Castle Super Beast - CSB 156: It's Not 4 Hours Of Elden Ring Talk

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps The Fall of Babylon's Fall Elden Chat 1 Elden Chat 2 Elden Chat 3 You can watch us record the podcast live on twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Go to http://stitchfix.com/superbeast to try Stitch Fix! Rollback netcode confirmed for P4Ultimax (3/17) PS4/Steam in Summer 2022 EVO 2022 Will Not Have Any Super Smash Bros. Games Because of Nintendo NieR Automata anime has just been officially confirmed For the first time in two decades, Call of Duty will skip a year. failed to meet expectations, leading some executives to believe that they’re introducing new versions too rapidly Epic Games offers hundreds of temporary QA testers full-time roles Samurai Shodown, The King of Fighters XV, and an unnamed new title all use Unreal Engine. Gabe Newell hand-delivered Steam Decks are free and may even be non-reservation/orders if you just call his name '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments, says Gabe Newell Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet for Switch. It will launch in late 2022 worldwide. Babylon's Fall is Depressingly Bad

Music Music Good afternoon. Good afternoon everyone. Hello. How's everybody doing? Are you doing well? Not too bad, I suppose.

That's... How are you? That's super. Sleepy. Oh hey, Dumb Dumbs. Yeah, it's more of a visual, but your camera settings have like changed your contrast and now you have an even sleepier feel

because of the paleness of your face and like the fact that all I see for your eyes is like a red line underneath them. That's about right. So that's... The contrast emphasizes the... Art imitates... The suffering.

Hold on, let's try this. Yeah, that's... There we go. You can do whatever you want. Now we're going to go with the dark HD. Yeah, as dark as you want. That's what I'm talking about. You got my permission.

Get that cartoon filter on there. There you go. There we go. Now we're getting dark. How about this? Okay. You see, for the audio listeners, Pat's getting darker. I'm getting even darker.

I'm in black and white now. Yeah. Now... I'm talking you from the past. Now that you're dark though, you might have a hard time finding a hairstyle. So... I guess... I guess this is going to be the week that we talk about Elden Ring.

Yeah, it's that one. It's the one where it came out. And like, I was fucking around with the character creator and I was like, wow, this looks a lot nicer. It's gotten a lot better in terms of just general options for sure. Yeah, but I still had just as much trouble making a character that I liked. So I just made a tired old looking man with red hair, which works for me. What is your experience with the character creator, Willie?

Well, so the first episode kind of chronicles some trouble I've had as I was attempting to go through. It's not just about... So I have a habit of often going, hey, can I make Woolly? And I've seen some people, I guess, misinterpret that to think that I'm just... I'm trying to create myself all the time. It's like, make someone else have fun with that. And it's like, well, if you see me in a lot of games, I'll make not me.

I'll make OC type things. I'll play as a girl often enough in games. I totally have fun with that process of just creating an original character. In many cases, my character off of LP and off stream is just my own random thing. But there has been a habit over the years of me going, well, if I can make a Woolly, that's a test to see whether or not... Or not attempt it. Yeah, to see whether or not this character creator is quote unquote black people friendly.

And it's been a subject matter over the years. So I've laughed quite a bit about some of the ones that have had some options, albeit maybe just an afro and some purple skin here and there. There you go. That's all you need. Right there. And then there's other times where it's like, oh my god, this is a predominantly black character creator because we're playing NBA 2K17 or 2K16 and look at all the black features that are here.

And you know, you kind of just... It's been a funny little gag and so when I continue to play games like Elden Ring, I continue to run the gag and go like, let's see if I can make a Woolly. And not only was I having a hard time making anything like that, the options became incredibly limited once we hit the hairstyle. Because skin color, you've got the full gradient and you can go HSB. So that's fine. You try to saturate some brightness.

But then when you get to the hairstyles, it's like, oh, these are all just like, you know, basically unnatted, unnappy, European ass, Caucasian hair. And there is one that's kind of curly. And I was like, well, that's the option. And it's not the comedic effect afro, which that's oftentimes what you will get is, what's the guy's name in FF13? Says. Yeah, there's like a bit of a funny, like let's drop the, you know, or whatever,

any of the many Japanese characters with afros that you... Well, black people have afros, right? Of course. Stick one right on there and there you go. And Reggie used to have a magnificent afro. Oh, shit. I wish I could see that. He probably looked really good.

He had a great one. You can go back to some of the old thumbs from a couple years back. But I just mean to say that, like, of all the common black hairstyles that will show up in something, the afro is the most frequent, I find, because it's not just serving the purpose of it's a black hairstyle. It's also a punchline, right? Like, you know, the clown guy in the... Well, there's a ton of examples.

There's the guy from WarioWare. The clown's in Yakuza. There's Bobobobobo. It's a DLC Goopy item in Monster Hunter. You know, Nabishin, all that stuff, you know what I mean? Like, it's exactly. So you kind of expect the punchline here and when you don't see it, you're like, okay, wow, not even that.

So it was pretty interesting because I just was like, all right. Wooly test failed, I suppose. Time to just make, you know, some tough lady and I'll just play with that. So it's interesting because Zuli the Witch, who does a lot of digging through these games to fuck with it, she went into the character creator. She put a video out yesterday where she was able to discover that it is absolutely like the same character creator that we have always been using. They've just like given more slider control to you and they've also like updated the actual

assets on the faces and the hair and all that. But like, if you max out every slider, including hidden dev sliders, you get the same face in both. So any issues you had back in the day are going to be very similar to issues you have with this. And I'm pretty sure all of the hairstyles in this game are all the same hairstyles in Dark Souls 3. They're just updated to look nicer. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

No, so that's it. And, you know, I mean, it was literally one, but I did have the pleasure of reading one impression, one person's comment, which was like, well, clearly, George R. Martin and from Soft wanted to design a Norse Eurocentric game that wouldn't have these types of features or characters in them. So why would you expect to see that there? And it's like, you can, you can be a race of character that has descended from literal rock. You can be, you can be a dry skin person and you can also be a samurai.

But okay, man, I suppose there was a pot with arms and legs. My bad. My bad. I shouldn't want that. It's about the fantasy of what you do and don't want to see. Yeah. You see. Also, you know, even though we can all agree that Vikings also rocked dreads, that's not,

that's not a, you don't want to see Viking dreadlocks in that list. That's just not, that's just not the kind of hairstyle I'm looking for on my list. It's literally like the same 16 hairstyles that they've had the whole time. Like a bunch of the girl ones are really bad. Yeah. I, I'm just, so, you know, I'm just like, all right. Well, that's, that's what it is, what it is, you know. Ironically enough, the hairstyle that I always choose, which is like Widow's Peak and like

thinning at the back, because they put the fancy new hair on it, it's actually thinning way less at the back. And I'm like, no, I want, I want this thing. I want this, this big spot available. I want us to look at that when I'm running around. I mean, I was, I, I, I, I, when I was originally making a character in Monster Hunter Rise, I remember looking at this and I was like, oh yeah, like some games are like just more leaned towards making you look like cool.

You know, like there, and so there's a lot more like steering towards that direction in Monster Hunter games I find, but it was like even looking through the hairstyles and I was like, I don't like any of these. And it was like, oh, well, don't forget to go look at the DLC list of extra hairstyles you can buy. And I'm like, they're extra purchases, but at least they made them. You know, I was like, all right, well, they're there, you know, if you, if you really do want to get that like particular style, you can go buy that.

And I will say one thing is that it's, it's the same thing. It's the same similar problem that you run into in Monster Hunter. That is I made my tired old man and he's got the big eyes. Oh, I'm so tired. And I picked my character starting class and was head to toe in robes and not see my own fucking face. Oh yeah. And for about 95% of the game have been unable to see my character's head in any way.

Dude, I'm rocking a fucking Griffith helmet. Like it's, it's done. Like there is no face. Oh, you went prisoner. I did. Because I want to get the closest thing to the enchanted night from the demo that I can. So yeah, the enchanted night gear. So you know what, let's, let's just start from the beginning.

What's your current experience with Elden Ring? Okay. I was going to say one other thing about the character creator, but go for it. It's, it's slipping away. What was it? I forget. Anyway, I have something else to say about the character creator. Oh, no, just, no, no, just that, like, you're like, I was, you know, happy with the ability

to make my large, burly, muscular, middle-aged lady. And oh yeah, you can slide up like individual body part sizes. And I was like, that's good. I like that because before, you know, I mean, going way back early, it was kind of like, do you want a big head or do you want a dumb, dumb truck with a tiny fucking like, I want a big head. You do want to be triangle shaped, you know? And I was like, can I get a compromise?

No. So that's nice. But now you can. That's nice. Just sell me, sell me an Afro from Soft. Sell me an Afro. So there, there is actually one other thing to say about the character creator, which is kind of fantastic.

I didn't expect it. There's a mirror in the hub when you get there. It just lets you alter your character at will. So I was going to ask, because I was curious about this, because ultimately I was like, you know, I might want to go back and change aesthetic things. And I did look and I found out that there's a location not too far in that you can go back and just. That's the hub.

Yeah. Okay. Great. It doesn't even cost any currency. You just walk up to it. It's kind of hidden. There's nothing pointing to it. It's literally a mirror and a corner of a room.

Wonderful. You know, it was there for a while. But yeah, no, you just, you just fucking do whatever. It doesn't matter. Great. Like, why wouldn't, why do, why do games make it a big deal? Like, why is it like, you know. Because that's your character, bro.

And it's like, oh, that's you. Getting the coffin and you can, you can go for, you know, male or female body type. It's like, what is the, what is the deal with just not giving you the free option to change it all again? You know, like fucking do whatever you want. Um, I imagine, um, that hopefully there'll be a cool helmet that like might have some kind of dreadlike thing sticking out the back of it, like that predator thing that. I haven't found one yet, but there might be.

Uh, the game's pretty big. Yeah. So what, what is, what is your current experience? Cause I, I've played it pretty much nonstop for five days. So I'll take a back seat. I want to hear about what your current like experience with the game has been. Well, my experience with the game was launching it on PC and immediately noticing textures popping the fuck in and out.

I saw the game like crash out into like a fucked up window when you got to the end of the first cutscene. Uh huh. Um, boy was I like, wish and I could have gone console at midnight, but we didn't do that. Um, and for anybody who has tuned into the first episode, but didn't hear, uh, me explain it, uh, as of season two, I'm switching over to console. So don't worry about it.

We're not, we're not writing. I have a, I have a question for that for your own purposes, which version on the PlayStation five are you going to play? Uh, the normal one that I bought. Cause the, so, cause when you buy, you get the PS4 and the PS5 version. Oh yeah. So I do know that PS4 versions have less, um, input latency for a lot of things. They have a little less input latency and they, it's the only way to get a lock 60.

Oh really? But on the, on the PS5 version, on the PS5, it runs pretty well. Okay. But it's definitely not a locked, locked 60. Well, here's the question then, uh, are there save transfer options? You can go from four to five, but not the other way. Like every other game. Well, then we're fucked.

We're locked on five and that's, that's, that's what we're doing. Okay. Uh, dude, it's, so I got the PC version as well. I double, I bought my own copy cause I wanted to, to like, I don't know. I got a, I got a free review copy for the PlayStation. I bought it twice. Copy on PC. Yeah.

And, um, the PC version is fucked up. There's stuff going bad. Um, now that window kick, uh, was, uh, happened to us and then a lot of texture popping happened, but there wasn't anything else really severe save for a couple of stutters here and there. Um, I noticed a lot of people were finding way worse issues. Um, but I'm not looking forward to running into any of them. So, um, but, but yeah, so I just, we did that first session. Um, and, uh, what I pretty much did was, uh, I got all the way up to, um, the like little,

one of the first little like forts where you have like all the guards and the guy that can blow the horn to alert everybody that you can like stealth through it or alert. Uh, you mean the one that's at like a T intersection with a big gate off to the left? Big gate right next to it. Uh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, exactly. And I, and I'm pretty sure that's the gate I saw in some of the pre footage where you're

running. Yeah. Okay. So I got right up to that gate. Uh, and we, what did I do? The, the, the first thing I did was actually head in the complete wrong direction because fuck it. Let's wander.

Yeah. I saw you get to like the ass end. You were almost in the fucking peninsula. Yeah. And I, and I saw, I saw like a little teleport pad into an ever jail. And I was like, let's see what's in here. And then, uh, there was a fucking, a badass in there. There sure was.

There always is in those things. Yeah. And I fought him for about 40 minutes and then I went, all right, I see what you got. Uh, I'll come back later. And then, you know, I made it through. I think the two, there's like, there's like, it feels like there's two critical path, little caves that you hit on your way to that big gate. One where you fight, uh, the, the cat statue or whatever that was, right?

And then the other one where you, you, um, you have all the wolves and stuff. Mm hmm. Yeah. So I did those two little, little huts. Um, and I'm going to call those for the purposes of our, our future conversations about this game. I'm going to call those micro dungeons, micro dungeons. Yeah.

Yeah. Give or take. And, you know, just got, got a, got a feel for what was going on, uh, as well. Playing a build that is going to be like, you know, half casting, half swinging. Uh, and got to that, got to that gate thing, got torrent, met the, met the maiden, got the maiden, uh, no longer maiden list. Have you heard about finger maidens bar bar bar bar bar bar bar. Can you put like, I, I, I was like dipping into people's streams.

I heard page streaming upstairs and I got like that. There's your George writing right there because I can't think of a single person. That covered this game. That didn't just start going to. No, the moment they said, yeah, the moment they're like, you have to go to a storm veil. You know, I was like, Oh, that's a fucking game of Thrones name right there. Right. Whether you're talking about the fucking the veil or the storm this or the storm that.

Yeah. That's a George ass word right there. And, and then, uh, I, we stopped and then I popped open the PS five version and restarted and more or less try to do what we're trying to redo it, but immediately had differences that I was like, Oh shit. Okay. So we'll, you know, and once we crack it open again, um, I'll point out what those were, but like I saw things I didn't see the first time around.

And I found, uh, I'm calling them grace holes. I found two grace holes that I didn't find last time. And, um, What is a grace hole that I was trying to think of. I couldn't, I was trying to use the game's nomenclature and I couldn't remember it because I just kept saying bonfire. And I'm like, where's the fucking bonfire? It's a bonfire.

Right. And even in, even in Bloodborne, it was like the lanterns. I'm like, yeah, the bonfire. Right. And they're just, just grace. I don't know why you're calling them grace holes. It's very unsettling. It's a site of grace or a point of grace or whatever.

It's not just grace. It's a thing of grace. Right. It's a lost grace. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There you go. Right. So when I forget it again, I'm just like, whatever, the fucking go, go sit at the bonfire. Um, and then that, that comic was like, yep, look, look for bonfire at every game. Uh, and I found a bunch and then, uh, I saw giants that I didn't see. And then I saw fucking some crucified moaning dudes and I was like, yeah. Um, and, and then I re, I noticed something after, cause I did it a lot faster the second time around, obviously.

Right. Yeah. Of course. And when I went, uh, and I took out those two like mini dungeons and then I was like, oh, I got some extra money. Let me just run back to the shop. And I realized that the, um, the maiden that gives you torrent, um, shows up at, I guess whatever bonfire you sit at, because originally it was at the gate.

And then the second time she showed up at the church. So, uh, you're talking about Melina, right? Yeah. Okay. Uh, so in the, oh God, back when I did the network test, they gave us a little breakdown of how shit works and one of the things that was so confusing and they felt the need to spell it out, which is wild because it was never spelled out to the average person is that she shows up at the third grace that you sit at.

Okay. Um, the thing is, is I supposedly, but that's not what happened on my second like run through the gate. I, I cleared two of the mini dungeons and then ran back to the church instead of going forward to the gate. And when she met me at the gate the first time this time around, she just came to the church, you know. Yeah.

So they must have changed that. I think there's a lot of what I'm going to call completely. Hey, remember, uh, this is a from software game. So we were making jokes about what parts of the UI we're going to lie to you. Maybe six months ago. Yeah. People can't even figure out what gets the prompt to go to the hub. Okay.

People can figure out that this thing, this specific thing causes the hub option to show up, but other people got it in a different place. Yeah. And it's like, what, what is the, what is the fucking criteria here? Yeah. The feeling I had was after beating this dungeon, the next grace you sit at is going to be the one. Maybe I don't know, you know.

People are suggesting that it is the third open world grace that you sit at. Okay. Okay. Um, who, who the fuck knows? And then, um, I was like, okay, well, I don't, I like, so then I made it back to the gates like, you know, and I got all the stuff that was there. And I was like, let me just get a bit better at fighting. So I don't want to like level up or anything.

I just want to get better at this combat because like without a guard break, let me figure out how to, you know, there's more do stuff. Yeah. There's a lot more to just swinging your sword than there was in the past one. And when someone puts a shield up, my brain says, okay, we'll walk up and guard break him. Right. And it's like, no, not necessarily here.

Now you're looking for either the counter slash on certain things, but if you're not getting fed that you want to possibly consider literally jumping over them. You know, and I was like, whoa, like, yeah, that's, that's different enough. Um, yeah, they incorporated, so everybody has a posture mechanic now. There's a, there's a secret Sekiro style posture on everybody. Um, stance and poise. Strong attacks and jumping attacks and charged strong attacks just do enormous amounts of posture damage and guard counters too.

Um, I don't know if you experienced it with that at all. I did a bit. Yeah. Uh, I also was, uh, at first I was using the little, the little spell that you get at the start a bit. And I was like, ah, this is not a soul arrow. And then it sure isn't. Yeah.

And then I was like, oh my God, it's better because like if you want to just, if you want to snipe and be an actual mage, um, I suppose there will be spells to do that, but the, the function I found beautiful for this was setting up your own assists. So, you know, as I lock onto something, I'll cast one or two shots and then run in with a sword and let the shots lead me. Um, or in some cases I'll circle cast. I'll do, I'll do a large cast and then circle around so that the shot will hit them in the back.

You know, and I'm like, oh, the ability to create your own assist is so much more fun when you cast and then run in with a sword as opposed to, you know, just standing back and popping shots. And that's not even the actual assists. Have you been able to unlock those at all? I found ashes, but like I haven't had the, you know, like it's literally, it was the, we sat and just got them is where I stopped. So, uh, I've been talking to people and some people, there's an NPC interaction that you

can miss, uh, but basically go to the church of Ella at night. So, and then some, someone will give you the item to summon other characters. And after I was just practicing, like just fighting a bit, I was like, okay, uh, I'll just resume here. And then I was like, oh, let me just, I have, let me see if I can go like buy a couple of these notes that the Santa Claus is selling. And I went back to the church Santa Claus. He's just a Grinch.

