Castle Super Beast - CSB 140: Elden Park [REAИIMATIOИ]

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Improving Darkest Dungeon 2 True Dice Rolls Feel Bad Too Huge For The Final Boss Elden Ring 19 Minute Trailer Talk Woolie VS MMO Real Estate Practices NFT EMERGENCY LINK THE FIRE NOW You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Arcane is now streaming exclusively on Netflix! -- Go to http://uncommongoods.com/SUPERBEAST to get 15% off your next gift! -- Go to http://awaytravel.com/beast to start your 100-day trial today! Elden Ring – 19-minute gameplay preview 5 Elden Ring Classes Will Be in the Network Test Elden Ring Cross Save and Framerate Details Revealed Mara revealed Devil May Cry anime details Digital versions of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 (PSN/XBL/eShop/GOG/Shield) will be temporarily removed starting tomorrow (November 8th). Konami is currently working on renewing licenses for select historical archive footage used in-game Leak revealed first 12 episodes of JoJo's Bizzare Adventure: Stone Ocean Capcom's Integrated Report mentions 'free additional DLC' for both Rise and Village

🎵 Hello. Good afternoon. How you doing, man? Alright. Not too bad. Had a late night, of course. Yeah, of course. On your day of rest, as well. Shame.

Yeah. Gotta try to get up to a couple things. But the... The reason for my sleep deprivation is definitely Darkest Dungeon 2 ah I knew you'd get to it this week yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure I want your

let's just skip the preamble what are your thoughts on because I dabbled in the first game but you fiended on it I did I did I did and I even went and like did a little refresher run in the last in one just to get it all you know um recent in the brain and the changes are really really different and like it's clear they're trying to create a it's almost as if

like this is more of a a spiritual successor than it is a direct sequel yeah like it was it was a blarkest blungeon or by made by a different company or like it's a spirit of darkness well yeah it's like what if a bunch what if there was a big bunch of drama and red hook and then some people left and made their own product for Kickstarter and then this is what we got?

You know? Where it's like, okay, you've got the spirit of it in a lot of places but you're going with some huge changes. had a lot of stuff that people found like irritating about the runs not just the difficulty but like there was stuff that was like sort of like extra frustrating for example your inventory right the ability

to stack things was always a huge annoying problem where you'd get some really good shit that was worth it but you're like do I have to throw out a couple thousand gold or the answer is yes you know and yeah because you can only stack so many things and and you can tell what people were interested in um the most by just going to like the community tab and seeing what mods people made in the workshop you know there's always something about like a a game that it's complicated and then you you go to um this happened with xcom 2 the week it came out

you go to the mod page and number one downloaded 80 million times is turn off the turn timers exactly exactly and you get to a point where you're like this is the design of the game and this is how we want you to play it and people go no yeah i hate that part exactly darkest dungeon one had that with the corpses where they actually included the toggle because it was so controversial yeah so corpses can be good or and bad that's the thing is you can use them into your advantage or you could or they can be a detriment in many cases there are detriment in most cases they're annoying

but that's that's one of those things that you see in the workshop like right away you got mods on that you've got the you see mods on stacking there's like a billion things that are all like stack to the ceiling stack as high as you want never ever ever stop stacking every Every single torch, one stack. All your food, one stack.

Shut up. You know? So that was something people really fucking wanted that they didn't like on the default system. one was the um the the stress chance for uh um a uh a stress penalty versus a a virtue right um and um you would get like so the way you know you fill up your stress meter and then you can either you either get a chance at a virtue or you get a chance at like getting a debilitating like a quirk you know and um like people wanted it to be 50 50 but it wasn't 50 50 it was 75 25 which made it feel like 90 10 yeah because almost always something is gonna go wrong and every once in a while it's like Oh virtuous fuck yeah you know or like you get like one of

those one of your characters ends up getting a virtue but for the most part everything always went wrong so people were like fuck that mod it so that it's 50-50 you know it's 50 50 you know um it's interesting so going into this now you can see where they just took some of that to the ground level and went all right uh you can increase your stack ability for items but you have to install wagon add-ons to do so. You have to choose

hey man stacking is important to me. Over healing items or other things I can do. Exactly. I'm a big stacker. You can see where they went hey the I like the idea of

a 50-50. Admittedly I'm okay with that. That's fun because your stress meter fills up and it's not something you want to happen. But it's cool if it turns out for the better. In this case, that's gone and it's really just like if it's going negative, you know you're going to get something negative. If it's going positive, you're going to know you're going to get something positive. So whenever it has that little screen where it's just like the relationship is tested you're like yeah but i know where it's going you know um it's more just kind of like what is it gonna be like are my partners gonna be amorous are they gonna be respected inseparable whatever what is it gonna be but you know which direction you're leaning in you know and and i

don't mind like like that's a bit more predictable but I didn't think they necessarily needed to change it from good or bad coin flip. Like I'm OK with that. Stress as a whole has also become much more manageable. They've nerfed the shit out of that system. And it's interesting because it's still crippling but it does not kill you. You know? So back in the day, you fill up the stress meter. You get to 50%.

You get one of those things I mentioned. And then you go from 50 to 100, and then you just die of a heart attack. Right? And then your stress meter becomes almost more important than your life, than your life when you have a character that's freaking out. Here, it's like you – every time you have a meltdown, you lose your entire life bar except two or three points. So you're not on death's door, but you get dropped down to like an inch of death's door. Yeah, you didn't have a heart attack. You had angina sure and you can then heal back up from that and it's okay in fact you can pass a turn

and every once in a while every once in a couple of turns passing heals you so you can actually pick yourself out of death store even if you don't have a healer it's it's interesting so they made these decisions and it it makes some of that a lot easier um but raise my hand up on this yeah uh the the feeling that i got from that is that in darkest dungeon one unless because i got i don't know like 20 hours in before i stalled out you had the situation where unless you were using those dlcs that added like a real timer to the game you could keep banging your head on it and so it was brutal but like a catastrophic nightmare loss just represented a loss of resources whereas in darkest dungeon 2 it's the end of your fucking run, start over. Yes, but there's, so there's two things, right? Like, they made those things I mentioned easier, but there's two, but then there's some shit that changes drastically to rebalance it.

So those mechanics improve in a way. Plus, and this is huge, huge, huge, huge. plus and this is huge huge huge huge every character and every class you're using has the choice between five abilities not four that is massive because originally you had to pick four out of eight possible uh moves per character and now you're picking five out of what looks to be like 12 or so yeah tons and tons of choice so you can you can do a lot more you can have a much more well-rounded party you know you know a

healer that can actually fight and all sorts of things so you get more options yeah again a little bit more easy but two things happen one you no longer get the ability to use items from your shared item pool in battle you gotta equip them one only one and after you use that one it's done and that hopefully you put the

right one on hmm so you know based on the area you're in what you probably want but you can't be prepared for everything and that makes it really hard because now you're like what you probably want but you can't be prepared for everything and that makes it really hard because now you're like oh fuck i don't have the ability to to fix this blight this bleeding this fire you know like you run out of the resources to to fix that in fights sometimes um whereas before you always had a lot like the full list of options to fix whatever problem you came across so that makes it

harder and to you can't fucking run away escape is gone and that is a huge thing is if you go if you run into a fight in in dd1 and you lose a really crucial like your leader or your your healer and you've got nothing to make up for it and no fire you just take a real bad crit you lose a dude and then

you go all right we're out of here and you escape the dungeon and then you suffer a stress penalty for escaping you know here escape is fucking gone so when one goes down you might still make it. But if two go down in a fight, you're probably fucking done. So I ran into a couple of really interesting situations where it's a futile run. It's completely worthless.

I'm down to the grave robber alone but she can she can use absinthe to heal herself and she's surviving on death's door constantly so this fight is going up to like round 17 and yeah it just she just won't die but there's nothing you can do you can't escape the battle uh it turns out that like the harder and the longer you fight the more hope you get so it's worth it to keep fighting no matter what you get incentivized in that way as we talked about yeah the hope is your permanent upgrades and things like that

but while it's completely different it's super fun I really like it fantastic the fact that it's like you have more options on the field but like less ways to back down, I'm okay with that, you know? I think that's one of the reasons they put in the turn timers on your average random battle.

So you pretty much have to take them all out within five turns. Yes. So it's like if it's going real bad it's going to end in two turns from now just hold on until then but also you get no rewards which makes that fight suck because you know you're just losing resources and stress over nothing you might have reversed a couple of friendships and relationships which are the so important now um but also like i i'm i'm what am i probably like level 12 or so like i'm multiple runs deep and i have not um like keeping a relationship positive is almost impossible right like it's it's rough it's pretty fucking hard

to keep everything on the up and up and and you see that in terms of like the game has these moments where you get into fights and then you can choose between who's gonna speak whether they're gonna say something like emboldening or cowardly and like that will affect other people's

relationships but sometimes you're like we're about to die we're all like on like high stress we're all on low life we cannot survive another fight right now we need to move on but if someone says hey guys we should back down everyone's gonna hate that guy you know so you're like it's the right choice to make to

run away from the fight but everyone's relationship inverts because of it you know and so you're like why'd you got to say that dude yeah like so you you basically can choose between stress resources and how much your party likes each other and like you're all you you get to pick two out of the three I ran into these situations where i'm like oh there's a supply point there's a there's a

friendly band of people i'll be able to get some lantern light because i got nothing right i got no lamp and then i get there and like two guys are like oh yeah sick let's help these guys out we get some lamp and then the third guy's like let's rob these fuckers i'm like no what are you doing yeah what are you doing now you're causing a fight for nothing yeah now we're all gonna argue over this for nothing or better you have no light at all you're you're fucking on zero you come across the the survivors and both two two out of four party members are like yeah fuck them like we you know and you're let's. Let's just take shit and we don't want light. And you're like, this sucks.

Or let's leave or whatever. And you have no options. So, yeah, the randomness is always there no matter what your circumstances are. But the actual combat is fucking fantastic. It's a really fun way to return to the game system and in style the visuals we've talked about it's impeccable

super beautiful game it's the kind of thing where fighting game players tend to actually zone in on this type of animation work because they have to because of the way active frames work but i don't see it talked a lot in a lot of other circles darkest dungeon 2 is going to be the absolute

like point to example of what you mean when an animation has a hit stop when it has an anticipatory movement when it has a uh like a cool down movement and when it has a keyframe because it's the bluntest it's pure anticipation then one keyframe yes then the cool down animation so in killer instinct jago's overhead represents the most important normal in the era of rollback because jay goes overhead is he holds the sword back and then it takes like a half second and then he snaps it on you right and because there's so much anticipation in the holding back pose that if rollback occurs during that you don't feel it it's a completely invisible moment where the game can detect which input you're holding, roll back, and you won't notice a change. And then, bam, it'll be one or the other, and it'll be a flawless experience in your netcode, right?

Visually going hand in hand and working together. That attack is what everything in Darkest Dungeon 2 feels like. You got that windup, that setup, that setup and then boom explode into the keyframe and then the unload the unpack it's so smooth and nice i oh i hit him really hard time to put the have you shake my hand and put my sword back on my my shoulder have you tried have you unlocked the new class the um the runaway did you try no i didn't play it much outside the the day that i streamed it okay so there's like there's a new class called runaway um and it's this this girl that has like a

she she uses fire a lot and she has like a poker and like a chain with like a flame on the end and a lot of her shit is just like spinning the flame into position and like it's just it's such a cool thing when you click on the attack and get ready for it. She basically spins it into different positions. Before she positions to strike.

Or to back dash and stuff. And it really like. Like the old classes. Are like looking better than they used to. But the new one. Is like. Built for this. You know. Oh man. I'm looking at this i'm looking at this

runaway character i got footage of her man this character looks cool she looks really cool unfortunately i she's not as useful as i wanted her to be but well it's early yeah yeah i have to figure out what else she's got going on which gets me to actually the next point which is when you go through these maps and you have the the spread that is like slay the spire right now it's almost unfair in the priorities of your caravan because as you uncover different things to go to you can go pick a fight you can go get

resources but there's only one thing that really matters that you're gunning for every time and that is the backstories of your characters it's such a massive power like jump the instant you get those new moves it's crazy um and of all the encounters you can get to like fuck going to a store fuck going to a hospital fuck even a watchtower where I can see everything I mean that helps me find the the backstories but you go to the backstory and then you pick one of your characters and you get one of five

chapters that are excellently narrated and like awesomely presented where you go back into their past and you either play a chapter or just listen to what happened to them and then unlock another move of those 12 permanently for that class on your save forever. And most importantly,

some of them have fights depending on what chapter. Some of them don't have fights depending on what chapter. But even if you do fight, they're flashbacks, so they don't take any resources. And you get something out of it it's one of the only places you can arrive that is just a universal positive good thing to get there's no downside you get good story you get new moves and like the and the flashback fights are like them playing with the system like um um uh uh you you like there's a well there's a couple i don't

want anyway i don't want to spoil any of them but like some of them like create uh uh for example there's one where there's one of the characters um fucking like just lost and fucked up and did some bad stuff and then like has to come back and then they're in a fight where your options in the fight are your move list is grovel and apologize and you have to deal with a bunch of people in front of you in a combat situation you know um it's it's it's really interesting how they play with that stuff, you know, and then you unlock more moves. And yeah, you just kind of like if you know which classes you used to play that you liked, you know who to hammer on to get to the good shit. You know, you know, you want to get that point blank shot with the highwayman.

You know, you want to get your Hellion leveled up so you can get breakthrough, you know. So that's nice to see all the all the old familiars and classics um and yeah having the five abilities is is a nice like i feel like you've it's opened up my my uh my options you know i feel like i'm i'm um using yeah like you're less constrained so that's nice um now the game is not without its flaws and that's because it's certainly early and uh i have uh more than a couple uh first and foremost that cart feels like shit yeah it's you remember me talking about it last supremely so you have a bunch of options like you have a three sliders i think that controls like the movement of the cart and there's nothing you can do to make it feel like anything other than garbage so i made so

you can change the cart um sensitivity to high or low making it go as high as possible for me helped a little bit it made it more responsive but i honestly just want the feature gone um i understand that they kind of wanted to include like they could have just made click to your next map point right but they wanted to include something of the walking through the dungeons in the old game. Right. And in this case, this is how they do it. They want a cool down period after a big stressful event. And that's all right.

But what I would say is, at the bare minimum, just take away this clunkiness of it and make it so that it auto runs and if you want to steer left or right just use the mouse and whenever you get to a fork in the road pick what click on one of the three forks you want to follow you know yeah just let you because you have the auto run there and that's nice and but like if you just ignore if you just

auto run and ignore everything then you're you're missing items on the road that you might want to collect so now you're incentivized to keep steering in this awful system and then when you get to a fork in the road if you're missing items on the road that you might want to collect. So now you're incentivized to keep steering in this awful system. And then when you get to a fork in the road, if you're not paying attention, you might accidentally choose the wrong one. Just let it stop and just pick which way you want to go. And then we're done.

