Author: MrBlueSky

War Story: Occupied France

I enjoy co-op campaign games. As a result, after finishing up Arkham Horror, I was looking for something new. It was then that I saw a writeup from Dan Thurot on War Story: Occupied France. Sure, a World War Two choose your own adventure sort of thing is a bit out of the usual wheelhouse, but it seemed like it would be worth giving a shot.

On the whole, I have quite mixed feelings on War Story. I think I can explain them (and the rest of the game) best by first pulling the box quote from BGG.

Through three replayable story missions, you must exploit the specialties of your chosen agents to uncover information, enlist allies, and obtain weaponry. Engage occupying forces on tactical encounter maps where careless positioning could cost your agents’ lives. Remember, no plan survives contact with the enemy…and time is running out.

Let’s start with those “three replayable story missions.” Yes, there are three of them. Yes, they are missions. Are they replayable?

I would not call them that. As the box also says, much of what we spent our time doing was simply gathering information. Playing again while knowing what and where the Nazi forces are up to feels like it would somewhat defeat the point. After all, it is a choose your own adventure booklet.

Perhaps the game has an elaborate branching path system, but by the time we finished mission 3, we had a pretty good sense of all three ways we COULD have finished our objective, even if we did only focus on one of them.

That said, the general missions and choices they present are fun, tense and exciting.

I would not say the same about the tactical encounter maps.

I’m going to be honest: the gunfights feel like a crapshoot, and there were at least two instances where we got absolutely screwed by the system. That’s not to say there aren’t choices, but often the choices boil down to trying to read the game text about the tactical maps for clues.

And many times, it just feels like those clues aren’t there. A choice with no information is the same as a random selection, and random selection isn’t agency. To the quote the box for a final time “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” and no, our plans did not. Instead, the gunfights feel like a matter of asking “Are you willing to spend gun tokens to avoid the worst case outcome on this check?” twelve or so times in a row.

Either way, I don’t think it’s something that would have annoyed me if it wasn’t for a larger problem I have with tone.

Now this might just be a me problem. My friend didn’t have it, and I believe Dan Thurot had a sort of opposite experience to mine. But it’s my writeup, so I’m going to talk about it here.

To me it feels like there are two very different types of story trying to co-exist in War Story. The first is a sort of grim, intense insurgency narrative, with all the things associated with said narrative.

Life is cheap, the enemy is endless, and while your actions are impactful in the grand scheme of things, they will also lead to death and torture for others around you. There are morally grey choices, and whether you are a terrorist or freedom fighter is ultimately going to be decided by if your side wins.

The way bulk choices are handled with cards, all available or not available as the mission demands is clever, but really only feels used to its full potential in mission 3.

This attempts to sit side by side with a sort of heroic myth thing. The primary enemy is a literal cigar smoking Kriminalkommissar Nazi, who the first two acts spend significant time building up. There is extended narrative time spent on a few “Face” characters who show up, but don’t actually spend much time as part of the story, like the albino toymaker.

Perhaps this is just the result of it being a choose your adventure story. Dan was darkly delighted at a moment when he was confronted with a treacherous informant, and given the choice of killing this person, lying to them, or trying to buy them off. I was equally frustrated when upon encountering a child of a German soldier or potentially SS Officer, I was not given the option to shoot the child.

This was not a choice I was enthusiastic about, but it did feel like a key moment where I would be confronted with the fact that in order to reach my objectives, I would have to make some heinous choices. Instead, we just distracted him and he ran off.

It was an oddly dissonant feeling, and one that has stuck with me since then.

It’s an interesting experience, but playing it by the book it felt frustrating at times, and frankly I don’t see how it could possibly be replayable. Would I play another game in the series? Maybe, but only if someone else was footing the bill.

I don’t really recommend or not recommend War Story. If someone told me they were thinking about playing it, I think the first thing I would say is that I’d love to hear their thoughts after they finish.

The second would be to ask if they wanted to buy my copy.

And here sit the 7 out of 8 agents that I got killed by the end of the campaign.

I drafted Innistrad: Remastered

Ever since my Brother’s War writeup, it’s been a bit of a tradition on the blog to write about the first Magic event I do for each set. As such, it’s time to talk about Innistrad: Remastered.

