Path of Exile: FOR THE LOVE OF ODIN PLAY THIS!

You know, do not even ask me about the "Forsaken Masters" part as I do not really know.  But Path of Exile, I do not think I have ever sunk this much time into a free-to-play game.  Even the previously mentioned Clash of Clans or Plants vs. Zombies 2.  No, not even Mafia Wars, which was way back in the day, as far as I am concerned.

At the moment I have put 35 hours into this game, although that number seems to be growing week-by-week.  But let us talk about the game.

Bloody hell this game is beautiful, just take a look at this dank and infested dungeon!

and a spectral-esque-type forrest.

Now if I only played good looking games, there would be room for an argument here, but I am also playing a lot of The Elder Scrolls: The Arena which looks a lot like Doom with a sword and heal potions.  PoE plays remarkably well too.  Think Diablo, with bits of Torchlight II thrown in (stationary waypoints) as well as MMORPG action hot key type actions as well.   There are even some improvements such as removable gem socketing in weapons and armor without damaging either the equipment or the gems.  I think that is one of the things that helped to sell the game.  

There are even little individual animations that the enemies do.  For instance, an enemy archer will run towards you, stop, pull an arrow from their quiver, lick the fletching, knock the arrow then fire towards you.  That is, if you haven't already shot them yet.  If you zoom in as close as you can, you can see the corpses of fallen enemies twitching a couple of times before they lie permanently prone.  At first I thought it was either a glitch or my eyes playing tricks, but no, you can see hands and feet twitching a few times.  Sometimes monsters will also roar at you before or during attacks, you know, because their wild animals that just happen to want you very dead.

Oddly enough, one of the best things about this games is all the ways Grinding Gear Games does not charge you to play and there are a lot of aspects to this game that I feel that could have been used to create options to pay real world money.  You want to enchant that sword to a +1 to damage, pay 50 gold (translates to $0.50).  You want to recover that life sapping gem from your armor that you no longer want, that will be 200 gold.  You want to create more than one character, pay us 500 gold to create extra character slots beyond your first character.  Of everything that I have seen that the game charges money for, everything appears to be cosmetic.  Sure you have your swag stashed in a chest that has four pages of a 12x12 grid and you can pay for a fifth page, but I do not foresee needing that much space considering I am currently only playing one character.

Basically, there was one time when I left the game for the sole purpose of finding out how I could give Grinding Gear Games money using real money.  Maybe buy a package thing via Steam using my Steam Wallet.  I could not.  There was nothing I could do but use their in-game market.  That was not was I was looking for, so I have yet to give them currency validation towards their great game.

Similar to Diablo and Torchlight, I do have a problem with hoarding.  When I found gems, I saved them until I could create the next higher quality gem, then I saved that gem until I could create the next. . .so on and so on.  I was always paranoid that I would find a better weapon or suit of armor and that gem that I had soldered into my equipment would then be lost forever.  Thankfully in PoE, this is not the case as I can take out and remove gems as frequently as I want (unless otherwise noted in the description of the gem).  Grinding Gear is making this game too easy to like and doing things that I had wanted earlier Diablo-esque games to do.

There are a handful of other features from the game that surprised me.  At first, I was annoyed that the maps were a lot smaller than what I was used to on Torchlight II, but I quickly realized that they were more like the Diablo maps and one of the sidequest goals is to kill every monster on the map.  That would be quite the feat in Torchlight II.  Another is that your health and mana potions autofill as you kill enemies and whenever you return to town, which makes healing spells almost obsolete.  It can become difficult however when you have to go up against a boss that does not want to summon creatures to help fight against you, which would then refill your potion bottles.

To date, I have only played cooperatively once with Chreekat a month or two back.  And while the game could be played with friends, you don't have to and I feel that playing locally would be a lot more fun than playing across the country.  That being said, I am usually up for playing cooperatively if people are interested.  That then brings me to the online-ness of the game.  Unless you are intentionally playing with anyones else, all the areas, with the exception of the towns/villages are instanced.  You do not have to worry about other people running around in the same area stealing your kills and loot.

The only negative statement I have to make about this game is that it takes a while to load.  The first couple of times I tried playing, I gave up because I thought the game was stuck on the loading screen.  It turned out that I just had to wait a minute or two, then everything was as I expected it to be.  There was no noticeable lag in the game and the only times the game had to load was moving between areas.

