In this installment of Ye Olde Grabbe Bagg Poste, I’ll be talking about my thoughts on some Gamescom announcements, as well as my recent activities in World of Warcraft and other games.

Minutes to Midnight

Every MMO blogger is contractually obligated to use that pun at least once in the coming months.

I’ve been listing off my hopes and predictions for WoW’s upcoming Midnight expansion over at Massively OP, and following the reveal at Gamescom, it seems I got pretty close on most things.

As expected, I am mildly disappointed by the lack of a new class or other major gameplay features outside of housing (which doesn’t seem to be hitting the notes for what I want from player housing), but it’s what I expected, so I’m not too fussed.

The prey feature sounds like it could be fun, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that’s going to shake up the game in any big way. Just something to slightly spice up grinding world quests by the sounds of it. Conceptually the new demon hunter spec sounds awesome, but we’ll have to see what the actual game mechanics for it are like before I get too hyped.

The cinematic, though, was a thing of beauty. I’m a huge Liadrin fanboy, and I’m so glad they seem to be centering her in the story. Plus Gideon Emery is always spectacular in everything he does.

The new zones look great, too. For me the expansion will be worth the price of admission just to revisit Quel’thalas and Zul’aman. I’m also happy to see another underground zone, as War Within didn’t fully capitalize on that premise. The Voidstorm zone looks a little too similar to K’aresh at first blush, but I’ll try to keep an open mind about it.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with how Midnight is shaping up.

Age of Empires 4 debases itself further

My expectations for the AoE4 DLC announcement at Gamescom were pretty low, but even so they somehow managed to massively disappoint me.

I was expecting another Sultans Ascend: An over-priced DLC with a short campaign, a couple new civs, and a bunch of dumb variant “civilizations” no one asked for. Instead, we only got the dumb variants.

Yup, that’s right. No campaign, no new civilizations. Just more variants. I’ll give them some credit that at least the Golden Horde was an actual empire — you know, the thing the whole franchise is supposed to be about; does anyone but me remember that was supposed to be the premise? — but the rest I couldn’t care less about.

My flabbers are particularly gasted by the addition of a second Japanese civilization. Even having the Japanese in the first place when the civilization roster is so limited is mildly questionable given Japan wasn’t really a particularly large or influential nation during the Middle Ages, but two different Japanese civilizations is just ridiculous.

Again, it’s getting harder and harder not to feel like the developers are tacitly endorsing racist attitudes towards history that view anything outside of Europe and Asia as being beneath the term “civilization.” We only have one civilization from Africa and none from the Americas, but hey, at least we have two different flavours of Japanese to cater to the weebs.

A lot of people are saying that the developers must be starved for funding and doing the best they can with limited resources, but that doesn’t really add up. Sultans Ascend was supposedly the best selling DLC in the Age franchise’s history. They should have plenty of cash.

Even if that isn’t the case, no one was forcing them to start churning out noble houses and random armies and calling them “civilizations.” If your goal is asset re-use, there are smarter ways to do it. You could make a Scottish civilizations that shares most of its building and unit skins with the English. You don’t need to call it a variant, you can just use similar visual assets like the franchise has from the beginning. Similarly I don’t think anyone would mind if, say, a Vietnamese or Korean civilization shared architecture with the Chinese.

No, this bizarre tangent into variants is an entirely unforced error. We had every opportunity to expand the cultural and historic diversity of the game, and the developers simply chose not to.

The only thing about the Dynasties of the East DLC that vaguely appeals to me is the Crucible, a new single-player roguelike mode. I’ve wanted some more repeatable versus AI content in the game forever. But considering that the skirmish AI has been broken since launch, the fact the mode is barely even mentioned on the store page, and the failure of Age of Mythology’s conceptually similar Arena of the Gods mode, my hopes for it are basically zero. It’s pretty clear by now that AoE4 devs only care about catering to PvP sweatlords, so I expect this to be a very half-hearted feature.

The sands of K’aresh

Moving on to what I’ve been playing lately, I’m back in WoW just for a month to catch up on the story. The rest of this segment will have story spoilers for 11.2, so skip ahead if you want to avoid that.

I’ve been a bit underwhelmed with this patch. K’aresh is a cool zone — the art team hit it out of the park as always — but phase diving and ecological succession are pretty weak features, and the story’s conclusion was disappointing.

Xal’atath’s betrayal was the most obvious twist ever. I’m fine with the idea that our heroes had no choice but to work with her against Dimensius, but the fact they actually believed she would be trapped in the Dark Heart strains credibility a lot more, as does the fact Alleria apparently had no contingency plan for the inevitable double cross. This is one of those moments where instead of making the villain look smart, they just made the heroes look stupid.

K’aresh’s world soul surviving also makes it feel like there’s no real danger in the story. If a world soul can survive that, can anything ever actually threaten them?

This is one of the biggest flaws of Warcraft’s story-telling. No one stays dead, nothing is ever really destroyed, and there’s no consequences. It sucks the tension out of the story.

I also don’t really get how Ve’nari went from a morally grey rogue of uncertain purpose to a selfless eco-warrior. That character really lost her edge. While not as bad on that front as Dragonflight, War Within is still suffering from being a bit too saccharine. I’m not saying we need to go back to the ultra-edge of Shadowlands or WoD, but there’s a happy medium between that and the hugbox we have now.

Still, I remain mostly happy with The War Within and its story overall. It’s just a shame it stumbled a bit at the finish line.

