Robot Season

[Beatrix Gerke]

InJune 2016, USA Network announced Hacking Robot, a live aftershow hosted by Andy Greenwald.[52] The first episode of Hacking Robot debuted after the season two premiere, with guests Sam Esmail, Rami Malek, Christian Slater, Carly Chaikin and Portia Doubleday and received 376,000 viewers.[53] The second installment aired on September 7, 2016, after the tenth episode of the second season,[54] and received 320,000 viewers.[22]

The first episode of Mr. Robot was released across multiple digital platforms in advance of its first broadcast. It had a viewership of 2.7 million prior to the first broadcast of the episode.[57]

The answer to both those things is probably yes, and when this season is over, we can certainly discuss whether it needed thirteen episodes or if it should have brought Whiterose and the Deus Group back into the main narrative before spending four episodes on the longest Christmas Day on Earth.

After seeing the last Mr. Robot easter egg from season 2 episode 1 I have been on the lookout for IP's and domains to try and go after. At the end of season 2 episode 4 (init_1.asec) Elliot logs into an IRC server and the IP address is clearly visible as 192.251.68.53.

After it logged me in as D0loresH4ze I was dropped in a channel called #th3g3ntl3man with the all too familiar samsepi0l (for the uninformed, Sam Sepiol was the alias Elliot used in season one to gain access to Steel Mountain, a secure datacenter).

What does that even mean? At the end of the episode this line of dialogue was not shown. Only wait for my instructions was. The scene after shows a news article from Business Insider titled FBI gives up Blackberry for Android. I assume that is their "standard issue" and he is going to hack into them via their smartphones. That's a bold move, we'll see how it plays out next week.

After this I investigated a couple of other addresses I found (192.251.68.240, 104.97.14.93, 192.251.68.249, irc.eversible.co) but none of them turned up anything. I looked at the page source too, hoping to find something hidden in the javascript or HTML. Nothing there either... I guess we will just have to wait and see where this goes! I'll probably take a closer look at this after work, but I thought this would be cool to share now.

Diablo 4's new spider pal may be far more complicated than last season's Vampiric Powers, but I like the change of pace. Season 2 was a critical moment for the game to speed way up and see what happened, and the result was what felt almost like a reboot: a major shift in philosophy for how Diablo 4 is meant to be played. Everywhere you went XP and loot poured out of monsters. It was the easiest the game had been since its launch, but as a result, everything good about it was accessible to everyone.

Season 3 is what happens after seismic changes to the structure of the game have settled in. Blizzard gave its new seasonal features a solid foundation to build off of, which means injecting a little more challenge into this faster, looser Diablo 4.

I chose rogue as my starting class for season 3 partly because I wanted to know what it would feel like to rely on the new Seneschal companion. Compared to how swift the start of the leveling journey was in season 2, it's been considerably more perilous for me in season 3. My spider buddy doesn't have the screen-clearing power of some of season 2's early Vampiric Powers. Instead of flushing dungeons of every demon I could see, I've had to thread the needle through the new surprisingly lethal construct enemies and all sorts of deadly traps.

The slower pace of the season so far has made combat encounters riskier in a way that has me carefully using skills again. By the end of season 2, almost every class could crush just about anything without thinking about it. The damage output was so high that most of the game became trivial. In the Season of the Construct, enemies send volleys of fireballs at you and traps chunk your health down when you're not expecting it. Careful positioning has become so important that I've fully swapped over to a controller so I can slip through packs of enemies unscathed.

Those playing classes without skills that make you go completely invulnerable will have to wrestle with fighting enemies in between traps. I never expected Diablo to play like a bullet hell shooter, but in the new seasonal dungeons, or vaults, that's basically what happens. Luckily not every room wants to kill you; vaults are mostly normal dungeons which require a little exploring before the objective is revealed to you.

I probably have over 100 hours in this game and I didn't realize how familiar I'd become with the same old dungeon objectives, or how superfluous the fantasy of dungeon crawling had become. While I'm sure vaults will become rote at some point, it's fun to discover new things in dungeons again.