You don't have to think too hard about this. It feels like shit, but fortunately it's an easy fix. You know? I'd be good with it being automated. Yeah, automate it and then let me pick let me pick which road to to travel down you know um of course the the the again to fully automate it would then mean people would just want to skip it um which yeah yeah i guess you can just do uh but like they want to have that cool down sense of travel exactly so do

something but as it stands right now it feels awful to steer sometimes because the way it looks the horses veer to the left thus the cart the cart veers right but you're at a fork in the road so you think like you picked the wrong direction for a second and it just it yeah it's poor it's not working out it

looks great it feels like shit and you have to do it's poor it's not working out it looks great it feels like shit and you have to do it constantly that needs to be the biggest address thing a second part about that is so going back to the first game I remember I mentioned you could play the entire game with a mouse except for one thing selling items required you to hold

shift huh everything else is mouse only. And I like that seeing as I can sit in a on a couch without a keyboard on my lap and just play casually comfortably. I enjoy that. You know, a lot of games. I was like, like a lot of the games I played actually had that when I got into into the breach when I got into bumbo like all these things were just like mouse only and in this case yeah you don't need the keyboard for one fucking thing here they now make it so that you have to control the keyboard

with WASD and they make it so that you can't pull the pause menu up unless you press escape there's no button to click on you know and then there's a bunch of other things where it's like the only way to see some of the icons that are the only way to know what a buff or a debuff is you have to hold alt so now

they've made the keyboard more essential but it's still like this doesn't have to be the case you can just quality of life these things away having you should get one of them MMO mice and then you can just map all your keyboard to your right hand well that is exactly what I did oh my god that was a joke no so I use I have a mouse that has

three different sidebar side add-ons to it and I'm using the second one that has six buttons. So I have six buttons on my thumb, and the first two are left and right, the second two are up and down, and then the last two are alt and escape. So now, when I play, I double tap the W on the button and then the cart

auto rolls and then I just tap the left and right first buttons to steer the cart left and right I don't need the keyboard it completely eliminated the need for the keyboard by using one of those mice but it doesn't change the fact that the game should have a built in

system for this that doesn't require this do you have like some kind of moral like issue But it doesn't change the fact that the game should have a built-in system for this that doesn't require this. Do you have some kind of moral issue with keyboards? I've seen you use a keyboard. You didn't seem upset. No. But I have a tactile keyboard that has wires plugged into it. And it's just annoying to have to pull it up from where it is with wires on on both sides of it into my lap it's just it's it's kind of cumbersome you

know and and the way the stream setup is over there especially it makes my life a lot easier if I can just use a mouse and but this has been the case long before you know if you do have one and it's there that's cool but it's a game that doesn't need it it's some easy fixes to avoid and there's no need to increase this this dependency for example here's here's what they really need to do they need to get fucking controller support working in that

thing right away because i bet i bet that steering shit is going to make a lot more sense when you're playing it with an analog stick. I imagine it would. I imagine it would. The ability to soft turn, perhaps, you know? Well, because sensitivity as an option makes a lot... It's like I'm still just holding down digital A or digital D. Yeah. And I'm having to time it instead of just being able to go

to the left or right with my thumb. But there's some shit where it's like like objectively no matter how much you no matter whether or not you think you care about the keyboard being involved or not right that could just be a me thing but the old game had a candle in the corner you could click on to bring up the escape

menu that is a little weird that's not there and now there's nothing there that's just objectively worse right for the state they're rolling it out in in early access so taking feedback i really hope they return things that used to be there like an like a pause button that you can click on you know it seems really strange that that's that's nothing you can you can you can do um furthermore the decision this is it's it's a mixed bag but the decision to change the way moves are explained when you highlight them or

when you click on them is now it's the it's better and worse at the same time I didn't notice any changes but I'm not that super familiar with the first game so the old so the first game when you highlighted any moves or when you highlighted um an enemy uh you what would happen is you would see a big a little pop-up window with a full description of like uh what what it affects bleed resistance goes up you cause bleed on on the enemy on your target uh you see the positioning you

move back by one space it'll give you a crit percentage and then all you know these the various things right and it's it just it's it spells it out and then it'll it'll in some cases describe like you know he part full party heel or whatever the case is you know right um what they decided to do is they're looking at it is they're looking

at it as like let's simplify um what people are looking at when they highlight any moves because they don't want to have too many words and make it seem too complex so they've turned it all into icon language right and that helps make things take up less space but a lot less space but it means there's a lot more icons that you have to that you better be used to or familiar with and sometimes you can highlight them in most

cases you can highlight to see what that icon means but in some cases you can't right there was a moment when I was streaming it where uh i got something i forget what to move and it interacted with a it says uh increases whatever against and then it was a symbol of a blue shield that had a crack in it exactly and i was like i don't know what the fuck that's saying to me exactly right now to find out what that is in most cases you would have to uh express escape

because there's no candle to click on then go to a there's a token glossary that shows you um the 30 or so tokens that you can be afflicted with right and these are good and bad included um dodge tokens defense tokens protection etc vulnerabilities you you see a list of them but not every icon the game uses is in that list right some are only um in like a particular attack when it's directed at an opponent. And some are in places where you can't like sometimes there's you'll highlight an item or a trinket and it'll say gives 20 percent to something. But you can't click on that trinket to then go find out what that thing is. You just have to recognize it, and if it's on the list of the tokens, then you'll see it there. But there's some that weren't, and you're like, okay, then I don't know which icon this is.

Plus there's new. The specific thing that I ran into was I was like, oh, what's that? So I hit G, which is the glossary button right and I hit G and I see I'm looking at all the blue icons yeah and I didn't see the exactly on that was mentioned and all I could intuit is that that icon I was seeing on the on the tooltip, was the generalized category icon for that whole batch, which wasn't there. And I'm like, just put the fucking thing down. Just write it.

If you're going to use symbol language, please, goddammit, put all the symbols in there. Yeah. And then on top of that, so the G key, we'll pull that up, sure. But then the Alt key is necessary on other screens to get details on the other set of icons that occur only in pre-battle exchanges. So when you meet a bunch of people to help on the road, when you meet a bunch of people before a fight and there's a number of of a number of circumstances that can change you see them underneath your characters and in that case you need a different set of you it's defined with a different button and you hold up that information it'll say oh this will give you plus 15 to your fire it'll give you these key resources and a couple other things trinket chance or or you

know quirk chance or something like that uh at which point you're like, well, it's just adding a single line of text above those things. Why not just have that already there? Always. You know? You know, we talked about this before, about people, like, starting a brand new game the first week it comes out,

and going, uh-uh, this needs to change. I'm thinking of the stacking in Darkest Dungeon, you mentioned turn timers and XCOM, but the one that I see very commonly across multiple games is the mod Better or Expanded Tooltips, which is, you like to say, a lot of CRPGs have this mod

where you mouse over something and the description will be does a moderate amount of damage to the it's like nobody wants to know how much it does on the on the fucking sliding scale of subjective qualifiers i want to know that it does 19 to 22 times three damage yes first yes fucker yeah Like I can see a toggle for this in Darkest Dungeon 2's options eventually that is literally just expanded tooltips and then you mouse

over it and a big fucking box comes up that shows all the numerical data and uses words for all of these fucking things. Fortunately most of the time Darkest Dungeon 1 and two will specify the number of hit points or healing

points you're gonna get out of something but in some cases you're gonna equip an item that heals a moderate amount and it doesn't tell you what a moderate amount means you know is that that that was that was one of the they're doing that in dark not darkest dungeon That was one of the... They're doing that in Dark... Not Darkest Dungeon. Dead by Daylight.

Every single add-on that you could equip to a survivor or killer had language like, significantly decreases cooldown time when equipped. And there was no number on any of it. The whole history of the game. So you'd have to go to a wiki. You'd have to go to some guy's YouTube who would run calculations on it. It was a total mess. Apparently they're finally changing that or have just changed it to tell you what the fucking percentage increases and decreases are.

Yeah. percentage increases and decreases are yeah don't worry about it is not a good design philosophy in most cases especially if it matters a lot to you know like you're the outcome of whether you can fucking if that's the right move to do or not you know yeah my favorite is in dead by daylight you'd equip an add-on that says uh it says slightly increases the range of your let's say lunge and you'd be playing with it and you're like i i can't tell the difference is is there a difference is this broken like i legitimately can't tell and then you see some guy's channel where they fucking do the testing testing and they're like it increases your lunge range by 0.017 so i guess it's not a lie and it's yeah so that's that's currently something that's pretty annoying and um and what also is happening and again this is there's benefits there's pros and cons to this but the decision also was clear like I can tell that the designer of the game

the UX the person responsible for the user experience looked at the height of the first game and went this is too cluttered this needs to stop and they basically threw it all out and took it to back to brass tacks they said listen fucker there's a lot of text on this screen and that's gonna be really hard to fit onto your iphone when this gets ported to it a year from now okay yeah yeah yeah yeah right because old game you had

your eight moves or your four moves, right? And then underneath that, you had the extra information. And then you had to the right of that all your inventory or the map. You'd have to switch between two tabs. And then next to the right of that, you'd have the enemy information and what their moves would be and what they could do to you. And so it was admittedly a lot. And I get that, like, that was clutterly a lot and and and i get that like that could that was cluttered and there's ways to do that better but what we got now is now you only have your moves and like very little information in terms of just again like it's all icons all minimal all

really simplistic you know things that just add extra time to you figuring out like what am i looking at what is that what is that icon and then in some cases you're talking about like oh this will make it better on a on a touch on a phone screen but there's icons where if there's two little swoops that means this enemy has a 50 chance of dodging whatever you do but if there's a third swoop on this tiny little icon it's actually a 75 chance and because each swoop is 25 and i you know i'm looking at that and i'm like i can see that fine but i'm sure there are people out there if you just want to talk about like accessibility we're like these icons are not distinct enough from each other one of them is i have a 75 inch television and my wonderful fiance sitting in this spot playing house of ashes last night could not tell where a monster's arms were on the screen geez yeah

when it would cover it when it took up the whole screen yeah yeah like these kinds of changes to anyone the other than having good vision is impossible to see so the shields are insane because there's three little guard icons that can appear and there are three little golden shields and the difference is one shield has one uh like stroke around it and then the other shield has two strokes and then there's one with three and it's like like you're just at a glance they're the same fucking icon guys you know and they're only appearing very tiny next to the attack or underneath the character and you just you can't get any information from that so like on the one hand yay let's clean it up and let's make it visually nice and remove all these elements but on the other hand you have this problem of like you're not communicating this game effectively enough and the game system has not changed in in a way that means you can ignore this information it's as vital as it always was but now it's more obtuse to discover slash to

figure out what it is and you've added more because burn is now a status you can you can be afflicted with you know um i like burn as a status yeah there's there's a bunch of shit you know so that needs to fix for sure the visual the user experience the visual language of the icons like you know communicating what they are right away and it wouldn't take that much extra space to just write the word like of whatever the status is you abbreviate it anyway in most cases so they really that that needs some fixing for sure um and um yeah that that's my biggest biggest complaint um the replacement of campfires to inns feels really nice i like it it works out well um i feel like at the campfires you would always be like how do i spend these points before we go to sleep for the

night and you might get ambushed which you know I don't mind in mind that system for sure but here because you spend a bit more time at the end prepping every step of the next leg of the journey it feels much more like a real downtime you know so that's a great choice where everyone's sitting around the fire okay play some games

play some darts some of you guys can eat some food do some boxing box a little bit yeah yeah you know and then deal with their stress levels and their possibly can we get you guys to hate each other a little bit less can we get the hatred down you know oh man you know just thinking about this i'd like there's two thoughts that popped in my head that are very tangential to this but i've never talked to you about them you played a good deal of yakuza 7 right whoever's decision was to switch around what red and blue mean when you equip something oh my god should go to hell oh my god that was brutal my brain was fighting every step of the way of like red bad right red bad no red good that game and still like with hours to go was still having to go like, wait, which is it?

Yeah, okay. Hey, guys, purple means healing and green is poison. Green is the color of poison and purple means healing. Green is poison and purple is a nice color because I like purple. Yes. Yeah, good. Done. Everyone's going to understand that.

Oh, man. Especially when you're trying to fit into a genre as a joke almost, an existing thing. Yeah. No, you don't get to change the rules. You've come in too late. Do you remember an interview about Bulletstorm way back in the day where they were trying to shake things up in the first-person shooter? By the way, I like Bulletstorm. That's a good game.

And they made the decision early on to make exploding barrels a bright green in that game. Oh, man. That's coming back now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And did months of playtests. And there was nothing they could get could get there was nothing in game there was no uh tutorial there was no voice acting cue there was no situations they could force on the player that would get people to shoot green barrels it just didn sometimes you come up and you're like i'm not i'm i am a fan of doing

original things but some design elements where you're pushing up against the grain on an established mechanic you're gonna you're gonna have decide like yeah i there's a there's a decent uh i want to say it's a rasputin video in which they discuss the the use of purple in games and how purple near universally means corruption or poison or whatever. And the reason for that is because purple doesn't really occur in nature very often. So it's going to necessarily clash with almost anything in a naturalistic landscape and stick out

and go, this is different. And then you throw some ooze on it and bam, poison. Everybody can tell from a glance that that's poison. As opposed to the color of blood or the color of nature you know hey what colors your health bar it's fucking green no it's red okay well almost everything well no it depends because some it's all turns from green to red or yellow oh boy yeah we're

gonna have we're gonna have hey we're gonna have a health bar where your health is blue and people are gonna spend the whole game going why is my magic going down when i'm getting hit yes exactly right um it it certainly does depend it certainly does depend but sometimes you get it green sometimes you get it red sometimes you get it yellow in fighting games, and then it changes colors. But regardless, yeah, that's a very clear thing. You know, hey, I'm playing this game, and every time you attack something, the numbers pop up off of the enemy. Those numbers are the speed of the attacks you're using, actually. Hey, Wooly, let me ask you a question you're playing a game

in which numbers pop off the enemy you hit the enemy and the number is white what does that mean to you what the number is white yeah it's just a regular like off white white when you hit the enemy okay it depends on every other number. If a ton of numbers are popping up and they're all one color and then suddenly... Yeah, that's what's happening.

Then that's a normal attack. Then that's a normal attack. Okay, and every now and then a number will pop up that's yellow. What does that mean to you? Crit, probably. Right, and what does that mean to you? A crit, probably. Right. And what does the red number mean? A big crit, right? Sure, sure, yeah.

That's how Warframe does its numbers. Yeah. And everyone just instantly understands, oh, okay, that's, yeah, right. And if a green number pops up, uh-oh, I'm healing you. 14 just has the number stay the same color, but a crit has an exclamation point at the end of the number. And what's called a direct crit makes the number twice as big and puts two exclamation points at the end of it. There's no confusion there's absolutely no way you can see a giant

floating number with exclamation points on it and go i wonder what that means it's the speed yeah no so you just this is this language stuff is is important you do have to acknowledge it admittedly um but but anyway um yeah the ins the ins are are really successful uh um change to the system and um i on the one hand like i feel like i'm i feel limited because the stagecoach right now only had like I only have one healer and it's Paracelsus the the plague doctor occultist they call but I'm looking for no no so the occultist the occult no no

it's the plague doctor okay my mistake but the occultist is for me the last class I can up I can I can free up and that would be my other healer option which is gonna take a while so I feel more limited in my parties and I and I my expeditions are like I it's it's an I kind of want to get there a bit sooner you know um on the other hand the the old way where you had a cart of random people to hire sometimes you just got unlucky

and you just didn't get what you wanted you just had to make this caravan's a bunch of losers man yeah yeah you know so now you've got to fucking make do with what you got and you know like i wanted a hound houndsman but i didn't i couldn't get one and uh you know but on the other hand now i can never get that occultist in my runs until i finally unlock it so i always have to use a plague doctor and that's like i want to mix it up though. That's a lot more like a classic roguelike which is just like learn to use your basic tools before you get your fancy guns. Yeah, I guess. I guess, right? And you start the new run and you have – you get your pick of the – you get your specific team configuration that you can build out.

So I made it to the mountain. I made it to the mountain once and and got wiped and went like got it and this is the darkest dungeon truly and uh um it feels as if like the speed at which you can make it there and get through it yeah it's going to be a lot faster this time around it's going to be a lot uh easier like you said that that five hour experience even shorter honestly um unless there's like some new shit that unlocks after you get deeper inside of it you could do that in almost like two two and a half hours you could get through a solid run so by the way i have to i have to correct myself from earlier in the week in which I said that getting to the end on your first run is probably impossible.

Literally, I think that day or the day after, it was November 4th, so that would have been Thursday, a Dead by Daylight streamer that I follow named Otzdarva literally just posted a YouTube video of my first run in Darkest Dungeon 2 in which he beats the fucking thing in 5 hours and 17 minutes that's incredible on the first

run wow the dude's a fiend he's just real good and what happens is that you pass through the mountain Beaned. Wow. He's just real good. And what happens is that you pass through the mountain only to end up back at the level select in that void. Yeah. And then you get to chapter two, for sure, or something.

Yeah. So it looks like that's the way they're going to do it. Well, you'll have to beat the first chapter to unlock the second, and it'll continue. Denial, and then whatever else comes next, you know? So it'll still be a plenty long game it will take at least 25 hours to beat if you want to get all of those runs done uh sure um and it's funny because i was curious going into it I'm like the best thing about your game is the narrator and what are you going to do going forward and the answer is

yeah Wayne Jude is just gonna be here he's just he's the voice of darkest dungeon and he's not going anywhere and you best believe the ancestor has more things to say the ancestor happened to be pals with the scholar and uh he sent him a letter before he died in the intro of darkest

dungeon and that letter just happened to be like a million words long yeah yeah and uh it managed to just correctly guess every conceivable event as it happened with context yeah no it's too powerful a voice for him to ever not be there it's insane you know so uh super glad to have him back and doing all these new line reads. Really, really good ones. And like some of the old classics, you know, was Singular Strike and stuff. But I'm like, I'm waiting to hear some of the new quotables. But yeah, I know. I've in my in my my runs I've done or I've unlocked jester and hellion and the like I said the the runaway class and yeah no it's just I'm gonna I'm definitely gonna like lose myself in

that for a while and then whenever the next update comes in erases all my saves then so fucking be it the epic game store still sucks. Whatever. Yep. Is what it is. But Darkest Dungeon 2 is fucking great.

It's fucking great. And you know what? I will say this. If you are someone who liked the first one, there's a lot to like here. But even if you didn't, you can still pick this one up and play it. And it's quicker to pick up and get into.

