Monthly Archives: April 2023
Planetside 2: A Decade Later
Ok, it hasn’t been exactly a decade, but close enough.
It was an interesting experience coming back to PS2. Some things had changed – apparently people can build little outposts and fly capital ships around – but most of the game was exactly the same. Fighters spam rockets from the sky, except when you’re flying one, in which case you get a personal dog-fighter stuck to your ass. Tanks soak spawn points with fire. No one goes after the enemy Sunderer. Just Planetside things.
And yet… there are the same moments of brilliance. Breaking the back of an attack, and then running across the fields towards the enemy base in a counteroffensive. Actually finding a good spot and doing some work as an Infiltrator. Grabbing an AA rocket launcher and harassing everything in the sky.
The problem now is the same problem then: the fun is inconsistent. When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s bad, it’s awful and l want to uninstall. It doesn’t help that after a decade the remaining population is a congealed mass of bittervets who will waste you in any fair 1v1 situation. Kill screens show you the equipment of your betters, but it’s hard to tell what weapons they actually used and whether it would have made a difference. I’m glad there’s a testing ground where you can fire guns before purchasing, but the stat screens for these things are borderline nonsense.
At the end of the day though, Planetside 2 certainly feels like a better Battlefield game than any I’ve played since BF4. You have the spectacle of outrageously large fights with air support, and an actual ability to pull vehicles yourself. And individual skill can turn the tide if you C4 a key Sunderer.
But I think the days of spending 5 hours a night playing are, well, a decade behind me.
Impressions: Arcanium
Arcanium is a lane-based, multi-character deckbuilding roguelike. You control the actions of three different furry characters with their own distinct card pools, passive abilities, and equipment. There are always three different enemies in the opposing lanes, although you can spend resources to get them to retarget other lanes (Taunt cards) or swap lanes with your own characters to distribute damage and/or fire off attacks. Defeating foes grants you rewards, new cards to add to your deck, and all the sort of things you would expect from a deckbuilding roguelike.
And, uh… that basically sums it all up.
I’ve played a lot of deckbuilding roguelikes over the years and Arcanium is OK. Fine, even. What it reminded me most of was Roguebook, in that you have multiple characters with their own decks, traverse a hex-based map trying to uncover new nodes, and there being incentives to maximize deck size. I also appreciate the new trend (?) for these games to allow banked energy – you start with 3/turn, but can carry up to 5 over to your next turn, if you don’t have a use for it. That part, along with the equipment, reminded me of Across the Obelisk.
I do have some issues with the game, although they are difficult to articulate. For example, a lot of the enemies feel the same: they attack for X amount, deal a debuff, perform an area attack for Y amount, or gain armor. That sort of reductionism can be made for Slay the Spire too, right? Perhaps it feels worse in Arcanium due to the lane-based nature of the game. After all, enemies always target down their lane, and you cannot target things more than one lane away.
Another issue I have is that the sort of highest-difficulty fights reward you with Heirloom Equipment, which are character-specific items that synergize with their passive abilities/cards in various ways. Getting all three characters their Heirlooms is very important… but once that’s done, those hard battles thereafter become mostly pointless, as you’d rather get regular equipment for the other slots. Technically you get an already-upgraded card choice from the rewards and closer to unlocking character upgrades (more energy/cards per turn), but again, it just feels bad doing these fights with the Heirlooms being wasted. I wish there was a way to scrap them or trade for regular equipment.
Overall, Arcanium is a perfectly serviceable deckbuilding roguelike. Unlocking new characters by doing specific things during each run feels rewarding, and cards are similarly unlocked and added to the pool all the time. Each character and their card pools feels unique, and you can be rewarded for discovering synergies between them. Having said that, I have played Arcanium for 15 hours and feel like I’ve seen all that I want to, whereas most deckbuilders taper off after 40 hours for me. Take that for what you will.
Legendary Grind
I continue to play Guild Wars 2.
One of the ancillary goals I have within the game is unlocking a Legendary weapon. These weapons are not actually more powerful than Ascended weapons (stats are the same), but they feature some nice quality of life features. Specifically, their stats can be switched any time outside of combat and they are basically unlocked on all your characters at the same time. Regular Ascended weapons can have their stats switched by sacrificing some items, and they are not soulbound, so technically they can be swapped around on your characters as well. So it’s really about the ultimate convenience.
Legendary weapons in GW2 are part of a monstrously insane grind, however.
I was looking at “Gen-3” Legendary weapons tonight, which are those introduced in the End of Dragons expansion. When you purchase the expansion, you get a free “precursor” weapon, which is the first hit of crack to start you on the downward spiral. I originally chose the Axe, so let’s look at that path. To create the Legendary, you need the following:
- Gift of Aurene’s Rending
- Dragon’s Rending (the precursor)
- Gift of Jade Mastery
- Draconic Tribute
Oh, hey, only three items! That should be easy, right?! No. Not at all.
