Asmongold TV - Bungie is 100% F*CKED.. | Asmongold

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

Bungie is 100% F*CKED.. Subscribe to Asmongold TV on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AsmonTV Disclaimer: This podcast is an independent project created by a viewer using content from the YouTube cha...nnel Asmongold TV. The purpose is to make his content more accessible to those who prefer audio formats, helping more people engage with the ideas presented in his videos. This podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially associated with Asmongold. All rights to the original content remain with Asmongold TV. If there are any concerns or requests regarding this podcast, please reach out. ------ Keywords: gaming content creator, gaming drama, twitch clips Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Marathon dev stream in an hour? Wait, what? Is it a funeral? As a matter of fact, yes. So for anybody who missed out on what happened here, is that there was an artist that was on Twitter, and these were things made in 2017 that this artist made, and these things were not inspired by.
Starting point is 00:00:23 They were directly copy-pasted by Bungy. Like, I'm talking about, let's get down to the pixels. all right that is in marathon that is the Twitter artist's art that's the same thing it wasn't Bungee it was just a single guy well no I mean there's a process
Starting point is 00:00:49 there's a like a process of things that go through this and also honestly I wish they had stolen somebody's ideas for character design maybe the game would have looked better but anyway of course bungee's not obligated to hire me for making a game oh this is what I said about it right after looking at the references it's obvious that this was directly copied embarrassing for bungee they should at least give the artist a few under k and
Starting point is 00:01:11 honestly they should hire the artist and fire whatever clowns they have working there now all right we're live hi everybody how's going uh i'm joe in case you don't know me i'm the game director on marathon to my left here or potentially on right on your screen depending on if it's married is uh joe cross everybody's favorite joe our director on marathon sitting sitting across from me is the audio director is uh is uh andrew Wits, Gameplay Director, and we're going to spend some time talking about some stuff today. Our show is a little bit different today that we planned actually to show a lot more stuff. For a lot of reasons we're about to get into, we should not to show a bunch of the stuff.
Starting point is 00:01:50 But we are going to be discussing a lot about what we learned through Alpha, some of the plans that we're going forward with. But before we get into that, Joe Cross is some sort of topic that he wants to talk to you all about. Yep. Thanks, Joe. And hey, everyone. I'm Joe Cross, franchise art director, marathon. Yeah, and wanted to take a minute to talk about some of the events from yesterday. It came to our attention, and sorry, I wrote this, I wanted to make sure I get this message right. It came to our attention that an artist who worked on marathon in the early stages of pre-production took a number of graphic elements from a graphic designer without permission or acknowledgement and placed them on a decal sheet that was then checked in in 2020.
Starting point is 00:02:37 The decal sheet included icons and text elements. They can't even figure this out? Ended up in our alpha build. Okay. And there's absolutely no excuse for this oversight. And we are working on and 100% committed to our review process to ensure instances like this don't happen again on Marathon or at Bungy. A few of the things that we've done over the last 24 hours and what we're doing to shore up the review process are as follows. We've reached out to anti-real, the artist in question, and followed up to ensure that we do right by this artist.
Starting point is 00:03:15 We're auditing all of the previous work by the artist, the internal artist, including the environment decals, already in the build, which is part of why we're delaying some of the content we're going to show today. And we're committed to removing anything that is questionably or inappropriately sourced. We're doing a very broad decal audit, and if we locate any other details or elements, we'll make sure that those are eliminated, recreated in-house, for sure. Hundreds of artists have worked on this project for years internally and externally, and we share many influences, including modernism, Swiss typography, 2000s, style vector art, cyberpunk, and of course, the original Marathon trilogy. Our style is a result of all of those inspirations. It's also worth noting that none of our external partners
Starting point is 00:04:17 who've worked on branding or any part of the visual design of our game were involved with this situation. And lastly, personally, I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for artists working independently, and producing, making a living, doing commercial or fine art. We've worked with many of them. It's one of my favorite parts of the job is to make those connections and create content and collaborate. Wow.
Starting point is 00:04:49 And so to that extent, I want to send my personal apology to Auntie Real, whose work was used in this case. And I know how unfair this feels, and we're doing everything we can to make this right with her. Her work is fantastic, and we clearly share mutual appreciation for a specific genre of graphic design. Yeah, we know. It's very exciting, and I'm excited to have folded that into our style in general. So thanks for listening, and thanks for your patience. So, yeah, so absolutely. And thank you, Joe, for coming in and chatting with us about that.
Starting point is 00:05:28 Yeah, if they're having for the questions about, feel free to ask them as we go along. We're probably going to transition now and just talk a little bit about Alpha and Alpha was a big milestone for us there was a lot of stuff that went into it It was always intended to be kind of like a smaller size of the game You know, Wits, right? As we were going into it, feel free to talk, by the way.
Starting point is 00:05:51 It was always kind of meant to be a smaller size of the game It was always meant to be sort of like testing a little bit more of that core combat and some of the baseline of the progression systems that we have you know, and it was really great to hear a lot of the feedback, especially from those who played the game, as well as people who witnessed it, you know, and sort of get a sense of where everyone was attaching to certain things
Starting point is 00:06:08 and where they didn't see as much meat as they wanted or things that they didn't like, you know, like it all or things that they did really like, you know, so there's a wide variety of opinions that sort of came about. A couple of things that we really learned, we really wanted to talk about them. One was the idea of sort of the core of the survival game, you know? I know we talked about this a lot, wits,
Starting point is 00:06:27 of the survival game being this sort of idea of not just running through the environment and trying to survive other people trying to shoot you or or the enemies, but like all the different challenges of trying to get out. And we feel like some of the bigger things that we missed on that we know we wanted to see, but we kind of like
Starting point is 00:06:44 didn't land super well. How does this keep happening? The idea of like resources and the survival economy. If you want to talk a little bit about that, Andrew? Yeah, like we basically we were dropping like too much ammo, right? too much heels. How does this keep happening? And so people were with lasting the session for a really long time and we just didn't really kind of push you out. And so we've, um, we just going to happen
Starting point is 00:07:09 in the build. And so we've been really like focused on how we can improve that and, um, you know, get more hazards in the game. There's a lot more hazards in the current build. Um, there's a lot more evil things we have in the, in the game. Uh, as also like, yeah, and half the, half the guns that are in the build. And so the other half are not. in the build, so you haven't even seen half of the weapons. I know that there was some folks that thinking that that was the full library. It is not. It's like half the guns in the game.
Starting point is 00:07:35 And they were dropping too often too. Like we were dropping too many guns, too many long shots. I know long shots were a thing. Long shots were up here, yeah. We're focused on. Oh, man. Yeah, there is the core of it is ultimately we wanted more stories where there was about like using your resources wisely
Starting point is 00:07:49 and we just didn't, we didn't feel like we put people or like we didn't put players in a situation where they needed to use resources wisely. And as a result, there There wasn't enough stories where it was like, oh, I ran out of this thing and I had to figure it out, you know? Or I really needed this thing and I was searching around trying to find it. And so we want to build more of those stories moving forward. And so we've been doing a lot of internal iterations.