And it's... It is a significantly different game. It's a streamlined experience, right? This is a much simpler thing. Where beforehand, the foray going out, there's a lot more planning to do like so much of the game took place before you even went out in dd1 and then like thinking on the fly and in this case they take away some of that and they make it more like improvising as you go and dealing with what you have but like you there's less to think about and more to just like play actively and the fights are fucking hard sometimes you know you just sometimes you

just get a shit deal where oh you hit zero and now you enter the fucking abyss and you're fighting the shambler right away and you've got like no resources whatsoever other times you know you get a a character who's constantly making themselves stealth so you can't target them but also if someone dies

there's a resurrector on the field and you've got like two turns left it gets into some fucking really hard fits situations which is exactly how the old game used to be but it's a simpler like pick up and play you know so I definitely think grab that, touch it, play it, and get in there. I just, I do hope i miss some of the old

because this is so different you know well luckily darkest dungeon one still there sure is sure is i think is is like legitimately the actual answer you would get from somebody on the dev team yeah like they they i read an interview in which they were very clear that they wanted dd2 to be a non-replacement game and they want to validate dd1 they succeeded with that so i gotta ask uh you played dd1 in early access a good deal right yes okay did i ever talk to you about the state of dice rolls in Baldur's Gate 3? You must have when you first broke down that Early Access run. Way, way long ago.

So one of the more interesting things about Early Access is how willing the developer is to compromise on their vision right if players universally go yo this sucks you can either go but that's my vision or you can capitulate so i remember darkest dungeon one when it came out i don't think it had that corpse toggle and i think corpse corpses came with version 1.0 because i remember people right when version 1.0 of darkest dungeon came out complaining like crazy that dude i love this game i supported it all this time and this corpse thing is totally ruining it for me really they eventually put the toggle Yeah, there was a lot of anger about that. Corpses are an extra degree of difficulty, but they can be tactical, right? Like, I have a Hellion in my front row, and I have her with a buffed-up Iron Swan, which is an attack that goes front row to back row.

Which means corpses holding something in the back row is good for me when that turn comes around you know i get that and i don't personally mind but at the same time i can understand that like people who have been playing the early access build for nine to months to a year yeah and learn how to like like it didn't like the change uh a lot of the stuff that you're complaining about in dark ascensiongeon 2 like it's gonna depend on like how true they want to say like the tool tips right yeah if they're just put their foot down it's like no this is

the way that this is better you guys are wrong and the reason why I mentioned Baldur's Gate 3 oh sorry after you I keep I keep oh no too much I was just gonna give a side tip just for anyone that if you if you're having trouble with that the grave robber go to one of her flashbacks and the first ability you

get when you do one of her memories is a corpse destroyer that heals you so you get up get pout always use get pouches of lie every time and pouches of lie will destroy the corpses but pick grave robber memory one destroy corpse get like 33% healing back that's pretty good so it's fantastic so yeah so the

reason I mentioned Baldur's Gate 3 is Larian has been kind of they They're probably the number one dev I can think of in terms of listening to feedback. With the Divinity games in Early Access, they changed a bunch of it, and they even went on to build in some of the more popular mods into the Switch version of the game.

Okay. Stuff like regenerating MP when you sleep, stuff like that. build in some of the more popular mods into the switch version of the game okay like stuff stuff like regenerating mp when you sleep stuff like that uh and so balder's gate 3 comes around the early early access of like the first thing they're like we want this to be the most pure dungeons and dragons experience possible so all these dice rolls are real and what that means is plague did a pretty big video on it that i think sums up my point better than i'm going to be able to is that with real dice rolls in a vacuum you can just get miserable runs of luck just absolutely miserable sequences i streamed it for a couple nights and won one of those nights i failed every single possible role that i could in every dialogue so just true true random one to

six random yeah it was such a goddamn bummer. It was the worst. And in a real tabletop session, the DM who would be making those rolls would eventually just lie. And be like, nah, you got it. Hey, man, you just barely clutched it out. So that everyone could have fun. Or you check your stats and you add to the number to see if you clear it. So they just say that was the number one.

Like the early X-Spel, it has issues. That was the number one complaint with a bullet. No question. So I went, okay, we're going to learn from our peers in the random number generation video game space like x-com and we're going to put a streak system in where the game is going to recognize lots of successes and lots of failures and try to adjust accordingly this led to a situation which was depending on who you ask even worse because what would happen is if you got lucky streaks you were now guaranteed to fail in the near future yeah and so so they finally have just totally capitulated fun limiter and and now the streak system is only in place for failure okay not you will not be penalized for you'll essentially be given pity rolls if fun is allowed yeah and they have added an option to click a button that reverts it back to the old system of just pure roles if you want it to be

that way okay yeah okay that's fine and it's like that is a that's one of the things i read interviews in which they talked about how important it was that they kept it super accurate and the integrity of the dice. And then, like, this wave of anger and like, no, no, no, get rid of that. Get rid of that. We're changing that. That was a mistake. That was a mistake. You know what fucking game could benefit from a system like that?

A little old something called doke upon journey oh yeah yeah yeah I was up because it's been like three sessions of absolute shit rolls across the board every time it's my turn yeah and it seems to just be localized entirely in my kitchen have you ever thought about like being better at the

game yeah well anyways um fucking that that would I don't know if that would like increase or decrease tension i just all i want is a little report card so that i can just show like the consistent roll digital dice i just that's it that's it just show okay right and if anyone has anything to say about fairness or unfairness please refer to the fact that the numbers hate me. There's no such. Wooly, I have to.

You know what? I don't know what's going on over there. If you are walking – if you are being thrown out of a casino lamenting, no, you don't understand. Look how many bad – it's not fair. People and bums on the street would laugh at you. Of course, of course. But that's only one half of the equation. You're only hearing one half of the equation. To quote Min, right, it's not just how bad your roles have

been it's that reggie's right afterwards have all been good well i don't know what to tell you gambling isn't fair of course not but like it got to a point where like he was like dude i don't i don't know i i just don't know like and and so anyway it's it's interesting because when it comes to like actual dice you're looking at dice hit the table and you go well that's what it is dems the breaks casino right um and then you look at this video game and you go, is there a rubber banding system? What's happening here? You're not going to contact a dev and find out that there's a hidden stepchild status that's applied to one player at random and then fucks up their dice rolls. No, but there was stuff in Kingdom that applied only to first place and only to last place.

Well, I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. So it might do shit like that, you know. And I've seen some – I saw a turn of Mario Party where the CPU on 3DS got six stars in one turn. I mean, I've played games of Mario Party in which Bowser comes out and just says that the game's placements are inverted because he feels like it and then just shits in your mouth

Mario Party like getting mad at Mario Party feels like an exercise in frustration because God will just decide who wins at the end of the game that's it and it's not just rolls like I'm of the game that's it that's it you know and i mean and it's not just roles like i'm saying roles because that's like the most tangible

like you know track of like look at these bad numbers but uh it's also like every event in the game because there's when you land on a space you might fight or an event might occur and like 90 of them only happen to me and they usually involve some shit fucking npc walking up and going like hey give me some money and then you're like no and then it's like well then you're cursed or yes and then it's like thanks and then they just take your money you know or in some cases it'll be like hey give me some money and something good will happen and you give them some money and then it's like they just walked away you know or you're cursed you know so it just it's kind of wild it's a wild ass streak but what can we do um anyways uh dokapon continues of course um darkest dungeon is a good time

i tried going i tried i tried yesterday was unfortunately a bad kiting day. I had a bad kite day. I went out, tried. The wind was not strong. Is that your number one criteria? It's just like there's not enough wind. Yeah. You go to throw your kite, it just hits the ground.

Exactly. There was enough that I got a little bit of flight, but it was ultimately a waste of time. And I was like, ah, you know, you got to keep your eyes on the apps. I kind of just, I winged it a little bit I kind of like it seems like it'll be fine today and went to some of the spots and unfortunately nope so I didn't get to I didn't get to crack open some of the new tech I've been I've been anticipating

next time sorry man well it'll just have to be next time luckily there's no shortage of wind on the planet. It will come back to you one day. It will. It will. And just last real quick thing is a personal playthrough of DS1. I wrapped it up and I finished it.

And yeah, I forgot the violent difference in difficulty and tone that comes from ripping through the Artorias DLC, fighting him, fighting Manus, fighting whatchamacallit, the dragon, Calameet. Calameet. And then walking out of there and waltzing up to Gwyn. Oh my god. It's a joke, dude. I can't, like, it's so... Oh, yeah. At the very least... There's nothing.

At the very least, thematically, it's appropriate because it's like the age of fire at its height and even the losers of the age of fire at its height are crazy and then it's this burnt-out old husk yeah yeah you know who's parable as is mentioned oh man it's but so but like by but like I I went in pretty strong to like like, the Artorias DLC. And, you know, again, going back through it, I didn't have anywhere near as much of a tough time.

Because, yeah, we're used to the systems now. But I still needed to, like, get my shit together to, like, you know, to fight, like, Manus and stuff. Manus is for real. Manus is for real. And Kalameet is for real. You know? Yeah. Like, you know like to fight like madness and and stuff and to get madness is for real madness is for real um and calamite is for real you know yeah like you do have to and i recently uh uh watched a video talking about kingsfield one calamite is totally the final boss of kingsfield one ah ah okay he's not he's not named that game, but he has the same head and he's got the big glowing orange eye dead center. Interesting. Yeah, so, you know, and I definitely like went in and just went like, let me build out in a way where I can just fucking Havel shield a bunch of this bullshit and then not have to think about it.

and then not have to think about it um but like going from from that you know and then like alternating between um like a a havel shielding and then two-handing for a big ass swing of like grant you know with with some good faith like still made those fights like you know precision technical but good because i'm still i'm walking with like 20 bit or whatever. And then you just walk up to Gwyn and swing four times and the game ends. And you're like, Oh, you know, like old King Allen's gave you this cool duel,

you know? And this is that, but just the DLC makes you so overpowered for it i forgot to say um that playing dark souls 3 what do you remember me talking about how dark souls 3 felt easier than the other games but way back in the day when we're doing the lp because of the experience right and and the average person was like ah that's because you're over leveled and it's like than the other games way back in the day when we were doing the LP. Because of the experience. Right. And the average person was like, ah, that's because you over-leveled.

And I was like, I've gone through that game a couple times since then. Like, no, that game is a little easier. And as I've gone through these games kind of over and over, particularly the D.E.S. remake, right, they kept doing this thing where D.E.S. was hard, but then players who beat D were ready for dark souls one. Yes. So they had to make it harder and so on and so forth. But there's only so much of that you can do before it becomes like

legitimately impossible for the average person who's not familiar. And I think bloodborne is like the line on that there were parts of bloodborne that were stupid and i can't believe that the average person didn't have experience with the older games was able to get through something like ludwig in under 100 tries like completely ridiculous and it's fascinating doing all these and all these years. And when the Death's remake came out and you go through Death's, it's like, this is a joke. Like, the threat level on even bosses is, like, hilarious. So the first thing I did, so I beat it, right?

And then, like, whatever, went around and you beat fucking Asylum and then save your souls or whatever, New Game Plus. And I – the first thing I wanted to do – the first thing I did and immediately was just curious about because it's been so long now was I'm like, okay, you just had this experience and everything in this game is so much more simple now that you've you're looking back on it and you have all that all that knowledge let me see what the fuck that fume night fight was about because in my brain that still represents oh yeah the peak of struggle right nothing nothing like made me fucking struggle harder than the than than i mean i i remember it well enough i could tell you right now uh the fume night fight is the number one fight in the history of dark souls that abuses a very specific type of boss moveset which is you're gonna do the anticipatory animation but it's not clear what move is gonna come out yep and one of those moves like a lot of

those moves are going to be still the rhythm of anticipate and swing roll right there but one of those is a slow tracking if you anticipated and rolled badly you're dead right the slow sweep is there but but none of that actually was the was the most impactful thing I noticed watching the replay of

it the most impactful thing I fucking noticed looking at the ds2 ever like everything was taking a sip of Estes and how slow you heal and going like man oh my god have you have? That was it. When's the last time you saw Dark Souls 3 gameplay footage where you drink Estus? Yeah, like years. It's like, oh, done.

It's like you throw it back like it's a shot, and you can still kind of move while you're doing it. Unbelievable, you know so looking at that I'm like there's situations where ds1 I'm like I'm fucked right here I'm in the I'm in the shit I'm standing inside of seats crystals and I'm just taking a sip you know what I mean like fuck it um but in ds2 like I'm watching that

fight and it's like back off take a sip it's like gulp gulp gulp uh and then the life bar goes you know and i'm like that is it is brutal i i will tell you right now have you ever played even 10 minutes of Monster Hunter? The old ones. No, never, never, never. Okay, so in the new ones, you drink, and as you drink, your health bar goes up, which is intuitive, right? In the old games, here's what you do, and I would try and get the timing correctly. Sorry for those of you at home who cannot view me.

You're going to hit the button, and you're going to you're gonna okay gonna drink the potion ah flex done and you cannot move in any of it when does your life get like returned the instant it touches your lips. Okay, okay. But the flex will lock you in place. Okay. So the animation takes like four seconds. You know, that feels worse than a really slow drinking animation because it's so

extra. You're like, stop it! Move! Yeah. Yeah, no, that actually feels worse. That is totally the the the fucking inspiration for those original drink times 100 so yeah i'm like i went back to look at fucking fume night and just went like oh yeah okay no i see the bullshit i see where a lot of that still came from you know um anyway and so like you get to bloodborne of dark souls 3 and you get to this this moment where you have two types of boss moves that are supposed to trick you up you have the what i'm gonna call the flailing bloodborne

nightmare which is a mass of limbs that are incorporating full body hitboxes at what appear to be random times just comes at you. Yeah, yeah. And then there's a boss which sometimes will raise a sword up and hit you. And then other times he'll raise a sword up and he'll keep it. It'll keep it. And then it's a sweep. Yeah, sure, sure. it'll keep it and then it's a sweep yeah sure right and it's like i hope you didn't roll the instant the arm went up also sometimes that mass of limbs is also what am i looking at

what is the shape of this monster i can't logically make out your your figure i forget who it was but they broke down um they broke down ludwig and ludwig is probably like it's a cool fight and it's a great fight but ludwig probably has like the most unfairness in all souls bosses ever there's a charge move that he does that he gains full body hitbox on that has like a oh god is it 12 frames of startup and you have to dodge to the correct direction but his limbs can still clip you depending on where they are in the animation and it's like nobody's reacting to that more correctly more more more than orphan yeah yeah orphan is orphan is fucked up. To me, Orphan seemed to be the most fucked.

Orphan is fucked up because Orphan breaks a rule. Turns out when that Dark Souls 1 debug copy leaked out, it turns out that bosses in those games are actually modified player characters and still work underneath the same rules that the player does in terms of health and stamina. You can hack boss control, yeah. Orphan uniquely appears to have no stamina system at all and just can attack you forever. Just does things. Yes, just does things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That made more – that's the bigger impact. But yeah, I'd have to go back and look at the footage there. But yeah, the video that I was watching, I wish I could remember, but they show like Ludwig's arm going back. And they're like, this arm attack is going to happen in 16 frames, but the start of this animation is the same for two different, completely different moves. is the same for two different completely different moves and the part where it starts to articulate only leaves you like six frames to react which is faster than human reaction speed so hope you guessed correctly off your panic button yeah i i i mean there's a kind of like there's a you know you go through a bunch of different categories when you're learning a boss, right?

Like any Souls boss that gets thrown at you, which I'm sure a couple will be soon coming our way, you know, with. What are you talking about? There's no Souls games going out. But the diagnostic approach that we all take to these now is like, all right, what do you do? Right. Diagnostic approach that we all take to these now is like, all right, what do you do? Right? Two, how do you feel about me at your feet taking some swings? Right? And then like what do you do also equals like the arena, look around, who's around, what's happening, where can I fall, is someone going to stick me in the ass, whatever.

Right? Assess. And then two, how do you feel about me poking your toes a little bit you know and then at some point it's like if the answers to a and b are complete and utter bullshit like the entire time then it'll just then your your final thing becomes all right i will not engage with you except for this one moment what will that be you know it it reminds me of um so many people had trouble with ons yeah right yeah yeah oh and ons are ridiculous right and you you beat ons and then you got to beat the super version right and most people end

up fighting super ornstein because it's easier to take out smogue in the earlier fight and what a night oh what a tough fight in your it's your on your low resources and then at some point in the process most people are going to find out you know if i jam my head up against his knees i don't think he knows how to hit me i i legitimately wait hold on if i just rub my character model on ornstein here can he no he can't he actually can literally do nothing huh great for me done well for me it's the pillar post he does he can't get around it and like doesn't know what to do about the post and if he starts glowing on the spear just get the fuck out of there and

then otherwise hug the post right um to me the real version of that is returning to fucking Ulusil sanctuary garden right you fight the Guardian on the way in and then all the the manticore yeah and then on the way in and then – Oh, the Manticore? Yeah. And then on the way out, you have the optional double Manticore. Right. And two of them at the same time in an open arena with nothing to hide behind.

That's a realer ONS. Yeah. Oh, it's rough. And that is where what I'm talking about exists where it's like, okay, literally 97% of this fight is me just moving. And there's going to be one moment where you're going to be open and he's going to be over there. And that's the one swing I get. It's funny that you mentioned that because you're describing the only boss fight in Souls history that I have yet to actually fight. Sorry, beat.

