Castle Super Beast - CSB297: The Ubidome

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Download for Mobile | Podcast Preview | Full Timestamps Go to http://shopify.com/superbeast to sign up for a $1-per-month trial period. - Go to http://expressvpn.com/superbeast to get 4 extra months with the 12-month plan or 6 extra months with the 24-month plan totally free. Atlus Solved The Lifeless 3D Model Problem "Skill Based Damage" MMOs: More Fun Catching Up Than Staying Current GOG Will Preserve Your Games Despite Blizzard Watch live: twitch.tv/castlesuperbeast Warframe's Final Devstream of 2024 Teases Big Updates, New Game Mode, and the Arrival of Warframe: 1999 12.02.2024 Street Fighter 6 update Battle Change List | Buckler's Boot Camp Official Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero tournament ends in disaster as finalists fly up and down for 10 minutes straight, which some fans insist is peak performance skill-based damage Blizzard is delisting Warcraft 1 and 2 from GOG, but GOG says it's gonna preserve them forever anyway, hands out a discount, and announces new policy for its preservation program to boot Marvel Rivals | Rivals 'Til the End | Official Launch Trailer Squirrel Girl: The Unbeatable | Character Reveal | Marvel Rivals Iron Fist: The Immortal Weapon | Character Reveal | Marvel Rivals Black Widow: Super-Spy Sniper | Character Reveal | Marvel Rivals  

Hey bro, what's up? How much caffeine can you get into your system in three hours? So there's a fun, fun story about that is that I can get it a lot, like a lot, like a lot. But then my wife will be like, how much caffeine did you drink? You look like you're vibrating. And I'll be like one caffeine and she'll be like, no, you didn't. and then she'll be able to check the tape. Yeah.

So one caffeine. I have one caffeine. There is video evidence of it. I suppose as long as you have your other cans pre-cracked and sitting just out of frame, you can just... You want to hear the fucking pro tip

is you make sure you get all the same color of monster. And then you're like, bro, I got to pee. Oh, it's time to pee. Ah. Okay, we're going to go to break. Yes, got it. Then you crack that shit. And then you drink, you have to drink a little bit before you get in.

Because if you don't, then it's really obvious that that's the first drink. I see. Yeah. That's, wow, this is the tech that has to be invented. Got it. Bro, this is just one of those days where it all just, it all just sinks up. And both of us join this Discord call, just going, uh, yeah. It's good.

It's good shit. No, I just, I had a, like, really rough sleep. night. I don't know. I'm super burnt and... You know what? You're super... I feel you very strongly. I'm tremendously cooked. It's one of those days that my poor little man, he had gas or something. He did not have a good sleep night. Therefore. So I didn't have a good sleep night. Yeah. And that's like, I feel bad because it's like,

oh, poor little guy, just... Just fart, dude. Mm-hmm. It's just... You got to massage it out. So I've never had much Much use for that He did When it's in there, it's in there Okay

Just gotta come out Well, I have It doesn't work for me either Well, like I can't I can't like massage my belly and get it out either So I just cry in the bathroom Okay But I pretend I'm watching videos

But I'm actually crying I know I know that I have exactly two and a half cans a guru in my system before it's like, that's your limit. Oh, okay. I mean, that is the limit. Well, what are you going to pour a half a can of guru around? No, but like I can tell because right around that halfway mark is where it starts to be like,

oh, there's that little, you know, you start to be like, yeah. So for me, it's like when I slam into 490 milligrams, of caffeine. When I slam into 480, 490, that's when you're fucking going. So to break it down, one of these regular ass sugar-free white monster cans is 170 milligrams of caffeine. So when you are at the two and a half mark on this monster can and you're crushing 450, um, uh, every,

It feels like the way that I had someone describe what it must be like to be Spider-Man with Spider-Sense, but no Spider-Augility. Nope. So everything's really, really fast, but I'm not faster to accommodate my increased perception. You just see it coming. I'm just really, I'm just so fast. Uh, yeah. I've realized as well that. Like if I still need, if I'm at my two and a half limit, if I'm at the limit too early in the day, if I have to push it even further beyond a normal cup of coffee with nothing in it, just straight black black coffee can do one of those.

Because I feel as if the Torin, Gorin, extra stuff is not helping with the- You got to get that Torin, bro. The jitter. But yeah, just a straight coffee after that is like, okay, I can do one more bump up and then that's my energy limit. But it's not actually energy, by the way. It's it's it's tired masking. Yeah, no. It's like you've decided to turn off every chemical that your body is sending that says, dude, lie down.

Yeah. Yeah. No, emergency. But that's energy. Emergency bean water. This reminds me of a tech talk. I remember seeing like three years ago, maybe two years ago. where it was this regular looking white lady

who was putting up a TikTok that was, I'm going to prove to my family that they're full of shit and that I know what I'm doing. So this is how many monsters I drink in a day. And she drinks exclusively white, sugar-free monster. And you're watching it.

And she's had three by the time she gets to work. And I counted them up. And by the end of the day, she has like nine. And I'm just sitting there aghast. And I remember the top comment being like, why don't you just switch to cocaine? It might be healthier.

Like what, like. Yeah, microdosing mushrooms. Like you might be better off just switching to, like caffeine pills or cocaine. That is three times over the daily limit, if not four, between three to four. And that's like the average test day that she recorded. Oh, my God. So, like, you know, there's those bad days.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, like, I just assume that the, um, what's it called? the engineering law of the law of how a thing needs to be literally twice as strong as it's given like load right so in other words the margin of error has to have a safety rating of zero or a safety rating of one

that there's like a whole there's a calculation that says this thing this table or this bridge has to support twice as much as someone would actually use it for right right it needs to be so a weight limit of a thousand pounds on an elevator has to go up to 2,000 pounds. It will not fail until it hits 2,000. Exactly. Right, right.

So that's the kind of bit where I'm looking and I go, if they say you can have two cans in a day, you can probably have four, four. 10. The damage, right? And you're saying nine. And it's like, well, I guess you don't drop dead then, but you are taking, you're shaving off time from the future. You know, it's like, it's like the cigarette that subtracts from your, your final life count number. I feel like that's kind of what you're looking at, if not instant damage. Delayed.

Cool. Good. Good. That's good. And yeah. Yeah. You see, the good part, the positive, is that we've had a long, healthy experience of taking this type of energy and redirecting it into the content for the better. So yeah, you know what?