Starting point is 00:08:09 I know even our most recent build, we've stripped back a lot of those pieces and we're seeing some kind of crazy stories come out of that. So, yeah, so that's a big part of the survival economy. You talked a little bit about like survival challenges, like the idea of like, you know, the environment being a little bit more hazardous to you, you know. Is there any stuff you want to share there, Andrew? Little bits? Yeah, we're working on, yeah, working a bunch of stuff. Working with Lars's team. Also, Lars is here.
Starting point is 00:08:36 Yeah, Lars, if you want to talk about, too. Yeah, so Lars, you should talk about all the fun things and all the ways that. How are you trying to kill players, Lars? Well, how are you trying to kill the game? Ex plants now that we have in Martian perimeter. So, like, between sort of going between POIs, you will have to keep a lookout for that. It's for the people who got really used to switch into knife and just go in full bore. You're not going to be able to do that any longer in the game.
Starting point is 00:09:18 So we're thinking about all those kinds of things, things in the world that makes sense. Like the world really does not want you there. You know, there's obviously the UESC. They obviously don't want you there and are trying to stop you. But maybe that's a good segue to, I don't know, Wits, if you want to talk about some of the UESC stuff we've been looking at lately as well. Yeah, we definitely know that the UESC. were they were they took a lot of damage they took a lot of damage they were like overly reacting like
Starting point is 00:09:45 and hit reacting and so we're looking at reducing what's called reducing what's called like first sighted which is like they look at you and they're like you and then you know then you know they get in the combat with you and then they take some shots we want them that's we want them to be more stand their ground robots and hit that killer mecca infantry fantasy that they can want to bring so we're we're we're looking at uh transitions uh for going right to combat when they see you. We also, we also noticed that, um, when players were engaging in combat, uh, with the AI, uh, they couldn't ever like disengage. They couldn't like kind of be like, okay, like I'm fighting. How do I break line of sight? Like they kind of a stealth options
Starting point is 00:10:26 didn't work as strong as you wanted to, right? In that way. Yeah. Um, and so we're looking at that. Um, we're looking at, um, you know, we had, there's, there's a few bugs we had where, um, you know, you, you take out, like, you have, you have your knife and you take out like a recruit. And And the entire POI, the entire point of interest, like, knows exactly where you are and they're running towards you. That's a bug we're working through right now with the team. And so the intent is that the, you know, that makes noise, obviously, and the nearest units, like, investigate, you know, that area versus the entire Hornets Nest comes barreling towards your direction. And so, yeah, we're looking at both increasing their challenge and making them more satisfying to fight as well as, you know, working. on their perception and how they kind of find you, right?
Starting point is 00:11:14 We want to kind of have this engage options where, you know, you can, you know, do some damage maybe, and then, like, you don't get to finish the fight and stand and fight, is that you actually might, you know, want, maybe they see you, and there's a moment in time where you can actually, like, break and kind of get a chance to get away. We still want them to be threatening versus, like,
Starting point is 00:11:30 you can just run around them, right? They need to really push back. The sweet spot you're kind of looking for is ultimately that you have more options for how you, like, dividing conquer and tackle them, depending on how you play. But if they do get an advantage on you, each individual unit feels a little bit more threatening to you, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:47 Like, you know, there's the shield unit, the big shield unit, for example, is, you know, if you get first shot advantage on this unit, especially like a precision headshot or something, sometimes they would hit react and then they wouldn't kind of do a bunch of their abilities that they kind of have that actually, like, charge you and they, like, kind of tuck behind a shield, and you can't actually shoot them and they're perfectly tucked behind that shield. and they push you and they want to do this melee attack. I don't know what they're talking about. They were getting taken out before they can kind of do that.
Starting point is 00:12:15 And so we're looking at their vitality in ways where they don't feel like their bullet sponges, but that really require you to play this like Marksman game, but also that they challenge you to kind of have different ways to you to resolve the fight with them. So the team's really kind of digging into kind of like different ways we can kind of get into that and resolve that. Somebody saying in chat that the sound guy's DEI,
Starting point is 00:12:39 Is that true? There is those disengaged moments. We're like, I'm going to tackle this fight with this unit, but I'm going to do this thing. Like there's this hit react they have. They kind of like power down for a sudden. They kind of wake up. It's like this big hit react if you do a lot of precision damage. We're looking at maybe, you know, maybe that, you know, if you duck behind a cover or something,
Starting point is 00:12:57 that they don't know exactly where you are when they wake up, for example. And so that also plays into kind of more of the solo liability in terms of like you don't have to like 1V, 1V9 all the robots. no totally makes sense you know I know another topic that sort of came up when it came to survival and it was also the pacing of like sort of every given session right like I know we talked about internally it's like there tends to be like a front loaded tension it's going up a lot of tension happens the beginning there's a lot of brawling and then it sort of like begins to oh my god as you're sort of playing through the rest of the session and we want to make sure we shake that up a little bit I know we've talked a little bit about how event pacing volts into
Starting point is 00:13:36 that you know what he's thinking about Lars I think you you and your team have talked a little bit better, right? What are your thoughts? Yeah, no, that was really good. We actually got a lot of good data from the alpha about how event pacing was working, but also just sort of being able to, like we got lots of good feedback about some of the events
Starting point is 00:13:55 and how difficult or not difficult they were, how frequently they appeared or not frequently. And so we're looking at all that data, and we also understand, I think you said, a really important thing, which is we also realize that as the session went on, you know, the tension started to drop. Like, if you were going after and you had run into a bunch of players,
Starting point is 00:14:15 you know after a certain, you never know quite exactly how many players are left in the session. But after, you know, after a certain amount of time, you can guarantee that the PVP population at least is dwindling a bit. And so our challenge that we're, you know, we're looking at right now is how do we increase that the world's danger over time? And we can handle that in a bunch of different ways. We've got some pretty neat ideas there. You know, like, is it about complexity or requirements for X-Fills? Is it about increasing PVE or world resistance?
Starting point is 00:14:53 Is it about pacing of the activities? I think the answer is all of the above. And so, like, we're looking at all of those things right now. And I think we have a lot of good knobs and tuning capabilities there. So I'm pretty bullish on our ability to make that. The longer you stay in the session, the less safe you feel. But also the more you're like, maybe I should get out of here now. So we want to, yeah, increase those sort of thoughts from happening to.
Starting point is 00:15:24 No, I totally agree. Yeah. Yeah, no, that totally makes up. Hey, Joe, you mentioned immersion, too. Yeah. And that's one of the things that definitely touches art. And one of the things we're hoping to show today or show next week is some of our fidelity improvements.
Starting point is 00:15:46 I know that there were a few very work-in-progress areas that got a lot of scrutiny in the alpha build, such as like exterior lighting and perimeter map and some of our lobby. So art is full steam ahead on a bunch of those improvements. Yeah. Very excited to show. That's good.
Starting point is 00:16:06 And then the other side of immersion is kind of the runner stories that we want to tell. Right. And the kind of fictional fantasy. And to that extent, we're working closely with creative direction and the whole team to sort of really dial in some of that fantasy. Yeah, I've seen a lot of the work that you guys are working out, which has been really cool to see. I mean, everything from, we had a bunch of stuff we wanted to show today. But by the way, we decided not to show it because we're still scrubbing all of our assets to make sure. that we are being respectful of the situation.