And I have no desire to ever beat it ever again not the double manticore the double tiger the double tiger from the end of the snow DLC in Dark Souls 2 after invisible horse fuck Valley mm-hmm I've only gotten to that fight twice and it's bullshit it's bullshit yeah i don't care i just don't care so you know like that that to me is like the peak of no matter how bad anything coming from elden ring is going to be, no matter how bullshit any of these fights will be. Oh, you were talking about Elden Ring.

I got confused because we were talking about souls. No worries. Well, in any case, whatever is coming, right? And I'll throw Sekiro on that list too, you know? Sekiro is a great example of what we're talking about because the healing animation is the fastest. Because it needs to be um but like fighting like the owl like i could getting i got wrecked by him so much but like eventually getting

it down to like yeah there's i'm just gonna wait till you do this one attack you know and for the for the the um the the manticores the the sanctuary guardians for me it was after they do the body tackle which they rarely ever do there's like 10 attacks they do and one once in a while they'll do a big charge at you and then you get a swing on the butt and everything else fuck

it not worth it not safe did you did you fight and beats demon of hatred in Sekiro which one is that again that was the yes I did boss that that they took from bloodborne totally totally yes i was talking to gene about that and we were both in agreement that that boss is complete nonsense because they they took it from a different game and dropped it in here wants you it wants you to play bloodborne against it yeah yeah i think i think

gene's what do you say he's like how am i supposed to do this i've been a ninja the whole game i don't know i don't know how to do this i'm not a hunter he's he's right you're not a hunter that game every enemy even the goddamn fucking apes you can block and parry but not this guy all dodges and jumps yeah yeah so it's just the retrospective looking back on some of this shit is like from soft what the fuck like what the fuck you know anyway it's like it's like looking through It's like looking through an artist's catalog.

You know, some albums generally have some huge, some bangers. And then there's some B-sides. And you're like, oh, man, remember this B-side? I sure do And then on their next album They have The important song The single for it Is one of those B-sides remixed To be a little better And on the next album

Wow It's all B-sides It's like they keep Reusing the same song ideas Over and over but they just tweak them A little bit so that it sounds different What do you mean it's a they keep reusing the same song ideas over and over, but they just tweak them a little bit so that it sounds different. What do you mean it's a remix album? I wanted some new Linkin Park. Anyway, whatever.

What's going on with you? All right, let's see. I didn't actually do much this week. I had to... I'm doing this thing where I literally always have to look at my video producer tab in Twitch in order to tell what actually

occurred. Mind Goblins this week was Age of Empires 4, which did not actually trigger any Mind Goblins. That's a really chill RTS game. Sorry, someone says Elden Park. That's really good. I like that.

That's good. I like that. I would listen to that. Elden Park is strong. Yeah. Played Age of Empires IV. That just came out. It's a relic RTS off the, obviously, the famous old Age of Empires series.

It is a very chill game that is it does that thing that some sequels do where age of empires one came out in age of empires two and age of empires is the two is the classic much like warcraft 2 or something like that and age of empires 3 was the different one and then age of empires 4 is wow this really looks a lot like a 3D Age of Empires 2. There's a real, like, fuck, go back element to it. It has the best keybind system. So apparently this has been a long time thing in Age of Empires, but I did not know it. But it has the best RTS keybind bind system i've ever seen it's really simple you pick a peasant

and i mean there's like 30 different buildings you could possibly build right and normally in a starcraft what you would get is every possible key that is not taken up by a real feature would correspond to one of your team's buildings. Right? So you'd pick it and then you'd go, problem is, that's a lot of keybinds. That's quite a few. What Age of Empires 4 does, and apparently the earlier ones do as well,

tier 1 buildings, you hit Q and then it unlocks a second set of keybinds. Which includes Q, W, E, R, T, etc. etc maybe six total maybe you want to build a tier two building hit w first and now those keybinds change to the modifiers right okay so with only five or six total keys you can just go tap tap. Tap tap. You can also shift click. And build like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

You control groups are extremely easy. Like it's a really. Excellently controlling. RTS game. Which is a weird thing to say. Because that. That control style. Has been so set in stone.

For so many decades. But even as somebody who has not played in RTS games in many years, hey man, I was easily actually doing what I wanted quickly with Keybinds. Looks good, runs well. And the presentation is, I want to give them a gold star like i want to give them like a thumbs up for the decision on the type of presentation they decided to go with everything is blue and gold and parchment and you go to start the campaign and a posh british lady starts to narrate to you about what England was like in the 1100s. Where they show camera pans of nondescript British fields and talk about how long ago there was a battle between the Duke of Hastings and so and so here. And they put little stick figure men on the thing and then they'll CG up.

Here's what it would have looked like. And it's the history channel sure okay the the entire presentation pre middle and post every mission is a little history documentary about uh this invasion out in china between uh the mongols and the roos or this battle between the normans and the Rus or this battle between the Normans and the English or whatever and it's constant it's really well produced I like that

it's great I'll take that over pleasant experience I'll take that over box cover CG centurion man walking up to his soldiers going man you know yeah 100 yeah it's it's it also allows them to skip like a hundred years in between campaign missions oh yeah okay because history is just

flowing yeah yeah i mean his sometimes shit doesn't happen for 60 years so it's not very character based hypothetical character is england or france or china or russia or whatever hypothetical hypothetical rts control here because i don't you know i i don't you're talking to an amateur himself so i'm gonna give it a shot all right right. What if, like, buttons to unlock layers, but instead of, like, button into button combo to unlock the layer you want, button. And then mouse immediately has, like, nine options around it or so. And you just, like, go up or down or left or, like, each one brings up a quick wheel right where your mouse is so you're not totally nuts because mobas have that for uh quick alerts so in uh league and hots i want to say you would hold alt down and then that would bring up a selector which you would

then click the left mouse button and you would drag to go. I'm on my way or enemy here or enemy missing or something like that. Yeah. As for buildings, it's not fast enough. Okay. Okay. Like tap, tap and then hold shift and they'll go click, click, click, click, click, click, click is a lot faster. Yeah.

I'm just curious, you know, if that's something that would – how that would hold up or not. Yeah, all right. Just – I don't know. So I feel as if – Keyboards are scourged and they must be purged. No. I feel as if the double tap or the triple tap would definitely be the fastest for sure. I feel as if the double tap or the triple tap would definitely be the fastest for sure.

I'm just wondering if anything like did that or if there was a precedent for anything like that. Yeah. I mean, I would just say, like, imagine you're throwing out a SRK and then before you hit the final button, you click your mouse down and then drag it to the srk button and then release or or or hold the button down do the input and then release you know weapon lord style or something yeah anyway it's that's it's just a question so age of empires 4 it's not going to light the world on fire but it's a really pleasant uh rts i also want to give it a huge big clap it has the best text options i have seen in an rts game a for a genre that has historically been the worst to play on your television or if you have bad eyesight you can make that ui fucking big like they warn you that text might come off the screen big and it's like man i don't care i want it i'm i'm far away i am nine feet away i want that

big text okay and it it goes big as shit there's no problem i cannot imagine a person who has eyesight problems with this does it wrap what does the does the text wrap around the area like no they're talking about like if you do if you mouse over a tooltip and the tooltip happens to be at the bottom of the screen because the extra text size some of the tooltip might actually just leave you off off the bottom yeah safe area yeah compared to just not being able to read it at all yeah no that's a huge improvement it's very impressive um i also with uh my uh wondrous fiancee played and beat house of ashes uh last night in which we got the achievement golden path for the ideal perfect ending, including the fact that we made mistakes. The mistakes were perfect.

So there's like a movie run version of the story. There is. Well, all these types of games have the did everybody live? Did everyone get the best outcome? Did it right? But it's hard because, you know, it's a it's a death. You know, it's did you choose to shoot the guy instead of showing him Jesus dead? Right.

Perfect. Now, with that being said, man, this game is great. said man this game is great house of ashes is a quantum leap forward over little hope it's also like twice as long it feels like it's way longer um it is more interesting it is better produced. It has a much, much better hook. Well, clearly Little Hope isn't the comparison point. It would be Until Dawn, right? It is one half step back from Until Dawn. Okay. Until Dawn was worked on for like five years and went through two console generations and a ton of money.

And it's still the gold standard and it won't not be the gold standard for a long time House of Ashes is your budget but still pretty great version of that game like it goes until dawn House of

Ashes and then let's say the first season of walking dead and then power gap for everything else in that genre like not here you know those just you're just gonna shit on game of thrones like that those games became so popular and now that we're far away and can look back on them most of them were not the best man borderlands was good borderlands was good i didn't play that one was good that first season of walking dead was like it's like the the the genre innovator that ruined the genre because everybody was just chasing to get back

to that one really good one that one that happened that one time yeah yeah oh man but yeah House of Ashes is fantastic in addition to that I was contacted by a company whose name I'm pretty sure I'm constantly making the mistake because I no longer know whether or not it's Namco Bandai or Bandai

Namco because I think they changed it from one to the other at some point might have gone under the rebrand the Gundam people who happen to be working with from software and was given early access to the, uh, Elden ring network test over the course of this weekend,

which I spent a lot of time with and am completely under embargo for until a later date. There you go. So all I can tell you is that I spent a lot of time with it And that I will be able to talk about my impressions In the near future You did it I didn't even have to suck anyone's dick

Fun fact I actually Contacted the The PR company that they were using and was like, hey, we'll get back to you. And then got contacted by a different group of people in that same PR company apropos of nothing. Oh, there you go. So I was doing everything I can to slime my way in. And they're like, oh, hey, man.

What's up? I'm like, oh, okay. Cool. Just taking the knee pads off. Yeah, I just don't need these. Yeah, I'll sign that. The sound of Velcro. I'll sign that right now.

Sure thing. That's pretty much been it for me this week alright well if they want to check out more of your stuff where would they go over at woollyversus on twitch and on youtube that's the place to go to see some more Reggie vs Dark Souls

to see some more Dokopan Kingdom to see some more reggie versus dark souls to see some more uh dokapon kingdom to see some more well the finale of uh gone in 60 seconds which went out yesterday so uh that's that's season three in the bag uh and uh yeah to see you know um whatever other fighting games we've got coming down the pipeline which there's always more. There's always more. And, you know, I got to say,

the return to Dong Dong was truly a special experience. I saw that! I saw Reggie's eyes bug out of his fucking skull! The return to Dong Dong and the, you know just having the secret the secret yeah the truth having Reggie achieve the truth was a special time and I encourage you all to to join us as we get into fighting games dong-dong dong-dong

never die and there's also a 10th anniversary edition or some shit like that that came out too. So please enjoy. Please enjoy the adventure. Fucking good shit. All right. On my end over at twitch.tv slash Pat Stairsat, my schedule is a bit of a mess this week. On Tuesday, I'm going to be playing Unmetal.

I don't know if you've seen this, Willie. It's a Metal Gear 1 tribute game. I've heard that name. Yeah. On Thursday, I'm going to be playing a new Mind Goblin game called Unsighted. Have you heard about this, Wulz? Yes. Isn't that the game that people are saying best Metroidvania of the year, possibly throwing a shade at dread it looks real

good it's a perfect game for the mind goblin series because the core mechanic is that you're all cyborgs running off of batteries and if your battery runs out you become a let's just say a hollow sure go nuts. Sure. But the clock is

real for you and every character in the game, including all shopkeepers, all quest givers, and all merchants or whatever. High stress. You have to go and get these batteries and give it to them or else

they will burn out no boy but that applies to yourself as well so it's a game that has a ticking clock on every single character at all times yeah okay that's that's big that's not just you though that's goblins yeah no no that's everybody that's universal goblins that's stressful on yeah yeah yeah yeah

but I've But I've seen multiple people saying this is like the best of this genre to come out recently. Like, again, like in the face of an actual Metroid game.

The idea, as far as I could tell, is that as you beat the game and learn it and learn shortcuts, learn sequence breaks, learn the best way to deal things, you are essentially gifting yourself more and more time on the clock because you're able to complete things more quickly. So there is – it is a game built around if you speedrun this hard enough, no one has to die. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. enough no one has to die which is a cool idea also apropos of nothing

on Wednesday at 7 o'clock and on Friday Weds pardon? Weds you were doing the abbreviations for every day? Mon, Tuesday? No, I wasn't.

I was saying Monday and Tuesday. I'm throwing the shit. I'm doing it in a weird voice. Anyway, on the third day of the week, known as Wednesday, uh, at seven o'clock i will be doing a secret thing stream that i can't talk about right now for some reason so if you want to come down to my show at twitch.tv slash pat stares at on wednesday to see a secret thing you might want to go and take a look at that.

And also on Friday at 5 PM, I will also be doing a different stream about maybe a different or the same secret thing. It's a secret. It's a secret. I hold out my hands to my sides and tilt my head going. What could it be? It's a secret.

So you might want to go take a look at the secret thing on Wednesday and Friday. Just saying. Cool. Alrighty. Orifice leaks. Orifice? You want to go leak some fluids? Oh, I heard you say O-R-P-H-U-S.

And I'm like, who, what, we're, who's, is that a thing? You want to go leak some fluids, bro? I could leak a fluid or two. All right. Fluid leak. All righty. A quick word from the sponsors this week

the podcast is sponsored by Arcane a Netflix original series about League of Legends wait is that that League of Legends show that I've done seen with Jason Vai? You saw it. You saw it.

I didn't see it. No, I saw the trailer. You saw it. Yeah. Yeah. I just found out about it yesterday, which is appropriate considering we're getting the word out ourselves. Yeah.

Well, you know, they got the big, shiny, the high budget quality cg stuff going on uh so it looks really nice it does look pretty fancy it looks real slick and i actually like unironically like i've had like friends be like yo like i don't know if you're interested but like you might like take a look at this because it might like sell you you know on the thing part of their master plan to get you woolly playing League of Legends I mean listen you know you start with a little bit of the KDA music videos and then you you

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And it looks excellent. I like the sound of that. Yeah. Witness the animation sound of that. Yeah. Witness the animation event of the year. See the champions we know and love like never before. Vi, Jinx, Hammerdinger, Jace. Their stories all intertwine in this action-packed series. Whether you're a longtime League player or a brand new to Runeterra,

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really shiny that looks pretty dope the number one question that I had is if I watch this will I discover what the thematic lore reason is going to be behind Jinx being a discard card like a

discard your hand oh could there be a hero card I Like a discard your hand hero card. Oh, could there be lore implications? Well, we'll have to find out. Thanks, Arcane. Why is everyone saying yes? Damn. Actually, actually yes.

Actually yes. That's pretty funny that's pretty funny how about that oh all right uh podcast also sponsored by Uncommon Goods. We've talked about Uncommon Goods. Yeah. If you want to be a good gift giver, the secret sauce for that. I feel, honestly, I feel like I'm a pretty good gift giver. I feel like I nail it. between the needs and the wants and the unexpected. And Uncommon Goods is a good place for the right gifts for all your people in your life. You need stuff for your mom, your dad, your kids, whatever you're looking for.

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there you go thanks on common goods thanks on common goods a little less murder in my house slightly less I like it right up until the end of Dokopan journey well and I like it. Right up until the end of Dokopan Journey. Well.

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thanks away all right into the news did anything happen this week you could say so I'd say 19 minutes of thing happened this week 19 minutes of thing

you're obviously talking about Yoshi P apologizing to the player base right for 19 minutes of thing happened this week. 19 minutes of thing? 19 minutes of... You're obviously talking about Yoshi P apologizing to the player base, right? For 19 minutes straight. Yeah, actually, for real. Dogeza. What happened? You don't know? It's not part of the news? There's the...

I was actually going to talk about the 19 minutes of elden ring but oh you mean the footage that i'm watching right now that's that's that's correct um i just got to the part where they used uh i don't want to call him a horsey jumper like the the wind thing to make the horse jump go i sonic bounce pads um so i can see based on the news that I can see that a lot of FF14 announcements have been dropped in the recent days yeah like literally the past couple days so would this be the fact

that end Walker has been delayed to early december yeah so uh they started up the last live letter before uh the expansion drop and yoshi p uh very much was like awkward and then he he tried not not to cry as he basically explained that they will absolutely 100% have to delay the game two weeks because they gave a pretty explicit reason and it was because

they had spent so much time just putting one more thing to make it just perfect that QA got back to them and they're like there is absolutely no way we're gonna have the time to hit all this stuff fix all this stuff and get server stability under control for the launch date so it's being pushed back two weeks. Now, I don't know a whole lot about anything, but from my ignorant perspective, the fact that he was close to or possibly did cry while announcing this sounds like an overreaction to something that is ultimately probably not that big of a deal if a two-week delay has to happen? So this is something that requires slightly more context.

