Video Games

Wayfinder 1.0 Launched

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Wayfinder is an interesting game. Back in March of 2023, I got into beta testing, which was under a strict NDA, so as a result I never talked about it publicly. I played the game quite a bit at the time and even managed to get into some multiplayer testing with my friend Ace and I think maybe even Ashgar. It was a perfectly cromulent experience, but also a deeply flawed and buggy one. I thought given enough time this might turn into a really great game. However, when August rolled around it was suddenly launching with a premium “Founders” pack price tag associated with it… I noped the hell out. I had just done beta testing prior to this launch announcement and the game was still in what felt like a relatively sorry state. Early Access is launching your game, regardless of what you think about that process or how much you claim it is still “in testing”. Launching a broken game is launching a broken game.

Wayfinder was an interesting combination of being developed by Airship Syndicate (Battle Chasers, Darksiders Genesis, Ruined King) and being published and hosted by Digital Extremes (Warframe). However in November Digital Extremes cut their publishing wing, and with it Airship Syndicate was suddenly floating in the wind. What was not necessarily expected was that the game was pulled from Steam, and effectively retooled to change it from being a lobby-based MMORPG, to a peer to peer based Co-Optional and largely single-player experience. It returned to Steam early access earlier this year and started the uphill process of attempting to earn back players. On Monday the game launched its 1.0 version and I started playing it some over the weekend on Sunday, just ahead of this rework.

There is a lot to like about the game, just like I felt when I beta-tested it… but this time it is extremely polished and ready for players. Essentially the best comparisons I can give it are what if you took Monster Hunter but made it a Dropped-Loot-Based Dungeon Crawler, or what if you took a Hero-Shooter… but made it an Action-Combat-RPG. It also very much lives in a space adjacent to something like Genshin Impact but instead of being cash shop-based Gacha nonsense, everything unlocks over time while playing through the campaign. You start the game by choosing one of three heroes and then pretty quickly after that point you unlock the ability to play as the other two. Then over the course of the main story quest the remaining five “Wayfinders” are then unlocked when you reach specific milestones.

Honestly switching from Lobby based to Peer to Peer has been a pretty seamless swap. The only time you encountered players organically in the previous incarnation was in town, so having to manually party up before going on adventures does not really feel that different. I’ve not done much testing but it appears that you can invite people through an invite code system, through posting a public party listing in an in-game party finder, through your Steam/PlayStation friends, or through a discord integration. The 1.0 version also adds cross-play so that console and PC players can both group up together. Right now the only console that the game is available on is the PlayStation 5, but there is apparently an Xbox Series X/S version and an Epic Game Store version in the works.

There is no cash shop and currently, the game is the low low price of $23 on Steam, or $25 on the PlayStation store. They have a single DLC pack available for the game right now which is a collaboration with Critical Role which gives you some themed skins for various Wayfinder characters. I am fully on board with selling additional skins as a way of expanding the purchase of the game and doing this through one-time purchase packs instead of an in-game microtransaction shop with a contorted third currency system. Founders apparently got a bunch of exclusive stuff when the business model changed, which I don’t love… but they had to do something to make it right for the folks who plunked down $100 to play their early access game.

I am only around seven hours into the gameplay, but am having quite a bit of fun. Essentially it is a blend of open-world exploration in the Genshin/BOTW style with respawning mobs and treasures to find, combined with dungeon instances that have semi-randomized objectives. So far I have ventured forth into the Gloom and fought void monsters and also explored these weird frozen-in-time “lost sectors” of how the world was before whatever calamity befell it. In both cases, there are a bunch of hidden objectives to find and loot to be gained, while fighting a bunch of baddy archetypes with differing attack patterns.

The character that I am mostly playing is Wargrave, which starts the game out as a Sword-and-Board style tank with an almost paladin kit. I heal myself by completing automatic swing combos and have a battery of abilities to deal damage and also shield the party. I can also seemingly swap what type of weapon I am using to change up this playstyle. I’ve gotten Shotguns, Rifles, and Daggers so far as drops but know there is also some big Two-Handed options from my limited-time beta testing. The only thing that annoys me a bit is that the loot seems totally randomized and can be for any of the Wayfinders you have unlocked. This means I am a bit starved for items that I can actually use for the tanky gameplay style that I have focused on. There is a gear vendor in town that appears to upgrade every time you ding a level, so I have mostly been having to buy a new sword/shield combo there to keep pushing up my power.

