drop a Doriani’s Machinarium Map and I have been unwilling to pay the 6.5 divines that they are currently going for.
I also attempted to play a few alts in Diablo IV at which point I was struck by how generally alt-unfriendly this game is. The seasonal abilities are on a character-by-character basis… which makes little sense given that all of the abilities cap out a level 3, and you can pretty much max them out on a single character. One of the nice things about Diablo III was how easy it was to twink out your alts, so that when you started your next character you got to keep all of your paragon points from the first. Similarly, gear was easily applied in specific bands. Right now gear drops are based on the level at which you got them dropped regardless of how low item level an item is. Diablo 4 tends to set equippable levels in a loose relation to the level in which you acquired the item. So you can tend up with items that are dropping and make no sense to be using them… because they are either not Sacred or not Ancestral… that have a higher item level equipped than the range for which those items are useful.
One of the things that I think would be cool is have something associated with the season’s blessing that as you level up… you lower the equippable levels of all items by a percentage until when you hit level 100 it removes ALL equipment restrictions. One of the biggest joys of alting in an ARPG is twinking out your secondary lineup of characters. It would be nice if this were possible in Diablo IV, but in its current state… it really isn’t. Not that there is a lot of crossover between gear items to even make that viable, but still something would be better than the current state of the game. The XP boost is at least noticeable though which I guess is still rather nice.
I am honestly not sure what my focus is going to be next. I popped into New World and tried to get back into the swing of things there… but honestly, I have been gone just long enough to make a lot of things unintelligible. It seems as though with the new expansion they have removed the ability to level up gear which sorta sucks. It also seems like they have increased the caps of a lot of the crafting professions… which also somewhat sucks because I had fought so hard to cap out a few of them before to be done with it. When new levels are added into a game… it makes me appreciate things like Guild Wars 2 where there is a fixed level cap and then horizontal progression with systems. I do really like the flail though as far as weapons go.
Anyways… I am rambling. I hope you are all having a great week and hopefully, by tonight I will have sorted out what direction I am going game-wise for a bit. I am going to need something to distract me from how empty the house feels for the moment with my Wife traveling.
Hey Folks! I am still more or less mainlining Diablo IV each evening. The game has finally started to slow down a bit as I am now level 56 but it still feels like I am gaining experience much faster than I did previously. While I am not gaining core levels quickly, it does feel like I am chewing through Paragon points pretty fast. The only complaint really that I have with the game is that there is some bug that is impacting my system where the entire game will lock up while playing… I think it has something to do with network play and new players showing up on screen, but I can’t be certain. Whatever the case I’ve taken a few deaths from the screen locking up for 5 to 10 seconds at a time. This did not happen in previous releases so I am hoping this is something that gets fixed over time or can be attributed to server congestion.
I think what I am enjoying the most is that I have a very enjoyable mechanic loop going on where I start by popping over to the Blood Harvest zone completing the three Tree of Whispers quests available there. Generally speaking, there will be a quest to kill two Blood Seekers, and as I am working my way through the other quests I will inevitably anger the Vampires and get Blood Seekers summoned to take me out. Unfortunately, few players seem to be focused on the big zone event, so I can rarely complete that but I have noticed that when someone is attempting it the green horned skull icon indicating the Blood Harvest begins to pulse. I wish there was a less subtle indication that the event is going on, but it is better than nothing.
While I am working on the Blood Harvest area I keep my eyes peeled for any Legion Events that are about to spawn. These take place every thirty minutes and are a great source of both experience and loot, so much so that I will leave the Blood Harvest area to knock these out when they are available. This creates a really good cadence of popping back and forth between the “Bloodtide” area as folks have taken to calling it, and then popping out whenever a Legion Event is going on. The community as a whole seems to realize how valuable these are now because I have yet to do one that did not manage to get the mastery objectives completed… which largely just means you are killing things quickly enough to get the mini-bosses to spawn before the final encounter.