Please. Right? Please. There's one big piece of information that you need to know to put this into context. to put this in a context which is two weeks is not enough time to tell your boss you need to change the week you took off from work oh oh my god it's about that level of dedication woolly these things okay come out okay once every two years got it and got it everybody takes the week off of work oh so that they can just crush it oh my god and now this is christ tons and tons and like literally millions of people are going to be sitting at home with a week off of nothing. And then having to go to work during the launch week. who actually plays and does it at a high level he understands exactly what that experience is like

more than someone who might not be in the trenches so to speak absolutely also yoshi p has never delayed a game okay and they're delaying it they're delaying it by two weeks two weeks from the release okay like it's it's it is the only the only shade i will drop on yoshi p and the team this is too late to announce a delay well i i i push back and i say that compliance doesn't have a fucking time limit. So it's not compliance. It's the fact that the player base has increased by over 30% in the past couple months. And they don't have the structure for it? Well, they've been working on it,

but this type of stuff was not in the plans. That's why they delayed the server crunch for the data center stuff. Okay. And they went too far in terms of like, well, if we have one more day, we can put this thing in. Or we can tweak this cut scene. And then QA gets back to them and goes, dude, there is not enough time. There is just not enough time to get this stuff ready to go.

And the reason I say that is because Shadowbringers is a good example. Shadowbringers came out and was actively being DDoSed for the entirety of its launch day and aside from one hour in which I lost my connection twice there was no issue it is the only MMO that ever launches and you can actually play the game the day

it comes out okay I have a very important question here. How was the community response to his live letter? They thought that it was two things. One, oh, no, my time off. And then was followed by, not separately, but followed by, oh, man, he's being too hard on himself. Not separately, but followed by, oh man, he's being too hard on himself. We can all understand that the team is doing their best. Jesus Christ. And they're trying to really just make the best game.

And they don't want to keep the release date and have the game crash on everybody on release date. Good, good. Because the two weeks out thing and the time off thing definitely are – like that sucks. I can see that one-to-one. The part of it where it's like I had a perfect track record and then a mistake happened and now here we are and it's not a perfect record anymore. That's – you can't hold yourself to that standard delays are normal and you cannot have an unhealthy reaction to like finally making a mistake when it's an industry where this kind of thing is happens and it's normal you know so yeah the the dudes don't want to have this

micromanager right somehow managed to hit those deadlines every time his whole career so i can understand the frustration so the world doesn't need to like weigh in harder on what he's probably putting on his own plate for sure but while he's also the head of the ff16 project i might add fuck yeah okay so no so that like i'm i'm glad that people have been understanding about that, because this sounds like somebody who will flagellate over these types of situations. On the plus side, legitimately, this has unironically, for many individuals, saved Christmas. Okay. saved christmas okay because the scheduling of ff14's expansions is such that expansion drops and then two weeks later they give you the new currency that you can earn because they don't want to unlock that at start because then people will feel the need to rush their way through

right so it's like multiple weeks before you can earn an endgame currency. And then two weeks after that, they put out the first raids because they, again, don't want people to have to rush. The original timing of the release of the Savage Raid and thus the world first race was going to be Christmas Eve. Okay. Okay. Which meant people were going to be world firsting it like straight through Christmas fuck the family we're doing it yeah okay now you said that this has the problem was that they grew

30% 35% since July of the so there's So there's a survey group called Lucky Bancho that does, like, they dig onto servers and they search characters and they figure out the numbers. There's two types of player counts in XIV. There's people that are logging in at least once a week that are at level cap, and then there is the total amount of players. The total amount is the one you

always see 24 million people that includes level one alts yeah okay that's like that's 20 that's 21 million registered service accounts that are not necessarily being played right now well fortunately that increase means that there's a higher percentage chance that the salaryman who uh took that week off will then get to go talk to a boss who super understands because he too took the week off and they're both fucked and they go all right the let's move it forward no problem the uh the the increase the 35 increase since july is not in total number. It's of people at level cap logging in once a week. Okay. So like the,

the quote unquote real player base is actually grown by one third in the past couple of months, which is fucking huge for a game that's running a service like this. No, it's like the, the most wholesome thing that I've seen out of this is you go to the 14 reddit and there's people that are like asking to move doctor's appointments and their doctors are like yeah no problem dude yeah it got delayed huh this sucks i know exactly that's what i'm

saying right like you have a time limit to get get your boss in on your raids with you and then they too will be like nah it's all good everyone you know early early break shut the office down for a week we get it we got to talk to those clients you'll figure it out the the other piece of news that they put out they I mean it was a live letter they talk a lot about all sorts of stuff but the one that would actually be interesting for people who don't play the game to talk about

is what they are doing with that game's pvp and that is they are gutting it so final fantasy 14 has had you know has player versus player stuff it's got one called the feast which is i think it's 4v4 but it doesn't matter uh it's not good let's start right there it's not good i have i don't think i've ever heard anyone like a pvp system in any mmo ever it's always i've always heard complaints about times where people liked it and there's even warframe which is universe which is generally like warframes pvp is like the actual worst ever. Okay, well, but this is what I just mean. I keep hearing how bad these things are all the time.

Right. So, step one, FFXIV's PvP is not that good. Step two, the Feast is the primo PvP that is the only one that actually has rewards anyone would actually want. Right? Step three, Feast runs on seasons and the seasons are usually one or two patches long so sees i think the last season of the feast was season 19 which gives you an example of like how many of them there have been number four the top 100 ranked players on each server are the only ones that get the rewards that everyone wants. Oh my god.

Jesus Christ. That's insane. Why? And the armor is, I shit you not, universally the best looking stuff in the entire game. The mounts are some of the best in the entire game. Okay, no, no, no, no. Hold on a second. Hold on a second.

That's not rarity. That's like non-existent when you're talking about millions. A server that has 3,000 to 5,000 people on it. That's non-existent rarity. Right. But now we get to now we get to point six it's not limited by service account which means you and your five alts if you bought and win trade hard enough can get five spots of that 100 per server so multiple people are also bullshitting

it so for 19 seasons the only people who have received any of these super good ass rewards are people who go hard on it.

And I mean like, I can't raid, I can't finish the story, I can't do the patch content. I need to go horde on this. I know one guy who has it legit. It's a guy who comes to my streams and I see him

on my server his name's chichen that guy went horde you know on it when everyone else cheats their way through wind trading bots etc when i heard about like mmos hiring economists to sit down and help them figure out how to do things like it's like oh yeah that makes sense that's cool and like it's gone from a like oh that's a novel idea that makes sense to like no no no like everything involving the like reward system for this larger group of people in a shared space and like rarity numbers and like things like this like no matter what you do people will find a way to abuse it that's number one it'll always happen you have to anticipate that and find ways to either disincentivize it punish it or um

you know make us make it airtight in in the way it rewards people and the more you talk about these things in MMOs the more it's like the emergent cancers of the player behavior are like in from day one they're just a growth that's encroaching and like when you introduce systems like that it feels like I understand the balance between being, like, ridiculously anti-player and being, like, incentive-driven. Like, Rarity, good, play more, get the thing, get the yay.

But, like, there has to be a percentage point where it's, like, 0.001% of players have this equipment where that serves no beneficial function. There has to be a number. Yeah. So I sent you a photo of last season's feast armor in the Discord tab. And I mean this as somebody who's played this game for seven years. That's probably the best looking piece of tank armor in the game. It even has a special wind effect completely unique to it. Shadow Cleaver's attire. I don't know how they did it.

It also appears to be legitimately a higher fidelity and higher texture quality than other gear. I've seen one human being with it ever. It was the guy i mentioned earlier so feast has had a situation where people who get this shit will threaten to cut you if changes are made to the format because they manage to get it and they'll be goddamned if you'll repay your student. Get your get your feast armor without having to know. I don't hard on it. I don't care. I don't care.

Like you put something out. There's a time frame expected. Show what you expect that to be. Show what you expect people to be show what you expect people to like like to legitimately do to get the thing and when it results in everyone that gets it is just a criminal you have to change the system or a psychopath

fuck off right fuck off right so today they announced we're gonna do a new small-scale PvP and people are like uh and then they announced we're also getting rid of feast entirely and people are like okay okay and then the next announcement is that rewards will no longer be based exclusively on season and people like okay and then they go okay you'll have a what is essentially a battle pass but it'll be free forever okay across the entire future of the game and you can use the tokens you get from it to buy whatever you want hey first rewards coming are the old feasts. Exclusive armors. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. That's how you fix a fucking problem. And I'm sure there's a lot of people that are mad. And by a lot, I mean literally maybe 500. Because a lot of money was spent. Now, here's the other thing.

You're telling me it took 19 seasons to fucking crack down on this and fix it it's the kind of thing where they made the mistake when they announced feast when they announced it they said you'll be able to get exclusive rewards for getting the top 100, and here's the problem. Then they said, and you'll never be able to get it anywhere else. So every time a discussion ever came up, people who had earned the last season's stuff went,

I only worked hard because you told me that this would be the only way i could ever get it and it's an mmo and it's an exclusive status symbol and i would not have busted my ass playing pvp that much during that season if it wasn't exclusive yada yada yada and eventually that just became like and that was this week's woolly's eyes bug out at MMO practices being explained oh no

Jesus Christ when does it stop that's the first of this week's because the other thing that they talked about during that live letter is that they are finally instituting a lottery system for the housing market so that they can cut down on landlording and price gouging in the digital house market. It's a government. It's a government it's a government you're you're you have a cabinet of game

developers that have to create a system that your citizens are happy with in ff14 right now you know how you get a house yeah you want to guess how you get a house join a guild money no you have enough money on your character and your character doesn't own a house already and you run up to an empty plot and you

go I would like to buy this house and you buy it okay but it's an instance it's not actually game space it's a limited instance but you're not denying actual real estate in-game world when you purchase something yes you are why wasn't that the problem with um everquest or or what do you like is didn't you learn the lesson that limited actual real estate is the problem and

make everything an instance to not have this issue so here's how it works here's how it works the housing servers are an instance but there's only so many of them i think right now there's 24 times three wards i might be wrong but the point is there's only x amount of houses and there's let's say 24 million potential people that would want a house in game so what happens when a new housing market goes up like when the expansion they uh they had uh the the shiragane asian housing uh wards go up right what did you have to do well me and everyone in my fc had to spread around the guild money so that everyone was sitting on 50 million in their character's account. Then you had to wake up early

when the server went live and rush to get to the plot we've all preselected and hope to Christ you got there before somebody else. And rig the bid as a group so that it goes to one of you no matter what. If people don't log in for long enough periods of time, their houses will get demolished to open it back up which

leads to situations where your neighborhood will have a permanent squat settlement of people who never log out because the instant they see the house disappear they will have 10 frames to mash the a button to buy it before the 50 people next to them also buy it. What's the time limit from the house being empty?

It's a couple months. Okay. And there's no way to tell when that timer will pop. So all you do is go, hey, nobody, this house is slated for demolition. You know that. But the date and time, who knows? This house is slated for demolition. You know that. But the date and time?

Who knows? And if anyone is standing inside of it, the timer is locked. Yeah. Okay. And here's where... All of that would be fine if not. And you can go get an old Kotaku article about this where they interviewed somebody. Where there are players who all they want to do is play house. The MMO is a side thing.

is a side thing. There's, I believe it's on, there's a, I want to say it's on Zalera, which is a lower population server, in which two gentlemen went there, made so much gil and so many alts that they bought up

entire wards of houses. And I'm talking like 50 plus houses so that entire neighborhoods could rp owned by single service accounts so they could build their perfect neighborhood now this server in question is a lower population server that some people move to explicitly so they have a better shot at getting housing only to find oh no there's literal digital slumlords here that will never sell they rotate their accounts so it never happens and this has been the state the change to the housing system is as follows. One, it's a lottery. The houses go on sale.

Everybody says, I have the money right now. I will buy it. Keep with me. I will buy it when it releases and it lotterizes. Number two, number two. Wait, wait, wait. Only one house per service account. wait wait wait only one house per service account no more can one person

with 30 alts get a whole neighborhood they get one if they want a second one they have to buy another sub okay number three you have to be a certain level to do it you need to have there's there's a bunch of conditions that i'm not you have to be a real person you you have to be a player character you have to be a real person you cannot just build like fire off a level one alt and fill them with money okay and send them off okay and number whatever in addition to all of this this expansion in the point one

patch will be having some kind of island resort like instance which is going to basically be like a a harvest moon style single-player instance for a house that is yours okay animal crossing your is your animal crossing harvest yes but it'll be just for you yes but you'll have it yes and there's all this other housing shit is for you know you're in a community or there's a public but can people visit your personal house on unknown as of right now? Because all of this and even the improvements to the system, I I'm like, stop.

Right. Because if you tell me like, hey, we put some sprinkles on this plate of shit. I'm like, I don't. But why are you serving me a plate of shit? I don't – but why are you serving me a plate of shit? Like what is the benefit to making limited physical real estate in the MMO? Is it technical server space reasons? Yes.

That's one of the reasons. So the housing servers are – there are more housing servers than game servers because of how much resources it takes up because you need to accommodate, you have to run, you know, the game instance. And on top of that, you also have to run in every one of tens of thousands of combinations of housing items and decorations, combinations of housing items and decorations both in and outside the houses while simultaneously allowing huge player amounts to coexist in those spaces simultaneously okay like it is a very serious resource so so simply allowing um like so simply creating 100 of houses to be all instances and having people join your instance and do all the shit that you do or whatever is not a thing that the resources can handle.

No, I think that's going to be the solution because I bet when we go to this Harvest Moon Island or whatever, you're not going to be able to decorate your house. bet when we go to this this harvest moon island or whatever you're not going to be able to decorate your house i bet that's the solution that that they will not have to run you know a million backups of server space so you make sure you don't lose your goddamn items also here are the two here are the two solutions they've tried in the past. They made apartments. Okay. You can get a single room apartment in a housing ward. But you can't decorate

the outside of your apartment. Oh, and who's the landlord? Who'd you have to rent? The game. You buy them though. It's more like a condo. Cool, cool. Nice, yeah. They're also limited. And the second one, which is, I think it was the moment that when this blew up in their face, was when the decision was made to make a new type of instance housing.

At some point, I think it was a year ago, maybe it was a little bit before, they doubled the amount of available houses. They said, listen, there's 165,000 total houses available. We're going to double it to almost 300,000. And that shit was gone by end of day. And all the problems stayed. Burn it down. Burn the whole thing down.

No houses for anyone. No one lives anywhere. Destroy it. It's too late. They've added so many... Destroy it all. They've added so many features in regards to the housing system. And I have friends that if you took out this thing, they would lose one of their biggest desires to play the game. you took out this thing they would lose one of their biggest desires to play the game a good friend of mine creepy porpoise like half of her game time is decorating the guild house

i guess what it looks incredible i'm sure it does and i'm sure yes there are entire uh uh social communities for role for role playing that entirely are all about that this is this system of like that is horrendous dude that is so garbage sounding I'm like I'm thinking of the fucking like I don't know what I played Monster Hunter world and all you get your little room you want to put fish in your little tank or whatever go dress up

sure okay the I limited actual real You want to put fish in your little tank or whatever? Go dress up. Sure. Okay. The limited actual real estate real world problems coming to MMOs. I fucking hate everything about that. So here's the thing. Dear God, that's awful. A friend of the show, Doc Burford, recently wrote a great article on NFTs. And in it, he describes, he uses an example of Destiny, which uses an example of World of Warcraft, where Luke Smith talks about how he got to be the Scarab Lord on his server. And how great that felt, and how exclusive that felt, that he was the person who opened up the gates back in 2007, or whatever it was, back of Warcraft and how that was incredible and part of Destiny's design followed that there's a problem

and it's been a problem endemic to the MMO space when you create rewards that are exclusive for a percentage of your population those people are going to feel great and everyone else is going to feel like shit because they're never going to get it and that's not why a lot of people play games in order to create a feeling of exclusivity you necessarily need to create the feeling of want both of

the system changes that I've talked to you today about FF14 going forward are stabbing that idea in the chest yeah they're finally going this is stupid but to begin with I didn't even know that existed be able to

go get it like no because y'all play the game yeah no no I know but but what I'm saying is like and I'm just like like what I constantly like crashing into at like full speed on the fucking Autobahn mentally with this is just the idea that you buy a game and then you can do the things that are in the game. And every week there's a new version of thanks for buying or renting the game for a month. There's a million things you're not allowed to do in the game that you've purchased.

And I'm just like, but I bought the game. And I'm willing to spend the time. If I have to earn it, that's one thing. But this is not even- You are literally describing the beginning of the conversation that leads. and that's why it's okay for me to go on a party finder and buy a fucking clear because i deserve that goddamn ultimate axe and that is exactly six days a week and that is why i was about to and that's why i

stopped because i i yes the it's that's why it's like one of the stupidest takes ever of like that's like no um i'm allowed to go like buy my raids or whatever no no no if you can do that if you can access it by playing the fucking game to get the thing we're talking about that's one thing but you're describing a system of like even with that time and effort go fuck yourself no you're not on the leaderboard you're not in the top 100 out of thousands i'm gonna raise my hands here the the housing thing and the feast thing came from different places the housing thing is literally our servers can only handle the x amount of houses because it's resource intensive that at least makes sense to start there was a cost to reason the fee shit from day one was like dude only the biggest badasses are gonna have this shit guess you don't want it bad enough

are are you as big of a badass to use seven bot accounts and win trade with a cabal of dudes on discord okay so so from the bottom level right from from on one step before you go on to that i want to hold up my hand triple triad has tournaments in final fantasy 14 that are automated there is no cool ass big reward for it right right i think all you get is a title triple triad tournaments for a long time were 100 rigged for years and there's no reward like like they're there you'd get you'd get like uh like some mgp which is like gold saucer points or whatever and i think you could get a title but there was no mount associated with it there was no yeah nothing flashy and they were still for years it's a real it's a real government it's a real economy it's a real social system that goes through all the strains stress and pains you know of everything yeah on a large level the housing system goes to shit on a large level some asshole will jump the line in front of

you at the grocery store and then be like fuck you too bad like people will be shit on every micro level of this system there's another one i forgot there was a they wanted to do like a raid kind of thing but for people who do crafting and gathering right so they had something called a restoration which is basically you're rebuilding part of the game that got destroyed in a war right and so oh material um and that thing had seasons and the top 10 people of each crafting job per server per season would get a unique title and in order to get the title hand of creation you had to place top 10 on all crafting and gathering jobs that's so on the final season should have been top five tens too many no here's here's the part where it was the most toxic because you could see other people's point rankings. So you would be like crafting for 10 hours and cash it all in.