I am going to stop now so I can get this out there.  Path of Exile has been out there in the world for 13 months now and honestly, it is never too late to pick up this game and start playing.  So, you should go and start playing as it is just too much fun to not play.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
The Great Warriors of Doom and Wind

Monthly Update: October 2013

Does anyone else question this?  This is the third month that we've done a regular "Monthly Update" with the current month in the title, although most of what I've said in these articles has to do with the previous month.  And I have now just answered my own question.  What I've just said would most likely then be titled "Month in Review."  That is now out of the way.

So during the month of September, I really got into Dead Island.  After playing L4D2 quite a bit, I remembered that I had purchased Dead Island in one of the Humble Bundles and wanted to play something else with zombies.  At first I wasn't sure about the game, which needed some tweaking in the keyboard input department, but after that first questionable hour, I've managed to put in 21 hours and I only recently started Act II (~33% complete).  You can expect a First Impressions article to pop up within the next week.  I've put some time in on Torchlight II and Symphony, which will also get their own First Impressions, hopefully soon.

I also just entered the world of smartphones which I last talked about.  I also picked up the Humble Android Bundle 2, because now I have another outlet for my gaming needs/desires.  As I may've stated in my previous article, I don't see the new phone becoming my go-to for portable gaming, that will continue to be my 3DS.  But, that doesn't mean I won't use if for such purposes.

For those of you interested in miniatures, Reaper is doing a second Kickstarter to promote their Bones line of miniatures.  I got in on their first Kickstarter and came away with well over a hundred high quality plastic-ish minis.  This time around, instead of having multiple tiers, there's the "Thanks $1" tier and then a $100 tier and the earlier you support, the earlier you will get your shipment of (currently) 140 miniatures of varying sizes.  With only a week in, they are already over $1,000,000.  If I didn't already have a backlog of minis that I needed to paint then I would definitely get in on this Kickstarter again.  I just don't know if I would be able to swing it this time around.  With hope, there will always be Bones III next year.

Lastly, Conklederp got me Antichamber because she's awesome/amazing and because we've been together now for over half a decade.  I played the game for about half-an-hour before accidentally deleting my saved progress as I didn't initially know how to exit out of the game.  I know now.  I'll delving in that strange world again soon, probably with Conklederp watching or watching her play.

And I need to get back to playing Papo y Yo and Penumbra: Requiem, although those games are pretty similar in their execution of puzzle-platformers, so I may have to put one on the back burner (speaking of which, I need to go drink some coffee) until one is finished so I don't make myself completely puzzled out. 

So that's where I am, here at the beginning of October 2013.  Nothing too new or out of the ordinary, just plodding along when I'm not at work.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

Life, Torchlight and Multiple Endings: Special Wednesday Edition

Today's broadcast is brought to you because of aforementioned apartment/condo/housing issues which are still in the process of being completed.

I just "finished" Torchlight about 30 minutes (as of this typing) ago and it got me thinking.  The game took me 25 hours to complete the main story line and now I'm just running random side missions in order to increase my character's level.  This seems to be a lot like the way I have lived my life.  

Bare with me.  

Take my Tank Grontog

Everyone, meet Grontog and his pet cat, Mjolnir.

who took 25 hours to "save" the town of Torchlight and is now embarking on level enrichment, I took 23 years to "complete" my primary educational career before I embarked on, whatever it is that I'm doing.

I could just leave him be and continue onto Torchlight II, or I could level Grontog up to level 100 (he's currently at 41), or I could go through the game with either of my other two characters:

Valkaria and her wolf Fenris:

Not her starting outfit and weapons.

Irwin Blaze and his wolf Ferrous:

I plan on having him focus on fire magic for obvious reasons.

I am somewhat tempted to go through the game again, but I think I have just decided (as in while typing this sentence) that I will go through Torchlight II first before revisiting this game again with a different character, although I have already played Valkaria for about an hour.  Either way, there are a lot of other games that I want/need/have to play so a second run through and/or level enrichment may just have to wait.

That being said, I like when games have either a New Game + option or in the case of open worlds, continue playing after the main storyline is completed, but doing practically the same thing as before.  Now, even though I like this in games, I often don't take advantage of this.  I just don't have the time, especially with RPGs, to spend another 40 hours reliving the experiences that I just finished.  Now, there are some exceptions such as when games offer divergent storylines and you want to see other aspects of the story that were not experienced the first time through.

I think I'll go and play some of Reus, because that was a fun 50 minutes that seemed a lot less intimidating than the 15 minutes I spent looking at Civ. V.

Also, I don't think I can finish Doom II: Hell on Earth.  FPS/motion-sickness is just getting too much for me and I get annoyed at only being able to play for 15 minutes before needing to turn the game off.  

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

And I Looked Back on My Busy Day