I am also keeping my eyes peeled for the next World Boss spawn, though these are honestly not as good as they once were. The difficulty of the encounter has been increased significantly which means they are no longer the loot pinata that they once were. As a result, there is FAR lower turnout for World Bosses and I’ve had several cases of once it started… and it was not immediately dying… folks bailed to do other things. On one hand, I get that players were frustrated by how easy these encounters were… but on the other hand, they require random players to know the fight in order to complete it. I think they are maybe a bit tuned for randos… and so far I have fought three bosses since coming back and only managed to down one of them. The others I kept fighting the entire 15 minutes but we wound up with like 3 players banging away in futility as folks bailed on us. If they want these to be challenging content they need to make them something you queue for and are locked into the encounter until completion.
One of the few problems that I see with the current state of the game, is that I have zero desire to actually engage with the “true” Blizzard-endorsed endgame. I’ve run a few Nightmare Dungeons, but my keys are piling up way faster than I am using them. Nightmare Dungeons are just not fun, at least not compared to Legion events and the “Bloodtide” area. The problem with this is that I am eventually going to have to run Nightmare Dungeons because they are required to interact with the Paragon sigil system and level them up. In order to gain the power contained in that system, I am going to have to force myself to grind them out and this just feels lousy. It feels as though you were forced to do Set Mastery Dungeons in Diablo III in order to get Paragon points or something like that.
Then there are the Helltides… which are now largely made redundant. The “bloodtide” area does everything that this limited-time event does… but does it better. Helltides are only up every two hours… and then if you take a death in the area you lose half of your helltide currency. The “bloodtide” on the other hand lets you drop in and play at any point and your currency associated with that event is additive over time so that your deaths really do not cost you anything. This all serves to make the Helltide feel weirdly punitive and not rewarding enough to make up for it. Sure you can target farm very specific gear slots… but you end up getting so many Seeker keys and you are generating so many Whispers Caches that I am not even certain that is needed functionality anymore. Add to this the fact that every time I have gone into a Helltide area… I was the only player doing them, which makes me think this is just an outmoded content type.
While I am “picking nits”, Blizz really needs to adjust the vendors to match the sweeping changes they made to Sacred and Ancestral gear drops. In the world, I am only seeing Sacred gear right now, which is amazing… save for Legendary items that often drop at base rarity but can still be recycled into either material or have aspects extracted from them. However when I go to the vendors, which should be viable sources of gear… it is all mostly baseline items. This is especially true for the Obol merchant, making that entire system even less useful than it was. Like Helltide… Obol gambling really needs a rework because at the moment I feel like the best option is just to buy keys when you need to spend down the currency. It is just a system that no longer really works with the way the game is currently played.
One legitimate concern that I still have is that I am uncertain if the game feels good right now because the base sandbox state of the game has been balanced, or that the Vampire Powers are just really strong. Path of Exile is in a phenomenal state right now, but it is more the base level of the game and less that any one league mechanic is better than the others. I feel like everything that I am enjoying right now in Diablo IV can be directly attributed to this specific season. Blood Harvest zones are amazing and Vampire Powers feel exceptionally strong… so much so that I do not want to interact with anything OTHER than the “Bloodtide”. It does concern me a bit that they have set up a borrowed power system that they are going to have to replace with something equally spectacular in Season 3, in order to keep the same elevated power levels and keep the game fun.
Diablo IV is very much a game in transition and still has some systems that are not functioning in quite the way that they should. I feel like the Nightmare Dungeons as a whole need a top-down rethink. They are just not fun, and the players really engaging with that mechanic seem to be doing so in degenerate methods that do not involve actually completing the entire dungeon. The most enjoyable part of the game… is not the part of the game that players will eventually be required to do in order to progress endgame systems. Helltides as a whole need a complete rethink as well, and the World Bosses either need to be watered down again or turned into some sort of serious smaller group content that players queue for. Maybe make the Open World spawns watered down, but drop an item needed to spawn a more difficult and much more rewarding version.
The optional bosses seem pretty cool and I have fought Varshan a few times now. Sadly he has dropped the unique twohander each time that I do not need, nor did it drop at a higher enough item level to use. I am hoping that I can keep the momentum going long enough to naturally reach level 70ish and transition into World Tier IV and be able to see the other optional bosses. Varshan requires you to collect three pieces and then enter a basement area at the Tree of Whispers, and I am assuming the three new bosses that open up in World Tier IV will be something similar. There is a tight synergy between the fun parts of the game which are keeping me going, but I am hoping with time Blizzard can make the largely unfun parts of the game like Nightmare Dungeons more enjoyable.