And you would literally see, oh, dude, I went from number three to number two. And then you'd log in tomorrow and you've been kicked down to number 11. So you see the race. You see it. You see it. Yeah. And so my buddy, Vel, has the Hand of Creation title. Why?

Because he got to work from home during the pandemic and he's a fiend. Yeah. Okay. So you get that, right? And you get the house and you get this shadow cleaver attire and and and you get the little icon that you said that you get for clearing that super like that old bird gang thing and

then you do what I did and you clear ultimate you clear yeah you get all right ultimate you quit you clear ooh-ooh and you get your ooh- sword. What does it look like when big cockmaster giant dick G logs in and has every possible flex that like ten other people have in the entire game? Like what do you even what do you what does it even look like i can i can i have a friend who looks like this so i can tell you um uh you can't equip all of them simultaneously um of course so like i said why would you be able to stunt that hard my my pal vel aka cool

lightning has multiple glam plates and he's walking around with um he's walking around with uh all he's walking for people who play the game they would get this he's either walking around with the hand of creation title or the world class troller title or the honest gillionaire title and he's riding on that fucking uh pterodactyl sorry pterodactyl you get from uh from restoration or he's walking around on uh the kerberos from DR Savage or he's strolling around on whatever the fucking latest raid mount is and he's got alternatively the

uwu the T or the it's uwu T and the other one weapon on his back glowing like other people's weapons aren't allowed to glow. Right.

The one. And, uh, what does he look like? He looks like a Lola fell dressed in a Starbucks uniform because at a certain point, like on the achievement scale, you just start to wear like mean garbage because you know and and do the people part like

the red seas like it like is there even i just you know like at a certain point all the i mean i talked about this the first like when i saw my my old roommate like going ham with the fucking super shiny badass glowing armor in wow and i was like but the whole screen is that yeah so and i just don't i don't get it i'll tell you i will tell you how it happens okay you're in the housing ward and you see a guy crafting and then the guy stands up and he's some shithead wearing dumb bullshit. And you see, Oh, that's a really rare title. And then they switched to their battle class and you see like, let's say the T weapon and you go, wow, that's a really nice, uh, that's a really nice dancer, uh, chakram. Hey, let me just look up how to,

how to actually get that. And you look up a T guide and you find a Google doc that's a really nice dancer, uh, chakram. Hey, let me just look up how to, how to actually get that. And you look up a T guide and you find a Google doc. That's 38 pages long with a two hour long video guide. And you go, I'm not fucking doing that. Okay. That's how it goes. And that's how it goes.

And somewhere that player feels that moment where you go oh my god what the fuck and they go yeah and they get a little right in the chest dude not even like my pal does all that all of it every relic weapon every raid every item all the titles he would want and end walkers coming he's like I don't know

what to do in the game oh I know what I'll do and this is only really gonna hit people who play the game I'm gonna go ahead and catch every single big fish in the game yeah there's nothing left yeah see but once he catches every big fish in the game, can other people still catch fish on their own accounts? Absolutely. Yeah, totally.

Then we're good. Catch all the fish you want. But if he emptied the ocean so that no one could ever catch a fish, that would be a very different discussion. And that I would have a problem with. Well, that's... That's... And here's... That's when you get in to running the market board.

See, when you run the market board in FFXIV, say you put five items up at one million gil, and some motherfucker undercuts you at 900,000. So you undercut him at 850. some motherfucker undercuts you at 900 000 so you undercut him at 850 so he undercuts you at 700 000 so then you undercut him and you undercut him and you undercut him and you get down to 300 000 then you buy his item and put them all back up at one million oh man yeah no it really is just it's it's real life everything that can go wrong in real life eventually can get duplicated in this type of environment

god bless and and i and i and here's the thing some stuff, like, if we were talking about EVE Online and the heists that go down in that, I'm like, it's practically encouraged in the system with how open and crazy that is. Right? So that's fair game because, holy shit, that's the point in a way. But, like, to me, this this is still a it's an rpg it's an m it's a game where you're going and you're doing raids and you're beating bosses and you're getting stronger and then you're casting spells or getting weapons and teaming up with your friends so all the other shit is just around that core idea as opposed to the eve online like this is duplicitous by nature design woolly i joined a discord server purely because it has a robot in it that i can type

something like exclamation point market space light the golden whisker and the cupo bot will give me the current price of that item per server as well as its historical average price on various quality levels which apparently it's going cheap at 1.7 million on odin if you want to get that fucking minion cheap go to odin right now and would you pay the 30 to migrate over to odin to get it and then migrate back? No, you can just travel between servers now. Oh, I thought it was a $30 migration. If you want to move your character permanently.

But if you want to visit... If you want to visit. Got it, got it. Okay. And here's the thing, Willie. Here's the thing. When they made the ability to visit other servers and buy from other servers, it represented an economic catastrophe. Because now we're in the international market. Because all of a sudden, you're not just dealing with those two guys who keep undercutting you on raid weapons.

Now you're dealing with the community. And turns out, different servers have different amounts of insane people yeah you opened up the silk road has a bizarrely high amount of super crafters i don't know why but you know what doesn't leviathan okay okay so hold on so what is to stop me from visiting a server that's not my home server every single time I play zero so what's the point of migrating permanently you can't own a

house on a server you don't live on and there's a good deal of social features that don't work it comes back to the same shit. No. No, hold on. No, hold on. There are social services that don't work. You cannot join a party normally on a server you don't actually live on.

You can't join a free company on a server you don't live on. Stuff like that. My cell phone doesn't work with these towers. It's not on the same cell system. Basically, yeah. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, like that. My cell phone doesn't work with these towers. It's not on the same cell system. Basically, yeah. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, alright. My SIM card doesn't... Alright, alright. Okay. Well, you know what? Those are some... I am

sweating talking about this. I am, like, drenched in sweat right now. This shit is so fucking whack um those are some good fixes I'm glad to hear they're they're improving the game it's gonna be a two weeks late but I'm sure it'll be fun they'd also

put out a launch trailer which contrary to every launch trailer they've ever put out did not really have that many spoilers in it well kind of shocking actually well this is like the big one of the big finales of this arc right like yeah can't spoil like but like the heavensward launch

trailer has the post-credit scene in it okay okay okay like they they have gone bananas with this shit in the past um so that 19 minute trailer then yeah that one okay well that's not the way you want to talk about that 19 minutes of elden ring footage yeah that's not the 19 minutes i wanted to talk about i wanted to talk about the other 19 minutes so the 19 minutes of Elden Ring footage they put out is like pretty obviously the same shit they showed to people like seven

months ago like forever ago that they've been like hold some people had their eyes on that for a while in which case then I guess that would mean this is not exactly recent footage no I mean it's quite old footage Well, in which case, then I guess that would mean this is not exactly recent footage. No, it would mean it's quite old footage.

That being said, there's a lot that you can glean from it. I looked at this footage real, real careful with my soul's eye when it dropped. And I talked to a lot of people who are obsessed with these games. I talk to a lot of people who are obsessed with these games. Do you remember the conversation we had when the Death's remake was coming out and how immaculate it looked and how incredible it looked? And we brought up the idea, it looks so good,

and Bluepoint made it look so nice. What if Elden Ring doesn't look as good yeah as the destiny man yeah well the footage is out and guess what it doesn't that being said like so there's a thing though you have to look at there's art design and then there's technical well here's the thing the art the people who made the art in both is the same. It's the same source. It's the From Software Souls artists. But the difference here is pretty obvious.

Demon's Souls is a bunch of discrete loading levels. In the Elden Ring footage that we see, a gentleman gets up on a horsey and just rides in a direction for 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, and overlooks a big vista. Yeah, a game that has that structure is never going to look like the Dess remake. Never. never now but but but just going into like again the difference between technical versus like the art art wise those fucking earth trees are gorgeous that's some real not real shit happening real real pretty and gold in the in the the distance whatever you're running around and like it's fun to fun to look at that's a pretty and also to be very fair to Elden Ring Elden Ring is coming out on the PlayStation 4 in the Xbox yes yes it is

like it's last gen not a ps5 exclusive no it is not whereas death's remake was absolutely five exclusive so for sure also that probably gonna mean no fun um uh dual sense stuff going on you know as more of an afterthought they'll probably use regular ass vibration um because that bow and arrow stuff was really cool in in the death remake you know with the yeah i turned it off yeah well because it would it would stop me from firing arrows every now and then I got I guess that I

got used to that but um the the stuff where you feel it in the base of the controller I love on every game that has it but all the trigger stuff I turn off immediately I cannot stand it I mean I it sounded like I said it sounded like awful to me on paper and then in in Returnal I was like oh my god that actually works

you know uh so so yeah you got that that that that 19 minute uh thing um one thing that i see uh that i'm really curious about because it was also in the one of some one of the first looks at it is like how many overworld oh fuck i walked into the area, now I'm fighting a boss spots are we looking at, you know? Like, the idea of, like, you just hit this watery area and now a life bar appears is like, damn, that's gonna keep me on my toes in a way that is not quite like Breath of the Wild per se. in a way that is not quite like a breath of the wild per se but it seems like if there's a bunch of that shit happening constantly um that's that's crazy it's it's scary and exciting you know well i'll tell you what there's no way to accurately answer that question without playing it for yourself uh but my gut reaction after playing the older souls games is that every souls game has been getting more obsessed with not letting you know you're walking into a boss fight.

Yeah, yeah. So Bloodborne was the start of you're not showing up and walking through a fog door. You're walking into a room and then a boss drops at you and then you turn around and there's a fog door behind you and you're like, goddammit, fucking shit. Yeah. I mean, The Pursuer was like one of the first times it was like oh whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what you know where's the fog door where's the indicator what's going on here i can i can only imagine that having like the in the footage you see a dragon come from like beyond the edge of the horizon like they're a dot it just crashes down yeah just crash in that's the that's got to be the new form

of that which is like there would be no way to tell that that was going to happen unless you already knew it was there get fucking ambushed yeah and then of course the other idea being like is it this is it this like a invisible arena threshold or is it a like uh if you're in this province you might run into some problems you know type of thing so there's there's a couple ways that could go all the footage they have of fighting that dragon is pretty much in that same spot in the water so i'm going to assume that the dragon just doesn't leave sure um you got that it seems like yeah you're gonna seamlessly summon and jump off your horse like constantly and that's cool um whatever magic lore reasons there are for that because you know horse is a cool feeling when you're riding in the plains

but it can also be cumbersome in small spaces. It's a weird-looking horse. We saw that in the first trailer, but, like, this footage, you get a better look at it. It's like a goat. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But there's a thing where they clearly went like, what are the fun parts of horsing? And then, what are the unfun

parts? And all the unfun parts, they're just like, yeah, it goes away now. You know? Bring it out when you want it and then don't when you don't. Now super jump off of this Sonic Spring and get a nice big, like, sweeping Sekiro. Woo! You know? And land. So you got to see some of that.

We got to see... And the boss fights, they showed you. They definitely... They're not going to show you the whole fight. But they give you, like, you know, a fade in fade in to like the start of it and then a fade out. Mr. Big Axe Man, multi-hand dude. Shit like that looked pretty dope. Yeah, I know that the point of making these things cinematic is to not have like a HUD so that it feels like more immersive.

But I would love to see that stuff and like item switching if it's happening. I'd like to see life bars and stamina, you know. I mean, for a promotional video like this, you can absolutely understand pulling the HUD all the way off because it looks so much prettier. Yeah, for sure. I totally get it. understand pulling the hud all the way off because it looks so much prettier yeah for sure oh i know i guess i totally get it um and uh alongside uh some of this week they they showed off uh or they announced at least the five classes that are gonna be available for the network test. And this is kind of interesting. Because it's less classes than you had in previous Souls games.

Direct comparison. But it's not less classes that you've had in previous industry demos of Dark Souls games. Okay. So the Dark Souls 1 demo had like I think think eight and like one of them was like black knight and it was a guy in full set of armor uh and they tend to be for the demo reasons or test reasons or whatever they tend to be more built up in terms of equipment than your actual real starting classes okay okay okay they're giving you yeah yeah uh interesting um i i'm i'm looking at like the fact that there is clearly a like here is a intentional spell sword and i thought

that was that's pretty sick i mean like the um i can't think of many of the series that ever included anything like that no and it's and it's super interesting because the what the fuck is it called the bloody wolf looks like the coolest like Artorias armor wearing badass wolf looks like the character they're going they would put on the box exactly right why would you the elite knight set or pharaoh set of armor that why would

you not want to be this cool guy right but the fact that you see um the what is it uh yeah the enchanted knight where it's like no sword in one hand staff in the other we're encouraging this actual spell sword thing oh here here you here you go mr madden yeah here's the build that you wanted to start as in every game you've ever played in this series. Here you go. Not just me. This is what Reggie is trying to do constantly. And I have to be like, okay, well, make sure you pick and choose how you want to do this.

Be careful. You might not get exactly what you want here. But yeah. And so it's like, okay. But the idea of casting and swinging and doing stuff and you know at sacrifice of a shield sounds super dope and here you see that and you see like not just like here's a homing soul arrow or some shit you see a fucking shinku hadouken at one point get blasted out in the trailer that is a spell that already exists in 3. Okay. That beam.

The beam. Yeah, that thing already exists. Yeah. You get... What do you get? You get... Yeah, also, the weirdness is back. They take a minute to show you Alexander the Pot Man. Beat his ass and get him unstuck.

And these are the types of NPCs you you're gonna hang out with this is not Dark Souls but they're obviously the these devs love certain types of archetypes so I seriously doubt we're gonna see Siegward or any onion bros but yeah what if there was a dude that was like a big dum-dum but he was like round and he and he talked to you and went

right like weird creature shit and then and this is like I mean I'm sure it'll be fine like once you just get used to it but like the fact that this map is the size it is and then there's a map to look at that's actually helpful and it lets you put down a god light to go to a actual like that's so much more forgiving navigationally than other Souls games would be. But this is just a bigger world.

So I guess it's like, yeah, no, you can have that map. It's okay. So I guess it's like, yeah, no, you can have that map. It's okay. You're still not going to know what's around that corner in that dark fucking shitty mansion or whatever. And to be fair, the map is hand-drawn. So it's not necessarily going to be 100% accurate detailed screenshot map. It's an artistic rendition rendition of the space right but it's but but it's not a

map telling you where every street corner is in the town you're jumping through or what floors are on what of this castle yeah it's just a dot that says this is that town you know I'm wondering as well because we still did see, there's like a fog door that you walk towards at the end and then you go and you fight, you know, whatever, big dude. And I'm wondering if, like, every fight is going to be designed, every boss fight is going to be designed for horse or non-horse, you know? is going to be designed every boss fight is going to be designed for horse or non-horse you know um because it seems as if like you're fighting that dragon on the horse because you're

already on your horse fuck you you're walking in to a fog gate to fight this big guy and you're going to fight it in a more traditional souls kind of way but since you can pull your sword your horse out wherever like in theory could you just do that and you know sacrifice speed for um extra moves and abilities if you have two approaches to these bosses that could be fun i'm looking at uh i'm looking at the footage i'm at the 14 ish minute mark and the person's walking through an area that looks suspiciously like demon souls is one one like the interior of the wall yeah i cannot possibly imagine like i there must be some kind of distinction between like being able to use a horse there and the

the inner world right right where it becomes a discrete souls level okay there's a point where it's like you you roll up to this barrier and then it's like, okay, you're going indoors now. Get the fuck off. And that's that. Because I'm just thinking, like, I'm seeing the person, like, they're running on the top of a battlement right now in the footage. And I can only imagine how fucking fucked up and jank it would look like if you were able to use your horse in here. But, like, when I see a large boss room, you know, it definitely makes me think, oh like what if i wanted to you know approach it that way like strafing in in large circles around this dude instead or whatever but um that's

interesting um there are some really also cool spells you see get cast and one of them calls out a stand who fucking not just attacks the boss but gets his attention yeah and that is the big part about summons is it's not just you have help on a boss it carries their attention away from you and if you can do that as a spell holy shit shit. Yeah, first seen in the Dark Souls 3 Cinders mod, there now appear to be enemy-type summons. They talked about this a while ago when people first saw that footage and did some of the preview coverage,

where you'll be able to basically get enemies or Pokemons, essentially, and you'd be summoned to help you. You see some of that here. But yeah, no, this is 100% something from a Dark Souls 3 mod that I play. I've mentioned it here before, the Cinders mod. Right, right, right, yeah. It looks to function exactly the same way. I mean, anything, no matter what damage it does, cinder's mod right right right yeah um it looks to function exactly the same way i mean anything

no matter what damage it does anything that you can get the that'll distract the boss from you for even a second is worth the cost of entry instantly and that would be more reliable than another human player because they can disconnect exactly. You can have trouble running into them on your network shenanigans. Let's see. What else to dance around? No. What are you talking about? Nothing.