The first Innistrad was the current set when I actually first started playing Magic. Despite that, I don’t actually have any strong personal feelings for the set, or even the plane. Vampires. Zombies. Blah blah blah. I don’t care.

Still, Innistrad has brought me one of my favorite cards in the game: Emrakul, The Promised End.

Fun Fact: Before even drafting the set I bought a copy of this for $45, because in the eternal words of Penny Arcade, “I am a corporate whore”.

How much do I like this card? Well, enough that I made a whole ass video that is pretty much just me simping for Emrakul.

Now, where were we?

Oh. Right. Drafting this new set.

The Draft

After having brutally learned my lesson at my last draft, a Top 8 in an RCQ, this time I was prepared. I would not just pick rares. I would not just follow my first pick directly into a garbage pool. I would be strong.

Then the universe decided to tempt me by giving me a first pack Vanquish the Horde, followed by being passed a Liesa, Forgotten Archangel.

As the week willed fool that I am, I took the bait.

Or perhaps it wasn’t just bait.

Over the following series of events in the drafts, I was handed a perfectly reasonable set of cards in my color. Multiple Thraben Inspectors. Three copies of Eaten Alive.

It was at this point that I decided to see if I could make white/black work, and the answer turned out to be “Yes, maybe.”

There was only really one tough choice during the draft. Late in pack three, I was handed a pack with a choice between Infernal Grasp, and Restoration Angel.

A difficult choice.

This was tricky. I already had a wide number of removal spells, meaning that Infernal Grasp was maybe less useful. On the other hand, it was hard to view restoration angel as a real bomb. Sure, it’s a 3/4 for 4 flier, that can protect something, but Infernal Grasp was instant speed, unlike all of my other sorcery speed cards.

After much internal debate, I went Infernal Grasp. Would it work out for me? Only time could tell.

Here’s my deck and the rest of the pool.

Generally speaking, this was an aggro list that tried to chunk its opponent for enough life that it could go wide in the later game. Everything was fairly cheap—and even the Eldrazi could be cheated in around turn four with Emerge.

So how well did that game plan go?

The Games

That’s right. It’s time for the games! Round one was… a bye.

I spent most of wandering the store, losing at Street Fighter, and playing a bit of Bosconian. It passed quickly enough, and it was time for round 2.

Round two was a bit of a slugfest. I was playing into a fairly reasonable green/blue deck. The one downside to my draft was that if the game went long, I was very dependent on getting one of my larger bombs or Blood Artist to actually close out games.

Fortunately, after we went to top-decking, (while I still had favorable board state), I drew into Infernal Grasp. With that, I was able to remove my opponent’s combo of Mist Raven and Deadeye Navigator, and pull out a win. This was repeated in game two, giving me a 2-0 win, and 2-0 record.

And then it was time for Match 3.

Match three was against a person I’m going to refer as “Player X.” They had drafted green/blue with a black splash.

Player X is very good at Magic, and probably a stronger drafter than I am. They’ve also been my opponent in a few other drafts recently. So it was with a sense of trepidation that I went into match 3.

That sense would be justified when game one went to 40 minutes, and turned into a game that I just barely won because…. Player X somewhat milled themself out.

Not exactly a clean victory.

As a result of the length of game one, game two went to time. A time that I used to squeak out a draw. I think it’s worth noting here that had we fully played out game two, Player X would have won, and I suspect they would have won game three. They had a generally stronger deck than I did, and despite my early game pressure, even with my bombs, I simply would not have been able to push through their Spider Spawning.

As a result of (or perhaps despite) this however, I found myself at 3-0, and as the winner of draft!

Reaping the Spoils

They say you never forget your first love. I don’t know if that’s entirely true.

That said, I have not forgotten my first favorite Magic card, Deadeye Navigator.

I just love Deadeye Navigator. My very first standard deck tried to use it and Acidic Slime to remove my opponent’s mana base. Was it good? No. Do I use Deadeye Navigator often in my decks these days? Still no.

But this was the card that really got me into Magic. It’s the card that showed me how fun the game can be. I no longer have my first Deadeye Navigator. But after last night, that’s no longer a problem because I now have a play set of both it, and Acidic Slime.