Listen, it may not be, it may not be the healthiest thing to jam myself with anti-sleep drugs and stimulants in over-the-counter gigantic cans. But at least I did something healthy and useful with it, like sit on my ass for eight hours and beat metaphor. Yeah, there you go. This is the only job. This is truly the only job. where you show up and then it's like oh man i'm so tired i'm fucking out of it yeah how are you i'm really out of it oh perfect good that's good use it yeah use it's also it's also the most like dog shit job in the world or even like hobby if you stream as a hobby because uh like thank god

page also streams so like they're the empathy is there because like oh man oh that that's metaphor stream was rough. Oh, I'm so tired. Hold on while I move 40 feet so that I can sit down and play metaphor to relax. No, it's different, no, no, it's, it's different. No. Yeah. How do you explain? No, it's different. I swear, there's going to be, there's going to be some great studies in a couple decades on this shit. Isn't it fun to be like, pioneering into the unknown. Yeah, dude. It's so fun. To create all the mistakes that everyone's going to...

I'm guinea-picking myself. Exactly. All the data is going to be pulled from us. It's going to be awesome. Okay. So let's go. No spoilers. But how did that...

Okay, so metaphor ends really strong. Nice. Good. My total, my takeaway is that I really, really appreciate that metaphor tried a bunch of different shit. And I think from a gameplay standpoint, it's definitely a more fun game to play. Like, the architectized system is better than the persona system. But overall, I did not come away from it as strongly and as in love with it as I did for three, four, or five persona.

Okay. You started talking about feeling your way towards the end about two weeks ago. So was the ending here a classic Atlas style? we're going to, we're going to linger as long as possible. It's rock solid. The pacing doesn't, doesn't, uh, pace, no, pacing's, pacing's aces. This is where we say farewell. No.

Uh, the, the pacing is aces. Uh, it, it, it, it, it doesn't overstay its welcome. Excellent. Um, it, it gives you tons of time at the end. Like, I did, in fact, finish the game with, uh, like 10 days of, like, just going to bed. Okay. Just, just, I'm just gonna go to bed. I got to run out this calendar.

Which is wild because I've never experienced that in an Atlas game before. Yeah, when you press the touchpad and you see it says some people went straight to bed. I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah, no, you got time. You're good. Yeah. Um, there's a couple things that start to happen that, like, are objective improvements in a vacuum. But I don't think.

they make the thing better overall. I think that the persona-style game has gotten weaker and weaker with their use of teleporting around conveniently. Huh. Okay. So you don't have to travel and deal with the journey from location to location. But also, this is a game that's taking place in a large fantasy country versus like running a lot of different places. Running around school, you know. But I'm actually specifically referring to like teleporting to shops. Oh, quick teleporting in town. Yeah.

So like I think back to P3, P4, P5 and how like you could, you know, you could, you'd hop around to different areas. But you always had this thing where like, oh, you got to run down to Shibuya. And like you spent like a proportion of your character's daily life section moving from place to place through in the areas. You're at Browaheaven. So I'll use Brow Haven as an example. Like I never ever spent any time in Browalhaven after that first couple of days because it would be like I'm going to the shop. I'm going to the Coliseum.

I'm going to the Beatle guy. and just instantly run there. And so I actually spent, I didn't get the, like, the vibe of these places nearly as strongly. There's a couple towns of the end of the game that I barely spent any time in at all. Interesting. Okay. I feel like I'm currently, so for me, I just completed the Browal Haven calendar event. which is cool

it's cool also it's a that whole this whole third section isn't yeah it's an anti-dungeon it's quite interesting it's very weird and I really like that it's super super weird even even combat expectations are super minimalized

and it's actually just like plot heavy you know you know as opposed to everything very very strange and interesting this is the chill part of the game but in terms of how it feels about quick teleporting I just had some thoughts on that because I have been, yeah, as once you get to town, you're like, okay, let me go to the armor shop, let me go to the sword shop, update, da-da-da. And you quickly get in and out and do your business without really stepping foot into some of the actual, like, sections of the town. And I noticed that once or twice, like, I would run outside and see somebody that had, like, just a text prompt that wasn't there before.

and talking to them was like a little activity for like, oh, hey, help me do this thing or that thing and raise your ranking with the people. And I was like, oh, so there's some good reasons to like hit the streets every now and then. Oh, absolutely. Like when you want to debate the gang, like the other candidates, like you have to go check manually. And I, and there were a lot of days where I was looking to debate and I noticed I was like, I couldn't find anyone, you know? So, and like, yeah, going to check manually then involved like literally teleporting to each town and trying to figure out was going on whether anyone was there or not.

And so I kind of had this thing of like, okay, as the ability to quick travel got better and better, I was like, this is awesome. And then it streamlines things. And then there's times where I'm like, you know, going back to the gauntlet runner and teleporting to Grand Trad is taking too long. I'm just going to go through the S-link menu. And it says that Maria wants to talk. So you do it that way and then you get there faster, right?

You know, they're instantaneously. Yeah, you need to speed up the already instantaneous method of getting to another location. But no, that transition is taking too long. And like, it's kind of like, okay, but when you see these people out on the streets that are worth talking to that have like some good stuff for you, you kind of be like, okay, hold on, back up a bit. Actually live in this town a little bit and explore it, you know? And I liked that I had like a reminder to go do that every once in a while.

So I like that you have the option when you're in a hurry to do that for prepping stuff, but then if you kind of want to just have a day seeing what's around or stuff like that. And maybe I'm early enough that it's not at a full-on like, okay. You're in there. Okay. But I did feel like I was moving around too quickly and ignoring too much. And then the game gave me a good reason to kind of slow that down. So that leads to, because that's like definitely.

to taste, right? Like, do you want to just go really fast? Do you want to vibe it out? And that leads to, like, part two of that for me is, like, I don't think that the game's soundtrack is as good as P3, P4, P5s overall. I think a lot of it. I think the really incredible tracks are incredible. I think the best piece of music in the entire game is, the normal ambush battle theme.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. To the point where all of the boss themes, I was like, I wish this was a normal battle because the normal battle theme is so exciting. I see. Okay. I feel that the normal town themes are usually just like, you know, melodic fantasy themes that are not standing out. like the battle themes are and like a lot of the Esperanto stuff. But if your comparison point is the...

Bada to... Bada to... You know, the funny... Like persona joy of like hanging out in the different cities and getting that bop going. You're not getting the bop running around the cities. Yeah, so that's kind of like the core big point of these two micropoints is like I did not have the humming a lot. long bop of navigating the game world at any point that I did from any of the persona games.