I'm thinking about... We're talking about the footage. I'm looking at this footage. I'm looking at some of the glowing spells that we see. And I like a big glowing spell I like a big blue sword that looks dope um I hope that there are

uh many attacks that follow that style because then you get the fun of like if you want to swing a big blue sword as a sword as a spell then you don't necessarily have to have the sword you can have your own sword but you can to swing a big blue sword as a spell, then you don't necessarily have to have the sword. You can have your own sword, but you can just summon a big cool one. And that's dope.

So, like, if being a spellcaster means, like, that type of move variety, then I might be, like, satisfied with not necessarily going and crafting the actual weapon myself if I can just do stuff like that, you know? actual weapon myself if i could just do stuff like that you know uh i gotta say one of the one of the more interesting things because i've seen a lot of people talk about this footage and there are there is a proportion of people that were using a very specific term where they had played and beaten all the souls games and they wanted something like more dramatically new and i saw the phrase being used pretty consistently like please don't let this just be big dark souls big souls four and you watch this footage and it's like that sure looks like big Dark Souls to me. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

At one point, they... Also, yeah, some guy in the chat is dead right. Sekiro was much newer and more different, and I didn't like it as much as any of these other games. This is true. Same here. There's a big... There's a nice little pause screen you take a look at as they go to do some crafting which yeah you know i'm not a big crafting guy but i know people love it so

that's all that's all fine and dandy i also hate crafting but if this means that you don't have to travel to a merchant every time you want to put like I don't know what they would call it fire bombs for a boss's week to fire yeah okay fine yeah that was always one of these annoying things in the souls games or you remember in bloodborne the electricity paper sure

yeah you remember how you could only get like back 10 and you have to go back to the fucking dream every time yeah but even then they had a limited amount in the shop mm-hmm yeah like it'd be nice if you could just make that like I can kind of get it um in a situation that's a bit more again breath

of the wild where you're coming across a bunch of shit on your journey on your travels anyway or whatever um it's a little less cumbersome if you have that material just sitting in your pouch i'm just thinking about breath of the wild and i'm thinking about walking around an elden ring and you hit a rock in here yeah yeah sure you know um but yeah just like i you know if it's not that annoying then then cool but in general i'm a little down on crafting uh but in that in that same pause screen i'm looking here

and i can see you got vigor mind endurance strength uh dexterity intelligence faith and arcane i mean that sounds pretty standard for these games sure what is that nine of them well what all those but one is a stat that we've seen in like at least four other games yeah I know exactly like I mean I mean there's no fit and vigor it's just vigor

and then mind is I guess it's whatever but mine mind has been in wait mine is And then Mind is... I guess it's whatever, but... Mind has been in... Wait. Mind is the one that's second on the list? Yes.

That probably replaces Attunement. Okay. It's your mana one. Okay. Arcane, I guess, would be a... You know, just a third branch of Spellshit is what it seems like it would be. And souls are runes. How many?

Let me ask you. Let's say, I don't know if you're planning on covering it when this game comes out. I'm going to play it. But I played Sekiro. I played Bloodborne, and I was never able to successfully break myself of the habit of saying souls. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. They're not souls in Bloodborne, and I don't even remember what they're called in Sekiro, but they're not souls there either. And I said souls almost every time.

I still say souls playing Nioh. Even if I'm talking about Onio tokens. Exactly. Exactly. Or Mibu salt water fucking... Yeah, they're souls. That's what it is amrita amrita they're fucking which is weird because it's just experience like that's that's what it actually is

but it's also money it's a single syllable yeah yeah money and experience are two and three three syllables respectively um yeah and then let's see hp fp stamina equip load poise discovery and then memory slots yeah that's pretty standard pretty standard pretty standard If Arcane is luck, then fuck off. Why? What? You don't like having to waste your points on a stat that just increases item drops? Give me 10 humanity and a fucking covetous serpent ring, and I'll go hunting. Leave me alone. Yeah, well, what if in Elden Ring you can only get the covetous serpent ring after 89 hours yeah

um didn't see any screens where like you would look at like ring equipment and stuff like that uh it was just so didn't get to see anything like that but you even see the equipment screen equipment screen do you ever see the equipment screen? Do you ever see the equipment screen at all in the entire footage?

No, I don't think so. At 540, you can see the pause screen and then the crafting occur. But that's about it. Gee, I wonder what it looks like. Yeah. um yeah so just i what i want when i'm looking at that arcane thing whatever the case is i'm just like can we live in a world without troll stats please like can we live in a world where like the player doesn't just get fucking you know ruined for spending tons of souls on a stat that does nothing that that lies to you that sting got blunted once respects were allowed to exist true true still annoying

because demons and Dark Souls 1 like you can ruin your character like you can absolutely level your character up into trash. Which is something that's a lot less common in 2, 3. Oh, actually, God, Bloodborne doesn't have respec either! What the fuck? What? Ah! And I know that obtuseness is the name of the game.

And I know that obtuseness is the name of the game, but how hard would it be to just make it so that when you do hit a soft cap, the number just changes color a little bit. It says, hey, that's a soft cap. This is not a soft cap. Well, no, Wooly. What you're supposed to do is as you level, you're supposed to take into account how much the R weapon number goes up every time

you do it, depending on your scaling. And this time, when you get to 40 and you go to 41, you realize, wow, it didn't go up very much at all. That's weird. Yeah, no, my equip load went up by.5 instead of a full point. God damn it. That must be the soft cap. Yeah.

Yep, yep, yep. You know, I just, it just, you could be a little nice. You could be a little nice. That's all. Just a little bit of. Hey, I have an idea for you. This is pretty radical. What about a system with no soft or hard caps on your stats at all?

At all. Short of 99. Okay. So just achieve heaven. Just keep going. Like, why not? Like, legitimately, why not? Because what if you make the game too easy

by breaking it in that way? But then it's like, well, then scale. Yeah, but that means you put 100 levels into health. Yes. Exactly. nothing can kill you you know or just make like uh yeah i mean well pvp becomes a whole other fucking wild thing to consider i can't even i legitimately can't because the the souls games have all lived and died off of soul level. And let's see. On this game, it's 90. On this game, it's 120, right? With a game that's going to be an open world format,

I cannot possibly imagine how a community is going to hit some kind of consensus on like, wait, do you really have to clear the whole map before your character is ready for pvp that seems like it would be quite an undertaking hmm yeah well yeah yeah um so that's that's that's that's, I can really squint at and glimmer and say here, I'm wondering if, I'm wondering if we're looking at a level of move list per weapon that emulates, like, the fullest, like, DS3 with arts and and with with possibly some weapons that might even have bloodborne um charges or you know forms tricks like there's a lot of different styles of combat and power stancing that we've seen over the years and this would be a nice place to incorporate them for like specific things you know maybe not everything not i'm not maybe not every two weapons needs a power stance but two cestus definitely should you know maybe not every weapon needs a blood-borne charge but some of them could have it

you know they we don't see anything too crazy in the footage it's all pretty standard but what i can say is that if this does it does look like it's running on dark souls 3's engine like it looks like dark souls 3 right if that's the case there's a lot of really really ambitious mods that exist for dark souls 3 there's cinders obviously there's also i forget the name of it but a guy is turning dark souls 3 into demon souls wow um and there's a lot there's recently been a thing where people are like I forget the name of it, but a guy is turning Dark Souls 3 into Demon's Souls. Wow. And there's a lot. There's recently been a thing where people are ripping Orphan out and having them fight Gale.

And just see what bosses win. That's interesting. Okay. Wait, with their AI? Yeah. Holy shit. They lock onto a target like anything else oh my god interesting okay uh i saw lady maria versus uh i forget who it was but uh something else like stuff like that wow so even if even if we don't get something like this i can only imagine it is a countdown

timer before people start going hey I transplanted Dark Souls 1 off the coast of this spot go check it Yharnam is now in the ocean teleport there with this yeah

and then I guess the one other thing and they've been I mean I know the story is always coy the it's always you know mise en scene background and and and subtle but i want now it's got the george r martin woolley but that's the thing i'm wondering about is like what is the part that he's getting paid the big bucks for because the stories that they come up with on their own without Grimm are still pretty good. So how are we to know whether or not the Grimm has had a positive effect here beyond what they could have done on their own? I can only imagine.

I can legitimately only imagine that Grimm's involvement was hit us with a creation myth and a world scenario and then they put all the shit that they wanted to put into it anyway okay okay like we're putting a like let's take for example the game is Elden Ring and it's like a

kind of Lord of the Rings kind of thing right and the story is well the Elden Ring got split and you know all that shit we saw in that trailer a million years ago um the game's color palette is overwhelmingly gold like you see what is a a bonfire equivalent it's gold you see the giant gold tree that dwarfs the horizon and everything i I seriously doubt that George was the one who said, what if you made your whole game gold? Right, right, right.

No. He's not the art director. Somebody from Soft says, the art director said, we're going to be making the game gold. Make us a fucking story where gold is an important color. I'm going to go a step further and say that they had that overworld dragon boss fight completely done and then they just waited for him to say and then there was a dragon and they're like yep right there

yeah yeah there it is and they just pulled it off the shelf and threw it down and said that's the guy legitimately only imagine like the game is like half complete asset-wise, and they show it to him, and they're like, write the opening cutscene now. I mean, for fuck's sake, how well can he know it? He called it Dark Souls 4 in an interview, for fuck's sake. Right, right, right, right. And he has his own shit going on, clearly. Or does he? But that's it.

They could have written a wonderful story without him and they've proven that time and time and time again it's a it's an interesting pr move to get a big name like that on board you know what would be the absolute galaxy brain hey george we'll pay you 300 bucks if you just say you wrote some of this just just pay him pay him to do a cameo where he just does he just records a video of himself going hey this is george rr martin um i see we got a message coming in from me. Me is me. Is that hey, Miyazaki?

Hey, glad to hear. Oh, man. Oh, I'm a I'm a big fan of Studio Ghibli, man. Says here you got a big birthday coming up. That's cool. Happy birthday. Yeah, just completely fucking and then just attach his name to that shit why not why not it'll get in the in the mainstream press when it drops because of it

yeah 100 you know it's hey did you know that that uh oh man did you know that not only is book six not out, but George took time to write this giant video game instead? You know what I can't wait? There is going to be a Reddit thread on the A Song of Fire and Ice Reddit. It's coming out in February. So let's say four and a half months going i've given up i'm never going to get the ending to the story i'm i'm completely given up i'm just gonna buy this elden ring game that i'm hearing about and just pretend that it's the ending this is the new ending and i'm just i'm just gonna pretend i mean what is like what really actually becomes a

question is like so this thing blows up takes off and elden ring becomes popular enough that it gets a novelization shut up what's the move and it gets written by brian sanderson you're thinking you can go go get some other people who's that i don't know if that joke hits no the same way no i'm hitting some people i don't know who that is the guy he's the guy who finished a wheel of time after oh the robert jordan replacement okay okay okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Robert Jordan Replacement. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, Brandon Sanderson.

Sure. Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mistake. Got it. Yeah. Totally. But first, we have to go. We can't get to a novelization until we get, we walk by an awful Western-style comic series.

Oh, yeah. The Dark Souls comic. The true the true cut to a scene dingy room with a single lamp looking down on a table an unknown individual puts a gun on the table says will you do it and then brandon sanderson grabs the gun and goes yeah i'll get right on it and then two months later game of thrones is over it's done it's done anyways um that's that's that's some good that's some good footage that's some good shit um and they released some details alongside that you got the five classes we looked at uh for the um for the network uh test and then you also got confirmation that a cross save compatibility uh will work however it is one way you can cross save yeah you go you go up but you can't go down so ps5 to ps4 does not exist but you can go four to

five I mean that makes that makes sense yeah but fuck off because neo lets you cross save whatever you want let's upload your shit ourselves a huge headache and just not talk about the things neo lets you do fine because we'll be here all day but if you happen to want to go down from five to four for any particular reason, whatever that might be, you know, you go to a friend's house and you want to play on the five and then you want to take your save back home. Then you could.

So anyway. You know, I'm watching the footage again with the part where the guy goes through the invisible wall and if anyone had any doubts that this is big dark souls did you notice that the chest that they open is the same chest is it going back as far from dark souls one oh my god is it the is the chain curled forward or backward it no it's curled backwards yeah look I'll say I'll I'll get a fucking screenshot of it for you I'll just send it to you so that's

that's gonna be the that's the thing is how like I remember watching the footage and going oh you know that one's not a mimic how many assets are just the exact same you know anyway confirmation on that with the with the saves as well as you're gonna have a performance mode and a high frame rate so you can get your 60

frames and you got your 4K. And that'll be the state of affairs for now. That's unshocking. And then on the personal computer, you'll probably just have all the knobs that you want to turn. And if it doesn't unlock, I'm sure it'll take two seconds

before someone says, here, unlock it. Do what you want. I don't think they're going to make that mistake again. Sekiro ran really well. Sekiro was a really solid PC port. here unlock it do what you want i don't think they're gonna make that mistake again sekiro ran really well sekiro was a really solid pc port um yeah i i i understand the limitations of where we are and i understand that we're you know like especially with um they said what is it ray tracing is going to come later so it's almost exactly like what's DMC five is going through with special

edition or went through. And I, and I, and I know that it's like pick which of these two do you care about? Do you care about having, you know, the crispest possible image or do you care about the crispest possible frame rate and frame rate,

the frame rate. These games are hard as shit. Of course, of course, of course, of course, a million times. But like, I, I hope that like, like you know as we go forward into the future that this divide doesn't

continue to be just like this is the state of all games now is you know one of these two where it's just like ah i don't know that's a dramatically better state than it usually was which is hey look the game runs like shit that's enjoy with it yeah yeah yeah having the having the option i remind need i remind you we're talking about the company that gave us ps3 blight town and we're okay with that where the engine is forcibly v-synced at all frames so it just shits itself the instant you hit 29.99 frames it shits itself and goes down to 15 while you're doing platforming with mosquitoes shooting blood at you um so yeah there you go Elden Ring looks cool

it does look cool based on that footage yeah yeah all right uh minor other things this week not much but we can just blow through it real quick um everyone everyone was excited but now those who have been waiting for the reveal of Mara, can go see the glorious detail that is Mara in SMT V, where for all the details, all the veins, all the anger in the mouth is now... The animation for when Mara casts a spell

is they lean down and point the top of their head at them exactly so mara has more animation now than ever more attacks and different things you can see them casting in the fight uh some animator had a really fun time getting that out also shout out to the fact that the mara in that video is level 69 and shout out to the fact that Mara was the 199th demon shown in that showcase and demon 198 was the Virgin Mary. Uh-huh. Mary and Mara.

Sure was. And shout out to the fact that the youtube video is age restricted yeah because what the fuck yeah they they now you know they knew i know a lot of you are really excited about shin megami tensei 5 and let me tell you so am i just remember if you happen to stream it don't show here's the name of the final boss dungeon in the game. Thanks, Atlas. And definitely don't show you scanning bosses for their weaknesses or else. Yeah.

I fucking. Anyway, I mentioned that you mentioned that last week we're like we're griping at each other uh earlier this week because it's like it's literally just like go they released the thing and i'm like i don't even i don't even want to know how bad it's gonna get because it's getting because the restrictions are just getting worse and dumber over time. And it's to the honest point where it's like, hey, SMT5, like, don't even bother. Why even bother popping it into play in any streaming capacity whatsoever? It's wild because their streaming thing, even for the average person, has become a blight

because they always spoil the final area in their guideline that says, don't spoil this. Like, make sure to show no footage after... After Aeris dies. You know. But also, scanning bosses is a huge no-no. Can't show the weaknesses. Don't do it.

Which means if you're streaming it, man, enjoy not knowing a single boss weakness while recording your footage. Or figure it out by process of elimination and write it down on paper. And don't let people see it. And maybe don't say it out loud. I don't know. Who the fuck knows, man? The power of Stegosaurus grows stronger every day.

Anyway, that's some dumb shit we're gonna give you a woolly we're gonna give you all the Harry Potter books to read but we're gonna allow you to have impressions on the whole series but definitely don't mention that Snape kills Dumbledore in any of your preview coverage okay also Deathly Hallows halfway through the book

throw that shit out can't do it just yeah just throw it out. Stop. Just stop reading. Definitely don't get in your car and drive by it on the way to the bookstore. I mean, someone... Yeah, yeah. Old internet.