Starting point is 00:16:35 So then how have you seen it and you think it's good? There's a lot of things we're doing to try to increase that immersion. I know we've even added like really like the details that have sort of helped to make it a little bit more immersive, like the blood that, you know, runners bleed even in water and things that sort as trails and indicators of damage that they've taken. I've also seen us like sort of putting more entropy into the world where we see a little bit, where the idea of the abandoned colony comes a little bit more life on the first of market. Yeah, some of that stuff planned. Some of that stuff definitely sort of heightened by the reaction to the cinematic trailer,
Starting point is 00:17:12 which I think, you know, I love it seemed to go over really well. Wait, they're running ads? Making sure that we're sort of following that thing. Wait, wait, are they running ads? To whatever extent we can. There's no way. You know, material spots. They are?
Starting point is 00:17:30 Lighting. That does so much. in terms of immersion. Yeah. From just from a technical sort of base experience. No shot. Even some of the foliage iterations. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:41 Some of that shimmer. Yeah. So, yeah. Lots of exciting stuff happening under the hood. Team is doing amazing work. Hopefully we can show it soon next time. Yeah. And also the sort of whole lobby infill experience.
Starting point is 00:17:58 It's a pre-roll. We're all excited about delivering that whole sort of Yeah, you can't turn that off. I'm pretty sure. To be fair. To be fair. To be fair. I'm always fair.
Starting point is 00:18:09 Yeah. Heading down to do dangerous work. Yeah, a lot of the UI that we went in with was definitely in a temporary state too. Bro. For us sort of finding a good group to make that cohesive experience has been a lot of the effort that we've been on on top of recently. We've always, you know, paying off the cyborg fantasy has always been our goal and sort of carrot on a stick for us. Oh, good. God, Art Raiders.
Starting point is 00:18:35 God, damn, that's good. Towards the end. And there's sort of like two parts of that, right? There's like the cyborgy part, right? Which is like, oh, I'm this robotic entity. And then there's also the part where it's like, you are this mercenary. So you're kind of doing like the thing which is like, how do I describe it? It's like you're not like necessarily a good guy.
Starting point is 00:18:53 You're not necessarily a bad guy. You're kind of going against the status quo in some degree, right? And so the selling, feeling that out a little bit more in terms of the experience, right? Yeah. The runner fantasy has always been a blue collar fantasy. Yeah. Most part, like you're doing a job. This is, you know, this is dirty work.
Starting point is 00:19:10 What? And you're, you know, taking contracts from sort of nefarious or questionable sources. But, you know, so, yeah, communicating that visual fantasy. That doesn't mean that your blue collar? It's very exciting. That's awesome, yeah. What? Yeah, there's, so we've been putting a lot of work into, especially sort of doing some iterations on the visual updates.
Starting point is 00:19:30 and also, you know, thinking about how we reinforce that fantasy as we're going forward. Another area we've been talking a lot about is crew play, you know, and sort of thinking about the variety of different ways that players play the game. We definitely had people playing a lot of people playing in solo matchmaking. We had a decent amount of people who played in solo unmade. This crap needs to be addressed. Damn. We had a lot of people, a chunk of people who played entries across the different board.
Starting point is 00:19:59 And we definitely found that through the feedback and also through a lot of the experiences that were relayed to us inside of the Alpha that the crew made It just wasn't that great, you know? And so we're looking at a lot of ways to potentially solve that on our side In the stream Some of it is thinking about how Each individual can contribute I know we've been talking a little bit Andrew about like the one VX situation, you know? If you want to talk a little bit about that It's like how viable you feel like you can turn around a battle and stuff like that Yeah, we did some updates in the Alpha Nose Live because we really wanted to move the conversation forward.
Starting point is 00:20:36 Because we thought we had a feedback on certain things. And we wanted to actually take some swings at some problems. The art director is reading the chat. We actually implemented. The shield change we did was actually something that we were getting to for our next milestone. Wait, he is. That was in our next, our current milestone, I guess, because it's an older build, right? It was in our current milestone.
Starting point is 00:20:56 We ported it over. I'm trying to see if he is or not. And so, yeah, really appreciate runner team and everybody kind of getting that change in because there's a bit of a content change. But we thought it was worth it to actually learn more about time to kill and being able to, you know, the power of shields in the combat economies and reducing the overhead of shields. Imagine losing the AI. Effective health was in your baseline health pool versus like in your shields. And what the hell are you guys talking about? changes that kind of came out of that. And so
Starting point is 00:21:27 we we're keeping that right now on the project and we're focusing a lot more on effective time to kill in specific range of a weapon. So an example is the overrun, we were kind of like, the over in the base gun in the game they kind of start off with. We were kind of, we were nervous about like
Starting point is 00:21:45 upping the damage on it because I don't folks were like, this is kind of like not the best gun. It's like, what's the starter rifle that requires a bunch of attachments to kind of get to its like big power delta. And so It requires a little investment to kind of get to a good spot. We were kind of nervous about like just up into damage onto it wholesale. And so we're doing as doing. Oh, man.
Starting point is 00:22:05 It's called like a what are they talking about? A skill floor, skill ceiling audit, which is like how skillful would you to be to have like the gun in its base like what we call like gray or standard state, which is no attachments? And then what is it like, you know, what does the skill demand at the floor at the base, you know, effectiveness? What are we asking for players? like how much aim skill do you need? And then like where are the major flaws in the guns so that like when you're putting attachments in, you're build crafting,
Starting point is 00:22:32 but also like removing as many flaws as you want in terms of like what you have a hard time controlling. Bro, they're spamming now. So we're doing that. You've been five minutes on a drama and you only read from the dev team tweet, clowns. This person was good. And so when you're lower shields versus higher shields,
Starting point is 00:22:48 you want to make sure that your guns are doing damage in the ranges that they're really supposed to. So if you get the drop on somebody, you should be affected. and it shouldn't be like you need certain rarity guns or anything like that. So we're working on that a lot. It's a bit spicy right now. You know, like there's some SMGs that are a bit hot, you know, in the current build.
Starting point is 00:23:05 But like we feel like they're appropriately hot when they're, you know, you're in CQC fights. And so fights resolve in close quarters with a close quarters weapon, the way you expect. LMGs are, you know, kicking way harder, a lot more, a lot more demand there in terms of the recoil, which is great. We hit some of the snipers. We're actually kind of reevaluating snipers a bit, not like wholesale, like, what are snipers, but more kind of like, what are they at the base value where they're not, like, too effective? Because we definitely noticed the long shot had a lot of demand.
Starting point is 00:23:34 And, like, you know, as expected in this kind of genre, snipers have, like, a lot of, you know, a lot of effectiveness in terms of, like, they have to kind of feel like they're, their lower time to kill. So, yeah, we're working on making sure that the time to kill is great for the shield, the shield differences. So when you're like going up against purple shield and you're a gray shield, you feel you actually can win. And there's multiple kills per clip that's possible. It's like not, it's not guaranteed, but there's a way to win there. There's a way to win. And that leads to the skill part. Like time to kill is always about skill. It's about effectiveness. Yeah. Right. And then like it's
Starting point is 00:24:11 also about like window of opportunity as well. And it's kind of like how you triangulate like overall time to kill recipe. And so we're focusing on skill fidelity. We're focusing like on all we're focus on every single aspect of that triangle. And so, yeah, we're looking at, we have this, like, how many purple shield kills per clip, which is kind of like a spicy thought. But we're really iterating fast on that on the weapon side. Cool. Yeah, that totally makes sense.