He's literally just a Grinch. Like, don't even pretend. And like, you don't do those color schemes with those trimmings and not know what you're doing. Right. There's other versions of him that like, oh, it's yellow and green or, you know, what do you, but like, no, that's just, that's just Santa. Yeah.

Um, so then I just went back to the church to go talk to him and then a lady showed up and it was like, Hey, okay. And I was like, okay, quit game, stop, quit, quit, quit, stop, stop, stop. That that would be her. Yeah. Yeah. That's the, the, the wits from the intro. Okay.

The blue and the hat and all that. So, yeah. I'm very interested in finding out like what exactly combat is going to be now because like from, you know, I've avoided a lot of, you know, I've looked at some stuff, but I've avoided like, you know, a lot as well. Um, and from like, there's stuff that I saw that is really interesting where they're like, we took an idea from Dark Souls three and then turned it into a different feature here. You know, like, um, like stance with weapon arts is like actually just one of the things

you, you can infuse now. Yeah. You know, and it's like, Oh, okay. And Perry counts as one of those as well. Like changing your scaling is like that. You just go, I want it to be quality. I want it to be heavily. I want it to be bleed.

Interesting. You just pick it. That doesn't cost anything. That's so cool. That's a really great idea. So about the ashes of war, I mean, some of them are losers, right? Some of those moves are shit, right? But you might pick them just to, uh, make your weapon heavy, you know, for your strength

scaling, whatever, uh, unlike Dark Souls three, a lot of those moves are winners. A lot of them are really good. I got something called, uh, repeating, uh, no, not repeating thrust, uh, lunging, impaling thrust it's called, right? Uh, and it's literally you, you step, you take one step forward and stab, right? That's the move, except you can equip it on almost any sword weapon at all, which means weapons that don't have thrusts, you can give a thrust, give a thrust. Yeah.

Um, I got the, uh, that great sword you get right in front of the gate and, um, it had that default is, uh, I think it's stomp, you know, and I tested that out and holy fuck is that thing really cool. You just absorb the hit and then like launch them and, um, instantly killed, you know, like the, the, the guard, the shielded guard, um, yeah, and I was like, okay, this is absolutely the type of shit I want, uh, where it's like, it's not, it's, it's more of a focus attack than it is a parry timing kind of thing. A hundred percent.

Um, and then I saw that like, I picked up the ability to replace that with like storm stomp or something, but I was like, hold on, if I replace this, do I lose the default one? Nope. That you just mix and match to your fucking heart's content and you don't lose a goddamn thing. Really? Okay.

Because the tutorial message was worded in a way that implied that the, you do lose the previous one. Nope. It's free. So I put it in and I get the new one and then I take it out and my old one comes back. Yep. Okay. Perfect.

I can even take them completely off to get the weapons original thing back. Yes. Perfect. Okay. So I, I got a claymore, but I'm running a holy character. So I put sacred oath on it. Okay. And then I, uh, if I wanted to, I could just swap it, just pull it right out and go put

on something else. Are the ashes grouped by weapon type? So this is something I only figured out in the middle of my stream yesterday after hours and hours and hours and hours of time with the game. Yeah. You're like 40 hours in. What? 39 hours in as of right before this podcast, the all weapons, armor, spells, et cetera,

are all grouped by type in your menu. That's why the menu is so long vertically. So all straight swords are going to be in the same row. All daggers are going to be in the same row. They're grouped into their group. Okay. Okay. That's why.

Okay. And it's really useful. It's genuinely incredibly useful. And then any given ash will work on that row. Uh, no, ashes will actually, uh, they're grouped by, uh, I think they're grouped by scaling. So like my magics are sitting next to each other and my holies are sitting next to each other and the ones that can be caught in quality are sitting next to each other.

Oh, I, maybe I'm using the wrong word. I guess what I mean is like, like storm stomp that. Yeah. No, because, because your, your art of war will have a type of move. But it will also have a scaling associated with it. So I think storm stomp lets you make it a quality weapon. Okay. For example, if you so choose, but there are the magical ones, let you keep it standard

or do it to magic or what have you, but, uh, but like, I, I noticed I was like, I can put this into the sort of the, the stock, or I can put it into the, um, the great sword. I cannot put it into the flail I just picked up. Right. Yeah. They, they have, uh, if you, if you look at their descriptions, it'll. List like all the, the weapon types that they can. Compatibilities.

Okay. Compatible. So a lot, a lot of the time you'll see something that goes all weapons except for colossal weapons or something like that. Okay. Um, yeah, no, I, I basically, I just, I remember I saw the Enchanted Knight and I, and I, I, I didn't know that the, um, the demo classes were not going to be the real classes. So, uh, you know, it was when I saw that and I saw the Blood Wolf or whatever.

I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. Shit. Um, cause I feel like of all the starting sets, like Samurai looks the most complete and like badass, you know, for like a starter. I think it's just a fucking re skin, Sekiro armor. Maybe, maybe, but it feels as if you, if you get that, you have a character versus the others where you're like, you're in some scraps, you're going to want to find some better shit.

Um, and, uh, but, but like, yeah, the Enchanted Knight, I saw the, the sword and the casting and shit and I, all the glint blade stuff and I was like, oh, that glint blade stuff looks awesome. I want spells that are like sweeping near-automata style, you know, magic weapons around me. Like that's the build I want. His gear, I have not seen even still and I've only picked up a couple of the spells that that guy had in the, uh, in the network test that, that him and the, the blood wolf characters were clearly like, Hey, here's some, here's some cool stuff that we can show people.

I haven't seen any of that shit. Yeah. The miracle replacement slash like pyromancy fusion, um, stuff was Incantations. Incantations. Yeah. It was interesting seeing like the ground claw that looked pretty good. And then I saw like the big dumb dragon head.

I was like, like it's, it's strong looking, but I don't want to do, I don't want to do a big dumb dragon head. So fun that you mentioned that I picked confessor and have been rolling a, uh, paladin slash faith builds, uh, throughout my game. First of all, they fixed faith. There are tons, tons of offensive miracles. There's lightning bolts. There's multiple types of fireballs.

There are the dragon abilities. Uh, that big dragon head is quite slow. It is a massive 20 by 10 foot cone that takes up your whole, it looks really strong. Just waste like the whole thing in front of you. It was also interesting cause like, um, as well, so I'm like, as we get, we get into what I'm explaining. I'm like, Oh yes. So F P to Reggie, I'm explaining like, you know, I'm like the difference in how they

adjusted everything in three. And then kind of returned to demon souls a bit with it, you know, um, yeah, where you have a, and I'm just basically a mana bar that you can do sword skills with, you know, uh, that, that big dragon head, like here's the thing about it. If it were either a, just your head at scale, that that would be cooler to me or B, if the dragon were floating just a little bit behind and above you, just a bit to the right, just a bit to the right or the left, I'd be like, yeah, that's a cool summon dragon head. But the fact that it's big and it's right over you, I was like, ah, it's just dumb

there. It either like I'm summoning it or I'm becoming it, but not I'm becoming it and it's weirdly big. Uh, yeah, I, I, the only issue I have with it is it can occasionally block your view, but you don't really need a good view because that thing just, it's a, it's a mob. It's like a clearing. It's like a whole room clearing thing. Before we get too away from it, man, you're not supposed to beat that tutorial boss this

time around. Oh yeah. I felt it both times. Even the second time I went out and I was like, all right, let's try to give this an earnest. Nope. This is not meant to happen. You're, you're not supposed to like the flex.

If you want to be that, you know, that guy, the one who, who pulled it off and got the holy shit poggers on stream, it's going to require you to be like there for 10 minutes probably. And you got to remake your character every time, you know, and then like picking and choosing the wildest shots like the, I, yeah, I can, it's not like stray and, and, and asylum and all that shit is like hits hard, big, dumb, slow, get away from the AOE. You can pick at it. You know, this thing's a spaz.

Mm hmm. It's a flail and all over. It's a bloodborne flailing dumb beast. And that's a way easier one shot death to get hit by than a big dumb, you know, swinger. So back to your talk about the combat. I've spent a lot of time with it and oh, sorry, is there a, do you know if there's a cool reward that I'm, there's a, you can, um, the tutorial dungeon is actually visible from Stormvale.

Okay. Like it's, it's off to the side and you can see that there is an area after that spot. There's a fog. Uh-huh. Yeah. The fog gate goes somewhere. It's like a little outcropping. Uh, and that's all I can, that's all I can tell you.

A cool sword and shield is, is what I'm seeing. Oh, there it is. All right. Um, so as for the combat, it's like, it's, it's clearly built on Dark Souls 2. It has Sekiro's, uh, um, that Sekiro's a posture shit. Power stancing is, is there from Dark Souls 2 and you just have it by default with one of the starting classes and it's free. It's just used two weapons of any class.

No weird statistical shenanigans. Just do it. Is it, um, the, is it identical in that like you have, uh, the two unique attacks and then the similar attacks on our, on the, on R2. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Nice.

Um, uh, fight and adding all this together, like in my time with it, like fights have ended up feeling like very different to Dark Souls 3. Like there's a, like even against bosses, there's a really, really genuine reward. To jumping and hitting the boss with an R2 when you have the moment, uh, in some cases on some bosses, jumping sweeps. Yeah. Absolutely. The hitbox is specific enough.

That was, um, yeah, no, honestly, like that, that ever jail fucker, um, and, uh, one of the, oh yeah, he has a couple that are, you jump, you jump that and like that's Sekiro training is supposed to kick in there. But in Sekiro, when you jump over something, um, you get the nice like headstomp in it, but you land into like basically a light slash, but here, though, when you land the heavy, it feels like a drop attack, you know? Um, yeah. So it's really satisfying to land.

Uh, it's the, the fact that every, cause in the past you had bosses like, let's say cleric beasts, you shot them enough times in the face, he would drop down, you could do the repost on his face and do a big chunk of damage. Now that every single enemy has that mechanic associated with them, it, it changes the, the feel. There's, if you have it really down, like on, on fights that I was struggling and then just said, no, I'm going to knock them down. I feel strongly that I can do it.

And then you knock them down and he gets huge, huge chunk of damage off of them. Like it's a viable way to play it just as much as hit and run and, uh, the guard counter is now made blocking like good for the first time in a bit, although, um, I would imagine based on the fact that like a lot of that stuff is, um, not locked it. Like the lock in black, the guard counter, uh, is not going to help you when you're surrounded. Right. Like if you, and it's not going to help you if you try to guard counter someone who is in the middle of a string, you know?

Yeah. So, uh, against bosses, uh, it has to be the last hit of the string or it has to have a big wide opening against, uh, against your regular ass enemies. You want to do it either if it's like a dog or something, you want to do it after like the second or third hit, or if it's like a human enemy, you know, that animation they play when they hit your, your shield and they bounce off, they go, boy, yes, right. That's when you want to do it. And that I've used.

Sorry. After you. No, I was going to say, and that's why, uh, I like, that's why having the parry on the little buckler I'm using is like still a nice tool to have ready to go because like there's many situations where I'm just like, no, I don't want to wait here. I need, I want, you know, and I got like a parry off like right away from like, even like I kind of, I was getting stabbed from a spear from an odd angle and it still worked. You know, I found that, uh, there's a wide variety of animations for the guard counters

and, um, a weapons effectiveness with it will depend dramatically on what that animation is. Hmm. Uh, I had a broadsword to start cause I played confessor and the broadsword, you do the, the, the guard and then they do a back spin and it's like a full horizontal spin with their guard counter and that's really useful. Hmm. Uh, then I later switched to the claymore and the claymore has like a big overhand swing

as it's guard counter, which would miss with smaller enemies. Yeah. I noticed that. I then used a spear, which it would just be a big poke forward, which was more rival. Um, so there's, there's like mechanically, there's so much more going on here than there was in DS three eat. And in terms of exploration, adding a jump button is the fucking be end all be all to navigating these environments.

And I find it like the, the crazy thing to think about too, with like all these combat like decisions and changes is like that these are also designed to work in a PVP contacts too. You know, I don't know about that. I don't know if there actually are. I think they just kind of throw it together. Maybe, maybe I assume so. You know, um, though I have found, I have found, uh, unique weapons and unique spells that

are specifically anti player. Oh, I found like Lloyd's talisman. This type of shit. Yeah. I have a, I have a scythe in my inventory that if you hit it's, it's L two is this big arching jump attack. And if you hit, uh, a player with them, they can't use their health items anymore. Yeah.

There you go. Okay. Uh, I also found, uh, I also found a spell that inflicts madness on player characters if it hits them with it. Hmm. Interesting. Before we get too away from from soft being the most obfuscated fucking freaks in the world, uh, you'll get a goddamn item that says increases focus and I'll go, what the

fuck is focus? And I can't find the word focus in my character sheet. Yeah. And I have to, then I have to read the description of the item and the item will say in brackets, this is resistance to sleep and madness. Okay. And I'm like, it's nice that you tell me, but why don't it just say resistance to sleep and madness?

Why bracket it? Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. Why? I did see the word focus somewhere. Also, why are those two stats linked? I did see the word focus somewhere and I did just go like, stop thinking about it.

There's a phrase called, there's a couple items I have that increase robustness. I don't know what the fuck that means. Uh, yeah, I have no idea. No, you like, like that, that's just more obtuse than it needs to be. Um, how, uh, so I, I, yeah, I got enough of a test and to just see like what it's like swinging on top of the horse. Like you must have done a bunch of like full on horse mounted bosses at this point. I have done, I have done a couple horse mounted bosses.

Looks like a completely different game. It feels like a fucking completely different game. There's a couple of pro tips I have for anybody doing horsey combat. One getting off, getting off your horse is 100% invincible. Ooh. Uh, the arrow is getting on your horse. No shit. The whistle is blown.

You are invincible until you have horse control. Wow. So you can occasionally use it to remount. Get the fuck out. Safely. Second of all, uh, you're both triggers and bumpers represent the left and right sides of your attacks. Uh, what I did not understand until about halfway through my play time so far is that

if you hold a strong attack, you know how you put the weapon to the right and then you hold it for a big swing? Yeah. That's a active hitbox the whole time. Oh, it's dragging on the ground. Yeah. So you can just, you can just like drag it through a bunch of fucking grunts. Um, double jump, lets you skyrim your ass up, bullshit.

You are not supposed to be able to do. Uh, I just saw two hand before you mount this. Okay. Actually change what you're doing. So you know how you gain a 50% strength buff if you're two handing a weapon. Oh fuck off. That's a bug. No, it's not a bug.

It's if you don't have the strength required to use a weapon and you're only one handing it and get on the horse, it'll maintain the one handed state. Right. But if you're two handing it and then that puts you over the requirements and then get on the horse, it will then work properly. Yeah. That's what I mean is it like you, you mount the horse with the, the state you're in and it'll allow you to, that's not a bug.

Because if you're two handing your weapon, that means you can use it correctly, which means they shouldn't penalize you when you're on the horse. But your move, even though you're clearly one handed, no, no, that is actually a feature. Not a bug. Well, well, here's the other thing. Um, uh, I caught a wear armor that's too heavy for you. It doesn't matter when you're mounted. Right.

Yeah. So also, I've used a wide variety of armor. Hey, guess what? Wear whatever the fuck you want. Like I can't tell any difference. Well, I mean, I want them, I want a mid role, you know, I don't want, no, no, I'm just saying like, like, I can't, aside from your mobility, I can't tell anything more than like a one percent difference in defensive value.

Okay. Like it, just, just, just wear it. Um, the game, I don't, I don't know where to start. I don't, I don't know where to start. Um, let's start with NPCs. First, there are more NPCs in this game that I have encountered than like multiple souls games put together so far, uh, they're everywhere and they are just as fucking inscrutable and confusing as ever.

Though I will say the story things they talk about are actually more clear. That's, you can feel the George in that the backstory, so how do I put this back in Dark Souls one and Dark Souls two and Dark Souls three, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can tell that they are creating pieces of a story, but there's no actual, these are the events that happen that they're drawing from. There, there is, there is actually a sequence of events that did occur that people are referring to. They're not just saying shit to just say it.

So when people are talking about the golden order or the war between this and that, you're like, oh, okay. And different people will tell you things that fit in together instead of just being a random mishmash. But their actual requests are just as obtuse. I was told by some lady to get her some grapes and that's the quest. Go find some grapes. Go, go fucking find them.

Yeah. Um, so when I walked into that wolf cave and I found the like fireflies, I was kind of like, okay, there's going to be rare cave specific materials that you have to know where to go track down. And we're going to do a little bit of Breath of the Wild here, you know, a hundred percent. I have the ability to make all sorts of weapon buffs. I have the ability to make the items that you pop to get more souls or get more items. Uh, lots of healing items with the NPCs are at least with the with the Santa guy.

I realized there was a dialogue option for recommended and then an option to talk and then the talk option went away and you ran out of stuff to say. Yeah. And then it came back when he had something else to say. Yeah. So there's going to be, and then there's one option that was about yourself, I think. So now that list is not just talk over and over again to get the new thing. It'll be multiple subjects in addition to buy or sell.

For example, if you have a list, right? So a lot of characters are just hanging out and you just got to mash on them until they actually do something. Um, what was I going to say? One of the best things for the NPCs is when you get to the hub, it gives you this nice little tutorial option and the tutorial option says this is a special area. You cannot fight here and all of your bumpers and triggers are disabled. Oh, okay.

They you can't even swing your sword. You can't even change, uh, like what hand your shit is on forced passivity. Huh. Yeah. And I was seeing other people that apparently jumping is a hitbox. And people jumped on NPCs by accident and those NPCs were literally protected by a golden force field. Okay.

And they said, yeah, don't do that. Wow. Okay. Not even allowing for the hostile version of events. Now I'm going to tell you right now, don't test that because I couldn't figure out an NPC quest line and killed them and they were, they were dead and I had to use a mechanic to fix that. And it was a whole fucking rigmarole.

Is there sin or graves? There is, uh, an absolution mechanic that you get ahold of, um, you know, I've been talking to people on and off of the past, a past little while about Elden Ring and Page came up with this great analogy and it's especially appropriate for you, Willie, as somebody who has not actually watched a lot of this talking to people about their experience with Elden Ring feels like talking to somebody about a Star Trek episode you don't quite remember because they go, Hey, do you remember that time Warf turned into a spider and spit acid in Beverly's face?

And you go, No. Is that a real thing? And they go, Yeah, it's this episode. That is what it is like talking to someone about Elden Ring. Everyone's having their own experience. Like I could say I could tell you that I went to a fancy church and discovered a dog wearing a Pope hat who told me a story about the sun and the moon and I could be lying. I may in fact be lying to you or not.

Right, right. I don't know. I can't tell if people are full of shit when they talk to me about this game. I saw someone say like, Damn, I want to watch this, but I want to watch the LP where Willie does the same things I did in my own LP in my own playthrough. I could watch the version of him going the same places and seeing the same things. And I was like, Whoa, that's not the game they made. But like, I understand that desire.