I enjoyed drafting Innistrad, but it’s hard to say if that’s just because I won, or because I enjoy the set. As I noted above, this has never really been my set in the first place, so even if I came away with a sense of ambivalence, I think that would have been fine.

But I came away excited, a bit bummed out that I likely wouldn’t have the chance to draft the set further, as it won’t be coming to Magic: Arena. Is is a perfect snapshot of the best the Innistrad blocks have to offer? No. But it’s plenty fun.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Ed Note: It seems that any discussion of works, or works inspired by H.P.Lovecraft require a disclaimer, a sort of preemptive dismissal of Lovecraft as a person. So I’ll do that here. Lovecraft was tremendous racist. Those elements populate his stories, and their tropes.

Looking at his legacy, I also frankly feel a sense of pity. It’s hard not to feel such a thing for someone who found existential dread in the concept of air conditioning.

Whenever I want to illustrate how different types of stories lend themselves to different gameplay experiences, I tend to compare Dungeons and Dragons, and Call of Chtulhu. Both are tabletop RPG’s, generally about a group of characters working together, often to try to save the world. In modern DND characters can get hit with swords, fireballs, poison and spike traps and keep trucking.

In Call of Cthuhlu, it’s a incredible victory if everyone is even alive after a given session, regardless of how many limbs they have left. Or if they now have extra! Both are possible.

In that sense then, Arkham Horror: The Card Game felt fairly reflective of the brand. I played through the intro campaign with a friend, and by the end both of our characters were worse for wear, and we only just barely stopped Arkham from being leveled via throwing someone else into a wailing mouth of tentacles.

A classic.

It’s also a bit muddly to try to summarize the mechanics. The players do all the normal things that Lovecraft protagonists do, but now with cards. They travel from location to location (cards), equip gear (cards), fight enemies (cards), and take damage (not cards, tracking chits).

The most re-used mechanic then is the idea of the skill check. There are four skills, and players will be given a number to try to beat. This is done by drawing from a bag of numeric modifiers. Some are positives, most are negative, and a few are conditional. There’s also an instant failure! Some of these checks can be quite high, necessitating either burning cards from your hand to pump the check, or having a friend help you by doing the same.

Notably, cards are burned before the modifier is revealed. As such, playing cards directly into a automatic failure is possible, and does not feel good.

Skill checks are used for attacking enemies, interacting with locations, and searching for clues. It’s the first situation mentioned above that causes the most problems, as enemies remain attacking you until dealt with, either by you or a friend.

Enemies, by the way, do not use random checks. Their attacks will always connect. Their dark plans always tick forward. Luck is only a factor for the player, not the grand things that dwell in the spaces between space.

I don’t know if I like the Arkham Horror card game. My primary experience of it is a sense of disappointed relief after completion. I was a alive, but those I had sacrificed were not. I feel no call to purchase the expansions and add-ons, to delve ever deeper into a world of mysteries, unpleasant secrets, and cosmic horror, not because I lack curiosity, but because I will never truly win. Because victory is not victory, it is a mere delaying of inevitable death, because I cannot kill the un-killable, because a stat block for the things that lurk is the dark is a cruel joke, numbers that can only at best sketch a foolish outline of inconceivable majesty.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is $60.

Path of Exile 2 – The Endgame

There is a mountain called Path of Exile 2. There are a lot of ways up this mountain. Some ways are faster. Some ways are slower.

Some paths simply do not lead to the top.

The first step in climbing is deciding at all that you want to climb. It’s an invisible choice, in the context of the game, but it’s a choice. It is one of many choices, and it is the first step, but it is not the first choice. That choice was made back when you first made your character, and selected which class you wanted.

Path of Exile was also a mountain, but it was a slightly harsher one. Maybe not more difficult, but less accepting of certain types of mistakes. Path of Exile 2 is kinder than its prequel. Respeccing is much easier—but there is no option to change class.

If you decide that as a monk, you simply cannot climb this mountain, I’m sorry. Leave the base-camp. You’re going to have to make a new character and walk there again.

You don’t give up everything though. You’ll still have all the items and currency you got on the way up, so your second trek to endgame will be faster. More importantly, you’ll have the knowledge.