I can't imagine running vaults without my companion: You need enemies distracted as you tip-toe over spiked floor panels and squeeze yourself in between pillars of fire. The Season of the Construct isn't playing around with environmental hazards and, at times, I almost wish I was back on Sorcerer to teleport past the worst of them. The Seneschal comes in clutch to tee up enemies for the few seconds you have to actually attack them, by either weakening them to your attacks or damaging enemies itself. Alternatively, you can have it equipped to drop a protective barrier on you, but I've yet to find a reason to use that over anything else.

All of your spider friend's powers come from governing and tuning stones you can loot off of construct enemies in the open world or at the end of vaults. It starts with a simple lightning bolt that you can augment to deal damage over time or stun enemies, but eventually you start acquiring skills that help you clear out large packs of enemies.

Few of its skills feel specifically designed for one build or playstyle, which encourages you to experiment in a way that the Vampiric Powers didn't. There's way more to chew on with customizable skills than one big power that gives you a lot of attack speed.

It's way too early to tell if the Seneschal will explode in power once I reach the beginning of Diablo 4's endgame at level 50. So far, I appreciate that it isn't playing the game for me, but also isn't so inconsistent that I completely ignore it. My build revolves around one big arrow that pierces enemies, and it can be a pain to clean up stragglers. The Seneschal is perfect for dealing with tiny inefficiencies like that so you can keep moving at all times.

The Season of the Construct isn't as flashy as season 2, but it's a confirmation that the work Blizzard did last year paid off. Diablo 4 feels great to play and is stuffed with exciting loot and gear to play with. Even with some of the issues that remain in the game, like useless stats on items and limited stash space, season 3 gives me hope that further iterations will only make the game better now that it seems like it finally has everything figured out.

Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his speciality is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.

And it's not like the plot vanishes. We see some of the impact of fsociety's successful hack, particularly in the chaos in and around Evil Corp. I don't know that the series properly sold us on Angela taking a job there, but it's useful to have her as our eyes and ears in the place, and to so quickly have her catching the attention of Phillip Price, who seems much more confident in front of her than he does in the ominous post-credits scene at the Lodge of Evil where we find out he's in business with Whiterose(*). Wiping out $400 billion of Evil Corp's wealth has hurt the company, but fsociety can only do so much to the 1 percent of the 1 percent like Price, and this unexpected alliance sets us up nicely for whatever's happening next season.

(*) Not only is Whiterose somehow playing both sides of the fsociety/Evil Corp game, but seems equally comfortable presenting in masculine or feminine guise. Just a fascinating character, and a great role for B.D. Wong.

But despite memorable moments for Michael Cristofer, Stephanie Corneliussen, all the members of fsociety, and even the actor playing the suicidal Evil Corp exec, this episode, like the season, belonged to Rami Malek. You just can't get away with building an hour around a character demanding many answers and only getting a few without an actor this compelling, and this sympathetic even playing a guy who willfully (sort of) plunged the world into such a big mess (even if it's one that's beneficial to the people who just got their debts erased). Watching Elliot rage at the absent Mr. Robot, and then suffer the physical consequences of letting Robot take the driver's seat in his body(**), was just riveting. A lot of that was just clarifying things we already knew, like the camcorder footage of Elliot falling off the boardwalk railing, or even how Elliot and Mr. Robot switched places at the cyber cafe once Elliot got punched in the face, but it was important for Elliot to fully grasp how this works so he can understand that he is the one doing all of this, even if he's only sometimes in control of what he's doing.

* I'm honestly not sure whether I should be more scared of Price or Joanna. We've already seen how hardcore she is, but listening to Price cheerfully tell Angela how the world is better off without the suicidal executive was pretty damn chilling in its own right. As always, Truxton Spangler is the goddamn best.

* In the Esmail interview, he talks about not wanting people to default to assuming everything is imaginary, or that every weird character is just another personality of Elliot's. I'd seen some speculation about Tyrell somehow also being an alter, but that doesn't fit anything we've seen previously, nor the reactions of Tyrell's assistant and Joanna to meeting Elliot. Two different people. Whether both are still alive when next season begins remains to be seen.

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