I understand that, you know, because that's the appeal of like, I've already played through. I know what's in there and now let's see someone else do it, you know. I spent about 20 to 25 hours going through the entirety of Lim Grave and the Weeping Peninsula, which is the southern little continent you can see. And I felt like I scraped it like exterior collisions on every cliff, talk to everything I could find, just scraped the shit out of it only to be halfway through the next zone and have people come into my chat or I know have Paige be running her fucking stream upstairs and then she looks at me and is like, Oh, did you find the Wolfman?

Yeah. And I go, No, what are you talking about? And then I start that up and find the Wolfman and then chat points out that I missed four bosses on the over. Yeah, I've resigned. Honestly, I've resigned to my fate that like the approach I usually take to a game like this is just not going to work here. There's a level of thoroughness that I take to the games and LPs where I try to really

get as much as I can and find as much as I can, even at, you know, sometimes sacrifice of time. But that's because that's how I play on my own time, too. In this case, I do realize that like scraping every cliffside is going to kind of be an insane endeavor and I don't expect that to work. So I'm going to just wander and let that, you know, guide my path. Like I even in retracing my steps, that's when I felt it was in retracing my same steps. I saw like eight new things and I was like, happened to look this way instead of that

way. Exactly. Right. On the way to the fucking Wolf Cave, like I walked by a bog with these the big circles in them, the big whatever those things are. And I was like, I didn't even look down last time to even catch that, you know, or again, like, yeah, a giant wandering by just outside the limb grave, like first entrance, a bunch of moaning, crucified dudes, like a bunch of shit that just like I turned the camera a

little bit more to the left this time and saw a completely different thing. So it's like, yeah, there's no way the thorough scrape is going to happen, at least like not fucking on camera at the very least, you know. So I've been doing the thorough scrape and the only way I've been able to make any significant progress over the past week is that I'm doing thorough scrape alongside eight to 12 hour streams every day. And even in that context, I'm missing a bunch of shit. But there's just so much genuine, like how do I put this?

It feels just as much of a big deal to Breath of the Wild as Breath of the Wild did to how frustrated most people were with open world adventure games. And so Breath of the Wild created a world in which there was something everywhere, like there was very little wasted space, right? Oh, what's over there? What's over there? What's over there? What's over there?

The problem that Breath of the Wild had was that it was a fucking, yeah, or it was a fucking series of enemies in a little camp, then you knew what types of enemies they were. Or a temple. Or a temple, which was kind of a known quantity, right? Or maybe it was a, you know, a Lionel or something. But you did it through enough of the game that you would start to see the pattern. And it wasn't like it was recreated or copy-pasted stuff. It's just like there was only so much stuff they could actually show and give you.

There's only so many enemies in Breath of the Wild. And so when I think about Breath of the Wild and I think about, like, wow! I think about seeing the dragon come off the map in the first place. I was literally about to say that the formula broke a couple times. Seeing the dragon was a big one. The second one is finding the stag god. The stag god, yes. And for me, the third one wasn't even the master sword.

It's getting to the northwest part of the map and seeing a gigantic square dead in the middle of the ocean. You know the maze? Yes. Yes. Yes. Right? And it's just like that is different.

Now Elden Ring, those micro dungeons, you can see that they are made out of component pieces. Okay. Right? However. Chalice dungeons. However, many of them have enemy types unique to themselves. And they all have their own bosses.

And they all give you something. Yeah. Now, I have yet to get a single thing out of anything that I have gone, oh, that's fucking bullshit. I don't care about that. A lot of times it's something that I'm not personally going to use, right? But I look at it and go, oh, somebody would actually really appreciate getting this faith great bow from this thing.

Right. If you had a build for it. I was going to say, Arcane serves what purpose mainly here? From what I can tell, Arcane is your status scalar, your bleed, your poison, etc. You also need a certain percentage of Arcane for certain types of spells. So there's spells in this game that require just intelligence. There's spells that require just faith. There's spells that require faith and intelligence.

There's spells that require intelligence and Arcane. And there's spells that require faith and Arcane. The dragon spells, for example, are faith and Arcane. Okay. I guess I wish it was just a different word from the prior games. It's also luck. Yeah. Okay.

Because sometimes it's like, it's not a problem when you make stats do different things. It's just when it's the same word, you know, then you're like, ah, boy, all right. What are we relearning this time? You know? All right. I will say exploring around probably the most impressive thing isn't just like there's shit everywhere. It's that every single time I've gone to some asinine looking crack in the wall or cops

of trees or I'm like, I bet there's something over here. There was totally something over there. I saw as Zuli the witch tweet that was like, I forget the wording, but it was something to the effect of I'm X ridiculous number of hours in. I have found my first illusory wall and the psychological effect of this discovery is damaging. It is like, yeah. No. Guess what?

No, don't tell me this game has those. Guess what? I'm about to ruin your day. So yesterday, I ran into illusory walls for solid days of streaming and the first place that I found it in had five, including three that were behind each other. No, man, I don't want like, I don't want it. I don't want. Oh, oh, oh, just wait.

That's not even the big part. I also found yesterday in the open world, an illusory floor, I just, what's the why? Why hurt us? Why hurt? Why hurt everyone? There was a boss behind it. Oh my God, man. I went into one of those micro dungeons and I had illusory wall and it had two bosses.

That is like, this isn't like, oh, I can't resist making poison swamps. This is everyone takes damage from like that's FOMO fucking, I walked right past it and until my chat started to scream at me that there was one. And then with my chat's directions, it took me 10 minutes to find the fucking thing. Like that is a fucking FOMO kick to the chest when you see that man. I can't deal. Okay, so here's the deal now. It's like either you fucking tell me there's an item that helps find them some stone of

agony shit or we're just gonna cheat. All right. So, hey, guess what? There is an item that helps you find illusory wall. Okay. It's called the tarnished, whizzened finger and it's what lets you write messages on the floor. Oh.

You see, when there's an illusory wall, oftentimes people will put a message on the floor telling you that there's an illusory wall there. However, unfortunately, people think that it's really, really funny to put that message literally every single place. So I had stopped hitting walls at about the 20 hour mark because every single one of them was a lie until it was no longer a lie. And now I am back to hitting every single goddamn wall that has it. Well, can we at least get, like, if we're gonna do this fucking thing and the messages

are it, then fine. Can you do the thing where upvoting doesn't take away a downvote? It shows you the tally of both because one message that is worth. Downvoting is the same as upvoting. If I show me the tally of both up and down, that's more information than just the one number. It's engagement. It's YouTube's engagement.

Fuck you. Though I will say one thing, and this is actually a real tip, really genuinely think about placing helpful messages everywhere you can because you get a full heal when somebody appraises it. It is genuinely very, very good to put down good messages. Although I'm assuming that you're gonna find those estus refill bugs out in the wild often enough. You don't even need to.

Oftentimes when you're out in the open world, you kill a pack of enemies and it'll give you like, it'll give you like, it doesn't refill all your flasks, but it gives you way more than just one. Like I've gotten three health and one magic flask off of killing some goobers. You can still double sip, right? Oh yeah. Can you double sip one of each real quickly? If you like, square down square?

No. Okay. No. All right. Well, I can't, like, how do I put this? I don't even know what game in size to compare it to because it has this incredible little trick that it's playing on you where, well, did you get the map for LIMGRAVE? I got the map.

Okay. So did you notice that the whole world map was just LIMGRAVE? Like the physical UI stops your cursor when you hit the top of the LIMGRAVE map after you get it? Well, I zoomed out and I saw that it was bigger. You zoom out, but the full square is just the part you've unlocked. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. So how big is it? I don't know because I only have this piece, right? When you get a different piece of the map, it only expands big enough to include all the stuff that you have. So I found a way to teleport to what I believe to be the ascent of the planet at which point the map more than doubled in size, but now it was all gray.

It feels like I would make jokes about like, oh, it's like Skyrim or whatever. It is actually closer to Skyrim than like Breath of the Wild in size. Okay. It is absurdly, absurdly offensively big and I have yet to find an area in which I feel like it is recycled. Even the areas that are those little gargoyle dudes, right? And you get to the end and the boss is one of those cat statues. The cat statues have different movesets depending on what weapons they have.

Like there's one that I fought with a staff that is way tougher than the ones with the swords, right? And I'm, I have seen more unique enemy types in this game than two Dark Souls games put together so far, so far. And I feel terrified because I've spent about 40 with it and I haven't finished cleaning out the second zone. And I thought there would be six. I don't know any more.

Hmm. Okay. Like you've seen how far the draw distance is, right? Well, I mean, yeah, you look into the fucking horizon. Like, yeah. Yeah. The draw distance isn't even far enough to show you a whole zone. Like, like, it's, it's, it's too big.

So, so, yeah, congrats on making something worse than mimics. And that's all I'll say. Okay. Um, what was it? The, the, the, the someone said something to the effect of like, um, this is, this is a Dark Souls four, five and five and six. At the same time. Yeah.

The first, the first day that I was playing it, I said that this feels like this feels like, uh, like you got Dark Souls trilogy for Christmas and you never played the Souls series. Right. Okay. Right. Um, uh, so how many feels like a goddamn MMO? How many bosses then would you say, like you, you have gone through in that timeframe?

30. Jesus. 30, 35. Jesus. And that, and that, and that runs maybe 20. I can't, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

God damn. Like I genuinely don't know. Okay. Um, um, it's, it like, I don't know what people count as bosses in this game. Does it get a health bar? A big life bar. A big life. Okay.

That's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah. Okay. And, uh, doing my fucking podcast, if I fought a fucking guy that only shows up at night in one church next to a dog and he beat, he beat me up, uh, there's, um, some of them are just wandering around.

Some of them are hidden in the deepest dankest part of a dungeon. Some of them are hidden in the deepest dankest part of a dungeon behind an invisible wall. And it's not, and that's the real boss instead of the boss you use the lever to open up the door for. It feels like the goal here is to reach the point that reach the point of exploration, for example, that, that Dark Souls three is at now and still have people coming up with shit, you know, and still have people like figuring out optimal numbers on things and just like to keep the mining process going for as long as possible.

Like, yeah. And, um, let, uh, let's take, for example, the easiest way you can describe scale in this game is through what the game calls a legacy dungeon. I don't know if it calls that in the game itself, but the marketing did, right? So there's at least one legacy dungeon that everyone has physically seen and that storm veil castle. It's right there. Staring at you for the entirety of the early game.

Um, and market is your, what, what would in MMO terms be called the door boss in which you, until you beat market, you cannot, you cannot play in storm veil. Storm veil is larger than the entirety of bullet area in demon souls. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. And here's the best part about that.

Paige was looking for a way around to get into like the moat or something and she accidentally snuck in to the next zone without going into storm veil at all. It's not mandatory. You can just ignore it. Well, that, and that, that, I mean, that's still, yeah. So that's always a thing of like, uh-oh, the noise played and a new name appeared, back the fuck out, finish your plate, you know, or go do a test. If you're in, if you're in exploring mood, go swing at something and see what happens

when you do and then back the fuck out. It is, uh, so how do I put this? It's both the hardest and easiest game from software has ever made. And that is going to entirely be on your exploration desire and your stubbornness. There are a lot of people who've been covering the game, a lot of people playing the game who, when the grace said go this way, they went that way and they're fighting market within the first hour. Oh, interesting.

That's not me. I thought market at hour 21. Yeah. Okay. And I beat his ass so fucking bad that he didn't get a chance to fight me. I had learned to summon a super ghost named Oleg, who I got from a reward from doing a dungeon way outside my level range. I had an item that shackles market to the floor for five seconds that I can use infinitely.

And I had weapons that were higher than I think I was supposed to be able to. I had plus three shit. I had spells. I beat him in two and the time they beat him, I just like literally stomped him into the ground until he couldn't move. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's it.

Like, because I'm to me, I'm like, I found a fucking teleporter to an instant challenge with the with the bloodhound knight. And I'm like, I wanted, I wanted to see if we can do this with no level ups, you know. Hey, guess what? Those, those types of things don't have to be appropriate for the zone that you find them. Oh, like it's, it can be like a come back way, way, way later type of thing. Yeah.

I found one that was like harder than market. Okay. And it's right there. It's like a hundred feet from him. Oh, boy, um, what, uh, so the, I remember last time the description of like the pooling online system, well, you were describing how that worked. I don't know if you did any online. I didn't.

I did not do a single online. Okay. I'll be quite honest. The ghost system where you can summon NPCs to help you for me, that's the trick has completely invalidated other people. Yeah. Okay. I don't care.

I don't care. They give you so many of those ghosts and they are all really cool. So of, of specific note, I have a, of a, a character called Oleg that is a giant knight with two swords that will last for entire boss fights against really tough enemies. Oh my God. No problem. The entire fight. The whole, no problem.

I have, I have a set of three soldiers, two like peasant soldiers and one of the, it looks like the, the, the guys in red and green that you've been fighting, but he pulls out and does homing soul arrow every now and then. I found them skeletons that are hard, that aren't very good to like fight enemies, but when they get killed, they retain the skeleton ability to get back up unless the enemies break their bones, which means they will last forever. They res. Okay.

Um, I found dogs. I found a jellyfish that poisons bosses. Do they draw aggro? Yes. Oh wow. Okay. Yeah. That, that replace it.

Sometimes you're fighting a boss and you go, you know what I need? I need five NPCs to help me so that the boss doesn't even look at me. And then I'm just going to lightning bolt that motherfucker for 10 minutes. Uh, wow, the whole fight. I thought they were super short summons for a couple of seconds. So there's two types of go summons. There's regular ones and then they're called, I think they're called ghosts of renown and they take way more MP and they use a different upgrade material.

And those are like, like NPC characters. Upgrade. Oh yeah. You can upgrade them. I did get a tutorial for that. Oh yeah. My, uh, my, uh, Oleg is a plus three Oleg. Yeah.

Okay. You make them stronger. Yeah. And, and, uh, they also get way stronger. There's a, there's a cost full bar, uh, Oleg costs 100 FP. Okay. I found a different guy that I haven't upgraded who costs 104, uh, basically the, the FP cost will scale with, uh, their, their, their power.

And what that means is that spellcasters will have better ghosts. Oh, your fucking int will make it do more. Oh, like more, your mind, your man, your mind, your FP, oh shit. So if you're a person who wants to use a lot of spells, you would have the bar to summon the strongest ghosts, which is good because you need ghosts so you can sit back and throw spells. And if you mine, if you're mine, if you don't have enough FP, if it's like 104, for example, it, nope, you can't do it.

It's just, it just won't happen. Interesting choice. Okay. Cool. That's, they're so much, that's really cool because they're so much because I activated the statue of like the summoning pool. And then I was, then I'm like, can I interact with the statue again or, and nothing happened. Then I was like, okay, I don't know what this is.

And then I just, no, you have to, to upgrade your boys, you need to do an NPC side quest. No, no, no, no, I meant, I meant the online going back to the online statue. I don't know. Like, you activate the statue and then I was like, yeah, I don't know. You know, you use a furl calling remedy. It's a fucking yellow rock that you eat and then that turns on online stuff and you can make it. It's really cheap.

It's really cheap. But yeah, dude, that like, I'm, I'm in this situation where I'm summoning a stand to help me and throw enlightening and casting madness for my eyes and getting in there with jump attacks to drop people so I can like, I just found out last night fucking around with my weapon scaling that if, if a weapon has an innate status on it, so if a weapon does bleed by default and you put like faith or magic scaling on it, it keeps the bleed. It does both. It stacks both.

So I, so off camera yesterday, last night, I upgraded a scythe that is now doing holy damage that scales up my character's faith, but also does bleed, which I should, which I should mention is really excellent in this game. That sounds insanely broken. It sure is like, who cares? Like if you can do poison and bleed at the same time or any sort of like, I haven't found poison yet, but I'll try it. Wow, you can go busted.

If you can do that. Okay. Huh. The game more than ever before, it's been something since demon souls, but that stupid prepare to die campaign really fucked it up. But more than ever before, this has been the game of a win is a win is a win. Do you want to, do you want to run some stupid shit, right? Do you want to grind up materials so that you can make 40 poison darts and stand in

a doorway that the boss can't get to you and just go fuck poison, like the impression I'm getting here is like summon an army to run in, stand back and just poison fog it and then just sit there or take the dub or use huge charged R2 attacks while your guy distracts them to knock their posture down and that again, get a big repost or like it's just yeah, there's so much I could, I could talk, I could tell all sorts of stuff. Somebody in chat was telling me they found a fucking sorcery that requires 70 intelligence. Who the fuck needs that question? Do bloodstains work at all for you?

Not right now. It's a little funky. Okay. Bloodstains literally just don't work. Okay. Good. Just it feels, it seems to be feels like they're off as right now. Hey woolly, how high do you think weapon upgrades go in this game?

Okay. What's the number? No, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on. So what's the number? Wait. I saw that something had e-scaling. Yeah.

You know? And I was like, oh, we're expanding our, our in both directions range. Yeah. Yeah. So if I fucking hear plus 20. What's the number? I'm. No.

No. Higher. Plus 25. Plus 25. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not. My fucking stick right now after 40 hours is plus seven.

I'm not even surprised. Like that, that we're just, we're expanding everything out in both directions. Jesus Christ, man. I finished my stream and I was exhausted. I was dead tired. I was brain dead. Paige went up and she went to grind out some stuff in Elden Ring and she was chilling up there.

And then I was like, oh, I don't know how, uh, maybe I'll test out the new weapon that I like. And I played it for two hours. Then she came downstairs and she's like, looking at me and she goes, this is the best game ever. I'm like, this might be the best game ever. She goes, this is the best game ever. We just set that back to each other four times.

Now hold on. The first upgrading thing I got in the intro part was like, you can take up to your weapons up to plus three. Yep. So is the implication here then? It's only that spot. You'll get a blacksmith at the hub. Okay.

And in terms of the materials, are we going through like three materials to get to 10 and then another three to get to 20 and then a final one to get to 25? Do you know what the fucking upgrade mats are called this time around? They're called smithing stone in brackets, one. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, and, uh, so I think that that blacksmith thing is because you don't have access to the actual blacksmith. So the plus three is so you can go beat market. Yeah. Sorry. I just, I hit my elbow on the cabinet. Oh, motherfucker.

All right. That's good. Use that. Son of a bitch. Okay. I, I, I feel so bad for people whose PCs can't play it like me. My PC with the 30 80 and I seven eighty seven hundred just chugs this game like shit. Like the game feels completely unoptimized, appears to have direct X 12 problems, Windows

MIDI compatibility problems, all sorts of fucking stupid shit. We're going to talk about a couple of those today as well, because this is like, this is one of those like fantasy games that I fucking made my head when I was a child. What if, what if all these cool things, but you can go anywhere and you can go anywhere and it was as big as England and it can go anywhere forever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to get to the credits, L-O-L Lamal. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. So. Okay. That's all incredibly encouraging and I have a really good feeling that because you know what?

