Tonight we talk about the May AggroChat Game Club game…  Heroes of Hammerwatch. This was Belghast’s pick who largely though we needed a much more relaxing game after the deep feels that A Night in the Woods gave us.  Additionally the first one was a lot of fun and it was well worth exploring what the indirect sequel had to offer. This leads us down a path where we talk about the differences between Rogue-lite and Rogue-like as well as some discussion about procedural generation versus hand built maps.  We also talk a bit about the June game of the month Evoland 2.

Topics Featured:

• Our New Battle Royale Mode
• Heroes of Hammerwatch
• Rogue-lite vs Rogue-like
• Procedural vs Hand Built
• Evoland 2
• Final Fantasy Four Job Fiesta

Tonight we change things up a bit and instead of recording the Game of the Month show…  we are in fact doing a normal style show. By normal… I mean we are recording with a Tam who has been day drinking.  We start off the discussion with Dauntless that just launched on the 24th… and by launch I mean it is a free to play game going into open beta which is absolutely a launch.  Ash talks about Hyrule Warriors on the switch and his experiences playing through it and all of the new content that came from the 3DS version. Tam talks a bit about Far Lone Sails a game where you drive a sailboat train and constantly keep moving ever steadily to the right.  Finally we talk about games as escapism and this turns into a far darker discussion than I had intended it to. We each sorta talk about how we use games to cope with whatever we are dealing with.

Topics Discussed:  

• Dauntless
• Hyrule Warriors - Switch
• Far Lone Sails
• Games as Escapism

Tonight we are down both an Ashgar and a Kodra… and the intro felt really weird to start with Grace.  Tonight we had one of those nights where we felt like we didn’t have an awful lot to talk about… but then wound up running over time anyways.  Bel talks about his experiences with State of Decay 2 on both Xbox One and PC and how it has changed from the original. Grace talks about her experiences with the Warmind Destiny 2 expansion that then spawns a discussion about why we feel D2 has a bad attach rate.  Bel and Grace talk about how not excited they are for Battle for Azeroth in World of Warcraft, but how otherwise generally awesome the experience of leveling alts has become. Tam and Thalen talk about their further experiences with Battletech and coming to terms with the random headshots.

Featured Topics:

• State of Decay 2
• Destiny 2 Warmind
• • Bad Progression Design
• World of Warcraft
• • Battle for Azeroth Angst
  • Excellent Alt Leveling
• BattleTech

Tonight we are down a Thalen because storms cause power outages.  Among the topics discussed is the new Destiny 2 expansion called Warmind.  Belghast has spent a significant amount of time with it and has things to say.  From there Tam goes into his experiences with Battletech and why maybe being absolutely completely true to pen and paper sometimes has issues.  Ash talks about Pillars of Eternity 2… and how he has yet to actually play it but has spent a lot of time digging around in the JSON code. Finally we wrap things up with a discussion of Magic the Gathering Commander…  and how to build a deck designed not to win but instead to do interesting things and subvert the flow of the game.

Topics Discussed:

• Destiny 2: Warmind
• Battletech
• Pillars of Eternity 2
• Magic the Gathering - Commander

Tonight we are extremely happy that Tam is still with us.  Find out how exactly he has managed to be hit five different times by motor vehicles.  With his ability to take a fall he is still with us and healing… but still very sore. We talk a bit about the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general terms and attempt to be as spoiler free as possible.  Largely we discuss what a feat it is to have 19 movies and 11 television series that all more or less interact with each other in the same shared universe. From there Kodra and Belghast talks a bit about Magic the Gathering Arena and the new quick draft mode.  Finally Tam talks a bit about his experiences with Yakuza Zero and what a weird game that ultimately is.

Topics Discussed:

• Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Magic the Gathering Arena Drafting
• Yakuza 0

This week we talk about the April AggroChat Game Club title…  Night in the Woods. This was Kodra’s pick and has turned out to be quite the emotional ride of the AggroChat crew.  This game is somewhat of a mirror in that it reflects back the baggage you bring with you. Each of us had experiences that felt very real and similar to things happening in the game but honestly it was a little hard to unpack all of that during the course of a show.  There is a blend of talk about he game and talk about our own upbringings. Definitely one of the most personal AggroChat shows to date.

Tonight we are recording our two hundredth episode of AggroChat and we still have no clue what we are doing.  There was a joke floating around this week that “lets make a podcast” is the new version of “let's form a band” and honestly… it sorta is.  April 13th of 2014 I gathered up some of my friends and said, let's do a thing where we mostly just have the conversations we normally have on voice chat…  while recording it. Four years and some change later we are sitting at our bicentennial episode.

Tonight we talk about the Kulve Taroth event happening in Monster Hunter World.  Kodra and Bel talk about Magic the Gathering Arena and how this might actually be the answer to Magic for the Hearthstone crowd.  Kodra talks about his experiences with the Dominaria pre-release draft event. Finally we settle into a lengthy discussion about games with defined metas and the battle between playing the way you want and playing in a way that supports the meta compositions.

Topics Discussed

• Monster Hunter World
• • Kulve Taroth
• Magic the Gathering Arena
• • Preconstructed
• Dominaria Pre-release
• • Drafting the set
• Playing the Meta vs Playing the Game
• • Warhammer 40k
  • Destiny
  • League of Legends
  • Heroes of the Storm
  • Monster Hunter World

In a human sense AggroChat just turned 5 years old this last Friday…  but in a more correct sense we have now completely four entire years of this podcast.  I still feel like we really don’t completely know what we are doing here. As the patron saint of bad decisions…  Belghast journeys back into Everquest… not EQ2 but the original and talks a bit about how many of those systems have changed drastically.  Grace and Bel talk a bit about their Mythical Nonsense journey in World of Warcraft as they reached Mythic +10 this past week. We go into a lengthy conversation talking about encounter decision with several examples including Monster Hunter World and Dark Souls.  We talk briefly about the Dominaria expansion for Magic the Gathering and the release of Standard Ready Challenger Decks. Finally we wrap up with a little bit of discussion about the MegaMan event happening in Monster Hunter World.

Topics Discussed

• Four Years of AggroChat
• Original Everquest
• • Changed Systems
• Mythical Nonsense
• Encounter Design
• • Single Player Encounters
  • Multiplayer Encounters
  • Variable Number Encounters
  • Dark Souls Encounters
  • Monster Hunter World Encounters
  • Guild Wars 2 Mistakes
• Dominaria Magic Expansions
• • Challenge Decks
• Monster Hunter World Megaman Event

Tonight we are back recording an normal show after last week's game of the year show.  This also marks the first show we are purposefully trying to time box at around 90 minutes worth of recording time...  which turns into roughly an hour of run time after editing.  The plan is to make this show a little easier to consume... and also easier to record for those of us who are in central and east coasts because some of our bigger shows lead to getting to bed occasionally around 1 am.  As a result we whittled down the list of topics a bit and wound up with essentially four solid topics to discuss.  As a result oddly enough the conversation seemed to flow much more easily so it may also be a good decision for our content in the long run as well.

Topics Discussed:

• Bloodborne
  • Soulsian Games
• Spring Blossom Event
  • Monster Hunter World
• Neostalgia MMORPGs
  • Project Gorgon
  • Shroud of the Avatar
• The Way Games Start

This week we record the March AggroChat Game Club game…  The Sexy Brutale. This murder mystery puzzle game is Thalen’s pick and the crew talks about their experiences playing the game and sorting out how best to utilize those time warping powers.  This also happens to be the first show ever recorded without Belghast, and while everything seems to have gone off swimmingly… be warned that Bel does in fact sound weird this week. Please Look Forward to It!