Starting from the top, Gift of Aurene’s Rending:
Aside from Mystic Runestones, which are purchased at 1g apiece from a vendor, the other three items have, you guessed it, four additional components each. The Poem on Axes requires 10 Tales of Adventure, 10 Lamplighter Badges, and two other minor items of no particular consequence. Completing the expansion storyline gives you 14 Tales of Adventure, so technically that’s not a stretch until you want to make another Gen-3 Legendary. The Lamplighter Badges though, require you to achieve map completion on Cantha maps, e.g. explore the entire map and unlocking all the points of interest, Vistas, and so on. You can get 1 per map, so you technically either have to do complete map exploration on more than one character, or repeat an achievement that has you lighting lamps all over the place. All of this is not technically difficult, especially if you have a Skyscale mount so you can fly around, but it is time-consuming.
The Gift of Research… sorry, did you think we were onto a different step? The Gift of Research is straightforward in that you need 3.75g of vendor mats, 250 Essence of Luck, and 500 Hydrocatalytic Reagents which themselves requires 2500 Research Note currency. The Essence of Luck comes from disenchanting gear which you accumulate in abundance; training one character as an Artificer will allow you to combine lower-level Luck into the needed type pretty easily. Research Notes comes from disenchanting crafted items in a way that doesn’t produce Luck, so this step is really all about destroying stuff. There are websites out there that will give you up-to-date info on the cheapest items to craft/buy and destroy for Notes.
Gift of the Mist. This one is where I start shaking my head a bit. This one requires Gift of Glory, Gift of Battle, Gift of War, and Cube of Stabilized Dark Energy. Glory requires 250 currency from PvP, Battle comes from the very end of a WvW Reward Track, War comes in small amounts from WvW Reward Tracks, and the Cube is crafted from two materials gained from salvaging Ascended gear (most efficiently from Fractal content). So, basically, this is the “go do all the other bits of game” step.
Hey, since we already have the precursor, we’re halfway (?) there!
Gift of Jade Mastery has four components.
The Bloodstone Shard costs 200 Spirit Shards, which is one of those currencies you either have thousands of or are starved for, depending on how long you’ve (passively) played GW2. Suffice it to say, you cannot directly purchase them, and must earn them via gaining XP at max level, doing three daily quests, and so on. Gift of Cantha is no big deal, as it requires four items you get from map completion, which you were doing anyway. Antique Summoning Stones, aka ASS, is a currency you can purchase 5 of each week, and earn from doing meta events. Realistically, you are probably buying 3-4 a week unless you are running Strike Missions.
Gift of the Dragon Empire. Oh boy. First is 100 Jade Runestones, which come from special chests in the expansion maps. There used to be an exploit of sorts that allowed you to get one per character parked at the end of a jumping puzzle, but that was recently nerfed and the price has skyrocketed as a result. I have toons parked around the other easiest chests, and I can get 5/day for about 20 seconds of work. Next is 200 Chunks of Pure Jade, which you are technically time-gated on, but it’s as easy as mining ore nodes in one of the maps over the course of three days. Next is 100 Chunks of Ancient Ambergris and this comes from fishing. You can get 1/day from turning in a specific fish, 5/day from turning in Flawless Fish Fillets, and occasionally get them from the fish themselves. Last is Blessing of the Jade Empress x5, which is an item that costs 500 Imperial Favor apiece, a currency you get from completing Events and such around the expansion. This technically isn’t hard to accumulate, but cannot be fast-tracked and requires time on the ground.
Alright, we’re in the final stretch! Draconic Tribute requires:
For the most part, this is the “random bullshit, go!” step. Mystic Clovers are typically acquired 7 at a time at the end of a 28-day daily login reward cycle. You can gamble for them too, or use some more expense currencies to purchase them in limited quantities each week. Gen-1 and Gen-2 Legendaries require 77 of them instead, so Gen-3 is a bit more forgiving in that. Amalgamated Draconic Lodestone can randomly be acquired from a variety of sources, or crafted from components that are randomly acquired. It can also be purchased directly (3/week) using Super Adventure Box currency, which is a once per year festival currently going on. It takes me about 30ish minutes each day to earn about half the required amount of currency. Finally, you have Condensed Might and Magic, which are themselves made up of four Gifts which correspond to the generic loot you may have been accumulating your entire GW2 career, e.g. Fangs, Totems, Scales, etc.
After all of that grind, throw everything into the Mystic Forge and you get your Legendary!
…
…
…or just straight-up buy the Legendary from the AH. The Axe is currently being sold for 2550g. The price conversion of gems to gold changes daily, but right now it’s approximately 35g per 100 gems. So that’s 7285 gems or roughly… $91. Yep. $91.
Granted, you can also farm 2550g through the course of the game and just buy it that way without even playing the expansion or doing anything special. Or you can purchase the majority of the necessary crafting items and skip certain sections of the grind. Indeed, it is the only way some of those 5/week limited items are at all reasonable. Plus, this site is showing how you can technically make almost 802g profit by crafting the Legendary Axe with materials you purchased from the AH. Options!
Nevertheless, I find it difficult to get over the $91 thing. Guild Wars 2 is about finding your own goals, as the Exotic Gear you got 10 years ago is still good enough for raiding today. Crafting Legendaries certainly feels like one of those things you can steadily chip away at as a form of content that gets you out in the world playing with other people.
Or you can just open your wallet.