All that really matters to me is am I going to feel cool when I get the things I want and then I feel nice and strong and accomplished as I go forward, you know? I will say they finally did it with one of these games. They finally made it. So that's like talking to your friends who are playing the game is now just legitimately completely mandatory. It is mandatory. And I will give you an example for why that is mandatory.

There is a little dungeon off the way in Limgrave somewhere out there that has the only sorcery trainer you will find for literally 30 kilometers. Oh boy. Okay. And if you didn't, and if you don't go in there and find them. That's that. You're just not going to be able to learn sorceries unless people drop shade or you grab them in caves or whatever.

Right. But. Sure. Yeah. But you mean I mean like the sorceries of like five, six, seven, right there. I was looking for the ability to throw a lightning bolt my whole game. My whole game only to find out that the reason why I did not find it is that a gold knight that beat my ass on camera was the only place in the entire game that drops the standard

lightning bolt. Geez. Okay. Okay. All right. I had, he beat my ass, but he didn't seem that unique. So I left him and then I went back and was like, oh, here's the spell I've wanted the whole game.

Okay. The item that you can give to an NPC to buy upgrade materials only exists in one cave in the whole game. Fuck. So, so I'll, you know, take this opportunity then to, I guess, let everybody know that unsurprisingly, we've made the decision to put out two hour episodes of this thing because who knows how this is going to go. It's probably going to be nuts and, you know, for some people, that might be a bit much

for others. It's just right. But that's how we're going to be releasing it is is an hour and a half minimum two hour chunks to just, you know, to make it through because, uh, yeah, like you have been doing, I guess, yeah, you've done, like you've said, like eight hours per day every day hammering at it. I'm afraid of what's to come. It took me about 18 hours to do all of the stuff in the area of the game that you have

physically seen. Hmm. So I just, but, you know, it's some games just are just built like this, they're just built fucking different. And this is, yeah, this is an all encompassing thing and there's no easy solutions here. Like it's, you know, it is, it is open. It is massive. It's meant to be something that you drown in.

So committing that experience to camera in any way, shape or form can't not be like fucking crazy, you know, um, like I and anyone rushing it, anyone like going from point to point to just hit cutscene to cutscene is missing out. Like that's a way of this experience. I, so I, I hope that's not what anyone wants to see. I'll let, I don't think that is literally possible right now in the future when people know what the, how to speedrun it and whatnot, but like if you went straight to market, markets going to kick your fucking ass in at level six, man, with your starting gear and then

Godric after that, um, uh, oh God. So I'll use an example, um, because there's a difference, you know, there's a long, there's a huge difference between like bespoke content and what feels like coffee pasted content. Right. When, when I'll use Skyrim as an example, because everybody listening to this probably played Skyrim to a degree in Breath of the Wild, you would explore around, you'd be wandering and you'd see a little icon on your map in Skyrim, right. And the icon would be like mine or dungeon, right.

And after a while, you just went, yeah, okay, I just kept walking, right. Because you're like, I don't really want to do a mine and fight a bunch of droggers and in rats or whatever, right. In Breath of the Wild, you'd be scoping around and you'd fall down a big pit and you'd check something out and it's like, oh, there's a shrine or, oh, there's a fairy circle. Yeah, haha. And you'd be like, yeah, okay, right. That it was clearly like they wanted a big world and they want to fill it up with stuff

and they filled it up with stuff that was good enough, but about half of the game felt like filler, right. In some tiny out of the way shot little mini dungeon that I found behind some NPC that looked like it looked like, you know, those little catacombs dungeons is where I found, I'm going to use the specific one. I found that I couldn't figure out my way to the lever to the boss and discovered what the game wanted me to do was stand on a X-blade trap so that it dragged me up to the ceiling so I could roll into a secret corridor, fight some necromancers, then blow through an invisible

wall and fight a super secret second hidden boss inside that dungeon that was insanely tough compared to everything else in it. And when I beat him, I got a story item that relates to one of the game's endings, maybe. Like it's everywhere. Everywhere I looked, I found something of value of interest of something like it's just everything is discovery. Everything is discovery. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Everyone's going to miss everything. That's just the way it's being. I'm going to assume there are three or four. I assume there are going to be three, four, five endings and I cannot even tell you how afraid I currently am of even attempting to get one. Well, it's never a question of like, oh, what are the requirements to get it?

It's a question of what are the lockouts that mean you cannot get that, you know? Like it's not go back and collect the umbilical cord. It's, oh, you already said no. I just saw a phrase in which somebody described there's something in the game locked behind looking at a specific bloodstain after a secret boss. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. And I'm like, great. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Great. Okay. Here's what they did. Here's the genius. They went, hey, what if we made this game like 200 hours long, but then if you want to get a different ending, you got to do it again.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, so, I mean, the real answer is just become the kind of player that doesn't care about these things and just goes forward and has their experience, right? Become the kind of player that will be okay, not seeing it all. And then you'll just have to learn what you do and take it forward and find out when you talk to other people or go online, what you missed, you know, but like except in your heart that you're not going to ever scrape good enough, except it.

You will never see it all. I scraped it with all the powers of streaming it with a chat of thousands who were looking at it with their eyes as well and obsessive compulsive disorder. And I missed four bosses and two dungeons. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what should we call it? Like everyone, you're going to get your primordial serpent says, go fucking link the fire and

then big chest says, go link the fire and then you link the fire and then the credits roll and that's what we're doing. You know, that's it. Just accept that that's what's going to happen. Get your generic ass ending and be okay with that and we'll see what happens afterwards, you know? Because if you get like if if I'm getting like if I get halfway through and then like it starts to cut like basically I don't want to hit like paralysis, you know, of not even

knowing how to go forward or if I walk through this gate, is it are we now beyond the point of no return? Like you have I can't imagine this game even having a point of no return is this is night marriage for the scale nightmarish, you know, I think I think this game will also be incredible on replay more so than a regular Dark Souls game. And here's why here's my last point of example. I saw somebody in the chat they've been talking about NPC quest lines. Somebody said, I need a golden needle.

And I went, cool, don't know what quest that's for. But I found a gold needle where fuck if I know I found it yesterday. That's all I could fucking tell you. No idea. No idea. True ending beat that first boss. Clean. That's how I don't remember where anything is the only item I can remember specifically

where it is is the claymore because I was using it for a bunch of my footage and people kept asking me where it was. So I kept saying it's over here on this spot. Are those caravan a caravan carriages a thing that like you see often enough? Yes. Yeah, I've seen a couple more. Okay. Okay.

They always have something good. Yeah. All right. This thing is going to be this is this is a beast. It's yeah, it's it's three games in one. It's all of you know, it's just it's going to be the all encompassing. Yeah. And it will clearly take whatever amount of time you're willing to throw at it.

It will receive. Have you found, okay, as someone who doesn't particularly like crafting, I'm open to it as long as I find myself not having to spend half an hour killing eagles and hunting pigs. Have you found that you've had to go do that? No, because I don't use the consumables very often. Instead, what I do is I just pick up what I'm going to pick up. And if I'm having trouble with something, I look into my crafting inventory and go, can I make something that will help me and I'll have tons and tons of materials in there.

So I could probably make something that could help me. Are you only crafting consumables? Yeah, that's all that you craft. Okay. Well, the crafting crafting replaces having a merchant that that has a gigantic stupid inventory that sells all the consumables. Oh, okay. Fine.

No problem. Done. I thought you were going to craft like non consumable items that you're going to need for things or do you? No, it is for fireballs, it's for poison on your weapon. Because that shit just sits in my inventory anyways. Like I'm not going to use that Elizabeth mushroom, I don't think. You know, I'm probably not going to use, I'm going to use repair powder and certainly

like some bulk paper, but I'm probably not going to use the like reduced faith requirements by one on this spell, you know, like, okay, all right, all right, good, good, good, good. Like poison throwing knives, by the way, once you learn how to make them, those are good. Those are excellent. Good. Okay. Cool. So for example, hey, are you going to go somewhere with a lot of poison and you would probably

like to not be poisoned, you craft the cure now instead of, you both find it and you can craft it. Awesome. Great. That's exactly what I'm down for. I'm down for specific use cases. Let's see what I can build. Yeah, that's great.

I don't want to be doing a farm side quest to gather materials mandatorily, you know. I was using, I was using a short bow to turn off traps from a distance, which you can totally do by shooting traps and I had no arrows. So I made arrows out of bones and the arrows did shit for damage, but whatever I'm not using. I'm using them to shoot pressure plates. Nice. Okay.

Um, so that's Elden Ring chat one. Also I found at least three swamps. Yep. Oh yeah. Well, you know, we were warned. So that's fire and they're, they're poisoning. That's fair. I'm going to be streaming this game pretty much all week.

Go down to twitch.tv slash Pat stairs at 7pm. Uh, I'm going to stream it Tuesday, Saturday, Saturday will be the afternoon though. If you're listening to this on Monday though, uh, you go down to peach saliva's channel. She'll be streaming it later tonight, uh, around eight or nine. I think she said, uh, go check that, go check that shit out. There you go. Um, as far as I had to stop watching her stream the other day because she was spoiling the game for me.

Yep. Yep. Good. That's exactly it. Branching paths. Exactly. Cause I scraped the whole starting area and she just, she just rode the fucking horse all the way as far as it would go into an area I had not been.

And I was like, well, yeah, um, mine is going as well. We're streaming, uh, basically the plan is to do, um, Tuesdays and double Thursdays. So we're going to do, uh, um, a regular length Tuesday stream and then a giant big boy stream for Thursdays and then, uh, episodes are going to be going up ASAP, of course, in two hour chunks. Uh, that's the plan for now. We might even put more time in depending on the pace. So right now it's going to be like more or less two and a half sessions a week.

Um, of, of, of, you know, a good couple hours put in. If we can put more in, then we will. Um, and yeah, that's over at, uh, Willie versus, um, and, uh, I would also say that if that all, if you're, if you're looking for more flavoring, uh, Plague of Gripes just started his as well. And my understanding is Plague's, uh, first episode, uh, spends that full time critiquing the character creator and its implications. So that's an entirely different flavor of, of, of play through flavor, if you would.

So yeah, there's all kinds of Elden Ring possibilities out in your future, uh, you decide. Hey, speaking of which, the last thing I want to say totally, uh, apropos of the game, I want to give a shout out to the guy they hired to voice that first cutscene. Cause that dude just screaming, oh, some, uh, like dude, you're killing it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He was way more excited than you're going to lose yourself. Yeah. So the fucking Elden Ring, oh man, why did you break it? Yeah. Why'd you break it? Idiot. You shouldn't have broke it. I think I just found out what the Elden Ring is.

It's complicated. It's actually the shit. It's when you put your, no, it's, it's when you put your fingertips together, right? It's the ring. All right. All right. It's so much content. Oh, I also, last, last thing, I just remembered too, I saw a tweet that was like, yo, guess

what the fucking moonlight greatsword is in this game and it's a fucking trip if you want to get it. So I'm shocked. I can't believe it. Yeah. Of course it's there, but more importantly, the shit you have to do though, you know, I saw a video from a Japanese player earlier today. There's the blood-borne pizza cutter is in the game.

Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. It even has the same weapon art. Nice. Nice. Like it's just set your expectations accordingly, man. Okay.

They got it. They got it all. They just got it all. Did you have anything else of note with the week? I don't know. Okay. That's fine. Yeah.

Fine. Fine. I do because my PC foibles did not end with the PC edition of Elden Ring. Oh, yeah? We played KOF 13 last week on console and, you know, it was fine. Like we know about the little, the input issues, but that's going to be with every unreal game pretty much going forward to be expected. And when I asked to see if people, I keep saying 13, but I mean to say 15.

So you know what I mean. That's what you really want to play. No, 15 is fun. And the deal was some people, when I talked about the, when I asked chat, I was like, guys, so how many of you guys have it and like, are you, you want to play like, what do you want to play on? You know, where's everyone at? And a bunch of people said, we're on PC.

So I said, okay, let me, let me get the PC version and we'll play again next week and I'll play online so that we can get more games with some of you guys because that's a part of what we do. So got that and cracked it open to try and unlock two of the, the extra stages that you get for going through story mode. And boy, oh boy, every single round had stuttering issues and frame drops going around and it was like, this is bad. And then it turns out that like, yep, this is everyone's having this problem.

There are some fixes that may or may not work for you. So you know, there's a couple of people that have some guides out. I think, yeah, like buttons put out like a tweet that had some information that might help you. There's a couple of other sites we looked at and it consists of a lot of like, go into the steam launcher and put in a suffix to make it launch with DX11. Go into your task manager and make sure that all cores are selected and running. Make sure you don't have any background processes going.

Go into your G4 settings, potentially remove NVIDIA, like your G4's experience or whatever. Go to the control panel, limit the frame rate, put a bunch of unique settings on for this EXE specific. And I did all of them. And then I booted the game and it's still fucking stuttered horribly. It works on my PC. And then it was like, all right, what else can we do? Go into one of the INI config files in the game files.

And I think it was like literally put out, it was turn on a couple options, vSync off by default, turn it on, because there's in-game PC options that did not like have that. So it's like, okay, do it via the INI file. Go back in, nothing. Go into the game itself, turn every single aesthetic option off, every PC setting to the minimum, play the game, still not stopping the hiccups, still not stopping the problem. I'm like, at that point, it's fucking done. I'm like, this is done.

This is patch or nothing. And it's not the kind of thing where it's like, oh, this is an occasional issue. It's like every single game has moments that are ranging from a little hiccup to a solid half second of frozen gameplay. Feels awful. It feels like the exact same thing in both games. It fucking sucks, man. And besides the fact that PC is always the fucking butt of the ports, in a situation where

people can't get their fucking hands on a PS5 version or whatever the case is, it's like you need an option for people to play the fucking thing. And universally, across the board, everyone is having this issue with the game, I was willing to put in the time, and after like, I want to save 15 unique setting tweaks to try and fix this problem and seeing no improvement at all over in-game and outside of game tweaks. I'm like, I'm fucking done with this. I'm done with it. Fuck that version of the game.

It's not worth it, console or nothing going forward. And I feel bad for anyone that fucking spent the money only to get this thing, and if you found it a way to get it running smoothly for you on your PC, then that's awesome, man. But this is easily the worst of the modern PC fighting game ports of all recent games, easily. Wow, that's quite the claim. It's trash. It sucks, man.

If it's the type of issue that was not staring me in the face every single game, you could maybe, you know what I mean? Or if there was a way that like, oh, turning it onto DX11 fixed it or whatever the case is, but after the trouble I went through and the fact that it didn't improve it at all, even when you turned the game to its most fucking basic setting, like fuck that. I remember when people with like pretty low end PCs were trying to get Decent Street Fighter 4 running in 2009, and I remember that. By turning absolutely everything off, sometimes they got it into this weird, like, weird GB

3DS looking version of the game, but at least it played smoothly. At least it was consistent, and you didn't have to worry about like fucking freezing up inputs, dropped frames, all that bullshit. It did its job when you turned it into like, you know, when you put it to the most minimum. Here it does nothing. So yeah, and I know that my rig can handle whatever the game is supposed to be putting out, so that's not a question. So just fair warning, man.

This game is really fun, but like, if you can't play it on console, like consider waiting for a fucking patch, because I, you can watch it, you're going to see a difference when we put the episode out, but the second session that we do of KOF 15, the video should be dropping this week. Like, literally, like try to watch a single game and see if you don't run it, if you don't see the freezes every time, you know? I can't, I can't fucking call that okay. That sucks.

It is, it is, it is really, really shit, and you know, this goes hand in hand with like a commitment to them making more unreal games. There's a story this week about the fact that, you know, Sam's show was developed on Unreal and then this is, of course, using it. Sam's show didn't have this problem as far as I know as much, and there's a new thing coming to it, and it's like, we'll see what that is. But yeah, this, this PC port is fucking nowhere near the unacceptable, but still delivered quality that like other PC ports and fighting games have been getting.

So fair warning about that. And last bit is, hey, this sucks. Yeah, not much to say so far, but I started Final Fantasy 6 and it is really cool. The music is incredible and it's really fun so far. There is, isn't it? Yeah, it's a good video game. Oh, that is so good. Really good.

Battle themes, fucking banger. Figaro Castle was hot. I've heard that theme before, I don't know where, but I remember hearing it and it was like, yeah, that's really good. And yeah, you know, it's pretty great. It is funny going back to the ATB system though and kind of realizing that, and you know, similar enough to Chrono Trigger, like active time battle between weight and, you know, active, it only actually makes a difference in a sub-menu.

Yeah, fucking do it. Yeah. So pick an option. Go faster. You know, and then sit there. Do it. It's like an action game, right? This, this, this is, this is a really, this might be the most off tangent thing I possibly

say about FF6, but like it is hitting me just how old that game is, like how astonishingly ancient it is to normal people, not like us old people. And the reason why I say that is a weird Elden Ring story that happened on my stream yesterday where I fought a hand enemy, right? I fought an enemy that was just a hand. And I went, oh, I know this guy. This is May Young's kid. And I was hit with just wild confusion and was informed that that storyline was 22 years

old. Yes. The Attitude Era and May Young and Mark Henry's child being birthed a hand, a hand, was literally legal drinking age. Yeah. And FF6 is older than that 27. That's crazy. So I played that shit in the elementary school.

I was a baby. Oh, yeah, no, these these these time locked references of ours are going to get more and more brutal. Expect them to land on more and more deaf ears, you know, it's going to be rough. But yeah, it's it's it's still pretty fucking cool. What can I say? I look forward to finding out more about about this band of misfits, although it's pretty funny to like right off the bat be introduced to like the trio.

And there's some characters where you see their sprites and you're like, OK, I kind of think I see what you're about. And then you fucking pause it and you look at the portrait in Amano art and it's completely different energy from the sprite. Like I think the I think the wildest is like Tara's arts can't can't decide whether or not her hair is blonde or green. Sure. Yeah, I mean, there's there's like looking at Edgar or Edward Edgar Edgar.

And you you look at and you're like, oh, yeah, he's a he's a king. He's got his armor. He's doing the thing. And then you pause it and you look at the portrait. You're like, oh, my God, he's blonde Gaston, you know, like completely. And who's the guy that's basically in the fucking Xeon uniform again? The he's the I think the old man that you have to like protect for a while. I forget you meet you meet a Bannon, Bannon, Bannon, Bannon.