See, I only, I got, but I was super like the fucking Gauntlet Runner theme when you're on the road is an absolute banger. I love that shit every time and I can't spend enough time on the road just because of how awesome it is to her to the per per per per per per per per per per per the Gauntler stuff is incredible. Running through dungeons, I think those dungeon themes have been excellent as well. I would just say, yeah, I'm like, if I'm like, if I'm like, if I'm not a lot of I'm thinking about it. I guess the day-to-day town stuff is fine, but you're not tapping along

with it as you are with like P3, 4, and 5 day to day, you know? Like my last thing to say about the music is that it's like the good stuff is good and the great stuff is great, but like I remember beating P5 and then going to YouTube repeat.com and throwing the 10 hours rivers in the desert so fucking link in there. Yeah. And just having that be the soundtrack of my day to day life for multiple weeks. And yes. And I don't feel that way about literally any song in this game. Okay. See, I, I, there I disagree because I feel like the, because I, you know, it's funny, I just did this because I was creating my, um, my stream music playlist.

And I was going over persona music and, uh, some metaphor tracks as well. And I absolutely feel that like the academia themes and like, yeah, I mentioned the, the gauntlet runner, the ambush battle. Like a lot of those themes are like, I want those. I want those playing. I want to hear that shit. Those are the ones that stand out for me. And going over persona as well, like, it's the rivers in the desert and the life will change.

And basically a lot of the vocal tracks, you know, are the ones you're kind of looking for. There's some stuff in between there that, like, is filler that we don't really think about as much on that really long playlist. So I think in each of these cases, there's a lot of filler on the persona tracks as well that you kind of are skipping past to get to the really good ones that you remember, you know, the casino infiltration and, you know, arc and all these things, right? So obviously this is like the most subjective according to taste kind of thing. Like to some degree, I'm pretty sure. I actually just prefer the style of like the more modern persona soundtracks. What is not according to taste is people are going to tell you, hey,

Wully, don't worry, that final boss has hands. And let me tell you, the final boss does have hands. However, and this is an incredibly core point, the way that the archetype system works, you can give yourself those hands way more than you ever could in a persona game. Like the most busted, like Hatsu Toby firing off like physical attack shithead you could ever fuse together in a persona game, that would be pretty good. You can smash the archetype system over your fucking knee and just break the game mechanically entirely. So I've started to feel that because where I've hit at this point is the, I'm looking at all the second tier and above archetype evolutions.

and I can just kind of look and preview what they get. And the last skill on each of those non-base archetypes is game-breaking in a lot of cases. You get the tier threes and tier fours and you look at these and you're like, you see, every now and then you'll see a skill and you're like, that skill by itself can wreck the whole game. and that's before you even like, you know, fill up the rest of the inheritance with just all passives that support it. There's another type. There's another type of upgrade I like seeing, which is this dual tech is actually now a single tech on this particular archetype. That's a fun one. And now the new dual tech is the triple tech equivalent of whatever that was.

You just scale it up by one. So we can add metaphor to a list. of games that I have gotten to the end to and optimized the final boss out of existence and had to be told later what it does. You skipped phases from doing damage. I skipped every mechanic the final boss had.

I did not see it do even one thing. Oh, no. All phases. the whole way through. Oh boy. Okay. And the final boss does cool stuff and has cool mechanics. Well, and I had to be informed of them later.

Is this what you wanted? Is this, is this the conclusion that you have fought for? So we had a really, me and the chat had a very interesting situation where I grinded a little bit around Dungeon 4 and they said you should be fine to beat most of the rest of the game,

but there's a bunch of fights that are really hard. uh and then i went into there's a bunch of optional bosses you can do before the final and i didn't grind again and just completely fucking steamrolled them because i i understood how to use the archetype system and what to equip and what to not equip um and then i'm like you know what since the final boss is going to be the final boss will probably be a multi-phase affair you know what i'll grind out the archetypes on the main character right for the stat boosts and uh just set up my party in such a way that I found something that worked. And it worked real well because for like 11 bosses in a row,

I was doing the exact same thing on every character, on every turn. And just the winning. The winning stack. Like I found like this person cast, Abilitate, this person does the strike attack. This character does the buff attack. You know, like the cycle.

And it's like, oh, I have solved. metaphor. I feel like what happened in the last couple of side quests off the main was I got there and then I started swinging at the enemies and they would die before a fight would happen. And I went, oh shit, I'm a bit too strong actually because the grudge are not engaging. And then the regular tough things are coming in yellow. And I was like, huh, I didn't try grinding, you know. Yeah.

So if you ever get to the point where so I initially a couple weeks ago was like this is one of the best systems ever because you never have to fight trash ever again, right? Cutting your experience in half on auto kills is not enough because you're still gaining a bunch of experience by just mowing through them because there's no threat. There's no reason you would ever avoid them. and I found that if you ever get out in front of the game on a level basis the game will never catch back up to you it will never catch back up to you

and even even in terms of like just getting a lot of like Heroes Incense and dropping it on the archetypes I want for the better skills that I'm like okay this one gets that credit great skill at level six fuck it spend it get that one And I'm like, the pace that I'm getting those at is, yeah, it's definitely at pacing the challenges in question. But I mean, it, but it's like, this is without me particularly trying to get.

Yeah, I know. That's my point. It's like, I thought I was doing that, like, because I'd like to grind out and get a bunch of levels. And I did do that. But I, I grinded a couple. I grinded like 10 levels above the recommended like on dungeon 4 and then never did it again.

And the game was with 40% of its remaining runtime, it was never able to catch up. Okay. So here, something I've said about 3, P3, P4, and P5 is to me, P3 has the best final boss, P4 has the best culprit. and P5 has the best crew. Those are the strengths of those individual games for...

Okay, well, this has the best culprit and it has the best crew. Okay. Easy. Okay. Easy, no question. Cool. Interesting. Absolutely the best cast they've ever had.

No, absolutely no doubt. It's all winners. Awesome. Okay. Even the only member of the crew that I'm not like madly in love with is still like a really good character that I like. So far, so far we're on track. So far, like, all the pieces that I'm looking at seem to be really high contenders. But when I compare those games together, those are the takeaways I'm kind of left with, you know? Yeah, it would take a lot to have anyone, like, surpass what Heismay is up to at this

point. High, Hayesme is the best character. It's kind of like, I don't think you'll find anyone that will disagree with you. It's, it's kind of broken, you know. Highsame, like, the, The cast is really strong. Like, stroll is absolutely the best first bro guy that joins the party they've ever done. Because he's not an idiot. He's actually the smart guy in the gang. He's forward thinking and intelligent and compassionate. But Heismay is like a full leap beyond the rest of the cast in Gravitas.