Starting point is 00:24:37 I know another part of, like, sort of the crew, experience is also, like, the idea of, like, do I have the tools to communicate with my career, right? Like, I know we had a bunch of challenges with the, man. In voice chat for players inside of the game. and we're definitely looking into that in terms of thinking about how do we make it easier for you to even enable voice chat or like how do we make that part of your flow so that you can do that i know we've talked a little bit about um ping system you know how do we add texture to the ping system make it easier for you to coordinate with your team if you're not on voice chat um and do you have any thoughts on that one i know you and your team have touched ping system but yeah yeah ping was in a very baseline state for alpha like i would say it was a very MVP even for alpha state um And we weren't super, we weren't super happy with what kind of where the decisions were it was at. And so we are spending a lot of this milestone really plusing up ping.
Starting point is 00:25:32 And we're also looking at things called like a communications wheel, which is like how can you effectively communicate to teammates? How can you like basically ping things in a container? How do you ask for ammo? Stuff like that. So yeah, we're- If they didn't hate their audience, they would have made that female character way hotter. giving her way bigger tits.
Starting point is 00:25:51 We're also talking about some contracts of two Lars, like as well, about like the fabric of contracts between like multiple players. I don't know if you can talk about what your team's cooking there. Yeah, Lars, tell us about contracts. Yeah, yeah, of course. There's a lot of work, you know, we, again, like, it was great seeing people's response to, I think, you know, working along AI, like the sort of different factions.
Starting point is 00:26:16 And so obviously, we feel really, happy with at least that first slice that people were seeing in the alpha and obviously not that was a very it was a small chunk of the content and then uh sort of looking forward to when you're talking about crew play like how do we how do we lean into that how do we make that more understandable how do we um how do we sort of surprise and delight players around when they are working with uh a random match made player right for example example, how do we highlight those things? How do we make them understood? How do we reward in ways that make more sense? And how do we make you want to do those things or like
Starting point is 00:27:00 feel encouraged to want to do those things and work with, you know, whether it's the people you pre-crew up with or the people you randomly got put in to matchmaking with or whether you're trying to do it by yourself and, you know, taking on those extra challenges. But I think the interesting part is now figuring out what things were working, what, what weren't, you know, I'll say like from my perspective and this, this isn't the team's perspective, this is mine. Like, I think some of those things could have been more challenging. And so looking at that as well, looking at contracts as I did, like, there were some that were great where you're like, hey, cool, I can go down to this audio file and now I can go throw
Starting point is 00:27:38 myself off a cliff, you know, not a real example, but you know what I'm saying? Like to be able to say, like, I did it. I think we want to take a real look at having a mix of things that are more difficult and challenging to do if we think about priority contracts and then the other types maybe they're a little bit more sort of background-y like doing things and so if that makes sense. So we're taking a hard look at all of them and I think we have some really good plans there. So hey, this is Cosmo. Can you all hear me okay? Yep. Awesome. Yeah, we're getting a lot of questions from chat. I want to jump in, a lot of our questions.
Starting point is 00:28:15 I have a question from WhigXU I have a question A genuine one Instead of scrubbing so many assets Would it not make more sense To employ the artist Who obviously has nailed the aesthetic
Starting point is 00:28:26 You're looking for And keep the assets as they are This guy's getting fired Sorry Joe Cross And I can jump in with the answer Unless you want to take it cross I know Cross He's on his phone
Starting point is 00:28:37 He got kicked out of the Discord for some reason Like I'm starting his phone So that we might have a technical issue right now Do you want to They're basically asking wouldn't it be easier just to hire someone to remake the assets? That's not what they say. Sorry, do you only repeat the question?
Starting point is 00:28:51 Apologies. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Oh, can you repeat it? Just so I can relay it to Cross. Because Cross can I hear you right now. Instead of scrubbing so many assets, would it not make more sense to employ the artist who obviously has nailed the asset? So the question was,
Starting point is 00:29:10 instead of scrubbing all the assets, wouldn't it be easier to employ the artist who made all the assets? Yeah, I mean, and for what it's worth, we're confident the majority of the assets in that capacity are original, created internally by our internal artists. We would love to work with anti-reel if that's an opportunity that presents itself. I mean, that's part of what we sort of reached out to communicate. At this point, it's a very small sort of set of assets. The decals themselves are the kind of, um, You know, they're details that are sort of placed on the sides of buildings or crates or something like that.
Starting point is 00:29:50 So we absolutely do need to replace them. And we would rule in sort of, you know, any, any sort of way of doing that, including contracting, collaborating, or working with the artist. So Joseph Cross was following. And additionally, I think we're a great question. I would just sort of add on to that. Additionally, when we run into situations like this, we also feel like something slipped through our net, you know? And so we have to go back and look at everything just to make sure that nothing else slipped through our net. that makes sense, you know?
Starting point is 00:30:16 Because it caught us by surprise and we want to just make sure that we're doing the right diligence to ensure it doesn't happen again. So either way, we're going to scrub all the ass. It's just because we want to make sure that we didn't miss something else. Yeah, because PR, this is bad PR. Another art question. Let's go. We got another art question. Yeah, but that's a good question.
Starting point is 00:30:35 We're getting a lot of general questions in the chat. About the overall aesthetic. Do you want to, like, speak to that? Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about that. the influence Let's hear about the art. Making the art.
Starting point is 00:30:49 Do you have to relate this question again, Joe? So there's a lot of questions just about where your inspiration for a lot of this art style and sort of like, you know, where that comes from. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:58 And how you think of the art? How do you get the art style? Yeah, I mean, I know how. It comes from, you know, a lot of sources, a lot of genres. You know, I talked about it a little bit online, you know,
Starting point is 00:31:12 probably a couple years ago. you know, graphic design is obviously a massive part of our game and typography in general. You know, that's one of the things I sort of am the most proud of in a lot of ways is sort of the idea of elevating typography and graphic design to sort of the forefront in a game or in an industry that, you know, typically doesn't, I think is sort of safe to say. So in terms of that, you know, the... Replace it with comic sands. There's even some DNA shared, I think, with destiny,
Starting point is 00:31:50 with sort of Swiss modernism and that whole, you know, that whole genre of, you know, sans-seraf typography, all the way up through 2000s, early 90s, you know, which is where I mentioned before. I think there is a lot of overlap there in terms of insuration. with anti-reel, the designers are public, vector art, that kind of thing. Just an example of sort of an exciting part of graphic design history that feels connected to, sort of naturally connected to games.