Yeah, I don't remember who that is. Sorry. OK, well, there's there's there's Bannon, who's like he's basically wearing a Xeon uniform and you're like, oh, yeah, he's a he's a grizzled old dude that's going to, you know, you have to deal with her or whatever. And you look at his portrait art and it's a fucking hobo. It's just this dirty fucking wild haired hobo grump of an old man. And I'm like, oh, my God, like completely changes the.

Oh, he's the head of the returners. That's who that head of the returners. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, Jesus Christ, it's been a bit. Yeah, so it is it is quite important, I suppose, to like make a read on the sprites and then as soon as we can go check that art workout on the pause screen. You know, you know what's one of the weird moments in FF six is like Kefka got like a weirdly high amount of dev time compared to everybody else because you

can feel them, they're so they so wish they had voice acting. So bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I this one character where he gets this high end SFX sound effect for his laugh that only he has. Yeah, the vibe is there for sure. And I feel like what was the other bit to the. Oh, with this remaster as well, some gorgeous, like beautiful fucking sprite work on display with the remaster.

There's. Shit, what the fuck was I about to say? It's good. Damn it. Not Kefka, not the sprites. Oh, yes, the speed of the game has also been drastically changed in a way where your walking speed is like, I don't know, I guess, like two or three times what it used to be. So that's great.

It was a little slow back in the day. So now your running speed is like, fuck this, like practically like flying around the map. So then you get an item that gives you like even faster movement and you just and it just becomes emulator on fast forward mode. Teleporting sick. Yeah, you literally you don't you don't have to deal with anything if you don't want to rules.

And there's a lot of like in like prompts and interactable things like walls, secrets and all that bullshit and like understandable at the time certainly like that that was all hidden exploration. But this time around, it's like there's an exclamation mark that appears if you should press a here. If there's an interactable of any kind with this like one bookshelf as opposed to the five that didn't have anything, there's a little interactable that's like, hey, yeah, yeah, press the button.

Oh, that's nice. I like it. I like it because look, we all know we can just walk around and press A on every bookshelf until you get the right one. Or we can just fucking get we know, we know, it's fine. Keep it moving. That's not why I'm here. You know, I want to read the books that have a thing on it, please.

Yeah. So that's that's a nice improvement as well. What was also pretty wild too is I found there's a there's because you don't have there's like secret pathways behind buildings and cave corners and shit. So I found where yes. So I found one where you have to kind of like originally you had to walk in the dark and then like walk in all directions until you navigated to like

a secret treasure room. And now they kind of just make the invisible pathway appear, which you know, I mean, it could have gone either way. I could get that. Yeah, I guess it's just to, you know, smooth that over with, you know, you know, you could have that that could have gone either way on it. But they've made they've made changes like that to the game as well. So hopefully I don't I'm assuming that there will be more of those.

And if there are complicated ones that are really, really bad later on, then that feature would be a blessing. But for now, it seemed like there was a straightforward one I saw. But quality of life stuff in the pixel remaster is good. So yeah, FF six continues alongside Elden Ring and of course, Sifu, which I've beaten and then I've beaten with the true, you know, pathway or whatever. The the the true ending. The Wuda.

The yes, the Wuda, the Wuda and not much to say that hasn't been already covered. Game's excellent. I feel that they're like the implications of the endings are something that I feel like in order to perhaps be faithful to the philosophy they're referencing, there's a little bit of openendedness that was chosen to be open ended. And I still haven't done it, but I want to read up on like that exact ideology and like what it would mean in a story like this, because it

definitely feels like a deliberate choice was made to give you some answers and imply things, but not all of them in order to perhaps remain faithful to, you know, the philosophy that they're they're they're introducing and discussing here. So yeah, I'm but I fucking loved it. And I will be doing runs in my spare time. And maybe one day we'll pop it back in and do like a nice little like, hey, here's a clean run of this game.

Well, there's a hard mode coming. So that'd be a perfect time for that. Cool. Just load it up on hard mode and go, OK, guys, the stream's going to be a clean run. Never played hard mode before. Let's do it. Oh, God.

And then you'll just do it. No problem. Well, I guess the question is, is it a damage modifier or is it an enemy remix? You know. One of those things is not like the other. No. So yeah, all of that continues over on Willie versus. So yeah, check it out if you want to watch it.

It's a fucking guess what, guys? There's like all amazing games. We're in a we're in a time of really good. Yeah, it's a good spot. It's a real good fucking spot. Sorry, Horizon. Yeah, what are you going to do? Oh, no, it's it's it's the nature of the fucking industry.

It sucks. But and oh, shout outs to Trey Allen as well for the FF six intro that we got. That's pretty cool. And yeah, I made I made a little logo of of of of of me and Reggie and FF style that we're going with on that. So all that fun stuff over on the channel, Willie versus on Twitch and on YouTube. Cool. That's about it.

Quick break and then. Yeah, let's take a quick break. The rest. B.R.B. Yeah, I just got a little update here. I suppose some pseudo breaking news of a response about the KOF PC issues. I was just talking about apparently there's been an official message on the Steam forums saying that they're investigating some of the issues on PC.

They're currently investigating one sided rollback, lag spikes, fair players, fair play score issues, matchmaking issues, general crashes, visual issues on PC and keyboard problems. Funny enough, I did not run into online issues when I played it. Uh, it was the DX stuff, you know, so that is, I guess, going to be considered visual issues on PC is what they say. But oh, yay, whatever. Um, I hope you I hope you do that.

In the meantime, until that is the case, uh, I I'm going to strongly advise against people, uh, getting that PC version, uh, get it on console if you can, or wait for a fix here. If you don't want to run into what appear to be pretty consistent issues, you know, um, yeah, all right, what is going on sponsors are going on. Dude, I love our sponsors. This week podcast is sponsored by Stitch Fix and Stitch Fix is in the business of making you not as ugly as you know you are.

Oh, because deep down you're, you're tarnished, aren't you? Well, but yeah, you're pretty tarnished. You're pretty unkindled and chosen, undead. And what else do we want? What else we got there? Uh, we got chosen. Oh God, in chosen, undead bearer of the curse slayer of demons, um, unkindled ash, unkindled ash, uh, hunter, hunt.

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I can't believe. I can't believe like how the cultural impact of a guy going, oh, you got no maidens, huh? No pathetic. It's not just that. It's the timing because it's the timing of you are alas, you are a maiden list, right? At the same time as a fucking mega mind meme where it's where it perfectly

timed with no bitches, no bitches, no bitches, right? That dropped in sync with Elden Ring. So it just naturally goes there, right? Similar, similar parallel thinking. Everybody came up with the same joke. Touch grace because touch grass is currently in the, in the air, right? It's the, it's the overlap of both. Everyone's on the same page with these things.

So make no mistake, it's, it's, it's the timing. Now, uh, that being said, uh, what else is going on in the news? Well, for one, pretty exciting confirmation that Ultimax is going to get rollback. Whoa. Yay. They didn't completely and early botch it and they waited to see if monitors would fix it and they're not gonna. So they're going to do it themselves.

So, uh, persona for, uh, arena Ultimax, the re release comes out on the 17th of March and in summer, uh, 2022, they're going to start, uh, they're going to drop the rollback update. So it's not going to launch with rollback. It's going to get rollback, uh, in about, uh, two months later. I assume there's going to be only buy it then. I assume there's going to be an open beta test at that point. Um, so, uh, yeah, yay, yay, yay.

Uh, and then there were two. And then there was dragon ball fighters and I, under night in birth question mark, maybe who knows? No, brand new fantasy as well. There's a couple. It's not just, it's not just two. It's a couple of games. There's a couple of games, but as far as the Arcsis side of things go, um, there,

they've cleaned up their fucking shelf. Right. Um, they've cleaned up their shelf and they're, uh, the, the only thing that, that really needs that attention right now, I would say is, is dragon ball. Excerpt, of course, is a thing you can consider, but you obviously know why that's not happening. Yeah. Cause they want to push, uh, grand blue fantasy versus you like, you, if you say

excerpt, it's like, yeah, uh, yeah, but you know, you know, you want, you know that answer. So let's be real here. It's not about excerpt. It's, it's, it's, it's about something like, like dragon ball that fucking, you know, uh, uh, absolutely needs that right now. An excerpt will probably maybe some, at some point, get it down the line when excerpt is seen the way, um, accent core is seen now.

Right. So yeah, you're going to have to wait for them to basically decide to not push strive. Um, when they put out a new, if they put out the rollback and the DBZ, just, just give us a new character and put it on sale for 10% and pretend like the game came out again and it will come out again. I just pack in lab coat 21 and everything that's dropped since actually. Yeah.

Just, just do that because they haven't done that. That's all still season stuff. So slam it all together and add another Goku. I'm sure you can find one. Yeah. Uh, driver driving license test Goku. Not kid Goku from dragon ball with the stick. Not GT.

Not GT kid Goku. The other one. Find a way to make, uh, Uzaru playable. I'm just thinking, uh, one of its, what if it's, uh, regular Goku from world's strongest without the sleeves? That's a new Goku. That's a new character. That's a new Goku.

Uh, anyways, yeah. So, so that's, that's good news. Um, and then, uh, while we're talking fighting games at the same time, uh, there was a, an announcement that, uh, Evo 2022 will not have any smash, uh, participant, uh, probably will not have any smash games. And, uh, further details have revealed it. It's mainly because of Nintendo, actually. Um, it might be because Sony, uh, is now part owner of Evo, or it might be because

Nintendo just partnered up with Panda Global to do a series of competitive events. It could be probably a little bit of both, you know? I'm certain all that mess with the stuff with Smash Bros' competitive scene didn't help either. Certainly not. Um, but, you know, it's, again, it's not like, uh, Evo went unscathed in that same regard, uh, but yeah, hopefully, you know, uh, with, uh, with, uh, the new people around, Pokemon and, uh, and Rick, the Hadoo, it's, uh, it's gonna be fine.

But, uh, Smash is going its own, its own direction. And, uh, as you say that it's going its own way, going its own way. Smash is going its own way. But, uh, as, as the, you know, discussed, uh, earlier, well, I talked about this with Reggie a bit and it's, and it is true that like Smash definitely has never needed Evo or anything like that. It's a very huge series of events and it's a huge community that's, that's always, no, it needs soap.

Evo has never been the biggest Smash event. Um, you know, uh, just considering their own majors. Like it's always been a major, but not as much as, as, as some of the other ones are the question, though, I guess I'm, I'm left with is, um, long term. Go ahead. No, I'm sorry. I just saw the phrase smell towel in the chat and it just, it just, it hit me about as hard as anything's ever hit me.

That would have been a spit tank if I had been. Anyway, so the, um, the, the thought I have is that in the long term, Smash and, and fighting games have enough in common that, um, it would be beneficial. I don't even know if I should, does it even matter? Should I even keep talking? You want to, I got you. No, it's good. Okay.

Uh, anyway, my, my, all I'm trying to do is that, uh, in the end, um, a bigger thing that is like all encompassing of everything fighting game related and that like starts to like become a larger event, would it be necessary for all fighting games and smash and a lot of competitive stuff that, you know, isn't currently in that grouping to come together. Um, and like, you know, it's, it's, it's fighting games. So it's never going to be the international or anything like that. No, but I think in terms of like the way outside, um, outside, uh, viewers look

at the whole thing, um, there's more power in, in working together. And, uh, I, you know, I, while both are going to be fine on their own and at bare minimum, they just need to be tournaments. Right. They don't, the giant spectacle aspect of it is not the priority. The priority is a bunch of people coming together, entering a bracket and playing it as long as that's, well, that's not Nintendo's priority. Obviously, which is what it's, it's always the problem.

Yes. So I think this is, um, this is, uh, you know, harmful from a spectator growth perspective, but, uh, in terms of just like the health of their respective scenes, it's, it's fine. It's totally fine. You know, um, get a piece of paper, get some stations, write some names down, run a bracket, you know, anyway, uh, so yeah, Nintendo. I, I, I, if the result of them deciding to do this is that they actually take their

fucking scene seriously and they get a bunch of good events going with Panda Global, then good, you fucking crazy. Uh, if that happens, but that's, I think what would have, I think what, what a lot of that would be reliant on is Nintendo going, yeah, I don't know. You guys take care of it and tell us what we need to sign and where to put our logos. You know, and then they'll show up at the last second and be like, no, yeah, we told you to have this event. No, bad.

Stop it. Nintendo has a long history of partnering with, with tournament organizers to set up events only to pull it out at the last second to make it so that these, these fucking things just don't happen. It was incredibly surprising to see them partner up here to begin with this, that they're even going this route. Yeah, they're going to fuck this company over for, for no reason other than to punish people for wanting to have a smash tournament.

And, uh, if that happens again, it won't be the first or second or third time. And smash will just be like, all right, back to doing it on our own anyways, you know, so, um, we will, we'll fucking see if Nintendo is going to do it a little different this time or not. Spoiler alert, they probably won't. They should just, and Nintendo should host it. And then I can do it. Nintendo should just host a tournament and hide a little thing in the

byline of the tournament that nobody reads when you sign up. And then during grand finals, they should just lock the doors and make everyone turn in their phones and just arrest all of them. I see. I was wondering where this was going. Okay. The, um, the thing that, uh, you know, it's gone. It's gone.

I don't remember. Oh yeah, that's it. Um, if there's, it's the same core, uh, ingredients is needed to make any of these partnerships work is someone with whoever they're partnered with, whoever the company they're working with, someone who understands and can basically bring to them the non-negotiable things that, that these events would need and kind of be like, look, if you want to get the results you want out of this, which is marketing and popularity, you're going to

need to acknowledge these concessions. You're going to need to not do these things, you know, someone to just play clear, like hardball that's familiar and goes like, and, and, and, and says like Nintendo, this is, you can't, you can't do things the way you want it. You know, we're, we're dealing with a smash tournament here. We need at least three ball pits and an ice cream machine. All right. And if we don't have those, it's just not going to happen.

Okay. Uh, what else is going on? Couple other things. We mentioned the new third SNK title, whatever that's going to be using the Unreal Engine. I don't expect that is going to be any old franchises miraculously coming back. I imagine that's going to be the only other franchise that SNK is probably willing to spend this kind of money on metal slug.

Yeah, they've got a really excellent metal slug stage in 15. That's like really wholesome. I can see it. I, it's, it's the other money making franchise, you know, um, and that's the kind of game that could definitely use, um, you know, uh, some new, some new treatment, the stuff that they've been putting out has been all these little mobile things that are not really the experience metal slug fans want. And if you were to spend a whole lot of money, cause like the Unreal Engine

games, they didn't, they didn't interview with, um, Unreal for like why they're using the engine and such. And, you know, the, clearly they're like, they're putting the, the time and money into stuff that they believe is going to help, you know, sell. So if it's going to be a metal slug game, it can't just be, um, a traditional coinop, uh, a shooter can, you know, sold on console. I would imagine you would see the metal slug formula, um, perhaps updated into something, maybe roguelite, you know?

Oh, that'd be cool. Um, yeah, yeah, just a metal slug, a game that uses the language of metal slug, but with a genre that would last longer, that, you know, we've seen, exactly, you've seen things that, that come along, that work really well with that, obviously. And have the Ikari warriors be unlockable. Come on. Well, yeah, they've been in there for the last couple.

I know. Yeah. All of them. Yeah. Ralph Clark and Leona at the very least have been in there since like, uh, fucking five, I think. Um, but yeah, so you're, you're, I can see them, you know, looking at shit, like Slay the Spire and enter the gungeon and all these other games where

you're like, Oh yeah, we can just run around and shoot, but just make it so that when you beat the boss, it, you connect to like a new larger randomly generated thing and you have a reason to go back in and you get permanent upgrades and stuff, you know? Um, and then of course the other genre to look at would be something more online battle royale oriented, but I don't think SNK is going to, I mean, they could, but that's a very expensive, risky route. Uh, I could, I could just see Metal Slug coming back more like, you know,

gungeon style. That'd be nice. Yeah. Um, and if you're not looking into it, then that's a freebie. Fucking do it. Other things going on. Near automata has just been confirmed for anime fucking sick. New soundtrack, not much else to say, or not, or not new soundtrack.

Oh, come on. Give me a new soundtrack. Okay. But remix the classics, just, you know, way to the world. I mean, that's going to be in there, but that counts as a new soundtrack. Even if it's a remix soundtrack. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. True, true. It's, it's, it's, it's good. Uh, I wonder if this is going to be the new Netflix style thing of like, you know, uh, 13 episodes, maybe 10. And if you can get it all in there, cause I feel like I'm down for brevity, but I feel like automata probably maybe not needs, but deserves a full 26.

You know, I feel like if you're going to tell that story and like give enough, um, give enough weight, quote unquote, to all the side quests and characters, it would benefit. I think that if they want to really, really do that story well, they need to make it unwatchable in its format. Just to embrace the full tarot. I think episodes one through eight should be the same as episodes nine through 16, except the camera moves over.

Okay. As long as you're not going full fucking Haruhi with it. Yep. Um, give it the full 26, give it multiple endings, let it all come together. Couple other things going on this week. Include this. Okay. I have to, I have to, uh, yeah, I'm going to shout this out.

So, um, excellent video from, uh, let me get the name correct. Uh, whoops. Sorry. Power pack on YouTube has a video called Babylon's fall is depressingly bad. Oh, I watched that. And this is, uh, a video that has, uh, about 20 minutes to explain to you what is happening with Babylon's fall. Now, I remember last time we talked about it, you touched on some

of the shit that was going wrong with the old and new versions of the game and how it all fucking went to shit. And I was like, whoa, I missed the, the gameplay betas that, that, that, uh, bunch of people had, uh, this video summarizes essentially a new beta came out on the same day as Elden Ring and same fucking day. And, uh, it allowed you to, to jump into the demo and feel what was going on. And oh my God, it's so much worse than I thought. I can't, that looks like a, how do I put this?

You know how people say this thing looks like a PS2 game? Hmm. That game looks like a first generation, first year Xbox 360 launch title by a Japanese developer. I, here's why I disagree because it doesn't look, I'm like, sometimes the metric for quality is not how old it looks. Sometimes it's just, it looks like a modern day game that looks terrible because you put no effort into it.

I specifically use that example because that is what the textures look like. The textures look non-existent on filters. They have put on them, make the shitty textures look way worse, which makes me confused. Older games with any kind of resemblance of texture work look better than this. This, it looks like a game that just like had to be rebuilt after the original version they put their effort into was scrapped, you know. So yeah, basically it goes on to explain, PowerPack goes on to explain that

like step one of this demo, press start, create your Squeenix account. Now somebody who has made a Squeenix account for myself and I made one for Paige, the Square Enix account system is without a doubt the absolute worst account system of all. It's, it is the worst. Yeah. And, and, and the, the, the same, the question of did I make one or did I not make one years ago?