And the fact that he's a cute little Batman. And I think, look, if we're, because you have to compare fucking Jim Pei to Yoske to, Ryugi. And Ryugi is easily like the winner of those three. Okay. Misogynist homophobe possibly closeted

homophobe loud guy. Guy who talks too loud. Like oh, what should he? You know? And yeah, Stroll is not those archetypes at all. But, well, and

that's the thing is like he kind of Strull's the main character of a fire emblem tagging along with you Okay sure sure Um Yeah but but it's he's kind of he's like you know The the naive like like you know But and kind of silly at times

But ultimately Simple and good person you know He's he's almost like a protagonist Like yeah like even in the way he looks and stuff Like he doesn't have the he doesn't have the like oh your best friends the horny one thing going on he's not played for goofs in fact halkenberg is usually the one played for goofs and she's even she's holding her head even higher up yeah and she's played for goose because she's the most serious member so it's like okay yeah in fact

so far so far like no one is the horny one i mean well maybe the fourth member or or fifth you know I don't know. Like, it feels as if there's a, like, just increase in honor and nobility. Although, yeah, my latest party member is a little bit like, ooh, you know. I. Mass dancer. There is very, there is very little romantic or sexual content in this game. Not none, but little.

hmm yeah and you and it's like the whole S link system in our brains is like synonymous with like who are you gonna date right

who you're gonna pick what's your who's gonna be who's totally divorce who you're gonna get to 10 with yeah and here it's just like like ooh

are those two an item nah no not interesting absolutely not no they're not they're not

mm-hmm but yeah no metaphor is really strong it's an incredibly easy recommend. I loved it. I think the gameplay is fantastic. I think it's brain dead that you

can't fight the super boss until you're on New Game Plus. I hate that. I think that they I think the game gives you so many tools

to break it that the game can't keep up with you if you decide to break it at And like the system they built is just asking you to to synergize and optimize and all sorts of shit. Yeah. And I guess like, again, I was feeling this strength while not attempting to grind. So like even at normal pace. And the interesting thing too is like while you can spend time going out into areas and kind of picking fights and stuff, it feels like the least useful way to spend your time, you know, by comparison to everything else you could be doing.

So like, you know, Coliseum is cool and like there's some great stuff. Oh, there's, okay, hey, I'm going to tell you right now. Coliseum has some fucking shit. Oh, yeah, I realized. I absolutely realized that. And I've been doing that. I'm like, great. I want a way to like get some fights in and build some XP and use my builds while getting

fights that are worth it. And that feels like the way. But like otherwise, just going out and then running in circles just feels like a complete waste of a day. something I noticed as well that I feel as a this is more of a I guess an overall thing that the Atlas has been doing since I guess P5 no yeah P5 is probably where they began doing this and it's a they've solved an incredible problem um around P5 is when because they've always had a thing in these games where you talk to somebody their portrait pops up and then

you see their 3D model also doing the thing, you know? Yeah. But the 3D models have not always been the most expressive, right? Like, it's only as of the more recent games where the 3D models are simultaneously voicing and are animating the discussion, the voice mouth flaps and their face expressions and things like that are going. I feel like thinking back to maybe like golden or so, you kind of just got the like vague RPG gesture. You had

PlayStation 1 Resident Evil voice acting gesturing where they're miming. They're like, don't open that door with the arm going out and shit like that. And a lot of the weight was carried by the emotions, like the sweat drops coming off for them and stuff like that, you know? But yeah, when you think of like

5 and 3 reload and now metaphor especially, the 3D models are you can watch them the same as the art can, and they're both just doing their jobs. The thing with 3D models, as we know, a problem has always been that they, like with Castlevania sometimes,

fail to convey the artwork and the right expression and the right facial, like subtleties and details, right? 3D models will work sometimes from some angles and fail spectacularly from other angles. I always like it's a hit or miss even when they do an incredible job. And I feel like so, for example, in this game, Luis, his 3D model is amazing. And you can often see great expression and detail coming off of that in game while his artwork on the side is just Nick crushing it. Showing you both at the same time covers for any situations where the 3D is kind of failing because the artwork

is going to make up for that in a way. Do you understand what I mean? I absolutely know exactly what you mean. Yeah. So there are times where the 3D models like just at the, it's not the exact perfect angle. It looks like it's okay, but it's not conveying the emotion enough, right?

Talking to Brigita, for example, Brigita is a really good one where, like, she has a lot, she has like her makeup and the actual, like, extra lines and things that they have in the detail on her face. There are some expressions she makes where she's like, you know, sad in her, in her story.

And the 3D model just looks a little dead-eyed and the angle doesn't convey it. But you see the little shift and the artwork on the side. And that carries the feeling over where the 3D model failed to do so. It's a really great option select that they run the entire game.

So here's where I get to be really unfair because the standards and expectations between these two games are different, but they're so directly comparable that I must. So Persona 3 Reload came out earlier this year. year.

Persona 3 reloads lip flaps and general 3D model animation during the discussions that you are talking about right now are way better than metaphors. Metaphor has basic lip flap talking and like you'll see and it's, first of all, it's synced to the Japanese voiceover because like sometimes you'll see a Will's mouth go up and down when it's not correct. Totally. And it's not lip synced either. Whereas persona 3 reloads was like absolutely lip synced and tied to whatever language you had and it looked much better.

And like reload was like doing old cutscenes. Right. And old, really old dialogue and had, you know, they're remaking it. So it's not exactly fair. But there is something about reload that really stood out to me extremely strongly. And this put me down a. like a mental path to find out that had me checking out like Josh Sawyer's post-mortem on Pillars of Eternity 2.

And it's about voice acting. And so in Persona 3 Reload, every single S-link is voice-acted in its totality. And so is every single story event. In metaphor, there's a shit ton of voice acting. And then you hit the 80% mark. And then more and more and more scenes that are really important,

just start to not have voice acting at all. Okay. They just do the one bark at the top of the line. Yeah. But therefore... Including like a bunch of dialogue with your party in the first. final dungeon of the game that seems really vital

that it seems very important and the the first and last bond link are fully voice acted in metaphor but the victory lap bond links aren't

which sucks a lot it's the same it's the part of the game I wanted to hear the characters act out the most. Okay. Okay. I've noticed that the links themselves, like the events you go on, are a mix. Some scenes have it. Some scenes don't, you know? Yeah, it's the first and the last one. It's one and eight are fully voice acted. But there's also lines or moments. Yeah, a line here or there. Like the, like when you start out the, you know, the date or whatever, there will be a scene.

that has like the full lines and then if they go to a change of location then it'll go into the lines are gone the lines are gone exactly yeah um uh it it started to get like strange in the last month of the game um and obviously i'll ask chat to back me up with some yeas or nays if they noticed it but like just just lots and lots of inter-party conversations of various levels of gravitas that i'm just sitting here going like, I really, really wish this was fucking voice acted. Okay. So some of that was. Because the actors are all great. Front loaded then. They kind of, yeah, I guess it staggered off towards the end. Um, and this led to me going back and finding out, there's the, the Western game equivalent of when this happened. So, um, in, in your traditional, like,

CRP's like, a Pillars or a Balders Gate, you'd either have like really important story moments that were voice acted. and like character introductions, but beyond that it would be like barks or like a line here or there, right? So Pillars of Eternity One is like the best example. And that gives them a lot of writing freedom because they can change the writing like super late.