Starting point is 00:32:24 The studio that sort of drove a lot of that worked very famously on a game called Wipeout in the very early PlayStation game, which is a big influence for us. Wipeout. And then all the way up to sort of current trends, which may or may not be a define. genres. That's true. You know, there's a, there's sort of a deconstructed kind of minimalism. Ante Design
Starting point is 00:32:47 is another genre that I've heard it referred to. So yeah, and this is just, you know, specifically thinking about typography and sort of our, the sort of super superficial layer of our branding and sort of
Starting point is 00:33:03 in-world... So why did you steal it? World building. There are a whole slew of influences when it comes to architecture and character design and world building and natural palette. So it's all a big, it's all a big soup. Okay, another art question. Awesome. Yeah. Let's see. Wrapping up the previous subject, which is like sort of on crewplay, I know that we've also been to exploring internally doing a lot more tests with mixed crew sizes. We're thinking about, we're still thinking about how we want to approach the idea of
Starting point is 00:33:42 of not just one VX, but are there different crew sizes that we want to support? Like, do we want to do something that's more about solo duo, you know, or things that sort? We haven't really landed on a discussion point yet. Those are all investigations that we're sort of pursuing. So nothing we can commit to there, but we're definitely looking into stuff like that. We're also looking into ways that, you know, you can communicate in some way with teams that are not your team. You know, we don't know exactly what future that could be. but we've been talking a lot about that.
Starting point is 00:34:14 Yeah, so we're looking into a lot of stuff on that front to sort of improve the overall, like sort of social complexity of the game, but also make it better for matchmate crews and also crews of different sizes, whether they be ones, silos, duos, or trios, to find a good experience. Let's see, what is another area that we've been touching on? There's so many things.
Starting point is 00:34:36 Oh, progression, yes. Progression rates in the alpha were way too fast. Everybody went really far, you know, in the alpha in a very short period of time. Some of it was a lot of stuff was being gotten out. Some of it was just our tuning on factions was way too fast. Some of it, I will say that, like, that's one part of it that was true. Another part of it that was true was, what's up? Money, credits.
Starting point is 00:35:01 Yeah, money credits. Like, yeah, credits and material economy we're thinking about as well, you know? Like, we want to make sure that credits and materials have really distinct purposes for how you use them and that you feel the value of using them. Right now, we don't think we landed that super well in the alpha. It was a little bit muddy, and you end up spending a lot less money, and then you gained, and the credit's economy was a little bit more grindy than we intended. There's a lot of things like that that we want to support. Some of it is rethinking sort of how those things are distributed inside the black market, so different things that you'll buy
Starting point is 00:35:32 with each one. Some of it is also we know that part of our aspiration for the black market is that you are able to upgrade your way into sort of customizing what your black market does for you, gives you reliable ways to build the kit that you want to, especially when you're recovering, or if it gives you options that actually continuously help you. And that's a little hard to do. It's a little hard to target which upgrades you really, really care about right now currently. So we're thinking about how to iterate on that as well. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:35:58 And we're doing some work already to improve that experience. Is that right? And then lastly, there's like a lot of progression systems that we just simply haven't put into the game yet, that we are looking to help sort of like make that journey a little bit more awesome especially as you go further into it. Things like our archive system, which is a little bit more about achievements
Starting point is 00:36:17 and collection stuff that we have. As well as there's additional other things inside of their life. That's why people play extraction shooters. Factions that you haven't met yet. But yeah, there's, and we're also trying to take all of our factions to give them a slightly distinct, more distinct identity against each other.
Starting point is 00:36:33 Right now they read definitely differently from like a lore standpoint, but like how that folds into some of the upgrade systems and some of the contracts they ask you to do is not as distinct. So we're refining that as we go along too. Just the way it is. Yeah, those are a lot of the big beats
Starting point is 00:36:48 of what we are tackling. What else was there in that list? I don't remember. Andrew, maybe you do. I'm going to say, it's a way to this. It's a good amount. It's a lot of stuff.
Starting point is 00:36:59 It's a good amount. Like, yeah, I think the overarching, like, the overarching deal is like, We definitely have gotten like a lot of points to improve on. And we're actively improving on them right now. And like some of our investigations for bigger ones. But I think like in general, the survival game being more robust is a,
Starting point is 00:37:16 is a, is a, is a huge one feeling more immersed in the world, having the world feel more alive. Yeah. You're hitting on the fantasy of like being a runner, right? Like the in what we call infill, which is like going from matchmaking into boots on the ground, you know, doesn't feel like super great right now.
Starting point is 00:37:31 So we're actively working on that. I don't know. I think it's all. the gaps that we heard either from feedback or that, you know, for data that we looked at in the game of like how players resolve things. I think we have a bunch of big improvement points and we're swinging pretty hard at all of them right now. Yeah, definitely. I know we've spent all the time sort of beginning a lot of,
Starting point is 00:37:50 a lot of the work has already begun, but like sort of also just, you know, talking about all this sort of work we are going to do about tackling a lot of these issues as well. So that's a good segue into a question from IMTK who's asked what's the biggest negative feedback from the alpha that the team is looking to change by release The art
Starting point is 00:38:09 The stolen art I know the answer to that I'd say The stolen art I think the survival stuff Like the run texture and the survival stuff is probably one of the biggest ones You know
Starting point is 00:38:19 I know the answer to that Because we're putting a lot of different Points into it Like we're thinking about how Lars mentioned earlier About how you How X filling is different you know, inside of the game.
Starting point is 00:38:30 Like, for example, we might change the rules around exploring and sort of the way it works right now. They can't do proximity chat? We're also thinking about everything from AI combatants to... Wait, why? To resources. Were they retarded? All as part of that. Actually, I know why they can't do proximity chat.
Starting point is 00:38:45 Pretty big amount of stuff that we're doing in that space. The other big area, I'd say, is actually the creative fantasy stuff, which we're really, really trying to land a little bit better, like the immersive fantasy stuff. Wish we could show you some examples. It's not toxicity. But there's a lot of work. Don't let them play that off. I'm sure that it really feels. Audio isn't their thing.
Starting point is 00:39:06 That it mirrors the intensity of like the experience that we intend on the planet, you know? Like really a marathon is supposed to be about surviving Tau Setti and the Marathon ship and surviving that situation. Right now it just feels like it's purely about surviving other players. And we want to really make sure that that all comes together both from a creative and gameplay standpoint. in a really impactful way. Maybe they can find an anti-R-E-L. Yeah, I'd say the biggest one for on combat. Maybe that way they can fix it.
Starting point is 00:39:37 We need to make the game, like, we need to have a lot more options for players to kind of like resolve different scenarios differently, which is a hilarious statement, but like it's like you need to be able to, again, go to the point earlier. Like you have to be able to peel off of AI, understand how to fight different AI,
Starting point is 00:39:52 different players, how you get out, get more variety in there. And then being, you know, we did have a lot of good feedback around you require two people to do anything in the game or two or more. And also like how much you're reviving and like, you know, at the time it takes that for that enemy team to revere, our enemy squad to revive and how long it takes. Yeah, we didn't even mention that we're revisiting stuff. Yeah. Yeah, the res stuff. We're changing how that works so that, you know, when you actually do get a pick on an enemy crew, they can't res in the time that it takes you to heal.