I don't, I must have, maybe I did, I don't know. And then it's like, yeah, go figure that out. Because literally you cannot get anywhere in this game without your Square Enix, your Squeenix account. You must be logged in and there is no like offline, you know, solo, whatever. Um, and then it's like, okay, you, you, you, you see, uh, you log in and then you get into the game and then they've mentioned that you should be able that if you want to, you can play this solo.

You don't have to play with the four player online co-op stuff, but it doesn't balance itself any differently. It balances the exact same if you're a group of four or if you're solo. So what you end up with is just these really long slogs of hard to kill mobs of enemies and like, and it's also hallway, battle room, hallway, battle room. Like it's such a fucking mess. Um, so I have a question for you, Willie. What is the first time you personally remember encountering adaptive

difficulty for multiplayer? Probably souls for me, it was December 31st, 1996, when Diablo one came out and a person joined my game and it said Diablo's minions have gotten stronger. Hmm. This has been a solved problem for longer than most of the people listening to this podcast have been alive. I genuinely don't understand. Like if you were to, if I were to play this demo and I got to that point and

realized it did not scale, that's the point where you just turn it off and leave because you know the whole rest of the game is totally pointless and stupid. Exactly. So that's the thing is step one is that you run into that problem immediately. Um, and then it goes into how bad the game looks and you see how it looks so fucking trash would like just like the, it's, it's, it's cobbled together. Um, and then anytime you cut back to the original footage of the game, Platinum was going to make Sway better.

It looks incredible. It looks fucking great. You know, um, so yeah, you know, you see that version of it and then you can, you can read between the lines and tell that Screenix goes, yeah, that's not the kind of game we want you to make. We want you to make a live service online thing that can make a lot of money when people buy microtransactions, the gas effect, the thing that I told you, I was there and I heard the meeting and I saw the, the doc, the stuff in the pitch

and everything's got to gas up, gas up, you know. So in this case, they told them base, it made, it looks like they told them go back to the drawing board and like salvage what you can, but bring us back something that is prioritizing a four player online structure, live service. And then also, um, the, what that brings is like this insane thing where you beat one grindy level, you get a fraction of an experience point towards leveling up. Um, and, uh, what was the other detail?

You, uh, yeah, like there's a bunch of times where queuing up, like if no one is joining your queue, you just get forced into the solo version of the game anyway, where like it's again, unscaled. So you, you, you get, you bet you get forcefully locked out of, or you get forcefully put into like the worst way to play it. When all four people join, it then becomes an unfun slog because everything just kind of melts and it doesn't matter whether you're paying attention or not. Um, and, uh, uh, uh, uh, then there's like, it gets to a point where there's

that one trailer boss from the original trailer, where you saw the big night with the sword swinging it around and then you steal the sword and then you do all the big cinematic effects and you see like slow down and cool down. And like you see sit that looks kind of like Bayonetta, like which time, you know, you see stuff that looks like, uh, near weapon combos and launches and all of that and all of that gets thrown out and turned into like the most bland, uh, shit version of, of like, I guess an MMO boss who does like an arena, what should be an arena clearing attack, but then you as a solo player cannot do enough

damage in time, you know, to it, it's just, it's a great 20 minute thing of like what the fuck is happening with this game. And then all of that, like micro, um, um, incentive and, and bad experience drops and everything is treating the game as if it's free to play when it's a full price game. Totally baffling. And more than that, I mean, Babylon's fall is this weird situation where it's own disaster and it is a total disaster.

Like, I don't know what the fuck they were thinking, even alone, like putting the beta out on the fucking 25th. That's insane. That's baffling. But like its own disaster, not withstanding is like, I remember hearing somewhere that Square Enix said to someone, we want a game that's big like that monster hunter. Uh huh.

And okay, let's look back in time because it's, it's predates that statement or when I heard it, we've got Nazgoth as a gas that killed legacy of Kane and didn't come out. We've got Marvel's Avengers, which is a disaster and they have blown the Marvel license on a pretty fucking important license that was real hot when that game came out, but Pat, we have Outriders, a game I was sponsored to play and which its demo was actually hot and then its full release was a fucking mess and now we have this where they're telling the other studios to make their

own games into it again. And it's confusing because they have FF 14 over there, which is a form of gas. It's a live service game. It's an MMO and it makes all this money and then they take this money and they go, well, we want another one and they just make bad ones over and over and over. That's four. But it's four. Yes, but if you keep rolling the dice, eventually it'll hit and pay for the

failures. No, it won't. No, we keep going because when we strike gold, we strike gold. It doesn't matter. Throw them all in the garbage, burn through developers, burn through their, their fucking good work, burn through IPs, light it all on fire. The one that takes off will be fucking fortnight-esque and it'll pay for all the rest.

But they already have that. We want another one. They're not clearly he's not allowing us to get in. I learned last week that, you know, he's keeping them at bay. Yo, she's keeping them at bay. Shada is literally, he's holding them up. So what they, their fingers need to be in pies and if the big pie of FF 14 cannot be fingered by them, then we need to find many little pies to get the fingers in.

You know what I'm, you know what I'm reminded of? I'm reminded of the night where the nightmare of Hollywood and casting and scripts and then a new producer comes on. And then the new producer wants his writing credit and his production credit. So he fires everyone that's already been cast and he orders a complete script rewrite so that he can say that it was his project and that exceeds it, it succeeded because of him and with Yoshi P on the board and Yoshi P being the creative director and the head of business unit three, no one but Yoshi P can ever take

credit for anything in that department. Yeah. So if you're on the board of Square Enix or you're a producer or you're an executive producer and you want your project to make the money, it has to be all you and it has to be a new team and it has to be. Oh, it's it's a a scaled out version of the punch up effect of when you hire in writers to punch up something that doesn't need punching up, you know. Well, I won't say I did my part and that's why I.

If I don't or if you want to do merit, if I don't do anything and tell them this is good, I won't get hired again. Yeah, right. One of my favorite game dev stories that I've heard from a bunch of game devs in various forms is the put in garbage features that suck so that the producer from the company will tell you to take it out and so they can feel important. I did it. I made that decision.

No, no matter what you show these people, something has to change so they can feel good about themselves. Yeah, so literally jam shit in there just to have it taken out. I mean, it's the the the other version of the the Mel Brooks strategy, you know, like just just either just don't just lie lie or put the fake thing in and give it to them. You got to feed them something. You got to feed them something.

They need something. I forget what it was, but I think there was some game in which they put like some horrible sound effect or like hats on the characters that was just like just visually awful and the producers just goes, yeah, it looks good. Just fucking take that thing out. They're like, no problem, boss. Yeah, we got it. It is like going to continue until, you know, like there's there's there's no

way out of this spiral. I don't think as long as they don't have a winner on their heads, like the next one, we're putting it all in on the next one. And what's fucking tragic, of course, is one, you're never going to get to see or play the original version of this game that Platinum had going. And two, Platinum is proven that they can deliver the type of game that screenings would need here because they did this. They did fucking an amazing job on near so they know that they're trusted here.

But this is what happens when you take them and you handcuff them. People in the chat have reminded me that the it was ducks flying around the Queen's head in battle chest that was the birth of that story. Hell yeah. Just take the duck out. I can only imagine the state of internal discussion about this game in Osaka. Oh, you want to you want to right now see something real fucking depressing? Like what in what is he?

Does does the Camilla just walk by the team working on this game and just just throw things, you know, like what is how bad is it? There's a tweet up that that's like, here's the early access times when you can play the game of Babylon's fall, right? It has like 90 likes and the games out. Like it couldn't be cared less. Thank you, darling. Anyway, it's a great video.

And yeah, I just retweeted it. It definitely caught me up to speed on what was happening because I fucking damn that game they were going to put out looked like it was just going to be that's a platinum, you know, and then the idea was like you have the floating weapons of near, but you use them all simultaneously. Seemed to be the the main draw. Power pack streams here right now. Hey, man.

Hey, that's cool. What's up? Anyway, I just tweeted out your your thing. Good job. Good job. Taking the hits so that we don't so that we don't have to exactly man out there in the trenches. Good stuff.

Good stuff. So criminally underwatched video to go watch it. Go give him some go go fucking go help him out. So latin is really looking forward. They're taking this experience and they're going, man, we really want to do lots more live service games, huh? Dude, that company is going to die. Like we always knew it would die, but I feel like it's we're watching it die

right now. I can save them. No, you fucking I could save them. Well, they're putting out games that even you and I, massive platinum marks are like actively mocking and as a news story on the podcast instead of, hey, this is what I played this week. I mean, they at the very least that article turned out to not be as bad. It is initially sounded, right?

Like about the, the, the focus change for the future. Anyways, folks, I think it's, I think it's, it's the shackles of a shit publisher will always be their nightmare. Like it's straight up, like whether it be scale bound, whether it be Sweeneyx, uh, whether it be, um, uh, to fucking the, the, uh, Ninja Turtles, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's brutal every time someone has to come in and tell them what to do about that shit, but at the same time, like left to their own devices

making the amazing game, if they're not selling anywhere near the numbers they need to, then something else has to change and we get into the same depressing conversation again. First of all, they need the money to make that amazing game, which they don't have because their games don't sell. Yep. That's, that's what I'm getting at, you know, so, um, anyway, that's, that's looking forward to that astral chain sequel, the ending teased.

That's what's going on with Babylon's fall. Uh, some other stuff is happening. How about a Pokemon scarlet and violet? So I saw that, I saw a guy tweet right after the, like within an hour of the news of smash bros, not, um, going to be an EVO anymore. He's like, watch, they're going to announce the new Pokemon tomorrow. And sure enough, sure enough, that is way faster than I thought they were going to announce the next gen games.

Um, I guess it was all just being developed in sync. And here's the thing now is if this is how quickly the next generation is announced, then that seems like it might not be taking all the lesson, excuse me, all the lessons from our chaos or whatever. Oh, no. Oh, it's going to be like everything that everyone loves about Arceus is going to be not in this one. And I first see many people going right back to Arceus.

I wonder if the implication on that trailer was we're not going to show you the combat so that we can, we can hold that off because the combat is going to be what tells you what this is going to be like, right? It's open world. They say it's open world in the description. Um, and it seems to imply that it's like you're going to have at the very least, uh, an environment that resembles, uh, what you're getting in Arceus in terms of your ability to just wander into things.

Uh, but it's just a question of like, what's it going to be once a fight starts, I suppose, you know? Um, I'm sure your Pokemon, I'll go, and then do a fun thunderbolt or some shit. Yeah. I, you know, I guess, uh, uh, and this is, this is me, you know, of course, fully coming at this from the outside, who's like, you know, not currently dipping toes into Pokemon. So, you know, my take my opinion for what it is, but that, uh, that, that

dream of the, of the, of the forest game, the ability to look up all that shit. Um, with the impressions you were giving me of, of, of how much fun Arceus was this, you know, despite the looks and such, it's kind of like, okay, they're moving in the right direction. So the next, if you want that fantasy, go play Elton. So the next gen, the next proper gen is going to move in that direction too. And you know, they're saying this is open world. So, um, and it, it looks like it could be.

So, you know, let's, let's wait to see more. Uh, let's wait to see more, I suppose. But yeah, um, shout outs, Donald Duck. Yeah, it's just Donald Duck, huh? We're, we're just going Donald Duck and we're going to Spain this time, right? We're going to Spain and we're going to Donald Duck and we get some fucking dramatic shit, some fucking dramatic Spanish shit with Pokemon. Yeah.

Clothing colors. No, I mean, like soap opera. Sure. Telenovela style. I want, I want, I want the storyline to just be a telenovela. Okay. Down to the music in the, in the, oh, yeah. I, uh, that's what I want.

Like, you remember when, when, when Sword and Shield was in England and everybody was like, there was like the Scottish trainer and all that shit. Yeah. All the game didn't have any of that crap. And then all, but all the memes took a life of their own. Yeah. Yeah. No, do it.

Fucking do it. Well, that's gonna, so that is a particular unique relationship that, um, Pokemon as a franchise has with art Twitter specifically Pokemon and art Twitter are chained and linked together. And it just nothing creates, uh, uh, its own reality of, of, of a meme verse like Pokemon does people will instantly create characters out of what little they're given, you know? Um, damn, you see those textures though?

Mm hmm. Those textures though. Yeah. Well, wow. It's, it's a, it's, it's shiny metal. I really feel like. Man, nevermind. All right.

I'm, I'm, I'm always like, I'm always aware of any time I talk about this stuff and like what's happening with Pokemon that like, I'm also someone who's, you know, pretty much outside the franchise. Like, I've, I've peaked my head. Do you even know which Pokemon is the most like, no, I peaked, I peaked my head and I don't, I don't know the answers to anything. Okay. Well, um, I mean, look, you want to sit here and smash or pass 800 fucking Pokemon?

Oh, that's Eli's job. Yeah, exactly. So, uh, no, I, I, I genuinely am like, look, I've, I've, I've played the original and then I dipped my toe in here and there whenever something's interested me and, um, I, I, I, oh, I hope this does the thing that, you know, it should have been a while ago. That's, that's pretty much it. But, uh, if you're like woolly, you're, you're valid and your opinion is invalid

on this franchise, you're correct. I agree with you. I'm never more empowered than when I say something stupid and I look over and all of a sudden a chat starts going at triple speed and it's all just people screaming, shut the fuck up, shut up, shut up. Oh, it's powerful. It's, oh, it makes my heart grow three sizes like the Grinch. It's so powerful.

Like I want to get up on a stage and have a drunk guy in the back. Yell at me to get off the stage. Yes. You, you've, you have carved out a space in which your entire power source is that no one will ever take you seriously. It is, it is, it is infinite guile with his hands out as the apple cores are being thrown at him in the ring. Oh yeah.

That is, oh yeah. That is the, that is the source, that is the source of your power. Give me the apples. Yeah. Absolutely. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. I have to sit here and be a mere mortal accountable to the things I say and, and

taken seriously the other day, the other day, the other day I was talking to somebody and they felt down and having a rough day and I was like, you know what you should do? You should just go on social media and make up some outrageous lie. That's obviously nonsense. Just to make a bunch of people mad and then they're going to be so mad and you're going to be like, I can't believe you're mad about this stupid thing. I just made up and they were like, like what?

I'm like, like rats not being able to swim. Exactly. You just say it and a certain percentage of people just lose their fucking minds. Even though it's the most obvious lie I've ever told my life. Oh yeah. You just say it over and over. They just lose it. The fact, the fact that you just like no cap, you know, on that, the fact that you

just like broke a fabe doesn't matter. The next time you say it doesn't even matter. I'm just going to lie about it later and it'll still work. Not everybody can hear. Not everyone cares. It is what it is, you know? No, it's powerful, man. It's powerful shit.

What else is going on? I was joking, though. They can't swim. There you go. A couple other things, although, um, I think it only, I didn't, blah, when I, when I first started, just heard the announcement and I was like, what is the link between violet and scarlet? And is it literally just that they end with let?

Because every other thing saw some weird quote is that was like, why isn't it scarlet in Asia and will you'll hear more about that later? Which I don't know. Cause you know, like sword shield and then X, Y and blue, red and, you know, the two things where as here it feels like it's more just that they both have let in them. I don't know. Apparently it has something to do with the old Spanish flag.

Oh, it's also referential. Okay. There are the colors of the Spanish flag are red and purple with yellows. I see. I see. Oh, that's nice. I don't know what the Spanish flag looks like. I hope it's not one of those lame European flags.

Oh, it's not. Cool. You mean like all the ones with the union jack in the corner? Like half of Canada's met the one's provincials, all the, all the ancient European flags that are like, we got two colors. We got three colors, the tricolors, the tricolors. Yeah. The one where I can't tell the difference between Italy and the other Italy.

Sure. There's two Italian flags that are the same, but apparently they're different. I can't tell. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, there's, there's, there's a bunch of tricolors that are, you know, like, and the some that have like a slightly brighter blue or a slightly deeper red and such. Yeah.

But no, like all, all of the provincial flags of Canada that are just like fucking Union Jack in the corner is just like, ah, boo. Union Jack's cool as its own flag, as its own thing, not as a staple. Exactly. That's exactly it. As its own thing, it's it's dope and it works great as a bandana or a pattern for the back of a jacket or a leather glove. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't like it's too busy for like a corner, a corner.

Yeah. Anyways, um, we've got, uh, Gabon, who's out there saying, uh, fuck your NFTs, I'ma deliver your steam decks in person. Yeah. He also goes into more detail as to why a steam tried Bitcoin and then fucking immediately gave up on having Bitcoin work through their store. 50% of transactions were fraudulent.

Uh, in a 50% in addition to the fluctuations causing most, uh, customers to be extremely unhappy with the rates that games were being sold at. So yeah, cause they'd have a situation where, okay, one in two transactions are going to have to be fucking thrown out or some shit. And then of the remaining, there's people that are losing their mind because a game that was like 10 dollars yesterday becomes a hundred dollars today. And it's like, it's a fucking mess. So useless.

Uh, he did that, uh, interview explaining the decision. And then people who were, uh, on the early list of, uh, steam deck, uh, pre-orders in Seattle were hand delivered, uh, their steam decks by Gabon who walked up and gave him over for free, signed a copy and handed him off. And also gave, uh, if Gabe showed up to my house, I'd be afraid he was going to cut me with his knife or crowbar. Are you, no, you're not familiar with the knife thing. He's got like this wall of knives in his office.

Okay. Like he's crazy. He's a knife guy. Oh, you know, these, these murders and stabbings, they take time, right? I am there. What was cool, I guess was the, the, the side story to that picture that went up, which is like him on someone's door alarm camera where he, uh, was like walking up to deliver to someone and then the guy's neighbor recognized him and went like,

Oh, hey Gabe. And then he went back to the truck and then just gave him and his, his friends, some steam decks too. So it seems like it's some promotional thing. Basically there's like a camera crew that there was following where he's handing them out, but, uh, yeah, all right. Let's see how the fucking steam deck runs KOF 15. That's a real test.

I saw a bizarre Elden Ring headline, which was from the movie, which was from software pledges to fix stuttering on the steam deck for Elden Ring. And I'm just like, yeah, no, yeah, I did. So when I restarted on console, I ran into a bug where one of those bats that like flies around or whatever, you know, in the overworld evening, that's or whatever. Well, no, they were on the daytime. Anyway, one of those bats, I fucking did a jump attack on it and slammed it

through the ground and then it was alive under the fucking earth and following me. I had a, I had a, I was, uh, fighting a wolf on like a staircase and I was on like the, I was on the staircase part and it was on the flat part in the landing. And then we like rotated around, but the wolf never interacted with the staircase. So I walked straight through it and then I stabbed its face. Yeah. Um, I don't, I usually don't mind when, when souls, games, enemies get fucking janked up and then you can stab them through the wall.