Let’s talk about that knowledge. Path of Exile 2 is a very popular mountain. There are a lot of maps of the mountain, and it’s your choice if you want to use them. Frankly, it can seem foolish not to. The mountain is big, and there are a million terrifying choices to make. What equipment should I bring? What path should I take? What skills, what support skills, what meta support skills? How do I manage the trees, specifically the passive skill, atlas skill, and sub-atlas skill trees?

Personally, I haven’t looked anything up yet. That doesn’t mean I haven’t learned anything from the community. Sometimes on my trek I’ll encounter fellow hikers, far further along than I am, and I’ll glean information about what they’re doing from observation.

I ran into a lot of players also playing Witches with 50% of their health reserved, telling me that they picked certain nodes on the ascendancy class. Those nodes seemed to be working well for them, so I decided to try them out.

I witnessed their entourages of arsonist skeletons, ascending the mountain beside them. So I turned off some auras, and called up some more shambling pyromaniacs of my own.

Sure, I’m not looking up a guide. But I’m using the trade websites, swapping my exalted orbs for alchemy orbs at favorable rates. I’m climbing by myself, but I’m absolutely not alone.

The result is that progress is slow. By numerical standards, I’m maybe a third of the way to the top. By practical standards, I suspect I’m less than a tenth of the way there. Map tier 6/15, after 80 hours.

But I’m still climbing.

Perhaps calling it the top is a bit of misnomer. Maybe it’s just a peak.

My “biggest” achievement in the original Path of Exile was getting a single kill on the end game boss called Uber Elder. It took probably dozens of hours to get there, and a massive number of attempts (less than 20, so mechanically, not the hardest boss I’ve ever fought). But probably the most hours to actually do the fight.

That’s because while Path of Exile wasn’t an incredibly hard game, it was an incredibly punishing one. Die, and you lose 10% progress to the next level. In the endgame, you got six attempts at each boss or fight and then it’s game over.

As a fight, Uber Elder was incredibly punishing in many ways. You have to fight the two hardest bosses in the game at once. But the main reason it took dozens of hours was because getting to that fight required a specific set of items, and getting those items required another specific set of items, and getting those…

You get the point. It’s turtles all the way down. And to be clear, once you use those items to start the fight, they’re gone, win or lose.

I don’t know how rare beating that boss even is. I beat it once. There are probably folks who have done it hundreds of times.

Path of Exile 2 is even more punishing, at least right now. You get one attempt. Die a single time, and you’re kicked out, back to your hideout with chunk of experience gone, and no recourse.

Better luck next time.

Except… luck probably isn’t the reason you died. Not really. When I die, it’s usually because I’m less cautious than I should be. I was a little too greedy, a little too reckless, not paying quite enough attention. Then, a slip, and suddenly I am tumbling back down the mountain, the last 30 minutes of progress wiped out.

It’s then that I’m tempted to look up a guide, to find a map. But I don’t really want to. A math quiz when you’ve been given the answer key is an exercise is scribing, and nothing more. For better, or more likely worse, I want to earn my success. When my enemies fall, I want it to because I outplayed them. More realistically, I want it to be because I solved the puzzle the game developer set in front me.

I want to climb the mountain myself. If that means I never reach the peak, so be it.

Path of Exile 2 – The (Beta) Campaign

The Path of Exile 2 beta is out. I got a demo a few months ago, but now that I’ve fully played through it, I have even more thoughts. I’m going breaking down my thoughts on it into two writeups, one on the campaign, and one the endgame. Technically, they are the same game, but mechanically they are very different experiences.

Now, before I get into that, there’s some brief background that is necessary. Path of Exile 2 is a sequel to my 2nd most played game of all time, Path of Exile. (about 3000+ hours?) My thoughts are going to be at least somewhat in comparison to it’s predecessor.

As a brief filter, I offer the following phrases:
“juicing maps”
“6L”
“Farming blood adqueducts for a Tab”

If you know what any of these mean, just click here to skip ahead. If you don’t, you are likely to find the following background information helpful.

ARPG’s in Brief

Path of Exile 2, hereby abreviated to PoE 2, is a isometric ARPG from Grinding Gear Games.

For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.

Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees, character customization and itemization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have a baseball bat.