A lot of the expeditions that you go on center around taking out specific boss monsters. These often unlock crafting abilities, but I have not dabbled heavily into any of those systems. Mostly the main story quest will occasionally tell you to go kill X boss and then walk you through the process of crafting your next upgrade that is required to progress forward. I know in beta crafting played a much bigger role in the upgrade of gear, but so far this does not seem to be the case. Gear appears to mostly be acquired through loot drops, which is both good and bad. However, so long as I can keep buying reasonable upgrades from the NPC vendors I won’t complain much about it.

On top of ALL of this… there is a fairly robust housing system in the game. Exploring the world is constantly giving me items to put in my house. For example, I found this adorable little Hermit Crab pet that I now have roaming around my house. I can stop and pet it… which will cause it to pinch me… which I find both adorable and hilarious. There are a whole slew of items that I appear to be able to craft as well, but I do not think I have made it far enough into the game to fully unlock the crafting system. I have however picked up a bunch of random items in my journey, and the Housing system itself unlocked right before I went to the first big boss dungeon, so plenty early enough for you to keep unburdening yourself of items you found by dumping them in your rather large mansion.

All in all, it grew into the really cool game that I thought it could be when I first beta-tested it. The business model has shifted entirely to a buy-the-box, no cash-shop thing… which is honestly always welcome. However, that means folks need to buy in… and I really want this game to succeed. I was honestly shocked it was as cheap as it was, so if anything I have talked about this morning has interested you… maybe head over to Steam or the PlayStation store and pick it up. This is not a sponsored post in any way, I just genuinely want the games that I think are cool and a good value proposition to succeed. If you end up checking it out, drop me a line and tell me what your thoughts are.

Stupid Alt Tricks

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Good Morning Folks! I’m getting to the point where I think I am almost “done” with Diablo IV, at least until the next season rolls around. This is the inevitable place that I end up with seasonal model games like this and depending on how engaging they all have different cycles associated with them. In Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4 I pretty much get a few weeks out of them before deciding I have run out of things that I actually care to do. Path of Exile gives me at least a month, maybe two, before I start to lose interest. This is not a failing of the games mind you, this is just the way that I play them. I love fresh starts and I have a lot of fun during the gearing and leveling phase, and then progressively less fun as I accomplish whatever goals I set out for myself. Thankfully we have reached a point where there is almost always another ARPG just about to fire up so that I can hop into it with much glee.

There are a handful of items that I want to check off the list before I move on completely. Ace is far better at this sort of tedium gaming and has long since completed all of these. Essentially I need to finish grinding out Reputation for Nahantu so that I can permanently increase my Obol cap for all seasons from this point forward. I also want to finish gathering up the Tenets of Akarat so that these stay unlocked in future seasons as well. I had started down this path shortly after finishing the campaign, but many of them were bugged and could not be completed. Both of these are sort of the fodder for a lazy weekend afternoon, and I have plenty of time to knock them out before the next season starts in January.

The other thing that I want to complete just for the sake of doing it… because there are probably seasonal titles associated with it… is completing the final level of the Zakarum Remnants grind. This has been the absolute worst reputational grind in any Diablo IV Season. What I think I will probably do is churn through a bunch of Nightmare Dungeons on T4 as I have an achievement for doing those that I have yet to complete. I believe I get another shard of “unobtainium” used to craft mythic from completing this reputation. I might grind out some Undercity Rune Tributes in an effort to compile six copies of every rune so that I can potentially target craft other mythics given that we ran over 100 bosses this weekend and saw zero as opposed to the five from the weekend before last.

You can tell that I am mostly done with a season because I started taking on stupid side projects. The Tree of Whispers is essentially the Bounties system for Diablo IV, and at any given time there are a bunch of objectives around the world that reward varying numbers of whispers. The best ones are the ones that reward five at a time, as you need ten in total to get a bounty cache. Interesting tidbit that my friend Eliyon pointed out, is that you can farm these caches on one character and then have another character benefit from opening them. I believe he was thinking in terms of passing gear, but it turns out you get quite a boost of experience from opening them as well.