Starting point is 00:40:27 full, which I think was a kind of a big problem. So we wanted to make sure that you by yourself have more agency and can actually affect more change in the world, but also the world really pushes back a lot more on you. So I think that's the probably the biggest trend of feedback on combat that we're actively, you know, tackling from a ton of different angles, like on combatants and on, you know, the runner's side and on the weapon side. This guy. Yep, and I got a question from a...
Starting point is 00:40:59 No, go ahead, go. Yeah, I was saying from the art side, you know, it's the, it's focusing on immersion and sort of divided into fidelity, sort of the technical side of our visual world. And then it's the sort of narrative. It's supporting the narrative of the runner fantasy, which there's a lot of work to do. And those are the two biggest takeaways for us from the art side. There's another question, Gospa, you said? Yeah, so we've got a question from curiosity. It says going forward, will we see more ways to customize and visualize represent ourselves as players within the runner?
Starting point is 00:41:49 This being one of my main questions for both game playing. That's actually a good question. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think we are going to be doing a little bit more. Like, I know Andrew's team has been working on skin work for a while, you know, in terms of just thinking about how to, like, give you visual. options to express yourself. We're not going to talk super deep about it because we're still in the process of figuring a lot of
Starting point is 00:42:08 those pieces out, but is there anything you want to share on that front? Andrew? Yeah, we're looking at different, you know, ways for their, you know, the runners to be customized. Why is it the art guy talking about the art? In terms of their visual sets, we're also looking at, we're also, you know, making, you know, weapons stuff, too, to express your weapons and stuff, different ways and multiple ways, not just one. That did trigger something that I think we forgot to talk about, that we want to talk about
Starting point is 00:42:32 was a build crafting how we're like sort of thinking a little bit more about how we want to make more distinct build crafting elements you know we don't want to yeah we're technically build crafting improvements in two vectors one yeah i want to play my own guy is really uh figuring that out right now they have they have some really uh good ideas of we're trying to basically um learn from we had in the alpha and then um extend it in terms of like implants being a bit more interesting um and kind of cores having a lot of the interest that people were kind of chasing and so we're looking at how we can get plus up implants uh yeah this you're so Serious? Yeah, I guess so.
Starting point is 00:43:04 So they stand up better alongside the cores. And then on weapons, we had perks only in like the upper tiers of attachments, like on purple attachments and so that. So you'd have like, you know, a purple magazine that had a perk on in a purple barrel that had a perk. We're taking all the, most, a lot of the perks and putting them into the chip attachment. And so they're not divided by the weapon or the weapon family anymore, like the chip are generic. And so if you find a chip, you can put on any gun. So it gives you more like an anchoring element then, like this like verb that you can throw on a thing and then. Yeah. And there's more chips at like lower rarities too. So we're really looking at
Starting point is 00:43:44 how we can get more of that field crafting into the weapons versus like you need a specific thing and there being more considerations or what verb you want to add to the gun overall. So that's a big push that we're doing right. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, from our art side, I'm super excited about the whole cosmetic side, the fashion game that we're going to deliver. Our characters, our base characters have such a unique look and sort of specific to our visual world that it's a question we've gotten a lot about what kind of range, what does that mean? aesthetic or visual range, do these runners support? And their answer is all of them.
Starting point is 00:44:31 Oh. So, yeah, we're very excited to start rolling out looks and sort of ways for players to identify more specifically with certain runners or styles or fashions. Guys, just stop. Turn it off. Cool. Just turn it off. So I got a question from Ethan.
Starting point is 00:44:51 Turn it on. Has the team reconcerned its stance on proximity chat or express. exploring other ways to encourage more emergent social interactions between rival players and squad. Great question. Yeah, I think that's one of the areas that we're still brainstorming around, you know, is like, how do you use signal to other people? Like, you know, the classic friendly, friendly, you know, like how, what's our version of that? Well, voice chat. Or is there a way that you can use those things in interesting ways between. Voice chat is how you do it now. We don't have a solution to it just yet, you know?
Starting point is 00:45:21 Use the wiggle, not stark off. right now. I got a question from agents. I would love to hear about the materials for each faction. I feel like there's way too many faction materials and it's insanely overwhelming. Can you ask again about voice? Oh, you mean for the upgrades? Ask about why they're not including.
Starting point is 00:45:44 Right, right, right. I think right now we're talking about the materials economy a little bit, you know, how it all aligns to different things. There's a couple things that I think we've learned from Alpha. One is that we want more materials that are kind of like a little bit more memorable and evocative like we see. said. We think the, we like things like, you know, tick milk inside of there because it just kind of has this like interesting, evocative, like, kind of like, but you kind of,
Starting point is 00:46:09 did he say dick milk? So the creative themeing on both of some of the materials, we're, we're taking a second pass out. But the, but the other part of it is there is a lot of materials and they're all like sort of value graded, like in terms of thinking about, you know, like greens. Wait, he's not for Blizzard, is he? Uh-oh. I'm trying to make it a little easier for you to understand the value of a material, you know, has it sort of is used across. different things between like sort of recipes for trading versus like upgrades and things that sort of. It's like it's sort of a top down how do we use materials kind of thing that we're
Starting point is 00:46:41 looking into. We do think that it's it's less about how many materials as opposed to it being clear how they're used. You know like and I think because part of it is that we do want there to be a big diversity of different types of things that you want to loot but it's about you associating it with the value. Why is he so sad from it that super? important and I think that we're still a little bit less on that. Everybody knows why. Yeah, we did it's a big pass on relatability and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:47:09 Which is, you know, we actually had a pass in, not for this build that everyone played, but the current build that we're in. And there's a bit more, I would say, theming, like, in terms of what goes where and, like, what things that, you know, would go with weapon upgrades. And you'd be like, okay, like, I kind of understand that. And so there's a lot of, it's one of the
Starting point is 00:47:29 gaming discussions, a lot of relatability discussions. We're still iterating on the look sets of them as well, how they sit in the environment. Still looking at the looting moment as well. So when you open a container that it feels really good right now kind of feels that this like pop in and then that like some folks feel like that it kind of like the pop in feels like or the pop in of the loot when you're going through a container. The searching essentially is what it is. It feels a little bit like, you know, your internet is slow or something. And so we're really trying to make it feel like it's like you're actually searching. through and that feeling really rewarding when you find something in there, whether it's a material or a valuable or
Starting point is 00:48:03 something else. So yeah, I think that we're looking at the organization of the materials, what they are, what they're used for, and then, you know, you're standing. Yeah, I know. When you find a specific one, you're like, oh, yes. It's got to some comfortable anger. The other thing, it's probably, I mean, we haven't had a question about it yet, but I feel like we should talk about it is bag space and all that kind of good stuff, right, Joe? Like in terms of like thinking about. Yeah, we've definitely. We've definitely gone back and forth on a lot of things, including around backspace, which is like, we want you to feel the tension of obviously what you pick up and how much of it you pick up, right? But we also want you to like think more about what, like right now, for example, just leave, man.
Starting point is 00:48:44 Our looting is very much based on sort of stack value in a size, you know, where it's like, oh, we have a lot of things that encompass. It's like how much value do get stacking something inside of a specific slot as opposed to getting a variety of different types of values. out of things, you know. So why not approximately voice shot? And yeah, we might be changing some icon sizes or things like that in the future, you know, or like basically some of the sizing of different types of things inside of your bag just to make it the puzzle a little bit better, but there's a lot of iterations we're going to do on that front.
