Hey everyone. It's time for a WRUP and I'm filled to brim with frustration trying to get my walk behind weed whacker running properly. I won't bore you with too many details but it's been a real downer after finally having a breakthrough this morning allowing me to use the thing for about a half hour before the mow ball broke off the damn thing. Since then I've managed to rig up some work around to keep it from digging into the ground while in use but now there's a big vibration in the cutting head which as it turns out is because the whole frame is cracked and just shaking all over the place. What a day.
Anyway let's get to the WRUP so I stop yammering on about yard work that's flipping me off with both hands.
Destiny 2 has a new transmogrification system and it's dumb as hell. Apparently it takes something like 25 hours of grinding materials and converting them into other materials just so you can make your current gear look like some other kind of gear. It's endlessly stupid that something so simple as making your character look like you'd like them to look takes so much grinding. Grim Dawn has a transmog system and it's awesome. If you ever looted a piece of gear the skin for that gear is saved and for a fee of iron bits you can just convert whatever you have into looking like whatever you want, as long as you've seen it yourself before. There's no recipe required, no stupid grindy BS material farming to process, just a set fee for the item level and it's done.
Speaking of BS grindy game play -Outriders end game is about as problematic as you can get. I do enjoy playing, quite a lot actually, but it's entire end game is completely different than the campaign. During the normal play through you're encouraged to be tactical and use cover to gain advantages on the battlefield. If you're having issues you're welcome to drop the difficulty level and plow through that way until you can make progress again. You won't earn XP toward your next difficulty tier but you can generally move on. It feels pretty fluid and is a lot of fun.
During the end game things do a complete one-eighty. You're now on a timer and the faster you finish a map the higher your rewards will be. It's a podium finish situation with Gold, Silver, Bronze or Fail being the end results. No longer is there time for cover, and taking challenge tiers down drastically reduces your reward at the end. Not to mention the levels are filled with unskippable cutscenes that you must watch while the timer just keeps ticking away chewing into your run time. Believe me when I say this makes a difference because winning and losing often comes down to a few seconds. There are also mechanics that do nothing except eat away the timer during these levels. "Charge the crystal" is something you'll see a lot. What this means is: run into a the circle with an obelisk or rock or what have you and wait for it to slowly sink into the ground. This takes a minimum of about three minutes when everything goes really well and it's possible for it to never finish because as long as there are enemies in the circle the obelisk isn't moving. And levels will throw literally hundreds of enemies at you in waves. Levels are won or lost in these sections because it's all about killing as fast as possible so the progress continues. This is especially annoying when you might have ten minutes to finish a level before your reward tiers start dropping. Also no matter what the objective may say in the upper right of the screen, "Kill the Brood Mother" for instance, it doesn't actually mean anything. The goal is ALWAYS kill everything. You don't get to move on until every enemy is removed from the screen, with the exception of the aforementioned crystal charging. Once that's done the enemies are removed. At the end of levels you'll get a "boss" sometimes this is just a particularly powerful monster or pair of monsters, and sometimes it's an actual boss and sometimes you have to fight that boss twice but it's almost never done when that boss comes out. You'll kill the boss only to see another wave or two of enemies and as I've said all those enemies have to be killed before you can move on. This includes completing a map. So if you've taken down the last boss now you may have to run all over the map area and waste precious seconds tracking down some trash rifleman that never followed you and is sitting a hundred yards away behind a wall. This can also be the break point between reward tiers. Even though you've completed the goal and killed the boss with fifteen seconds remaining on the clock for gold tier, you might have to run over that time because one or two low level enemies are still in that area somewhere spread way out.
Despite all this however, the game is a lot of fun to play. I do really hope they fix all this crap because it's truly a shit way to build an end game but it mostly works regardless. Rewards are also generally pretty great for finishing. Even if you don't see legendary items for a while you will be getting a ton of loot and that can be sold or broken into upgrade materials and that will all make huge differences in the way your character responds. Legendaries drop pretty regularly though. The way it works is that you bomb through a map and kill a couple hundred enemies and they can drop ammo but you won't see loot at all until the end where everything is stored in a chest of sorts and just drops on the ground when you open it. The medal tiers give higher percentage rolls as the tiers go up so gold is where you're aiming all the time and drop rates at the highest level gold tier are four rolls at 25% each to get legendaries and the tiers go down from there. typically you'll see about twelve gear pieces per level and tons of materials. You'll even get rewards if you completely fail a map. It's still rewarding and worth playing even with the frustration of timers and having to relearn how to play the game a completely different way. However with all this being said, I don't blame anyone in the slightest for walking away from it. Maybe I should actually write something with substance about Outriders and go a bit more into it's pros and cons.
What are we playing?
Yoda: I'm gonna make a 7th and maybe 8th Character in BDO and see just how fast I can get them leveled to use Oasis gear :P
AJ: Cave Story and Monster Hunter Generations.
Scrooloose: Still doing some Outriders end game, though I will say that it's getting very repetitive really quickly. Vermintide 2 has somewhat recently opened the Chaos Wastes expansion for free so I'll be checking that out as well.
Greywolfe: magic. i'm doing a frustrating grind in that particular game because it's forcing me [for the sake of being expedient and efficient] into doing drafts. drafts are awful. buuuut as of tonight, for two weeks, the draft queue for the set i'm trying to collect is turned off, so i get a little breather. i finished off evo - which is a snes game - during the week. it was ok. very 5/10. think "spore" but with just the creature creator and mid section of that game, but in a very early design where there's endbosses and platforming. i'm trying to figure out what to play next in it's stead. i'm also trying to [again] wind my way through hand of fate. maybe i'll hate it less, this time around, who knows? [i'm doing all the side content before getting back to the main game, because the main game has an end boss i thoroughly despised the first time i played the game and i'm at that bit now.]