Trash mobs are fairly brainless and just rush the player, while bosses tend to be more correographed experiences, closer to something from a Bullet Hell, or Hades.

The first Path of Exile differentiated itself from other ARPG’s by making everything into game an item, and making those items tradable. Skills are items, (skill gems) which got socketed into other items you wore, and those sockets had colors determining which gems could be socketed.

The ability to refund skills points was an item. To enter endgame areas, specific items were needed. Same to fight endgame bosses. To buy items from vendors, it was necessary to have more items to trade them.

It’s other big differentiator was a skill tree so massive that one of my favorite things to do is pop it out as a joke, just to mess with people, who did not believe it was real.

Finally, there was the gem system. Gems could be supported by other gems. Take a fireball, link it to a multiple projectile gem, and now it shoots three fireballs. Link it to a piercing projectiles gem, and now they penetrate. Link it to a faster cast speed, make a few more tweaks, and now your character is a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Changes between PoE and Poe 2

PoE 2 makes a lot of changes to the above underlying systems, most of which serve to make the campaign much less punishing for inexperienced players. Gold exists as a flat currency to use with vendor NPC’s. This makes getting leveling gear a much easier process.

Gold can also be used to refund skill points. This is possibly the biggest change between the two games, because in PoE, a badly built skill tree would softlock a character. This would make it impossible to get the items needed to respec, and pretty much force the player to make a new character.

Sockets on items and their associated colors are also gone. Skill gems are socketed into a general skill gem menu. The types of support gems that can be used are limited by primary stats. There are even more small tweaks to make suggestions to players on what gems to use, and to prevent them from making choices that simply don’t work.

The skill tree is still massive. There’s now a dodge roll. Movement is a much more flowy thing then it previously was.

The general changes though result in much easier on-boarding experience with the games initial systems, instead of purely being thrown into the deep end, like the player was with the first Path of Exile.

Does all of this mean the game is easier?

Well, yes and no.

The Campaign

Generally I like the campaign. There are some incredibly sloggy bits, notably a single map in Act 2 that just goes on forever, and three or four of the Act 3 areas really tested my patience for just wanting to see the next few things.

That said, outside of these, I really didn’t have many complaints. The bosses feel far more diverse and interesting then their PoE 1 counterparts, and also much harder. The final boss of Act 1 in particular killed me about 10-20 times before I finally defeated it. It’s worth noting that I actually killed it right as it killed me, but that still counts, so on I went.

They’re also just much more fun as a general visual spectacle. My personal favorite is probably Crowbell, a giant crow-man thing that tries to beat the player to death with a bell. The fight isn’t particularly hard, but does have a fun transitions, with Crowbell running around, powering up, wrenching a bell off it’s stand, then using it as a bludgeon.

The trash mobs… well, they’re ARPG trash mobs. The nicest thing I can say about them is that they did in fact contribute to my /deaths count.

Finally, there’s the story elements. I generally quite liked these, even if the current content kinda ends on bit of a cliffhanger. I’m also the only person I know who cared about the lore of PoE, so maybe take that with a grain of salt. There are some callbacks to PoE, but I don’t think missing them will have any impact on your enjoyment.

I will say that I personally experienced a moment of glee getting to fight a character whose only ever been hinted at in flavor text from PoE, but another friend of mine who played the game before me didn’t even realize he was a recurring character, and thought he was someone new.

If you’re playing through the campaign without a build guide, or information about the game, I’d estimate it’ll take about 12-20 hours to play through? There’s a good chunk of game here. That said, the campaign does not currently conclude the story, as that’s planned for the games full release, so if you’re playing the game just for the campaign, I’d hold off.

Overall Thoughts

I like PoE 2. I have problems with the game, but they’re not present during the campaign. It changes a lot of esoteric bullshit that was required to play, made the boss fights more interesting, and is just generally more friendly, if not easier.

Some parts are a bit of slog.

That said, I think the main reason to currently play the campaign is to get to endgame. The campaign is not a finished game yet, with a complete story, and the beta is currently $30.

If the full campaign maintains it’s current level of quality for the remaining acts on full release, Path of Exile 2 will be worth playing purely as a standalone ARPG just for that. But for players who aren’t in a rush, or want a new ARPG, I would say to wait.