I mean someone yeah yeah once a month the words you bitch just goes through my mind and I just start to lose it someone out there it's one of the goodies somewhere out there there's gonna be that trooper uh who runs that dedicated mega 10 channel and

they're gonna play and they're gonna do it and they're gonna do it without any of the guideline violations and the last episode or three will just be their face cam and as they and that'll be it and then in the just and the in the description will be a coincidental link to the boss fight database sure sure that uh you know it's weird but you can't actually sync it up with the footage it's weird how that works but then the the muffled audio in the background and the reflection of their eye will result in atlas the uh fucking taking their their shit down and striking them so fuck off you know i've never been eaten by a t-rex but i don't wish to start just you get the biggest thickest glasses possible like shades that have like

just stare at the screen like super close yeah anyway all right um what else was going on uh this we got a little bit more about the dmc anime and um just some basics but it seems like it's going to be DMC3. It's not going to have Chris Pratt. Chris Pratt, de-confirmed. Darn. Eight episodes, multi-season, Virgil Lady confirmed,

Capcom supports the show. That's the one. That's the bullet point here. Can we get an episode that is like literally just one normal day in dante's life yeah like i like i would kill for that i hope so because no demons when we were when we were playing dmc5 we came to the conclusion that we think he literally sits in that chair for months at a time on moving. Yeah. No, like, you need your library episode.

Right? Your Castlevania library episode or your Tales of Ba Sing Se. Just give us one of the eight where, not even just Dante, like everyone, just what do these people do when they're not comboing demons like can I like legitimately can I see Dante make a sandwich because I don't think he eats anything other than pizza and ice cream. What is Virgil fucking do what is he doing time when he's not doing katas and when he's not reading poetry, what's, what's up? What's going on? You can't do that 14 hours a day.

Every day. You're going to live forever, man. You gotta, you gotta figure some shit out. There's gotta be some stuff in there. You know what? You know what?

I'll tell you what Virgil does. He looks, he looks at flash art for tattoos tattoos he's too scared to get. Yeah. You know what else he does? He Photoshop's himself onto covers of anime. That works too. Man, I could do this.

No, he goes to the grocery store and strikes a pose and then photoshops Masato next to him. So they just had the latest arc of Teppan is is what? He texts Nero the screenshot and he goes, ran into your mom at the grocery store just one episode just one that's all we need oh no it says um addy shankar is working directly with Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Yeah. We'll see it. Let's see it. Hey, here's hoping it's good.

Here's hoping. It's probably not going to be able to be as good as the stupid shit I have in my head right now, but it'll probably be pretty good. I want just lots of downtime. You know? That's the key. And then we got a little

bit of... That's not the only Netflix thing. Somewhere, someone someone somehow on netflix got access to the full episodes of uh part six stone ocean okay and uh they just started and there's some screenshots of like thumbnails of fucking oh this is gonna be great and it's crazy i don't know how or why or what but someone had access to to that so obviously you know be careful out there if you're worried about uh part six spoilers if you haven't read it but there's there's all the full seasons of jojo are up on on netflix now. And this person was just filming that they had also part six sitting there with a number of episodes.

Up to 12 were just sitting there done. Oh, great. So that basically led to a bunch of other people talking about it. And someone else had access to it as well. And it's a hard series of events to trace down where it came from, how, and why. But the person who originally posted basically said that it's looking like there is going to be a Friday release schedule. And that they think that it's it's not 99% sure it's gonna start December 3rd and that they

then that they're gonna be doing weekly drops so that's really soon that's that's pretty soon that's pretty soon I mean the fact that it's up there sitting uploaded means like you, they're fucking... It's good to go. There are good ways into that, into the season, yeah. So, you know, I don't know how or why or what, but that's...

There's some leaks out there. Be careful. You might see some stuff. Be careful of getting spoiled on the anime of this decade. Well, okay, so you know what it is really, though? It's actually like spoilers for what color they chose to go with for the palette. The music they used. For some of these characters, you know?

Yeah. Because it's like there's different versions of them on different covers. And it's like, oh, they went with that color jacket. Okay. So, sure. versions of them on different covers and it's like oh they went with that color jacket okay so sure um and then we've got uh just a little thing going down also heads up before you watch stone ocean go ahead and watch sixth sense all right definitely want to do that before you can do that i mean there's a couple, there's a couple of things. There's a couple other.

Oh, there's more than that? Yeah, there's a couple other things. But for sure. And then we got a little information update about the state of Metal Gear from Konami for a temporary period of time, starting on November 8th, which is today. They're going to be delisting MGS2, MGS3, MGS HD, the special editions, as well as the 360 3ds but like basically everything two and three related from all platforms including good old games and the nvidia shield

because some of the footage they used uh needs to be re-licensed and they have historical archive footage that was only okay up until a certain date and now they have to go and figure out whether to pull that footage out of the game entirely. Which was clearly a really far off date in the future. Yeah. These games are like 20 years old.

And so they're going to be pulling them down and then figuring that out. Either pulling the footage out or re you know, relicensing. And then I guess it'll go back online. So here's what's going to happen. They're going to temporarily pull it down. And then six months from now, you're going to ask somebody at Konami, when the fuck are they going back up? And they're going to be like, ah, we're working on it.

And this brings up the second part of the discussion, which led to some folks, I think, going free Metal Gear was the hashtag or so. Because there's a number of people that kind of then looked and went, you know, the entire franchise is kind of locked on the PS3 right now. And it feels like, you know, they're probably going to keep it that way while Sony is trying to deprioritize the PS3. Because we had that situation occur not too long ago where they were, like, about to shut down everyone's fucking ability to purchase or do anything with those consoles. And then everyone said, fuck off, Sony. And so they and so they said sorry okay we'll wait a little bit longer so we know that sony is already trying to push that to die and right now there's a number of games that are there that you'll never get a chance in fact the only mgs games that are on pc that are good ports are um ground zeros and phantom pain right everything else is pretty much

stuck so this discussion is leading to some people demanding for Konami to just can you please give us some PC ports so that we don't have to worry about console obsolescence in the future and then at least call it a day for MGS4

Konami playing the part of the scorpion goes lol lamau lamau yeah yeah so i mean you can only profit from the situation if your delisting is followed by a collection of some sort that you want to sell to people but if you just delist it and say eat shit then you don't get to profit off of that yeah well fuck off

this ain't no god damn slot machine pachinko is the only way to experience the metal gear story from beginning to endo is the only way to experience the Metal Gear story from beginning to end. It's the only way, man. Yeah. There you go.

There you go. That's what's going on. Also, NFTs are now subject to federal regulation in the United States and you'll go to jail if you don't report income over ten thousand dollars IRS is coming IRS is coming yep I mean I found out recently about the NFTs Willie you know how the NFTs have only become popular in the past year would you be surprised

that earlier this year there were new uh money laundering laws put into place to deal with the money laundering issue with pieces of fine art being sold to and from certain individuals to clean up that money? Oh, you don't say. And then nearly overnight, NFTs got huge financial backing from anonymous people. That's a... No, isn't that crazy? That's an incredible coincidence. That's wild. from anonymous people that's that's no is that crazy it's incredible coincidence that's that's wild hmm yeah the explosion of multiple game companies all jumping in and being like this is

the future and this is the way it's going and stuff and it's just kind of like I don't know if like it's clear that anyway it's clear that every that every one of these places has someone in their ear that's going like yeah bro this is it web 3.0 etc and all that and it's like um does anybody like on not even just on like like cutting aside all the the extra stuff because some I talked about this on the channel not too long ago but it's like at the base base level right does anyone know or is anyone discussing the fact that like what you're

actually purchasing is not the actual minted data of the jpeg or whatever it is oh no it's it's a fucking scam it's a url it's a url you're buying a URL. And I'm going to add my own shortening of that, which is say you're playing an Ubisoft Assassin's Creed game that has NFTs and you gain an NFT of value and need to cash it out to money. You will have to give Ubisoft your social insurance number to verify the transaction. And I don't think that's something anybody wants to do. I don't think that's something anybody wants to do. I sure hope that the URL pointing at what I own that's hosted by fucking funky depressed ape or whatever. Have you seen that motherfucker? Have you seen that guy? There's just, no, but there's you see that guy there's just no but

there's like 18 monkey like stupid ones they're all it's always it's always a pixel those motherfuckers stole my nft i reported it to the fbi they're holding it ransom no wait i paid them and they were they gave me some of my nft bet and it's a fucking screenshot of the top 10 percent of the fucking monkey with sunglasses these people are insane like you're you're saying you're saying have you seen that guy but there are multiple monkey based like like palette swap you know this is the crazy one this is the angry ape it's the sad depressed monkey this one's this monkey's a captain of a boat the the one that got it's always a monkey like these people are hyper

susceptible to this kind of scam and there's no saving them they're the same type of people who would get in a multi-level marketing scheme or a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme or a cult and that is the gentleman I'm gonna assume it is because the crypto bros or whatever the fuck but the dudes who got hosed for a totality of i'm using fucking big air quotes here 67.8 million

dollars when the owner of all those ape nft that market just fucking left just fucking peaced out and disappeared and the important thing is that the person running that database was paid real money and then disappeared with real money and then these people were left with you know a database that was worth nothing and did nothing literally the next day a similarly named named ape NFT collaboration announced that they were going to buy back certain people's things and build it up. And all they had to do was take their existing NFTs and invest it in their database or whatever the fuck it was. And it was just thread after thread of thank you. How much can I.

Can I buy 10 hyperlinks. You know. Because I feel really hosed by those last people. You know you guys are saints really. And it's like oh my god. You fucking people. Well. What you're failing to understand is.

It's one to one with the sigma grind set the Venn diagram is a perfect circle it's the dark side the sigma grind set is the burning ring that surrounds it's a one-to-one oh boy all right it's it's the only way it's the only way gwyn could fucking you know set himself apart it's it's

unbelievable i'm like looking at my discord right now there are people saying that the head of discord right now is talking about nft integration into discord and you have ubisoft ea square enix extroversa where nfts of the future and like literally last like on saturday nfts are now regulated like a fucking security in the u.s and that will follow within various other places i'm like square enix and ubisoft and discord do you guys want to be responsible for running banks do you know what that fucking means for your company thumbnails of gwyn with a shocked youtube face as the text is like like crypto emergency emergencies you have to act now these are sick nft emergencies set to blow up by november 31st

link the fire now Set to blow up by November 31st. Link the fire now! Link the fire now! Oh, man. You have to link the fire now! But won't link the fire burn my humanity? No, no, no, no! Hurry if you don't! No, no, no, no. Hurry, if you don't... No, no, if your humanity's safe in the blockchain.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And then... Last thumbnail. Just Gwyn hollowed out. Why I hate... Crypto souls. It's good. Sifcoin was a bust.

Damn. What about Estus, though? it's good sif coin was a bust damn what about estes though dollar sign estes is blowing the fuck up yo estes monkey coin coming at you estes apes so so i have to say by the way uh the reason why it's apes so much like there's a there's like legitimately a reason is because they made apes and apes appear to be easily templated i assumed it was because lol so random monkeys waha i believe there i believe these are like nearly all being made on like a Japanese like avatar creation website. And like, Oh, like they are.

Yeah. I think it is actually literally pick room and they're, they're, they're either auto generated or they're easy to template a fi, which is why they're all the same lion or eight or whatever the fuck. But this one's got a pirate hat and this one's got glasses. Which is just a million steps removed from the artist that, you know, an actual artist that is looking at this and was thinking,

you know, this is supposed to be beneficial or whatever. Wait, it's the apes together strong meme? Oh my god. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is getting cringed by the this is getting no that's totally it that's totally it minute that makes actually that's that's super obvious now that you think about it that totally makes sense by the minute that's absolutely why it's always i know man if you want to invest your money in a completely decentralized anonymous currency that doesn't actually mean anything and isn't backed by fiat

and you want to trade it to other idiots who might be laundering for you buy a house in ff14 and the only way that you can make any money off of it is because you can drive up the price by being completely anonymous despite the fact the u.s government just removed its anonymity literally five days ago i don't know why not buy i don't know gold at least gold is there woolly unironically ff14 housing markets are more real might be more real than this shit um are more real might be more real than this shit um let's take some letters i mean look i think um we'll see what happens but like all these studios uh at the same time mean we're gonna find out very quickly um like now as people who point out this law is only coming into practice in 2023 which means from now until january 20 uh january 1st 2023 is the time to get your hustle on and see if you can make some money off of this.

But yeah, just to finish the thought, you're going to find out very quickly because all the different companies that are trying to implement this at EA and Ubi and so on are – you're going to see – this is all happening right now so the timing of development to turn around is going to be similar and the rollout will show you all the bad ideas at once when it oh yeah when it eventually actually hits they're all gonna hit simultaneously one month before the fucking securities comes down on them and we're gonna see up I bet we're gonna see a bunch of these games

get announced and then just whoa where'd it go why didn't it come out what why did the legal requirements for reporting become too horrible if you've got a letter

you can send it into castle super beast mail at gmail.com If you've got a letter, you can send it in to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com And, uh... Once again, that's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com And we might read it. We might. For example, Misunderstanding in Mooresville says,

Situationally terrible game names. Hey, Willie and Pat, I recently had a friend tell me to my face while standing next to David, her boyfriend. David finished inside. This was not spurred by an earlier conversation elaborated on and it was completely out of the blue, given that we were standing inside and after staring at her and David for multiple seconds and struggling to find an appropriate response, I asked what that meant.

And soon clarification was reached that she was referring to the 2016 puzzle platformer inside i didn't i didn't know i didn't know where this was going and then and then it went somewhere and yeah that's uh maybe this is what happens when we stray too far from war face war you know dawn face war yeah we need to just stick to the basics on the slot machine mm-hmm dawn gate coming at you Gate

Gate face Gate Dawn Dawn Anyway Dawn Gate's always the one I go to Because we struggled for years to remember it That's good That's good Don Gates always the one I go to because we struggled for years to remember it. That's good.

That's good. Jared says, Dear Tangela and Trubbish, keep it short and sweet. Reading back through Lord of the Rings, notice that Boromir's horn splits during the final battle. Went back and watched the movies again, and it said that his horn horn was intact but split off screen between the second and third times he gets shot the camera draws attention to this when it happens and I think it's that sort of Easter egg is awesome what are your favorite subtle Easter eggs

that's a cool that's cool I like that I was actually just looking at Easter eggs for one of my favorite movies last night The Thing and there's three that come to mind one is when Knowles comes in and

complains about somebody throwing out their dirty drawers it looks like somebody shit themselves but it is in fact Long John's covered in blood because the thing got somebody the second of which is that who destroys the blood but it is in fact Long John's covered in blood because the thing got somebody. The second of which is that who destroys the blood in the middle of the movie is actually very confusing

until you rewatch the scene where they run outside to see beddings and realize that Windows drops the keys. His hands are below frame and so you only hear a key noise hit the ground and discover, oh, somebody must have run in there grabbed the keys got to the blood and the third one is that the thing hates windows the character the thing as palmer repeatedly draws attention to and blames windows for everything

they possibly can in every scene. And in addition, when Palmer becomes the thing and attacks them, he immediately attacks Windows first instead of MacReady. It's not that deep, but I always thought it was pretty fun how um in kill bill in the fight scene with vivica fox uh when they're talking about like having their duel at dawn and like she's and she's preparing the cereal for her daughter like the cereal box she's about she's like pouring out has like a clown on it and it's called like bang cereal or something like that like the name that's good the name on the

cereal is like kablam or so so that like what immediately follows is like is you know hyper telegraphed good old kablam oh yeah that's that's always fun uh cool all right that's it let's take a small one right here hey Patton Woolley Maddy Max T wants to know light simple question hey man Max was thinking

about what is your ideal RPG party size for the battle and for the game FF or runs the gamut between three to five and battles have four to fourteen for the cast curious on your takes four i think four is good universally i think four is good um especially with darkest dungeon on the brain i think that's enough to like have you know uh support healer damage dps or tank DPS. You know, you can kind of get a nice variety in there.

Five is like, I think FF10. I'm thinking of like, you can get, getting five out there is a little wild. It gives you some versatility, but it's not strictly necessary, you know? I want a tank, a DPS, a healer, and a flex spot. Sure. Sure. The three essentials and something to mix with. Yeah.

Again, Darkest Dungeon is giving... It's on the brain right now. That's exactly what you end up with most of the time. And if you want to go wild and be like, nah, fuck it. Two tanks and some crazy shit, you know? You can do that kind of dive comp as well as it used to be called in the in the overwatch days yeah four is a solid all righty that'll do make sure to go twitch.tv slash past

airs out on Wednesday at 7 o'clock for secret stream go there probably gonna dig some fucking stupid jank out of the barrel for fighting games this week I'll let you guys know but you're it's gonna be some dumb shit rest assured don't you worry all right have a good week everybody