So as I am likely to do… I set forth on a totally degenerate play pattern and spent good chunks of the weekend farming Whispers Caches, only to flip over to my baby Barbarian and have him open them. It is honestly shocking how fast you can amass a huge stack of Whispers Caches and in truth, it is pretty damned fun popping around the map completing various bounty objectives. I always used to like running bounties in Diablo III, and it turns out I still enjoy that same sort of gameplay in its newer sibling. I was even doing the PVP Objectives because in truth… no one is out there actually PVPing. No matter what the loud faction of PVPers say… ARPG players do not give a shit about PVP. I could kill the boss for 5 whispers and then cleanse the blood shards that I got for a few more… and make it back to town all without seeing another soul. I did this several times, so it was not like it was a fluke, literally no one cares about PVP.

I wish I had kept better count of the total number of caches that were required to go from around level 7 when I started all the way to level 60 at which point I inherited all of the Paragon points I had accumulated on the Spiritborn. Quick mental math would tell me that it was between 20 and 25 caches in total that I had to farm, which honestly was not that bad. The first few caches gave me ten levels or so per cache… then it settled into about a level per cache until 53… at which point I started getting slightly less than a level. At 53 I farmed up eight caches which took me to 59 1/3, and then I proceeded to farm two more caches just to make sure that it would push me over the line. The cool thing about this process is that by the time I hit 60, I had pretty much gathered up all of the aspects that I would need for the build. Were I smarter I would have specifically kept out the best legendaries while leveling, but I was not that smart and ran around in a bunch of random uniques for a bit until I got things straightened out.

The only annoyance with this method for leveling is that you have to unlock Torment levels on the new character. I assumed as soon as I dinged 60, I would be able to flip over to Torment 1 and start rolling. However, I had to complete a Pit 20 in order to unlock that difficulty level. While I was at it I went ahead and tried Pit 35, the gate for unlocking Torment 2 and was able to do that just fine. My build does not really feel stable enough to push on to Torment 3, and in truth my Double Swing Twisters build is mostly a transitional build. The new Barbarian hotness is Mighty Throw, but it requires a specific unique called The Third Blade in order to make it function, something I have not seen drop yet. For now, Twisters works well enough for any content I would want to do on T1 or T2.

So thanks to my degeneracy, I find myself with two characters at max level and geared this season. The challenge there is that I feel like it isn’t necessarily pushing me to play more. I still feel like I am winding things down significantly. There is one more thing that I would like to try, since we used to pull up alts for each other in Diablo III by running Greater Rifts, at some point I want to see how effective that is by running an alt along with a Pit Run. This is mostly kicking the tires at this point, because I can’t say that I actually want to play additional characters. There is an achievement for having a level sixty of every class, so depending on how fast this process works it might be worth doing just for that.

Anyways… all of that said. Diablo IV still has problems, but it has finally reached a point where I can universally recommend it for folks who enjoy the seasonal model of ARPG gaming. The story for the expansion is still sort of shit, but the endgame gameplay loop is great.

AggroChat #497 – Kids on Bikes

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week we start off with Ash’s early thoughts about Metaphor: ReFantazio.  From there Grace and Bel decide to share some of the great things going on in Diablo IV after last week’s story bashfest. Kodra is Cursed and cannot upgrade hardware without it for some reason going completely off the rails.  From there he talks about Mechwarrior 5: Clans where we are in fact the baddies.  Tam shares his thoughts on Kingdom Eighties where kids on bikes try and save their hometown.  Kodra has hit the credit roll for Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and shares some of his final thoughts.  Tam talks about playing through Adios a game so good that he dealt with it not having an inverted control scheme.

Topics Discussed:

  • Metaphor: ReFantazio
  • Diablo IV Vessel of Hatred Endgame
  • Kodra is Cursed
  • MechWarrior 5: Clans
  • Kingdom Eighties
  • Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom Credit Roll
  • Adios

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Garuda Simulator

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Good Morning Folks. I do not like change, but when I get off my butt and do it… I make rapid and sweeping changes without much forethought. I was frustrated with how low the survival of my stinger build was feeling… not realizing that a huge part of this was due to the fact that I had swapped to Subo instead of Rahir as my Mercenary. I did not realize how much survival Rahir provides. In any case I used one of my legendary scrolls that resets paragon and talent points and spent the next fifteen minutes painstakingly placing points in my paragon boards to switch to the Orange Quill build. I struggled a bit when I first switched, immediately questioning my life choices.

