Tag Archives: fantasy

New World: Fresh Faces

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Just a small post today about something I felt was worth marking but wouldn’t fill a Vitae Aeternum column over at Massively OP.

My less than perfect attempt to fix my Covenant alt's face in New World.A few months back, New World revamped player faces, leaving both my characters with new faces I didn’t ask for. While I didn’t mind the new look for my Syndicate main too much, I hated the changes made for my Covenant alt. This left me eagerly awaiting the release of this season’s barbershop feature.

Of course, the barbershop tokens come from the cash shop. I’ve nothing against that on principle, but considering they changed all our faces a few months before, they really should have given every character a free token off the bat. Instead they offered only one for free, at level 90 of the season pass.

I spent a few hours enduring the misery of grinding the current season pass as a PvE player and got the freebie, and my Covie now has a new new face, as you can see above.

To be honest, I’m still not thrilled with it. It’s nowhere near as ugly as the one the update saddled her with, but it doesn’t suit her. She looks mean now. While I imagined her having a fairly rough past, she’s a true believer in the Covenant’s mission now, and “mean” doesn’t fit. Problem is there just aren’t that many faces in this game, fewer that look good, and even fewer with Asian features. Maybe the new one will grow on me with time. One could hope…

My main's updated face in New World.That was to be the end of it, but my Syndicate main’s new face wasn’t quite sitting right either. It didn’t look bad, but it wasn’t her, either. Thus, in a moment of weakness, I bought a second barbershop token and changed her up, as well.

This does mean I broke my boycott of Trump-aligned big tech, and I feel genuinely bad about that. It is complicated because I’m pretty confident the California-based developers of a game about a multi-cultural setting that’s featured bisexual and nonbinary NPCs since launch aren’t particularly supportive of Mango Mussolini, but at least some of the money still does get filtered up the chain to Amazon’s orange-scrotum-gobbling boss. I won’t attempt to make excuses. It was, as I said, a moment of weakness.

At least I’m happy with the result. While I struggled with my Covie, for the main I was able to find a nice-looking face that feels like a pretty good match for her original look. While I was there, I also gave her a messier hair style and a nasty facial scar, as I figure a few years on Immortality Is Actually Hell Island would have her looking a bit less prim and proper.

This reflects how my view of the character has evolved over the years. I’ve always pictured her as a magical scholar, but originally I was picturing her as very book smart and civilized, whereas these days I’m seeing her as more of a witchy, druidic type. This can be seen as a natural evolution rather than a retcon. You can read all the books on alchemy you want back in Europe, but once you get to Aeternum, the wild powers of the island don’t follow such clear-cut rules.

With that done, I’ve largely dropped New World, and I imagine that will remain true until season ten launches in fall. Maybe I’ll drop back in for the occasional world boss or something, but I’m pretty burnt out on the game on its current state of content drought. Let’s hope they hit it out of the park with the new zone that is probably Dunwood. I want me a nice spooky zone where I can get a gothic horror mansion for a house.

Gaming Round-Up: Mods, Demos, and Ashes

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Feels like we’re about due for another post on odds and ends of my recent gaming not covered by other posts.

Breaking the fourth wall in the Section 13 demo.RTS mods

Finishing all those Age of Empires campaigns a few weeks back didn’t entirely quell my RTS lust, and I ended up turning to the modding community for more options.

Firstly, I did end up trying that Swedish campaign for AoE3. For fan-made, it was pretty decent, but still well below the quality of professional content, and I quickly remembered why AoE3 is my least favourite installment of the franchise, so I didn’t make it that far before losing interest.

Next, I was looking for some good PvE custom maps for Warcraft III: Reforged. The problem with that is that most of them are RPG campaigns or MOBA-like modes or otherwise radically different from the baseline Warcraft III experience, and I just… like… wanted to play more Warcraft III. A lot of mods aren’t compatible with Reforged, either, and I can’t go back to the old graphics at this point.

I did find one interesting option, though: Advanced Melee AI (AMAI) updates the skirmish AI to behave more like a real person, with more diverse strategies.

The Advanced Melee AI puts me in my place in Warcraft III: Reforged.It may succeed in its goal of replicating ladder players a little too well. I got tower rushed my first game. On the plus side, it did make for a fun comeback as I eventually broke free of the choking siege.

The AI is also programmed to periodically trash-talk you, which is… something. It hasn’t thrown any racial slurs or threats of sexual violence at me, though, so we haven’t quite perfectly replicated a real gamer yet.

I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect solution to skirmishes quickly getting stale, but it definitely added some variety, and I got a good few hours of fun out of it. I’m not ruling out playing more in future, either. Still wish I could have found some proper custom campaign-style missions using the original factions, though.

A Warcraft III version of StarCraft II co-op missions is probably too much to hope for, but it doesn’t stop a man from dreaming.

Steam demos

I’ve tried out a few more Steam demos lately. Most were swiftly uninstalled and forgotten, but a few stood out.

I actually quite liked Section 13 aside from the fact it’s a roguelike. After running the first mission at least three times without beating it, I just lost patience, but I did like the art style and the humour a lot, and the combat was mostly enjoyable. I find the roguelike and soulslike trends have ruined a lot of what would otherwise been great games.

One that did make it onto my wishlist is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. Gameplay-wise it’s sort of like a low budget Skyrim, which isn’t my favourite thing, but the story was actually pretty intriguing. It’s allegedly based on Arthurian mythology, but aside from using some familiar names it’s pretty much its own thing.  The music and voice-acting were top notch, too, and I really liked the twisted visual aesthetic.

I probably wouldn’t pay full price for it, but it’s definitely something I might pick up on sale one day. I am curious to see where this story goes.

Ashes: Red Rains

I haven’t been playing physical card games as much these days, partly due to a certain degree of burnout and partly due to my ever-worsening mental health leaving me with little energy to, but I did stumble across a new (to me) game I wanted to try.

A promotional image of some cards from Ashes Reborn Red Rains: The Corpse of Viros.Ashes — later rebranded as Ashes Reborn and now rebranding again as Ashes Ascendancy — was originally envisioned as a competitive card game but has since added robust solo/co-op support with the Red Rains expansion line and the upcoming Ascendancy expansions. Intrigued, I picked up The Corpse of Viros, a de facto starter set for the Red Rains line.

I’ve only played one game so far, so I’m still making up my mind, but my early impression is mostly positive with a few quibbles.

The onboarding experience could have been better. The layout of the rulebook wasn’t always intuitive, and the starter deck they give you didn’t feel like it had reliable tools for dealing with all the boss’s mechanics.

The card art isn’t bad, but it isn’t amazing, either. I also would have liked some more context on the lore. There’s basically nothing on the setting, the characters you’re playing, or the boss you’re fighting. I don’t expect much story in a card game — I actually find the amount of story in something like Arkham Horror LCG a bit tiresome — but give me something.

On the other hand, I like how the resource mechanic is based on rolling a dice pool every round, which makes you adapt your strategy on the fly a bit, and the way they implemented escalating boss phases was really cool. In general it feels a bit more dynamic and less predictable than I’m used to solo card games being.

I don’t think I’m going to go all-in on this one like I did with Lord of the Rings LCG (I might have considered it if I was still at the peak of my card game obsession), but I’ll probably pick up a couple more expansions.