I do think it’s interesting how much of Xal’atath’s story is about her fighting other agents of the Void. Infighting in that group is common, but she seems to have a special devotion to it. I’m starting to feel like her goal is not to conquer Azeroth in the name of the Void, but to use its power to make herself top dog of the Void. Like we’re just a stepping stone to her greater plans.

Outside of the new stuff, I’ve been half-heartedly leveling a few more alts. My Undead death knight from Pandaria Remix is almost level 80 now, and may be there by the time you’re reading this. My enthusiasm for the character has been waning since the recent Frost revamp, though, which added more pointless attention tax cooldowns to what had been possibly the only spec left without them. Playing Blood now, which is… fine, I guess, but man I just want one spec that’s purely resource-based.

I had planned to put a lot of time into my latest hunter, also from Remix, this time around. I’d collected some cool pets to fit her Dark Ranger ethos and everything. But try as I might, I’m still struggling to enjoy playing a hunter. I’ve tried so many times over the years, and it just never sticks. I wish so much we could get another class that uses bows.

Minidan returns

I’ve also been playing a little of Pandaria Classic. That expansion had my favourite incarnation of the warlock class, with Demonology in particular being possibly my favourite spec in WoW’s history, so I wanted to check it out.

MoP Demonology is every bit as good as I remember it (the gameplay anyway; the graphics less so…), but leveling up from scratch all over again has been rough. Theoretically I would like to get to level cap and check out those Celestial dungeons, but right now I’m kind of stalled out around level 30. Classic dungeons are so painful, man.

Spidey sense tingling

Before getting back to WoW, I played through Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (they really couldn’t have given that a better name?), one of my latest Steam sale purchases.

I wasn’t really motivated to do the whole open world grind shtick, so I ignored most of the side activities and just blitzed through the story. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was a fun romp full of Spidey nostalgia. I appreciated the wholesome, classically heroic vibe of it. Peter’s just a good person doing his best to make the world a better place. Feels good, man.

I found the boss fights pretty annoying (yet another recent game where my reflexes held me back), but otherwise the gameplay was fun enough. Tossing around goons was a good time, and the web-slinging was well done.

I’ll probably buy the sequels at some point, but I’ll definitely wait for sales.

ARPG ennui

I’ve run out of steam in Path of Exile and Diablo: Immortal. PoE did finally start to get a bit challenging, but mostly in the form of being one-shot by boss mechanics I couldn’t see because the visual clarity in that game is terrible.

I still kind of want to finish it, but it was really starting to feel like a slog. I may just watch the rest of the story on YouTube or something, IDK. The story isn’t even that interesting, really, but closure would be nice.

I realized after a while the story is actually incredibly basic but just seems deep at first because the dialogue uses such flowery language. And don’t get me wrong, I love how over the top dramatic the language is, and the voice acting is great, but there is something off-putting to the realization of how much of it is just smoke and mirrors to make things seem deeper than they are.

Everything in Path of Exile is like that, and I realized that’s my biggest issue with the game. It’s how hard it works to seem deeper and smarter than it is. It would be so much more fun if it just embraced its own dumbness. ARPGs aren’t meant to be a cerebral genre; they’re just dumb violence simulators, and that’s why we love them. Path of Exile feels so ashamed of what it is.

Meanwhile in Immortal, I really was loving their take on the druid, but — in stark contrast to what people will say the problem with mobile games is — it’s just far too generous.

I’ve never said that about a game before, but it’s true. If I play for twenty minutes, the first 15 of that will just be claiming freebie rewards and sorting my inventory. I’m only a few zones deep into the campaign, but I’m already level-capped with legendary gear in most slots. Nothing is challenging, and none of the rewards I get from actually playing compare to what the game gives away for free.

What a bizarre game.

Overwatch struggles

I’ve uninstalled Overwatch for the moment. Even with the accessibility aids of Stadium, I’m just hopelessly bad at it, to the point where it felt unfair to make other people play with me. You’d think eventually the MMR would put me low enough to reach a 50% win rate, but I don’t think there’s an MMR low enough for me.

I can play Reinhardt okay because he’s so brain dead easy, but I don’t want to be limited to playing just one character, and I’m pretty hopeless otherwise. It’s frustrating because I otherwise enjoy the game, but I just get curbstomped every time I try to play it.

I may give it another try at some point. I was looking forward to Brigitte joining the Stadium roster. But I worry I’m just never going to be good enough to hack it in this game.

Future plans

I’ve only got a few days left in my WoW sub. I’m kind of leaning towards doing more frequent but shorter stints in the game, at least for the near future. Once the current jaunt ends, I’ll be on to other things.

I’m planning to revisit The First Descendant soon. My always shakey interest in the game was feeling like it was running out, but Nell is my favourite character in the game (not for any good reason; I just like the cut of her jib), and making her playable is enough to entice me back, or at least poke my nose in.

I also picked up Songs of Silence on the last Steam sale, and I want to get to that soon. Like Clair Obscur, it’s another turn-based game that seemed interesting enough to give it a shot, despite my usual dislike of such things.

Farther down the line there’s the upcoming Legion Remix, which doesn’t excite me the way Pandaria did but will probably be worth playing a bit of, and in theory the release of Heavenly Spear for Age of Mythology: Retold shouldn’t be too far off.

After AoE4’s recent embarrassments, I find my criticisms of Heavenly Spear feel a bit less relevant. I still wish they’d prioritized something else over the Japanese, but it does look to be shaping up to be a cool civ based on the previews, and at least it will have an actual campaign, and skirmish AI that meets the bare minimum of functionality.