When I said that Stinger was a spammy build… it was a whole other level of spammy. Essentially the only way that I had resources for casting Stinger was by spamming all of the other abilities as they came off cooldown. That ended up in practice that every moment I was trying to piano key my way through six abilities… not just mostly spamming one and then weaving in other abilities as needed. So obviously when I swapped over to Quill, I noticed it was using a lot of the same abilities… and immediately assumed that I needed to do the same thing. I do not in fact need to spam everything, and instead, I can play the character as god intended and just spam one key. It is not a one-button build necessarily because some of the other keys are pretty important but it is mostly one button that matters.

The result is so much more chill, in spite of the build still being fairly spammy. I am far less likely to get a repetitive stress injury, so that has been a massively positive swap. I am however needing to effectively rewire my brain since I have been playing Spiritborn in a specific manner for awhile now. The end result feels more akin to a Fan of Knives build or something like Frost Blades from Path of Exile where you need to face the direction of your target rather than trying to leap into the middle of a pack of mobs and grind it down. What is great about it however is it is so much easier to do the Hordes event and rack up more than enough aether to get good rewards. With this build… Hordes MIGHT be my favorite game mode currently.

Right now I am very much in “Gold Acquisition” mode because I need 50 million gold to buy a Mythic Cache. I had the bright idea that I should convert all of the Aether that I got from doing the Infernal Hordes into gold and see how much that nets me. Essentially this gave me 5,495,600 gold for converting 316 Aether that I had collected during the event. While that is a lot of gold… it isn’t near as much as I thought it would be. I think I am probably going to be better off buying the 200 Aether chest, and then just selling anything that I did not need since several uniques sell for over 100k gold each. Similarly I am shifting into selling mode for most drops and instead only salvaging the things that give me immediate aspect upgrades or cosmetics that I have not gathered yet.

I was extremely lucky I and was able to pick up an Ancestral Harmony of Ebewaka through the Obol vendor, which was one of the required uniques that I did not have already in Ancestral form. Then through running Infernal Hordes, I almost immediately snagged an upgrade to my Rakanoth’s Wake which rolled with Resistance to All Elements as its upgraded stat. When I masterworked it up to the first breakpoint it upgraded Movement Speed so I am already way more zoomy than my previous incarnation. I am keeping my eyes open for an upgraded Rod of Kepeleke and also a Midnight Sun ring. Really at this point, I need to luck my way into Tyrael’s Might Mythic chest to swap out of the ancestral legendary that I am using currently. Other than that I just need more levels and more paragon points to keep unlocking deeper into my boards.

I’ve got a bajillionty boss summon materials, so I think Ace and I are getting together tonight for a round of those. Will be good to free up the inventory space since several of those have rolled over to new stacks. It will also be a source of quite a bit of gold and uniques that can be sold for gold. At some point I need to clean out my bank and sift through so that I am only keeping the best copy of things, instead of my current scenario where I am dumping in anything that looks vaguely interesting. I have way too much of everything, but it was handy when I swapped builds because I could just build up brand new ancestral items instead of trying to reroll the ones I was using with Stinger.

I made a bit of progress on the rewards track last night, but still have fourteen levels to go. Basically, I got ten levels done and if we do the bossing nonsense, I might even be able to push the rest of the way through this evening. I have a bunch of tributes stockpiled, including one that supposedly can drop a mythic unique so at some point I plan on trying to run those. The state of tributes is awkward because some of them can be done in a group and others are purely solo. Having activities where you cannot share the rewards feels sort of awful given the group play is really the shining example of what makes Diablo IV good. In the meantime though I am having fun being a Garuda Simulator as I throw feathers everywhere and watch things fall around me.

If you are looking for a fun Spiritborn build, I highly suggest this nonsense. I should have gone down that path, but I thought the whole Centipede nonsense was really cool.