You don't have to lock in super early. And I watched Josh Sawyer's post-mortem on Deadfire 2 and he basically describes that when Larian's Divinity original Sin 2 came out, that had full voice acting for literally, every single spoken word in the entire game. And it kind of ruined it for everybody because that is now the standard going forward. Unreal.

And he said, though that might be. Yeah. And so he spent, pillars of eternity too, despite the fact that they were like more than halfway done through the game, the order from on high from their publisher came down that said, games got to have full voice acting now. And they went,

oh, wish we had planned for that beforehand. Hmm. And now with Balders Gate 3, that expectation is even more like cemented. Balders for sure. Like every single random character in the world's like fuck off town dialogue is voice acted. Here's the thing though. With those shortcomings as far as Atlas is concerned though, if they front loaded then have some stuff that's crucial that's missing later,

I feel like the approach they've taken Same thing with the dual art style I feel like the approach I've taken Has been to overwhelm you With things to look at To confirm the emotion That you're supposed to be feeling So when someone's saying something

You have the art You have the you're reading what they're saying You have the 3D acting it out Or the 3D animation playing it out And then you have the Bark at the top of the line Going you know Like no or whatever

As it says like This can't be happening you know And like And the approach is to kind of give you an overwhelming amount of information with each line to look at or check or hear that you never stop to think like for a second. It's absolutely adequate to understand the emotional tone of the scene. But I don't want the final time I talk to these characters to be a text box. I want to hear Heismay's actor tell me about how Heismay feels. And it's one of those things where like,

every Atlas game had this to some degree. Like, you know, most of the time, S-links weren't even voiced, right? And it's just like, only the really important story stuff is the stuff that gets full voice acting. But after they did P3 reload, where it's like every single thing,

now I'm spoiled. Now I'm like, oh, like, I could, every line of dialogue spoken by Gourmet King is voiced in Persona 3 reload. Are you telling me? The Gourmet King is more important than hearing the end of Hysmay's story about his child. Yeah. I think they are saying Gourmet King are more important.

Yeah. No, it's about budget. It's about they had more budget for voice acting on reload because it. Yeah. And you know that there's a, you know, you know that like there's a version of the game that they have going where like all the lines are being inserted over the fact. And, you know, they just have like the generic barks there at first and I can imagine them replacing it. Yeah. there's times where you see the flaps desync as well and stuff.

Yeah. And it wasn't like me going, darn this game. Oh, how could they be so lazy? It's, you know, it's like, I want to talk to this character very badly. And I want to hear what they have to say. And you know, it's, it's very likely that they kind of just, they take that full script, they roll through it, and they go, we have a thousand lines we can highlight for each character here to be voiced, you know?

And then the rest we just can't do. And so you're just going to pick out what you think are the emotionally resonant ones. And that'll be that, you know. But yeah, okay. I can see that being a bummer. It only started to really like pop up like for real during like the last dungeon because like shit is popping off. And I'm like, this would have been voice acted in earlier dungeons. Okay.

Okay. But yeah, for the Western games like yeah, Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 have like totally ruined. it and like there's no going back. Of interest when Josh was talking about it during his postmortem, he said that Pillars 1 did not have full voice acting and one of the biggest pieces of

criticism they got was that it was really hard to get people to stream Pillars of Eternity 1 because streamers don't like huge big blocks of text. Disco fucking Elysium. And as a person who despite

everyone wanting me to stop streamed the entirety of Pillars of Attorney 1. Let me tell you, I did not want to read gigantic big blocks of text. So formatting makes a difference because Disco Elysium's paragraphs rolled through on that ticker and you feel them like pages of a book. And visual novel style line by line blocks appearing in this in metaphor. and in Phoenix Wright, which I'm currently playing, give you a little bit more chance to digest piece by piece. Even though you know you're doing, you're in for a while, it just doesn't feel as daunting as when that full fucking dialogue list goes up on disco's case.

It really is, yeah, it, for streaming purposes, it's, you know, that's not the average gamer's, like, like, situation, but, like, it fucking feels horrible and tiring and exhausting when you, when you see it like that. that made or break the voice acting added to the final cut oh absolutely

like saved the game there and it's all and it's wild because I'm like this is one of the best games ever made you know

but you and I looked at that game and Paige looked at that game and I'm sure a dozen or hundreds of other streamers looked at that game and they're like

well I'd be insane not to play this on stream but I don't feel up to being able to read all this dialogue on stream so I guess I'll just wait and hope.

Yeah. And like that turned out well for us on disco. Also, it turns out, and not only was it voice acted, it was like unbelievably phenomenally voice acted at that. Yeah. Cool. Okay. What do you think your, um, your hour account was at around?

I was 90 something. 91, 92, something like that. Got it. Um, uh, I feel, I feel no desire for an upgraded version. well yeah okay but like no like p like once they started doing those you looked at them and like when persona five came out you could be like oh i wonder what they could change and upgraded or whatever and like yeah you can kind of see it yeah no the archetype system is extremely complete and the bonds that you have are extremely succinct and well formed and and like very succinctly i can see the updates

that come with these versions, though. I could see a part of it almost being like, we can't help it. We just see little things that we're like, how we can make that a little bit. Oh, there is like a hole in the game. Okay. There is a part of the game that you get to

and you're like, this used to be a full-scale dungeon with a whole month associated with it. Okay. And we're not going to get to do it. Like you can see where they just went, no, and took it out. If they, you know,

if the promise that was made is the promise that's kept, and this is all going to be DLC and not new versions for sale, then whatever, that's fine. I'm down with whatever extra stuff gets thrown in as long as it can be thrown into the existing progress I have. Cool.