Morning Folks! I am still fairly shocked to be able to say that the Season of Blood in Diablo IV seems good. As I near the point where I will do the capstone dungeon that allows me access to World Tier III, I have to say that my build is holding solid. Overpower still feels great, but I am uncertain how much of that is the core build and how much is how good the assorted vampiric powers feel. This brings up a whole other series of concerns about Blizzard and their dependence on borrowed power systems in World of Warcraft… and now seemingly Diablo IV… but that can be a concern for another season. For now, the game feels great, which is a wild turnaround from my previous feelings about the game.
Last night I recorded a quick and dirty video of some gameplay in the Blood Harvest area. I also talked a bit about some of the vampire powers and showed off some gameplay of what my Barbarian looks like killing things. I have to say that more than anything it is this seasonal mechanic that is making the game feel good. Previously the open world largely felt pointless apart from the Helltide Events, and now I feel like I have a reason to do the thing that I enjoyed the most… which was roaming around aimlessly and killing things. Blood Harvest areas are exceptionally rewarding both in experience and loot and gave me the thing I was missing in this game… aka a default thing to log in and do. No matter how hard I tried I just did not like Nightmare Dungeons. They felt weird and forced and too rigidly structured. Popping into a zone and hopping back and forth between mini-events while killing copious amounts of Vampires is my jam.
All of that said, while I have not reached Nightmare dungeons… the few normal dungeons that I have run to unlock legendary powers have felt much improved. I will essentially have to relearn the pathing, but it does feel like you have to go in the wrong direction far less often and that most of the objectives that you need to collect and take back to a location are closer to the destinations. The Dungeons however continue to feel fairly boring and tedious, and I do worry a bit that I am going to be forced into them in order to level up my paragon glyphs once I hit level 50. The Blood Harvest area feels so fresh and exciting… that the old dungeon design while improved, still feels like a massive step backward. Personally, I still feel like the dungeons need to be taken back to the drawing board. I would love to see all objectives removed and implement some sort of clear percentage system that spawns a boss similar to Nephelem Rifts from Diablo III.
One of the biggest changes for me personally is how much better town and settlement layouts feel. Firstly there are SO MANY more stashes available in the game, and you are rarely far away from one. Take this overhead map of Kyovashad, where there used to be a single stash in the Inn with your Wardrobe, now there is one at the Enchanter, Jeweler, and Smithy giving you rapid access no matter what task you are needing to complete. I would still rather have seen more compact layouts that put everything within a few steps of each other, but for that, we have the Tree of Whispers that now has an Enchanter. If they swapped the Jewelry merchant for an actual Jewel Crafting vendor… that “town” would be perfection because you could do everything that you might need to do in a single location.
However in the “weird hill to die on” department, Blizzard still seems to be pushing the RealID in spite of having long disabled it in my account settings within Battle.net. What this means is that after the Season 2 patch, if you do not go into your settings and enable one of the “Streamer Mode” options you are going to end up doxxing yourself if you happen to take a screenshot with your inventory open. All of the options around this are awful because this originally defaulted to “Character Name (Firstname Lastname)” and with streamer mode on… instead of getting just my character name, I get random character names each time I log into the game. Why this exists on this screen is beyond me and why someone might want to see their RealID in addition to their character name is beyond me. Does anyone use RealID by choice?
All things considered, though I am enjoying myself and I didn’t really think that was possible. I think my biggest frustration is… had the game launched in this state I think it might have been a game of the year candidate. Now however it is probably going to take a lot to get some players to return. I know my friend Cyl for example pretty much wrote the game off, and has moved on to other games and is probably unlikely to pop back in and give it a second chance. This is the challenge with games that launch in a rough state, you never really get that second chance to amend those first impressions. New World is a prime example of this, and it has more or less improved everything that was wrong with that game at launch… but will never again see the numbers it did in those first few weeks. It is going to take a lot of work to remediate the meme of “D4 Bad”.