Starting point is 00:49:15 We are going to make it probably a little bit rarer for you to find bags, but we're going to try to make it easier for you to like reliably get them from the black market and things that sort. So we're shifting some of those. It's almost like they're punishing him. Yeah, base bag space is always the topic. Like, you're going to sit there and you're going to like it. It's always the big discussion. I think we're still talking about base bag space.
Starting point is 00:49:34 You know, like, basically, the thing is we don't want you to not feel like you want to get a bag. You know, right? Like, I think it's, I think it's, like, it's weird if you always, like, you have enough space and you don't need a bag, you know. But I do think that it's, we're still, we're still one, like, we still want to make sure that tension feels right. You're not really asking questions? Answering questions? No, no. What about product?
Starting point is 00:49:52 I got a question from Zionless. It says, is there plans to add guaranteed ways to build craft? I heard lots about build crafting, but not being able to get a load out I designed without hopefully randomly stumbling upon it sounds bad. I would like to see crafting system or at least have the option to change cores with some material expenses. I think we're trying to make the lower level of the baselining of the crafting something that you can. Establish through black market a little bit easier, you know, like acquire and build in that way. But I don't, but there's always going to be like a difference when it comes to high rarity things. high rarity things.
Starting point is 00:50:26 Like, for example, there will be builds that involved having a really rare item that may not be something you can always have. But, like, we want you to get more involved at the lower level of building crafting where you feel like you can actually kind of do that kind of thing. I mean, I'm sure it doesn't people would have turned down. I think we agree with the statement that was in the question, which is like, it feels hard to maintain, like, a build. And we need to, we're looking through a bunch of ways, yeah, through black market or like through bartering or something like that. kind of like be able to get the right verbs. Maybe it's not the same thing you want. I'm assuming it's going to go for an hour and it's about to be over.
Starting point is 00:51:02 But we want to have you have verbs that you're like, I like when I like when I'm playing glitch and like this is like the overall verb set I like for the glitch and you having more opportunity to be able to go back to that go back to that well versus like, oh, though my access to the well is purely based off of the randomness of the container. I think that's it. I think it's like if you think of like if the like, the like, the like, lower level version of the middle version of it and the perfect version of it, right?
Starting point is 00:51:29 We want you to have access to like the lower or middle version, depending on how you've like, you know, done that. But the perfect version of it, I think, some pieces will still be, you know, things that you, if you lose them, you'll have to find them again, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So Drifter wants to know, is there any discussion on reworking the resurrection of dead teammates system? I'd like to see this address before launch as resigning dead bodies seems free as bad. for the tempo of the game. We concur.
Starting point is 00:51:57 Yep. I'll just go jump in and say, yes, we concur. Yes, we concur. Whereas I bought a bunch of work is going into it right now. We basically have a kind of one axis of a solve we have for right now is increasing the resurrection time and also having it so that every time you go down, the timer does get increased. And so if you keep on going down, like you kind of like your ability to come back into,
Starting point is 00:52:23 you know, back from the abyss is harder and harder. We're also looking at... We also did a bunch of changes in the alpha around like the... Sure way. The timer, we saved progress timer. So when Alpha first came out, it saved your progress the entire time. And so you could like get to halfway, take a fight, and then go back and kind of just pay for the half of the rest timer. We did have a decay, a reaggressive decay on that, so it goes down.
Starting point is 00:52:51 And we're looking at other things, too, if that's not enough, we definitely know that. um, rezing feels a bit too free. We're also taking a look at, um, the messaging. I know that there's the, uh,
Starting point is 00:53:02 that little, um, the little, um, the little stick figure above the bags and stuff that we, we adore, we call the little gentleman, the little gentleman above the bags.
Starting point is 00:53:09 Um, uh, we're looking at, um, that, that actually being a tell, um, so you can't just like camp the bags the entire time.
Starting point is 00:53:16 We liked the texture of being able to know whether or not, like, a crew was downed and like making combat decisions as a crew about that. So you can kind of like, you know, coales from the information. But I think we're seeing that there's once you give too much information Obviously like it just like you you can you can have too much action in terms of what to do
Starting point is 00:53:35 Yeah and where like not you can stay in the area knowing that there might be like a clutch play happening or something So I'd say we we agree with the baseline is that Resing is is is is two free and we're not looking for just purely punishments where if you do get fully dead like You feel like coming back and being alive is like not working the time. That's definitely something we don't want to do. And so we're trying to make it so that there is a thing for, you know, continuously dying and then Resing just feel
Starting point is 00:54:03 we got five minutes left. If they don't end it in five minutes we're done. It's not a guaranteed thing. I know we've talked about, but I think the sort of place we're trying to land ultimately is that if a person gets down I want to see if they're going to end it and say anything. Like, not completely eliminated, but like down. Life is suffering? Is that true?
Starting point is 00:54:20 Resin them in combat is hard, but it's doable. And if they get eliminated, getting them out like raising them in combat is really really really like very almost difficult to do right you really want to do it once you've cleared the area is that the intent yeah we want yeah we want it to be that like doing it in a fight is not as you don't want to take that on as often as you did in the alpha like i think that's something we're seeing is that like you saw folks in the middle of a fight go in the back and like res somebody and then like now it's like the numbers game of it's like it's like
Starting point is 00:54:51 okay it's three okay now it's three b three okay now it's two b two now it's one b two okay okay Now it's 3D2. And so, yeah, we're definitely working on that. And so not that we definitely don't want it to like remove it from the game entirely because we do think that it gives a bit more of that social texture to the crew play. Even like if you're playing, you know, whether a duo or a trio or something, but we definitely don't want to make it like the obvious choice where you, there's no, there's, like they don't have.
Starting point is 00:55:18 We want death to matter. The names of the people that are speaking. There's a feeling I don't even know who's talking right now. Death does not feel like it matters. Yeah. Mike. So I've seen a lot of questions in chat about like, where are the aliens? And there's another question.
Starting point is 00:55:31 Like, where is the four? Are they coming? You want to speak to any of it? I mean, it's, we have plans for, like, a lot of alien stuff coming in the future. It's not coming. It won't really. It won't be. There is some other stuff that has to do with, like, the four.
Starting point is 00:55:51 We have a touch of it already that we have in testing, you know. But I can't, but I don't know if we're ready. It's not going to happen. Talk about all those plans yet. I mean, like, those are, it's content, but it's not kind of we're ready to show yet, if that makes sense. Yeah. Part of, part of, like, part of the baseline of, of Marathon right now is the table stakes of the universe, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:56:15 And then. Table stakes. We're trying to build, but not, like, build in, like, a forever way, but, like, build aggressively towards. Who's talking? Nobody asked these questions The alien friction I think everyone's kind of like leaning at And kind of like you know
Starting point is 00:56:32 And heading towards like in their In their wants But we're Is it hard working on a game with such high expectations And then you know We go from there Even some of our weapons I know that there was some folks that were just like
Starting point is 00:56:45 Where's the Where's the four rifle right Where's the giant pink four rifle From the first marathon game And we're setting the baseline but that doesn't mean that we're not invested there or anything. It just means that this is the baseline of where we're going to get to. We're definitely conscious of starting from a place that we can grow and get crazier from here.