But yeah, MAP4 is a good game. Thumbs up. It's on sale right now on Steam, actually. Is it? Yeah, it's 25% off, which at least one person on my chat, was like massively fucking pissed off about because they're like I beat the game like yesterday and it's already 25% off it came out like like eight weeks ago well isn't this just like a

holiday like black Friday yeah but it's it's pretty uncommon for Atlas games to go on sale within their first year of release oh even so it's like great for everybody that that didn't buy it not as great for people who bought it on the first day uh I almost I feel like holiday sale things almost don't count because it's not like a it's not a permanent discount on the game right it's like these yeah but holiday sales also exist in like a weird alternate reality like

Ubisoft can't make up its mind as to what Far Cry 5 should cost because Far Cry 5 is either 7999 every single day of the year unless there's a sale at which point they always cut it 90% down to 799

it's like so which is the real price because it's on sale for 799 literally every time it goes on sale. Because yeah, I feel like a permanent slash is one where you feel more like, oh, God damn it. You know, as opposed to like a window of time where I can, it doesn't

feel as bad to me. I don't know. Okay. Cool. You know what? I'm just thinking, because you're, you did the calendar event in metaphor around Braillehaven, right? Yep. That is the moment

where I prepared for like a big sortie. and then you didn't get one. And, like, after that point, the game couldn't catch up to me, because I prepped for, like, a big deal. They really make it sound like you've got a fucking juice. No, man. Yeah.

Holy shit. They really make it sound like, and you do expect, you know, emotionally for it to be a big deal. You steamroll it. And you're like, it's a joke. Yeah. Okay, okay. I was going to talk about metaphor as well. So, like, yeah, that just all rolls in together there.

Yeah. What else, man? What's up with you? I just wanted to talk about metaphor right away. I played a little bit of tactical breach withers. Tactible brief with us. Tactical. I'm going to breathe that.

Bleith with us. I played some tactical breach wizards. And that is a fun concept with great execution. It's really in love it's it really dedicates itself to the natural result of its stupid setting absolutely so the concept of what if a plus B in this case what if wizards plus you know like swat team style uh tactical gear come together and you see a wand with a silencer on it and you see a body art you see a bullet um kevlar and then like a knife where like the the shoulder knife like holster would go. but it's a magic dagger you know and you're like yeah okay I get it

you hit the door you put a ruin on it and the root is like C4 exploding breach very fun concept like you can't just defenestrate everyone

but you're gonna try and then the game's like to fucking throw everyone in this level out of a window yes so in terms of literally like not just look feel animation like even the model

quality It's very reminiscent of fights and tight spaces. Oh, it sure is. The way things get from spot to spot, the pacing of which you move has a little bit of that going on with it too. So yeah, perfect information game. You are planning your steps ahead of time and making sure that the order in which you take out all the enemies is optimal. and I really right away found it fun to be like, here's all the special challenges for like.

Yeah, which you're like, oh, they seem really hard. And then you get a couple and you're like, oh, maybe they're not that hard. No, but that and those are the things where I immediately, I'm like, here we go. It's the into the breach little extra goals that become the goal for me. You know, a lot of fun with that.

And I want to say early on in with the one of the first big missions, before you have a boss fight in it. There is one where you have to knock like three enemies out of a window in the same turn and then do something else. And it takes a lot of thinking ahead. I spent a lot of time on that specific one. Good. That was a really fun one to piece together that showed like, okay, they have,

they understand the assignment on these types of games. So very, very fun and charming with that. the dialogue is opt in for Marvel dialogue. So you can choose to say he's right behind me, isn't he? Or you can skip that. But it is there. And, and, you know, it's fun. It's quirky.

But, like, they're yucking it up as they go through the whole thing. And I didn't get to see it by the end of, like, I guess the, you know, first couple, I guess, yeah, the first couple missions in the intro chapter. But I'm hoping for some of those fun tile-swapping skills you see in these games where you're like, okay, grab someone on your left and on your right and swap places and shoot them out the other way. Or, you know, like have a swing a chain that hits somebody and then it comes back and hits the person behind you. Or, you know, like all these fun things you can do with just the constant. of like how many squares around you do you affect in what way and then which way are you pushing

or pulling the enemies you know um i want to see a lot of that spells midnight suns if you like that oh yeah right because there's a there's like an entire like 40% of all cards in that game are knock someone in a direction that is harmful to them um and the uh something that i did not expect about tactical breach of wizards either, is perfect information in this case is a game mechanic that you have to activate. Yeah. Every other

game shows you a little ghost of like, the enemy is about to step forward and swing at you. And you're like, okay, cool, don't be there. Here, you've got to click through the plan and then simulate to see what would happen as the main character's ability is to like pre-cog.

And then if you like the result, you can commit to it or you can go back and change it. And it's a little more work than I would want that mechanic to be because I prefer when I can just see where things are already going, trajectory-wise. But because it's in, like, because it's in law reasoning is like a part of what's his ability and stuff, I get it. And it feels, it feels fine, you know? I think that it gives it a really different taste. so like into the breach is like perfect information is like you're going to sit there and you're you're you're you're playing the game in your mind in a lot of cases before committing to it on paper yeah whereas it's it's the equivalent of like doing an algebra problem in your head and then writing down the answer right whereas in tactical breach wizards you're like oh i have really good idea oh that would not work oh that would work really badly so all right let's let's roll that back

It's more like show your work kind of solving it. Yeah. And so that pacing of like trying this, it failed. We do. Try this. It failed is actually unlike the, you know, so Into the Breits Shogun Showdown, these are the comparisons, fights in tight spaces. But when you're doing that particular element,

that's actually a lot like what it is to play Phantom Brigade. Yeah. When you set up your mechs and like how they're going to move an attack on the timeline and what's going to come in what direction. Like you try out a couple different runs before you commit to. playing it out. So a Phantom Brigade does a lot of that and transistor also does a lot of that, right? You move around and transistor on that timeline a few times before you, you're like, this is the one I'm going with. I feel like this is the best way to, you know, to deal with the

threat. So, yeah, it comes even more like genres being pulled in here just from the pacing setup and change there. And I still do prefer the one where I see the world, coming at me and you have to like find a way to you know squeeze around the the bullet lines and limbo them but but but it's fun here you know this is this is this is definitely not too bad so that was a big part of it that I thought was great and then it has the single best cosmetic currency I have ever seen in any game ever fucking phenomenal you have to earn confidence to pull off different cosmetic looks. How do you earn confidence?

Oh, you do those little special conditions. So you acted real cool. You feel cool enough to wear your cool jacket. You have to do things that require confidence. Balzy plays in the mission reward you with confidence points, which you spend to get the crazier, wackier looks. Can you pull this off is incredible. What an amazing system.