Impressions: Across the Obelisk
Across the Obelisk is a chunky deck-building roguelike that has a lot of overlapping mechanics that… mostly work together.
You control four characters each with their own decks. By default, these characters are a warrior, ranger, mage, and cleric, and all have their own unique card pools. Additionally, each character has four equipment slots (and one pet slot) that can be filled with a wide assortment of gear. Additionally additionally, each character can level up five times, getting a binary choice of abilities unique to that specific character (e.g. the four warriors each have different choices). Additionally additionally additionally, you earn Perk points across all characters that allows you more customization options in the form of +1 bonuses to various stats.
Oh, and you accumulate “Supplies” that let’s you upgrade the towns at the beginning of each map. And maps have various lanes and encounters and character unlocks and secrets and general themes.
Like I said, there’s a lot going on.
The problem, 25 hours in, is an understanding that a lot of the game just doesn’t matter. In Slay the Spire, you always go first and can see what the enemy is going to do. In this game, enemy actions are hidden by default – you have to debuff them with certain cards to temporarily see – and turns are based on the speed stat… which can be buffed or debuffed. So sometimes the enemy will just do things to your team without you knowing what’s going on. Like all deck-building games though, sometimes you can’t do anything even if you do know what’s coming due to the cards drawn.
Another issue I have is how often what the card says doesn’t matter. Characters have resistances to the various damage types in the game, and it’s often a fact that enemies get 60% resistance or higher. When I first unlocked a high-cost card that said “Deal 60 damage” I was excited… only to find that it actually deals like 20. The game calculates it for you so there’s no surprises, but nevertheless this funnels all successful strategies towards stacking debuffs (which typically lower resistances as a bonus). Which is whatever I guess… until you face enemies immune to that debuff, or can self-dispel, or can transfer (!!) the debuffs back your way. Most of the time, whether a given enemy can do this will be a complete surprise. Fun times.
Ultimately, I’m finding the game plenty compelling in an almost unhealthy way. Each run makes the next one that much easier, which is good, but this also means you are set up to fail the first dozen or so runs. I like how you can end up crafting a lot of your favorite cards right at the beginning of the game and thinning your deck out so there is less ramp-up. Figuring out synergies between the classes feels satisfying, and unlocking characters can lead to new ways of playing based on their unique talents.
But if you aren’t into deck-builders, this certainly isn’t going to get you onboard. Not only is there a lot of RNG – moreso than normal deck-builders – each run takes several hours between having to coordinate four different decks and equipment and upgrades and so on.
In An Age 
Nothing is Forever
Apr 12
Posted by Azuriel
ARK is no stranger to controversy, but the latest debacle is especially cruel.
ARK 2, which stars Vin Diesel for some reason, is set to radically change the formula from 1st-person survival game to 3rd-person Soulslike, presumably with you dodge-rolling away from a T. Rex’s jaws. So there’s already some angst from longtime fans (including myself). Like most of Wildcard’s products though, ARK 2 is getting delayed… this time all the way into late 2024.
Enter a tweet from the devs that they are working on a UE5 engine upgrade to the original game, to be released to everyone for free!
…oops, just kidding. The UE5 upgrade will cost you $50, but hey, you’ll get ARK 2 for free. For whenever that gets released. In the meantime, enjoy the original game upgrade… until they release UE5 versions of the expansions, at which point you’ll have to buy them again.
Also, the official servers for the “old” ARK are shutting down.
Wildcard is doing some damage control, with them acknowledging the general shittiness of the situation. The new deal is that, yeah, the ARK UE5 upgrade is going to cost $60, but it’ll come with the upgraded expansions too. But now ARK 2 will be a separate purchase. Which is sort of what you’d expect for this situation, although it still seems like something is getting taken away.
Which, in terms of official servers, it is.
Now, everything I have ever heard of in regards to the official servers is that they’re a shitshow. Alpha clans raiding noob shacks for fun, murdering dino tames that take people literal, concurrent hours to achieve for no reason, and trolls building posts everywhere on PvE servers to prevent others from building a base anywhere useful. This is the same game where you could literally be drugged, kidnapped and held indefinitely in a cage.
In my few hundred hours of playing, I never joined an official server for more than a few minutes. My escapades were safely sequestered on a private server, where I effectively eliminated the time it takes to tame a dino, because fuck that. However. Wildcard got famous and (presumably) made a lot of money on the backs of players using their established rulesets on official servers. And now that will be over in a few months. Not because the server is shutting down per se, but because they want more money for an upgrade that is probably being done to save the sequel with a cash infusion. Sort of like how Wildcard sold paid DLC of the original game while it was still in Early Access to pay for the lawsuit threatening to bankrupt the company.
As MMO players, I think we all understand that none of our digital lives are forever. Granted, EverQuest seems to still be going strong, and WoW Classic is more profitable than Blizzard certainly ever expected. Nevertheless, I still sympathize with ARK players who are seeing their digital lives evaporate. The servers are apparently able to be exported to private servers, but that is cold comfort to the
psychopathsplayers whoroleplayedmurder-hobosARK socially.Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Ark, ARK 2, Controversy, Damage Control, UE5, Wildcard