But in this case, I could not. It was under the ground and making noises, fluttering. And it was, I hated it. When I was fighting, uh, the Agile Dragon, uh, it kept like doing a jump backwards to get more space, but I was fighting it too close to the cliff side. So it would hit the top of the cliff and go like 45 degree angle and get stuck there and start doing all of its, it would do all of its animations at an angle. And I had, it took me like 40 minutes because I couldn't get it down from there,

but it was still dangerous. Fucking weird. Yeah. Um, that's happening with the steam decks. Uh, some good news. Um, hundreds of temporary QA testers at Epic have been offered full time roles. Oh, that's nice. So maybe they can fix the store.

Maybe they can fix the store with full time testers on the team. Maybe. Uh, yeah, that is, uh, the, the basic thing that most of the time when I was in, and back in the day when I was early on in, you'd see a rotating door of people coming through that was just there. People are considered disposable, you know, um, it's, it, it's a job that's treated like McDonald's, but it doesn't certainly have to be. And, and, um, the, the, the, the fact that this is happening is fucking again,

more movement in this direction, you know, I, the stories are building momentum. This is great. Um, put some fucking respect on that department's name. It's, it's what saves your ass every single day. Uh, can't wait for QA to get ahold of the Epic NFT integration. You got to test it. How they're non-fungible, except for the fungible part and the fraud part and the scam part.

Well, you're going to have to provide your team with some test tokens, you see. And, uh, and once you take those test tokens and what, what do you mean? They were all transferred to private wallets. Where did they go? Oh, no. Yeah. Go ahead. Just can only imagine like QA just going like, yeah.

Hey guys, just write that it doesn't work at all over and over, like no matter what they do to the implementation, keep bugging it. Sorry, um, looks like we're having some huge problems. You're going to need to send us another ape. We're going to need another ape for, for regression. You know, you know how it is. Yeah. Um, so that is, that's, that's not, not, not much to it.

Just good shit. Um, please respect your. Your teams, uh, and then let's see. Oh, yeah. No, I think those, I think that was it. I think that was it. Really? That's it.

Yeah. Okay. Well, how are you? Oh, my brain just stopped and restarted and my default right now is like, Hey, do you want to talk about more Elden Ring? I mean, there's, there's, I'm no, there's, there's a level of newness, but I, no matter what I'm hearing, I always know there will be unique and more for me to see.

So that's all fine. So you're going to be going stabby, right? Yeah, exactly. So I guess, I guess, yes, uh, the answer to your question is absolutely. And, um, to, to not get into, I suppose, um, anything, uh, whatever, who cares? My plan for my build is to, like I said, recreate the, uh, the enchanted soldier to some degree, um, mainly because what I've seen of, of the, the Cassie stabby is I want, of course, a nice big, strong strength weapon.

That's going to be fun to swing. But I also want the glit blade shit because everything I've seen with glit blade has been awesome. And it's cool. And, and I, and I can tell that there is besides the summon swords that's, that shoot out, there's the, the one that stabs forward. And then there's the one that kind of swings. Oh dude, there's a bunch.

I found like 10 different variations of that. So this is the question is like, what kind of numbers am I building for? Um, and obviously if I got mind restrictions on some of those summons, I want my fucking mind to be able to handle it. I, uh, uh, if, if you want like, uh, uh, any stat advice, I would say like. Only level up the int to use the shit you can use. Yeah. Did that you have.

Yeah. And, uh, you absolutely want to put some points into endurance and, and vigor because like dude, they, it's shit does so much fucking damage. It's crazy. Okay. I was basically, I was basically going to follow my rule of like dumping into strength and then, um, yeah, spell, uh, spell requirements come up. I'll go intelligence.

Um, but now with the, with the thought of duration on mind, like, uh, or, or, or like the summons, I wasn't even considering that aspect as well. Um, but I also don't know what type of like regular ass weapon requirements, not much less like what it's going to be like. You'll just have to go by whatever you find. There is a respect. Mm hmm. The respect is pretty deep in.

I have not found it. I know where it is, but I haven't found it. Have you found any like twin blades? Yeah. How are those? I don't know. Okay. Not built for it.

No. Okay. But there's actually a twin blade, like really close to the beginning, but I, I had to be told where it was because I couldn't figure out how to get through the fucking door because I'm wondering if you like, if you just power stance twin blades, can you just Darth Maul, you know, probably, I imagine so. Um, what about the, so there was a, a spell that was shown off in the, uh, one of the footage things of like enchanted night, just doing a straight up fucking

Kamehameha. Um, yeah, that's, that spells in Dark Souls three, too. I haven't found it, but like, uh, the, the, like weapons and armor and gear and spells are kind of thematic to their location to a degree. Oh, okay. So like the second area is the one with the magic academy and you go there and there's lots of blue crystals everywhere and you find way more spells there. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, fuck then. Well, now I'm like, maybe you should just skip ahead. Maybe I should hunt for the zones that are going to give me what I want. Yeah.

Um, no, I'm, I'm expecting to come across like some fucking awesome strength weapon that'll just be the thing that I feel like using. And I just don't know what it is yet. You know, I have no, like, I found a fucking, uh, glint blade great sword yesterday. The spell art. No, the weapon. Oh, the weapon art is you hold it up and it gets three times as big with like an energy sword and you do a slice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That's, that's yes. Yes. Yes. This is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for summon swords.

I want a summon sword built in every meaning of the word, you know, big, close ones, far ones, skinny ones, tall ones. Uh, a friend of mine was telling me that she found a fucking, a fucking, uh, int magic katana that it's special ability is like a judgment cut. Not even joking. I'm not even joking. Uh, of course it is. So then, so, no, she didn't say judgment cut.

She said dimensional slash dimension slash. Okay. Okay. So what is the requirement on the glint blade you found then? Oh, I don't know. And I don't, I don't even look at the, the int shit. You don't even try out what you can do with the, um, cause you can do the cool shit works because I don't have the stats for it.

You can just see, but you can see the basic move set, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Huh. Um, what about like replacing like, like, for example, the staff I have has no secondary on it, right? Um, yeah, then none of them do.

And, and like the shield, I assume you can, that you can, you can replace and put some shit in there, right? Replace your parry with, uh, whatever. Like, can you take a parry and put it on a great shield? No. Okay. So that things like parry are not going to be transferable. They're just dedicated to the smaller shields.

It's transferable, just not on a great shield. Okay. It'll just be, it'll just be classification. It has to be medium or lower. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Cause I'm just like the crossover of like these abilities and where they can go

on what you can do is like, I'm like, ah, you know, and not only that, but like, um, you, it always defaults to your left hand. And unless you two hand your thing or put your shield away, right? Then it's going to become the right hand ability. Cause I noticed like I had parry up. You have to have, you have to have a skill on the shield called no skill. And then the weapons weapon art will pet, we'll do it. Is that, can you do that anytime or you have to get that?

You have to, you have to go get it. You have to, you have to buy it from a merchant. Oh fuck. And then it passes through to the, to the right hand weapon. So I have a shield right now that has no skills. So whenever I use my weapon, uh, the L two, the webinar goes through. Hmm, to sacrifice a parry for that. Yeah.

No, that's probably worth it if the ability is great. Um, because, uh, I definitely want the ability to do stomp, for example, but without two handing, you know, uh, in the animation though, like it's switched, he does a two handed swing. So does it matter at that point what the animation is? Whether it's tied to a two hand or not? No, I imagine. No, you'll two handed for the animation.

Or if you put it away, it'll, yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, what about talismans? Like it's rings replaced as a single slot. They are rings. They're, yeah, they're just rings. Um, and because you can only wear one to start.

Uh, I beat a boss and it gave me a second slot. Okay. So there's ways, but not. Yeah. And then the network test, you had up to four. It is. So it's, is it, is it just progression then? Just raw progression?

I guess, you know, uh, also same thing with memory, uh, with memory slots. There's no stat that does it. You have, do you find an item that gives you another spell slot? I heard about that. Yeah. Well, I prefer that to, um, wasting stats, uh, uh, 100%. I'd rather, you know, since they're not hard to get. Yeah.

No, I'd rather go acquire these things than, you know, fucking attunement or whatever. So, uh, that's good. Um, I just hope it's not like the, the fourth one is at the 80% mark and there's no getting around it type of thing, you know? Mm hmm. Hmm. Okay.

So, um, I guess what, like, what is your build been? And then what have you like switched from and to? I've, I've been, uh, running, uh, a, I've ran a spear. I've ran a claymore and I started with my regular broad sub, uh, broad sword. And they've all been faith. I've been throwing lightning bolts. I've been throwing fireballs. I've been using dragon abilities.

Ground claw. I've been mostly faith with just enough to equip my equipment. Okay. Um, did you get, did you find the ground claw thing? The, oh, the, yeah, I did. I didn't pick it. So when you get a, when you get a dragon heart to, you know, trade for a dragon ability, uh, it gives you three to choose from.

Uh, once the dragon breath, once the claw and the other's the dragon bite, uh, and you need a heart for each. Hmm. So I picked the flame and I have yet to get a second dragon heart. Um, and then the other thing, I guess, is like, does how, like, does the move set on torrent change completely if you switch to like a spear instead of a sword? No, that's pretty much the same.

Okay. There's some minor differences, but it's pretty much the same. Cause I'm just like, should you have a, us, should you have a mounted weapon in your, in your inventory? No, I, I tried three, four, five, six different weapons on the, on the horse. And it was like, they all had the, the side swing three times and then the big one. I mean, to be fair to from soft, that would be an insane amount of work to like, you know, create a whole new set of like mounted moves as well, depending

on things besides the broad class of the weapon. Okay. So, but it's basically just like born arrow or like the stabs. Yeah. You can also spell cast on the, on the horse. Oh, shit. But you have to put your, uh, you have to put your talisman in your right hand. Spell cast.

Whatever's in your right hand becomes the weapon for the horse. So like, what happens if you do like an AOE thing? Does it just move with you? Or is it just in the spot? Fine. Oh, I've only used like lightning bolt. That's good. It's good on a horse.

That would be a swap hands on the horse. How the fuck do you do that? Oh, serious swap weapons on horseback to left hand. Get the fuck out of here. Damn. That's cool. Hell yeah. Cause yeah, I guess, uh, I'm just imagining like, like certain bosses on horseback with

like the ability to just fly out of like, uh, uh, you know, attack range or whatever. Exactly. It would just like completely change everything. Um, and stamina is not the same consideration at all at that point. No, instead of how many jumps do I have left? Well, one or two. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I frames anywhere though, right? Uh, only getting on and off the horse. So yeah. Getting hit. Oh, I have a tip for Torrent, but it's not about fighting things. Um, because, uh, so Torrent's double jump is omnidirectional. So you can use it to get directly above or directly below yourself by jumping and then doing a 180 to the area above or below you.

Oh, I see. Yeah. Okay. Like a Mario backwards jump. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Um, can, uh, uh, can, since taking, since every time you resubmit Torrent after taking a hit, it uses a flask. Um, is it both types of flask or only life? I believe it's only the life one, but I'm not sure. Okay. So blue is not going to get you another, another. I don't think so.

But again, not sure. Okay. How many sips do you have at this point? Uh, nine. That's not as many as I expected. I have nine and I have what's called a flask of wondrous physics, which has unique effects. I did see a note about that. Yeah.

Okay. They come so completely different thing and it uses one of the same slots as well. Yeah. Yeah. You, you just, it's, it's an extra one. So you can have it. So the wet, the flask of wondrous physics can like increase your stats or put a regen on or make your stamina regen faster.

And the effects last for like multiple minutes. So like it's a, it's a, it's a buff. Regen. Yeah. So one of the things that had the, one of the more interesting things is there's one, uh, there's one of the effects that you can get that it lets you take one hit for free. Hmm. One sip, one hit, first hits free.

Okay. Yeah. Certain bosses that would have a, you only, you only get to drink the flask once. Oh, you can't put more slots into towards that. No, it's one. Okay. So the, for example, like what I would do is I would have one that makes my faith go up and I would have one that makes my stamina regen go up and I would, uh, sip it before

a boss, like right before a boss, like to be the first thing I did. And then for like two minutes, I would have that buff up. Now, couldn't you just craft a consumable to, to give you that instead and give yourself more sips? Cause like stamina regen has been a consumable thing in previous souls. You know, so like, I haven't found that if I have. Okay. But like maybe, but the flask is infinite.

It just, you can only use it once. So you have to choose from a pool of multiple types of flasks, then. Yeah. And you also get, uh, you can get more effects for it. Like there are bosses out there that you kill them and you get like, here's two different effects that you can add to your flask of wondrous physics. I mean, by making it tied to your, to your flask, it, it allows you to use it more often instead of, you know, like fucking burning through a consumable.

Burning through a consumable. So that deals with any goblins there. That's pretty good. Um, I like it. It's a cool one. Yeah. Uh, like when I hear shit like that, it's kind of my brain kind of goes like, oh, yo, just beeline for it and you'll enjoy the ride so much more.

But then it's like, yeah, but what am I be lining past? What am I be lining to war? Oh, don't be lined at anything. No, no, no, no. Here's how you, here's how you play Elden Ring. Hey, what the fuck is that? Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

I'm going to go look at it. It'll make me happy when I get it. But if I never get it, I'll be very sad. You know, like, so, yeah, that's going to be a tough balance, I suppose. Um, and, and, uh, the other thing too is the, uh, what was it? Um, Arcane FX, your drop rate or discovery rates rather? Yeah, it's, it's luck. Yeah.

I'll just be called luck. I noticed my first run through. I found fucking nothing on the people I was killing. Um, yep. Second time I found armor and boots and, and fucking. Yeah, drop rates are just bad. So that you wildly different time. Yeah, I have multiple things to pick from second time around.

And it's just like, uh, the, the shield that I'm using is called a brass shield. I found it really late on one of my streams. And then Paige got it like literally the first time she killed the guy that drops it, and it's a great shield that I've been using the whole time since I got it. Uh, it's just, it's just the way it works. Is it a hundred damage reduction? It sure is. Yep.

Okay. Cause I saw that one of the starting classes does have a like confessor. It's one of the reasons I picked it. Okay. You got a, you got a real shield right away. A confessor and the first one, I think it's Vanguard or something like that. They both start with 100% damage reduction shields. Probably, I mean, it's got to be a merchant somewhere though, right?

Like you can fucking. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. So eventually. Yeah. All right. We should, we should do emails.

Yeah. We're just going to keep gabbing about Elden Ring next week. No, I know, I know. And, and, and basically it's, it's, I mean, it's less discussion and more just fucking Q and A, you know? Yeah. So yeah. All right.

Um, if you've got a letter, you can send it over to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com. That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com. Here's one coming in. From our graduate says, hello, Willie and Pat with the release of Elden Ring. I was prepared for yet another round of souls born difficulty discourse on social media. Luckily, it seems this time it has been much quieter. No, it hasn't. Depends who you follow.

Um, whether it's because the discussion has been done to death or the community is tired of it, or because the general public, uh, is aware that this type of, what this type of game is, I'm glad that my Twitter feed isn't riddled by people either complaining about difficulty or dunking on people complaining about difficulty. I don't mean to be rude, but you're wrong. You're just straight up wrong, sir. It's, it's, it's still there. It's the same as it was at the start of Securo.

It's the same as bad as it ever was DS3, DS2, you know. Um, yeah, it, it's absolutely a constant and it's, it's happening right now. It's, it's really wild to me seeing other people in our line of work, other content creators who, uh, had not taken a look at the soul series ever in the past. Go, well, Elden rings the big game and everybody's talking about it. I should really start streaming it and just seeing the wheat fucking sifted from the chaff on that and just seeing just how mad otherwise professionals get at this game being bullshit.

The scrub quotes is working overtime. They're, they're putting in their fucking hours. I love it. Um, I mean, here's the thing though. Like I saw the one about like the quest log stuff and like I have to imagine that if you again have never touched any of these games, but you're coming from something like a skyrim, you're just going to expect and assume that's going to be here. Oh, the quest log shit is actually like, uh, not being able to pause the game actually

sucks. That's still the case. Right. I used online the least ever. It does suck that you can't pause the game. Yeah. Yeah. The, um, but it's, but it's also, but it's, it's part of the difficulty mythology

though to, at this point, it's not just online synchronization. It's like, you can't take a breather. You know, yeah. The other thing is that, um, the quest log thing is like, haha fuckers, but at the same time the game weirdly does occasionally give you what is the equivalent to a quest log. There was an NPC that did actually mark something on my map, which I could not believe. Wow. It's the only one.

It's the only thing I found so far where somebody marked something on my map. But like they do try like there's a character that I spoke to and they literally said, yeah, go talk to so and so. And I was like, oh, I just went back and talked to such and such. And then I was able to continue the quest line. Well, here's the, here's, here's, I guess the question. Um, if someone asks you for grapes and 50 hours later, you find grapes, will anything like you're just going to have to remember that someone asks you for grapes.

Luckily, uh, most of the grapes are nearby that character and also where that character is sitting. Yeah. Well, that's why here's the most important tip. When you find an NPC, put a little person marker on your map so that you know that there's a person there. Can you, so besides just putting like waypoints down, you can put on, you can put down permanent reminder things. Yes. Okay.

There's like 10 symbols. One's a diamond, one's a fort, one's a banner, one's a person, one's a donkey, et cetera. And how, and is there a limit to how many you can put down? 100. Okay. Okay. That's plenty. Okay.

It's plenty, trust me. Cause that's the thought is, um, damn, somebody wanted these, but I forgot who they were and where they are. You know? Yeah. Uh, and then of course there's the other bit where it's like I, I picked them up and I didn't even notice I picked them up because I was running through the bushes from a giant thing that was trying to kill me, but I was grabbing inside them. So you just started matching, I started matching as I was running and oh no, I got grapes.

Yeah. You know, these grapes are different. You'll know. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Cause yeah, you better bet, bet your ass I'm fucking grabbing shit. Okay.

You know what fucking sucks here? What tears, what sucks though? I do not like the glowing skulls. I hate those. What about them? I hate that you fucking have to use physics to attack them because well, so here's the problem. Uh, I use, I'm using an S talk, which is stabbing forward. No, you don't.

You don't have to do that. What are you? What are you run them over with your horse? I didn't have the horse yet. Well, then go get the horse. Now I got the horse, but I know you got the horse and you'll be like, oh cool skull and you'll pedestrian it and match the button. So session one, I ran into like five or six of them and it was before I got torrent and

I was trying and I'm like, I can swing, but both of my stabs go right up in the air. So like there was no clean way. Aim it, bro. Yeah. So the, I mean, it, when you, especially if you're, if you're, uh, anyway, like you can get it, but because it's physics based and I had no straight up downswing, there was a couple of moments where there's one, there's one in particular where I stab at it like three times and it just goes flying in the distance.