I can't believe it hasn't been done before. Amazing. I love that. That's great. That sells that. That whole concept in one shot. So, yeah, that's a fun one for sure. It does feel, too, that when taking all these kind of, these types of games, amongst which I'll put Slay the Spire as well to some degree with, like, you know, setting up your moves and progressing rogue-like, into the, not into the breach. Tactical Breach Wizards is on the more time-intense missions. a part of that. So you can do a run of, you can do a stage in Shogun Showdown in like less than five minutes, you know, you can do, you can do honestly like a minute 30 seconds to get through a level. Um, here it's just bigger. It's more involved. It feels like. You're doing sets of stages. Yeah. It feels like each one is going to be much, much heavier. And I imagine as it's a AAA game, that's what Midnight Suns is as well, right? Like, you're, no.

Really? It's not. It's a minute long missions. So minute, okay. Well, okay, Midnight Sons is not. It's,

it's in the middle there. So first of all, Midnight Sons is not a AAA game. That is a firm double A. Okay. And when you go on a mission in Midnight Sons, it is not, it is not.

So eat, like, you'll go on one stage and then come back. Mm-hmm. Right? So you're not doing like five. little rooms in a row like you do in tactical breach wizards, but your given stage is going to take a little longer than an into the breach map will.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I would say that it is half as long as an XCOM mission. And that is where I was ultimately going is I realize in this discussion, too, that I'm like, huh, Xcom is a big frame of reference for all these things, but not quite the same because in Xcom, you don't know for certain what's going to happen on the next turn. You really don't. Right? You see percentages that you cannot trust. So the unknown variable means that that game is just like,

it's a completely different thing. But then second, and this is probably part of like, it changes the feeling for me. Like I never really got into Xcom, you know, outside of like when we did that run back in the day and played it, LPing it. Failed all the way through. Yeah. I feel like my desire for like shorter, quicker runs is that same scratch I have when I go like, you know, let me get on Ballotro for a minute and get out, you know.

An excom mission that takes upwards of, you know, maybe 30 minutes, depending on how. Yeah, excom mission is like 20, 30 minutes, I'd say. It's a huge commitment that I feel like I'm kind of like, ah, I wish, it's not a It's no, I'm framing this in the wrong way. It's what that game is trying to do is perfect for what it's going for. What I usually want. Yeah, but you can't just sit down, bang out a mission and then walk away. X-com's a fucking sit-down and play some fucking video games.

And I'm not finding myself in that mood as often these days as I am to like scratch a little litch and then, you know, come back and sit down for a few, do another thing, go back to my task, you know? Sons lives in a weird space where it's definitely. longer than a breach map and but like you can it is like you sit down and you bang out like a easier

like non-narrative mission in 10 minutes but the narrative missions that have like cut scenes attached to them and are way way harder will take like 20 okay uh yeah into the breach

could the bigger missions with like tons of enemies and reinforcement waves could take you know 15 they could go heavy but the fast ones

are like you know like yeah five or so especially once you like get used to your your team and you're going quickly through it so so yeah into the

so I feel like right now Breach Wizards is landing in that like higher time investment space for my buck and that means that like I'll probably pick at it a little bit less for now a little bit more in the future

once I'm done with like Shogun Showdown and stuff like that. But very fun. We also had get into fighting games for Rivals of Ather 2. Reggie brought his homie Ned, who came over and was a guest to kind of teach us a bit more about Rivals of Ather. And hey, Rivals of Ather 1 was my favorite of the platform fighters, the, the, smash clones and rival then how come it didn't beat game of the year fighting game of the year multiverses

damn the Pope was too strong the aura was could not be cracked there was not enough tithes paid I feel like ather 2 is easily just running away with it

as far as I'm concerned it's my favorite not smash smash style by the way all jokes aside even though I'm not crazy about Ather, I totally agree with you that Rivals of Ather 1 was absolutely the best not smash game. Yep. Part of it was like it was doing more of its own thing. And it had its own feel that was more distinct.

So here's the interesting part. Coming into it, like in two, there's a lot of unique things that are really, doing its own thing applies really well to like the character kits. but the game in a lot of ways is actually just, is actually doing a lot of things that are very smash-like, but it's just doing them exceptionally well, right? And I think we've had a-

Get real labor of love energy off of it. Yes, it feels like, you know, each of these games has now come out and had its different thing where it's like, how are they going to stand out? And multiversis had the 2V2 part of it. And being shit. Also. They also had that. And then it had its other problems.

But they pushed that kind of aspect as their identity. Hey, Willie. Hey, hey, hey, Willie. You might not be a fan of our pizza now. But what if we took the pizza you're eating into the back and then pissed all over it and brought it back out for you? How about you like it now? I'm not going to pretend. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I didn't have fun with multivers. when it came out and when I was going through that.

Oh, I totally did. I totally had fun multiverse when it came out. I feel like the progression of events has made that game a much of a bummer over time. But like we can't go and make it sound like PlayStation All-Stars. We had held a candle to it. You know what I mean? Hey, you know what PlayStation All-Stars didn't do? Go away for you.

And then come back. Yeah. And then come back worse. Right. It came out and it was bad. But Isaac from Dead Space. his rival was Zeus and that was stupid as shit but but yeah

I do when we line them up and you kind of get those and then you get your everything from TMNT smash up to you know Nickelodeon and so on

Slap City had stood out because it had a clutch button and the clutch button is really fun what a great concept that's like the name but but I feel rivals just always felt like it had the most love put into it. And my go-to example of this is the way it treated

shovel night. When you look at shovel night as a guest in that game, sure, shovel night has been a guest in every game. And there's often a very predictable but solid move kit that he gets. You know, you got the down shovel, you've got the fishing, you've got the spinner, you know, you got all the things you expect to see. but the rivals of Ather one had so much extra love put in. His is just the amount of the lengths they went to to make him as accurate as possible and have way more in there than your average, like, you know, platform fighter would expect. It showed, yeah, it showed love, you know. And so I feel like that goes into a lot of all these other, all the other characters as well. And you feel it.

You feel it in the amount of things they can do with the possibilities and a lot of what the system has. going for it. And it's just fun, man. The parry system in particular, I was talking about it from trying out the demo earlier, but I think that's a really fun addition to the game that you, you know, you can use to, like, call out big predictable moments and, like, get a nice big reward for it. But you could also do, like, regular dodging and spot dodging. And the things that you, you know, like if you're used to smash movement, you could,

you could always do. it finds these places where these other games and smash included didn't give you options and it says hey when you're hanging off the ledge what if you pressed your B button you could do a ledge special yeah well what happened man that's cool

when you grab the someone you can hit them or you can throw them or you can do a grab special you know and like and by having the ability to like you have the time to land one grab special and then do a toss in a certain direction. You know, like a lot of these things are just like, oh, yeah, that's a more fun way to implement things, you know?

