From Hell's Legacy to The Icebind - and Back to Building

It has been a busy few weeks split between Sanctuary, the Origin System, and a lot of code.

Diablo IV: a rough start that found its footing

Official Season of Hell's Legacy artwork via Blizzard.

The latest Diablo IV season had a pretty bumpy start, but it really turned around for me compared with some of the previous seasons. I made it to around Paragon 275 on my Warlock before Warframe pulled me away again.

Season of Hell's Legacy is built around Diablo's 30th anniversary, and the throwback angle ended up working better than I expected. The seasonal quest has you face echoes of Diablo, Baal, and Mephisto in recreated locations from the older games. Each Prime Evil also has its own Soul Splinter path that changes different activities: Helltides and Infernal Hordes for Diablo, Undercity and Lair Bosses for Baal, and The Pit and Nightmare Dungeons for Mephisto. That gave me more reason to move between activities instead of living in one grind forever.

There are still rough edges, but reaching Paragon 275 without feeling completely burned out says a lot. The season recovered well enough that I left because something else caught my attention, not because I was done with Diablo.

Warframe: mostly waiting for the ice to break

Official Iceblade of Narin artwork via Digital Extremes.

The first part of Warframe's Iceblade of Narin update felt light. The big six-player activity -- originally shown as Glacial Defiance and now called The Icebind -- was delayed, so the main things waiting at launch were Narin and Citrine Prime.

Narin is a fun addition, and Citrine Prime looks great, but the farm was the real letdown for me. Narin's blueprints and the new Entropic Kuva currency both send you back through Zariman missions to hunt Entropic Eximus. Those missions are still good, but repeating familiar content did not make the update feel as new as its presentation suggested. Digital Extremes has already doubled the weighting of Narin's blueprint in Zariman Exterminate and Mobile Defense, which should at least make that loop less painful.

The Riven update also landed in pieces. Trait Locking is live now: you can preserve one stat while cycling a Riven, though doing so doubles the Kuva cost. The more interesting part for me, Riven Splicing, arrives with The Icebind. Splicing combines two compatible traits into a new locked trait; it is broader than elemental stats alone, but it uses a special pool of combinations and needs Riven Splicers earned from the new activity.

The Icebind is scheduled for Wednesday, October 7. It supports up to six Tenno, with weekly Cryobells and squad-stacking modifiers aimed at veteran players. Hopefully, once it arrives, things will not feel quite so chill. I may even stream Wednesday, so keep an eye out!

Development update

On the development side, the site has been stable, with only minor changes here and there. My work for Black Sheep Radio has moved primarily into maintenance mode, which has freed up more time for personal projects.

Wrench, my Discord bot, is well on its way toward a public release. It has now been running across multiple servers for weeks with little to no trouble, thankfully. Most of my attention there is shifting from proving that the core features work to making the setup and management experience ready for people outside my own servers.

I am also working on a plugin for Windower 4, the widely used third-party enhancement framework for Final Fantasy XI. Windower addons are written in Lua, but its plugins are compiled -- usually in C++ -- and delivered as DLLs. That makes this my first real dive into C++, as well as my first game-development-adjacent project outside Lua. It has been a different kind of challenge, especially working closer to the game client than I normally do, but that is also what makes it interesting.