I'm like, that's physics shit. Just fucking, you know, just roll on it, bro. Can you roll on it? Yeah. Okay. Great. All right. That's fine.

That's confirmed. Oh, the person's question was actually something to the effect of, are there any fandom discourses that you're glad that people have gotten bored of? But this one is not, they never, they never, it doesn't actually go away. It never goes away. Every time this game genre comes up, this will be discussed. Every time Pokemon comes up, it'll be has game freak like made it a modern game yet. Every time a fighting game comes up, we're going to talk about rollback and we're

going to talk about every time a sports game comes up. They're going to talk about, is it actually different from last year's? No, it's not. It's, it doesn't actually go away. Every time Dr. Who comes up, it's going to be a discussion between Dr. Who fans and the people who want to lock them in jail forever where they should belong, the Whovians, you mean?

Yes, the Whovians. And then 20 years later, Ray or Asuka, whenever, whenever Disney comes up, yeah, you try to figure out who among you is a Disney, a Disney adult and walk away from them without breaking eye contact so they can't see you. You mean you're not excited to live a storybook life? No, I'm living a storybook life right now and it sucks. Could could use a little more interesting times. Move to more, I meant less, I meant less move, move to Disney.

Yeah, no, these discussions don't go away. They literally intensify and prop back up every single time. Because the public discourse is never going to be tired when there's an ever influx of new people that have never had that discussion. So. Yeah. Yeah, distinction between more and less is a very important one. Yeah, I mean, I want more, less interesting.

Wait, no, wait, got it. I want more, less interesting. Wait, no, wait, got I want more, less. Wait, no, yeah, I want more, less interesting times. I want the times to be boring is what I'm saying. No, bro. Well, I threw myself. I got confused by my own words.

We were promised the roaring twenties and we're getting the roaring. What the fucks? I don't want it. I mean, yeah, so anyway, your question, unfortunately, just doesn't isn't valid, I feel. Your question is wrong. I'm sorry. Your question is your question is valid. It's not valid.

Yes. Um, anyway. Uh, let's take one over here from Omar, who says, hello, podcast, Dudley boys, Omar from Georgia, the state here. Uh, hey, Omar, how you doing, man? Um, all right, some preamble, some stuff. And the question is, um, basically this person says, uh, yeah, Sifu solves the Arkham boss fight problem.

Um, there are boss. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm parsing through the beginning stuff to get to the actual part where the question starts here. Um, there are boss attacks in Sifu that are enough to stop your combat momentum, but not a simple attack like in the Arkham games. You aren't severely penalized for not clearing a room without being hit once. If you think back to the death, stroke, fight and origins, I assume you know what that is.

Nope. Didn't play origins. How much you had relied on QTEs and the awkward pauses between waiting for his next attack. Even the regular goons in the game getting hit meant that Batman will still stand straight up starting over after having a 50 times combo could be grueling. I love to remember that. I love to play, uh, I'd love to play a future Arkham Arkham game, but with Sifu combat system, uh, and hopefully the next step, uh, is better combat in games.

Uh, what existing franchise would benefit from having Sifu like combat? A lot of them. Yeah. A lot of them. And what, what comic character would you like to see in this game type of game as well? Better than that. So, so I think, I think that the deal is, is that, um, if you're making the comparison here between something like Sifu and something like Arkham, um, I, it's, it's almost an unfair comparison

in that like games that are superhero games and stuff like Arkham or Spider-Man and such are not built around the combat as its core design feature. It's not built around the superhero fantasy. Exactly. And feeling like the here, the superhero combat is one of many features that the game is trying to juggle. So, you know, it'll always be secondary to the swinging or the detective thing or whatever else is going on.

Spider-Man part of the superhero fantasy is to be left on red by your long-term girlfriend because she's a complete bitch. Missed the reference. Mary Jane in that game is terrible. Oh, in the original. In Spider-Man. Well, did you not play it? No, I did.

I did. I just, I forget. Okay. Um, but yeah. Fucking sequence where they're texting each other and it's just so fucking awkward and awful. It's like, oh, um, but yeah, it really is going to always take a back seat, whereas a game like Sifu is built entirely around the combat and nothing else. There's nothing.

It's not murder. There's, there's, there's nothing else in Sifu that is like, you know, whatever, like superheroing, putting even the, the clue board is just like, you just pick up collectibles and go, go fight. It's just for murder. Yeah. So like it's not, it's never going to be that way because they're never going to like design it around that.

Even in situations where the combat's fine, it's still like, like Tsushima, for example. Combat's pretty fun in that. Yeah. But Tsushima's built around doing 50 other things as well. It's built around being a Kurosawa character. So you're not going to get the thing that slow clap does for its combat. You know, it's, it's also like expecting devil may cry levels of in depth combat ability and a thing that is trying to also be five other things in a game that's not just about

fighting the next area. You know, so I mean, you want to tie it back to Elden Ring. That game has one core design thing. Hey, what is that over there? I think that's, that's the experience they wanted to go for. So, you know, basically you can't, you can't look at something that is like pure uncut X and expect to, to see that level of, you know, fidelity kept in anything that has to dilute multiple other focuses.

But if someone did do it, that'd be great. But yeah. And then last one over here. Let's take it from Ray Reborn who says, Hey, Wolves and Orb Men. I've been playing Horizon Forbidden West before Elden Ring. Crazy. I know, probably won't finish it. But I noticed something interesting about the game after seven to 10 hours.

Horizon Forbidden West has integration of story and side quests via spoken dialogue. By Alloy when leaving a town. Also, you get a sort of close, when you get sort of close to near a story mission checkpoint, Alloy will go, Oh yeah, right. The thing with the stuff I need to do as a tiny reminder. It's pretty cool. That you've been out in the open world doing side quests and the other side content. I find that I like this kind of stuff, even if it's ultimately unnecessary.

Have you played any games that have bothered with this type of integration besides? Not just, just Horizon. That sounds incredibly impressive. I love the sound of that because, yes, little gentle reminders are good. Yeah, it's also like the one of the things that's actually very interesting in Horizon is that the the, what do you call it? The cutscenes for side quests are all bespoke. They're all actually directed.

They're not just like you're talking to an AI generated person. Okay. And all I can think of when I think about Horizon and most Assassin's Creed. Assassin's Creed? Assassin's Creed, yeah, fuck it. Assassin's Creed, after playing the Elden Ring, is that like, wow, man, most cutscenes and dialogue is totally pointless and is a horrible waste of money. And they should put that time into making more interesting stuff to be out there.

So there is a game that actually does this, something similar to this recently. When I was playing Miles Morales, every time you finish a mission or a side mission, he says to himself, I have to go visit Quinn, you know, like I got to make sure to get down to this place to do that thing, right? Or you'll get a little, you know, whatever, talking to yourself prompt that recaps the phone call you made with whatever person. The thing is, though, in that game, like that is super helpful, but there's so much constant dialogue and phone calls while you're swinging around.

Half the time, I'm afraid to move because a fucking podcast just started or I'm listening to Jonah go off and I don't want to walk up to a crime and cut him off and then lose where I was. You know? Yeah, I had that happen all the time. It sucks all the time. Any time the conversation is good, stop swinging and let it play out. I was great. You know, you know what the, hey, get down to the, the, the, the tarnished character.

They shut their fucking mouth. They don't talk. I like it. I'm, I'm consistently annoyed. Like it's one of those things. Like I praise it in horizon because it's, it makes sense for that character and all that stuff. But in most, in most games, I'm like, I can feel a designer going, oh, can't let the player get annoyed by Nathan Drake sitting here and solving this puzzle for 10 minutes.

Let's make sure he constantly goes, whoo, what a tough one. And like it's always like the most annoying fucking thing in the world to me. Well, you're shut the fuck up. I'm thinking here. You're going to get a voice actor doing it anyway, but their job is to go, you know, as you test in the character creation. I would not mind hearing both sides of the dialogue at talk prompts when you're in a menu talking to somebody.

Uh, but outside of that, yes, I definitely don't need it constantly. Like, oh boy, whatever puzzle solve thing, uh, that and, um, shout outs to, uh, level up, lady Melinda. Yeah. Melinda shout outs to Melinda talking while you play with the numbers. Yeah. You don't actually see her very often. She, she, she teleports in and out randomly, right?

Is that it? Or like seems like every now and then you'll sit down, you'll have a talk prompt instead of the normal ones and then talk to her. And then if you decide to level up, she'll do the bullshit, but nine times out of 10, she's, she's not there at all. Like hit me with all the bearer seek, seek less that you want. Just do it while I'm playing with the numbers. Made in black know what she was doing.

So was so did the doll. Doll, doll knew it. Yep. Are they enough? The same character. Ah. The voice actor or just yeah. Function.

Oh, interesting. Made in black and the doll are the same lady actress. I probably, probably shouldn't miss that. I keep the candles lit. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I see it. Yeah.

Anyway, just think about Melina, Melina, Melina, Melina, Melina, Melina, Melina, Melina. But here's the thing about Melina. She's got three fingers on her face, but the fingers that you're hanging out with are the two fingers. Why is it always fingers, man? She's, yeah. Wally. What the fuck?

Why is it always fingers? I can tell you why it is always fingers, but I will let you figure that out for yourself. Okay. Because I'm especially with my recent replay of a bunch of these games, like in close proximity, it's been des, ds1, ds2, and a little hint of Bloodborne. I'm like, yeah, fingers. Hmm. Okay.

See, because you got the two finger maidens and they're pretty cool, but the three finger maidens, they're crazy. Did you try fingers? Yeah. It's one of the first items you get. All the online play items are fingers. So. But whole.

Yeah. Oh my God. I'm so sick of that fucking message. It's everywhere. Okay. Okay. So as uncreative as the community has been with the meme propagation, I do have to say I saw one that was fucking some new tech was a message of the ghost appearing.

Oh, is he A-posing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was like try two hands or something and there's two statues to the left and the right and basically you're just giving them off, giving a double handy. It's great. It's good. That's good. I'm like, all right.

Now we're getting creative. Now we're using our fucking brain. We're getting removing new shit, new content. Let's go. We can push this to the next level. We've, we've all, you know, amazing chest. Yadda yadda, you know, so the innovation is good. That's what I like.

Alrighty. That's enough Elden Ring for one week. I want to play more Elden Ring. I know you do. I want to play more Elden Ring. I can't. I am, I am with bated breath excited for checking out what's going on with your, your run through.

Like it's one of those games that like I cover it and then I cover it until I'm exhausted. And the first thing I want to do is watch what other people are doing coverage. Yeah, I'm not sure how, but I'm trying to figure out if there's a system I can develop by which I can maybe only progress on stream and then find a way to still dick around in the broad areas. I know, but I'm like, maybe I'll just go backwards off stream after a certain level of like discovery, you know, it's all progress because I'm, I'm down to knowing

how big this is going to be, like kind of be like, Hey, I won't do any major new things, but I'll scrape around a little bit and tell you what I found off camera. You know, I am telling you right now. There is absolutely no way to tell what will be a major new thing before you are doing it. Okay. Even walking backwards. Especially walking backwards because that's when you think nothing major would happen. But then you fall down a pit and then the rats attack you and then there's a bear.

I saw Max post a video about the bear. If I, if, if you were going to do that, what I would recommend, Willie, is do the stuff that you, you want to do on stream, but if you do play it off stream, just, just hit that record button so that you have the footage. Just in case. Yeah. Just if something really wild happens, you can cut it into a three, four minute bit. So I did that with another game.

I forgot what it was. Maybe it was Sekiro where it's or something where then Reggie came back in and I was like, okay, let me show you what happened here, you know, because that's the thing is ultimately like, yes, the easy thing is to just go hit the button, do more, stream more, etc. But it's like, well, I'm, I'm, I'm a different streaming. That's what I'm doing. And it is at the complete limit of my professional and, and endurance capabilities. Yeah.

Oh, death stranding. There you go. Yes. In death stranding, I did stuff off stream and then I, and then I caught Reggie up to what it was. So I would be, I would be down to do that as well. But because we play the game together, like I just, we're going to have less time than if I were to sit here and just do fucking, you know, 12 chunks per day as, as, as, as it is. So.

Yeah. So if you play off camera, literally not. I don't mean like, I don't mean perform the LP by yourself. No, no, no. Just have it ready to go. So that if the one in a million thing of which happens roughly once an hour happens, you will have something to go back to. Okay.

I want to make it a little further in just so that like, like we're not like, once the new mechanics have been, you know, established, then it's like just all it is is finding variants of those new mechanics. I know, I know. There's sounds like you're going to be the person who shows up and is like, so I grinded a little bit off stream this time. Nope. Nope.

Not going to do it. I ain't going to do that. I'm too savvy to that moment. Not going to do it. But I do, I do want to find ways to do the things that are especially not uninteresting, but not the one to do the filler off camera. The filler, the off priority, you know, the off priority stuff, perhaps. Yes, what?

It's tough to make that distinction until it's done. That being said, I will say about grinding. It's extraordinarily difficult. A huge proportion of your leveling like currency is going to come from distinct bosses. After a certain level, the, the, the reward amount for the overworld shit gets really low. The, no, what I mean is the entirety of limb grave and almost every enemy will only give you like 50 to 100. Okay.

No matter right. So it takes, it takes like grinding is like a boss will give you 20 times what the whole dungeon gave you the way to grind is to go out there and find more stuff and kill more bosses. Mark Mann made a tweet of an area that like was just like ride a horse up somewhere, trigger a trap and the trap will kill a bunch of people and then maybe sit down and do it again. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's a couple spots, but like the games, the games economy seems to want to tell you, hey, go out there and go find more shit. Yeah.

Well, anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm well aware of, of, you know, the, the, the problems that can come from getting a little too excited off stream. So I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to stop that from happening. But I will, if I do play, like hit the button and just make sure that I don't lose anything important that each time. But that's that, but I think that only makes sense to do again, maybe after like next session or so, you know, but yeah, it's, it's definitely hard to sit there and be like, fuck me. I want to play right now.

And I can't. Yeah. So I know that. You're not usually like that. I'm not usually like that. I'm usually very patient with it. But the difference is one, one, it's the unknown excitement for sure. I, I, I'm, I'm being bit with that.

But two, it's also the worry that the length is going to be impossible to address appropriately in the LP format. Okay. Let me think. Let me know, like literally break it down because here's the thing hours a week, do you think you'd cover this normally? So I've, so I've done, I've done so a little bit of crunching on this, right? And like, and I, I know that like, you know, there's always the jokes like part 1000 incoming,

woolly takes forever, yet he had it. And I like, I don't know how to fix that for those people. Like, I don't know what to tell you. I like the stream does exist for anyone that literally cannot wait. But for people in general that are still down with the LP format, I'm still putting out the episodes, right? So I'm, I'm, I'm trying to make something that most people can be satisfied by. I'm recording, um, the play, if I'm going to be doing it, like a given session is about

like five hours, right? We, like maybe four to five hours. And then on Thursdays, we're going to do like seven probably. Okay. So that's 12, right? Let's say 12. Yes. Right.

Okay. And then we're putting out either one and a half or two hour episodes each day. So we should be one week of streaming should automatically also equal one week of episodes. Right. Okay. And that's the pace I'm going to move forward at. Okay. So that's, this is the math I've done off camera behind the scenes,

lifting the fucking curtain to tell you what's going on. So I did 40 hours and I don't even feel like I'm a fourth. So like at that pace, you're looking at, uh, 10 to 16 weeks, probably. Okay. Maybe you'd, I mean, nobody's, it's early enough and it's long enough that like nobody's really scraped it and gotten to the end, but it's an easy 100. Okay. Then plan B, if someone does, if you, you know, if we look at where this is at by next week,

and it's, it's not going to get any better. It's just literally like the infinite LP type of thing. You know, again, there's no easy solutions here. You just have, you just compromises in order to do enough at a pace that makes people that are, some people want infinite content. Some people want less than that, right? I'm considering that the offline and recap at the, you know, to be like, here's the eventful things that happened and let's continue forward,

will mitigate some of that damage. So, um, that's the way, that's the way I think I can also avoid some of this is like, okay, maybe not like killing a boss or something, but like, you know, I encountered some wild shit. Here's the cliff notes of it. Moving forward. Let's keep going because there's always going to be more shit to see and do, you know. I'll tell you what, I'll be able to answer these questions you have,

with way more clarity next week because I'm streaming it's five times at seven hour chunks. So if I'm at, uh, five, seven, 35, if I'm at 70 ish hours and I'm sitting here going, dude, I don't think I've even seen half the map. That would be, that would be a data point for you to consider. Right, right. Exactly, exactly. And, and, you know, and I know that like most people are fine with, with the pacing that I've described.

Uh, there are always those who are like, again, all kidding aside, like upset about these types of things and there's nothing I can do for those people. But I think the way the approach we have for now should tackle things like the best we can, given that Reggie comes over a couple of times a week and sits down to play, you know, to, to record with me. So by the boy before we get off this, want to give a shout out to YouTube for having all of my Elden Ring uploads broken and never going to HD.

Really? Is you just like, it never gave you the, uh, the proper bit rate? No, never. Fuck off. Well, the first one's 12 hours long. Yeah. Okay. Uh, the, uh, okay.

The other ones did eventually go to HD. Okay. So I think what I might have to do if people really, really want that first one HD, I think I might actually have to pull it down and then re-upload it as two pieces. Possibly. It'll treat it nicer. Which I bet you, you people better appreciate because that is a massive fucking pain in the ass. Now, when it's for the, now the thing, of course, you know, again, as we're talking

behind the scenes, um, the giant Vod dump, uh, if that's the dedicated purpose of your channel, then that's what it fills its purpose and that works out. If that's not the dedicated purpose and that's not what mostly what you're putting out, obviously the giant Vod dump is suicidal. It's channel annihilating. It's a giant piece of content that a lot of people are not going to sit and watch entirely because why would they? It's hours long.

And then YouTube goes, well, people don't like the entirety of you. People don't watch the whole thing of this video and it's pretty big. So you're going to lose priority. Yeah. So like, for example, if I decide for anyone that doesn't know this, by the way, that for anyone that's making like more curated content at some point, I'll just change the name of the existing one to Pat stairs at archive or some shit and make a new Pat stairs that account.

And then that'll be for the whatever. Yeah. No, the episodic nature of what comes out every day on on woolly versus means that like, besides the fact that it would be really rough schedule wise, it means Vod dumping would actively hurt the channel in many ways. So I hope that's also understood about how we do things, you know. Anyway, it's a minority. Most people are very chill about this and understand it's just there's some people

that really don't and don't seem to want to. And what can you do? Hey, is that enough Elden Ring? No, but it'll have to be. See you next week.