Starting point is 00:57:08 And if you start at full volume, you know, there's kind of no place to go. You're going to get to the ceiling and you crush up against the ceiling pretty fast. But that doesn't mean we're not invested in those areas. I think we're pretty heavily invested. Yeah, ultimately, we're at the start of a journey that we hope, Marathon is taking towards, you know, telling a much, a much bigger story, you know,
Starting point is 00:57:29 but you want to start at a place that, that makes sense. Yeah, there was a really great conversation yesterday about something in this vein. Jesus. The excitement was very high in the room. Oh,
Starting point is 00:57:40 this guy's a fucking savage. If you like aliens and mystery, I think we're actively having good conversations about that. Okay. Well, I feel like we say we talk a lot on here. We have conversations about, There's things we're building.
Starting point is 00:58:01 I guess like what I say? There are things we're building. There's things we talk about with the goal of building and then things we talk about knowing we'll be building them even further in the future and all those things are true. Yeah. It's like what do we do? All right.
Starting point is 00:58:20 We got time for one more question. Are there any plans to expand the verticality of the early game maps by increasing their depth and complexity? For example, by adding more underground locations that could be unlocked. through collective community progress or completing some kind of raid-like mechanics? We've talked about
Starting point is 00:58:40 how we use that, we're probably going to be shifting around how we use some of the existing spaces to be fair, like in terms of thinking about how we're going to add more complexity in ways that we approach this maps, right? Lars, like in terms of thinking about it, but like I know we've talked about how
Starting point is 00:58:58 as a as like a live game, we want to continuously sort of like add to these maps and think about the future. But, Lars, I know you guys talk about it. Oh, you're right. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it. You were just talking about the, you know, the alien stuff and how we started the baseline. I think the maps, we think about it in the same way.
Starting point is 00:59:22 And obviously, you know, there were some nooks and crannies in the maps that were in the alpha. You think so? And it obviously wasn't all of the content we planned to have. when the game comes out. And so, but yeah, we see it as, again,
Starting point is 00:59:38 creating like this really satisfying baseline and then looking for room to grow and how we increase that complexity over time. And I would say some of the maps, the newer maps that we're working on right now,
Starting point is 00:59:54 take that into account even more so than perimeter and March. Even though we had a lot of those conversations early on about perimeter and marsh as well, and then which saw things like the underground sort of gold-locked room that was underneath AI blank or the sort of twisty and terny tunnels that are underneath bio-research. And so, yeah, again, I think it's like starting at the baseline and then figuring out the right things to add and thinking about that approach from first principles going forward to. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:33 All right. Joe, do you want to close us out with anything? Yeah, once again, I want to appreciate everybody for, like, sort of not just joining us here, but also whoever participated in the alpha or whoever was part of watching it or just even part of the discourse, we really appreciate it, you know? What about me? Like, excited that a lot of people are interested in sourcing where we evolve this game and sort of how we're continuing to iterate on it and make a better. So thank you all for the feedback.
Starting point is 01:00:56 Thank you all for the questions. Thank you all for the sort of, you know, support and for sharing your feedback and opinions with us. It's all super valuable. And we've been listening. We're like constantly talking about how to tackle it. We're doing a lot of things already to tackle it. We're sorry we couldn't show anything this week. Unexpected conditions came up.
Starting point is 01:01:15 But next time we want to be showing you a little bit more about what we're working on. And hopefully that'll be exciting to see. But yeah, thank you all very much. Look forward to talking to you again soon. Yeah. Tell them to raid me. Thank you. Well.
Starting point is 01:02:13 That's just the way it goes, guys. That's the way it is. So they didn't really address it. They just talked about some bullshit for a while. Man, I, uh, I really got to say, guys, this isn't looking at, good for Marathon.
Starting point is 01:02:51 It's not. There's nothing that's looking good about this at all. It's a shameful display. I mean, look at the amount of audio issues that they had. Like, again, you can't figure out a live stream. You can't figure out your audio. You can't get a Discord call to work. You can't even get their names on the screen.
Starting point is 01:03:15 You can't fucking figure out you can't do the art the right way. The characters look like garb. Like, this is it. Guys, guys, guys. You know, you ever heard the phrase, sometimes you know when to hold them. Sometimes you got to know when to fold them.
Starting point is 01:03:36 I think it might be time to fold. I think it might just be time to fold. We did a poll during the event, and it was about if the new name for Marathon is either Art Raiders or Concord 2, It seems like Art Raiders came out ahead, but Concord 2 had a pretty good amount of showing as well. And so, yeah, that's pretty much it. Art Raiders 1,000.
Starting point is 01:04:07 Yeah, there we go. Well, that was a disaster. Wow. Bro, that is fucking iconic. I'm going to be honest, bro. That is fucking iconic. Oh, geez. Wow.
Starting point is 01:04:48 Man. that's too bad poor dude I honestly he was the one that you are in charge of the art direction of this game and it is yet another flaccid boring lame like western video game
Starting point is 01:05:10 with a bunch of ugly androgynous weird looking characters that are not appealing to anyone and you've done this like so even besides this like you this is it It sucks. It sucks.
Starting point is 01:05:25 The whole thing sucked. And so it's DEI slop? Well, I'm not going to say that, but I think a lot of people would. I'll tell you that. And so, anyway, that's apparently what's going to happen. Bunchy should respectfully close the project, salvage what they can. Yeah, maybe they should. And how fucked was that?
Starting point is 01:05:43 Uninspired thievery on display with total lack of passion from the dev team. I mean, this guy at least seemed like he gave a shit. And I'm sure some of the other guys gave a shit, too. but man I really feel bad the art for the game is like some of it is okay the stuff they stole was okay but the character designs were just garbage and I don't know what they were thinking by going after them
Starting point is 01:06:06 and man they're real users for there we go and seeing so much you defend this shit as abhorne it makes my skin crawl seek help tomorrow's live show will be the most uncomfortable thing to watch it will be the most uncomfortable thing to watch. Yep, there it is. There's no way to be tactful about it. Ignoring it is bad. Even having a message at the beginning doesn't really mean much when 90% of the stream will contain stolen art. Yep, well, I didn't either. Then it hit me. I didn't even think about
Starting point is 01:06:37 this. It's going to 100% be awkward. Well, it certainly was the game is cursed. Yep, it seems that way. They deserve every awkward, prolonged second that comes with it. I doubt they'll say anything because of HR. Well, they did. And so there we go, guys. There is the event. And, And we'll look at what some of the new posts about it are. And there it is. There it is. Wow. And, wow, do you think it's a bad time to talk about the thief runner?
Starting point is 01:07:15 Yeah, I think so. True Marathon Inspiration and Marathon style. And post alpha, please don't fumble the stream. Please don't fumble the stream. Well, there it is. I guess so. They fumbled it. Well, I don't think it was really that good. I think that honestly, it was going to be bad no matter what. It doesn't matter what they would have done, what would have happened. It was going to be bad regardless.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.