It was great. It was great. I think it stands out as, yeah, it's the best of these not smash games. And it's not going to get the attention it deserves, unfortunately, just because that's the way it go. But I do feel like it's nice to as well know that you don't have to think about, like, hey, you want to jump online? Yeah, of course they've got everything roll back and working

and all that set up and get to go. You don't even have to think. Yeah, we're living in a golden age in which you are now a stupid pariah for your online being weird or non-useful in a lot of situations. And as a side, yeah. And as a side note, the ather verse, you know, is a thing because there's like the card game, there's the dungeon crawler, you know, there's like all these different like genres they're kind of getting into as well.

So shoutouts, you know, Dan Fornes and rivals of Ather too, man. It's real, real good. It's a lot of fun. And, yeah, I think it stands out. I think it's absolutely worth your attention. And it was fun. Yeah, shoutouts to Ned as well, who came over and kind of showed us some of the tech and some of the cool things you could do. I've always liked Krag in that game.

And Craig continues to be really good in the. one too. And seeing what you can do with these characters, like being played like really well, it looks like it's, they look just unique and doing their own bit and like it. And like, and it's a lot of fun, you know, the way you, I always like the way that like the orca, you put the puddle down and then you can recover by going through to that, you know, or the, um, maple where you put the, the, the flowers and then you can whip to the flower. Like all these little bits are just kind of really fun and well thought out. There's a new giant, uh, elephant. with like an axe that like has to step in his lava, like walk on lava to like get his

to buff himself and get stronger and make some of his moves better and stuff. And they're just, yeah, they're fun. There's just a lot of fun and great stuff going on with it. So everyone go check that out. I hope Aether continues to do well or at least well enough to continue to exist. It's one of those things I look at it and I'm like, yeah, this isn't for me. but I'm also like appreciative of its continued quality in existence. Yes, yes.

And something I pointed out as well is that, you know, as we do, like, as you are well aware, there are different proportions and styles of furries out there, right? Yeah. You have, you're, you, it's a wide variety of that. Yeah, art style changes, the, the, the, the number of heads high, whether they're more like Jim Henson-esque or, you know, going into, yeah, like, like however you cartooned them. Or do you want to be like a tiny little,

little furry rabbit in this game called Atlas that has good reviews? And I'm like, this looks cool. And then I scroll past the fact that it has an absolutely degenerate ass slider in it that has the fucking shorts ride up the bunny rabbit's ass. There you go. And then you click on it on Steam and it's like overwhelmingly

positive. And I'm like, I don't know if those, I don't know what the positive, I don't know what proportion of what positive of what part is, these reviews are coming from, but apparently it's pretty good. Well, there you go, right? So look, Zootopia, B stars, and My Little Pony, different styles of, you know, anthropomorphic character design here. The, the Furry's character designs in the Atherverse, it feels are like Disney's Robin Hood style. Okay. And those are pretty good. So pre, so, no. I think those are pretty

good ones. Closited era furries. I mean, Robin Hood was before they knew what they were doing. I wouldn't, that's not the case here. I think Ather knows what it's doing, but it just proportionally reminds me of that.

You know? I feel like that's what I'm seeing here. Anyways, anyways. Yeah, no, by the time Minnurva Mink came around, it was too late. At the time I remember Mink came around somebody walked by

the guy drawing that I was like get the fuck out of here they're never gonna let you put this fucking bitch in the in the kid's cartoon like yeah you fucking bet I mean you know they knew that they were making sexy animals but they did not know

that they were sculpting a generation of young impressionable minds that were watching these things yeah and it'll never go back You can't go back now. The contagion has existed. It's in the water.

All right. So yeah, that is going to be pretty much my week. We're going to be, we did some Phoenix right yesterday, schedule-wise. That's continuing. And tomorrow, we are starting cyberpunk. Hey! So come swing over to Woolly versus. That's on Twitch and on YouTube.

We're going to be getting into the first session, seeing how that feels. And then on Thursday, I think I'm going to take a look at and probably continue through 1,000. times resist? Mm. I want to check that out. So I was thinking about that after Phoenix, right? But I think I'm just going to start it now. You know what?

That 1,000 times resist is such a great game to talk about after the conversation we had about the voice acting. Because I was finishing up metaphor and people were like, you should try a thousand times resist. and I'm like, answer me the one question. And this one question will determine if the chance of me playing it is zero percent or anything higher than zero percent. And it is, does 1,000 times resist have full voice acting? And the answer was yes.

Ah, awesome. Very cool. So like that made it from a, well, I will probably never play this to maybe I will play it. Good stuff. Okay. Um, yeah. I know. as well that things, when we run three things, it gets a little spotty on the schedule.

But I think Phoenix Wright should be wrapping up shortly. But yeah, we had a slot here. So I'm just going to get that looked at. Phoenix Wright's a fun game, but man, it's sometimes impossible to figure out when the fucking game is going to end. We got them. There's no, here's a videotape of them committing the murder and a sign confession. how they get out of this. Hey, look, it's some bullshit.

I pulled out of my ass. I mean, I think, I think as well, the only thing I can trust is the turnabout theme. Because when you get cornered and then you get, I don't know them perfectly, but there's three levels of escalation, right? Yeah. And when you get from the first one is when like, oh, should I caught you? And the second one is like, now you're cracking. But if you never get to the final one, you know the case is not done yet. You know we might go for another day, you know?

So I'm relying on listening to, when I hear all three, that's when I feel like their back is against the wall, you know? They also kind of get caught in like their own, like, and you notice it more as the games go on. You get caught in this cycle where you're like, well, this is the third case. So the likelihood of wrapping this up on day one is zero. Like it's not No matter how this goes Because each case is 20% or 30% longer than the case before it So even though it looks like I got him dead to rights

I know something's coming down Something's gonna happen Gotta be dramatic Unknown people just showing up in the fucking courtroom Or you hit them with the fuck with your big shot And then they just kind of tank it and go yeah And they're like Yeah so fuck we're gonna be here another day

Just because I own the gun that shows them doesn't mean, and I wanted them dead, doesn't mean that I shot them because I have an unreliable alibi that you'll need to interview tomorrow. I was saying it in, I was saying it where we're playing, but I'm like, I'm just getting hit with the, uh, fucking Joey Buttafuoco situation over and over of just like, I could not stand my wife. She was the worst. I hated her.

I didn't kill her. No. You're like, okay. You know. Like, yeah, it was that type of vibe. Anyways, we will be checking that out this week. Saturday, no stream, but perhaps Friday instead. So check my Twitter and my blue sky for the schedule.

Yeah, that's pretty much for me. All right. I got to use the restroom. And then I have a bunch more week to talk about it, actually. Be right back. Oh, what's you eating, man? protein bar fuck yeah

all right let's see hey it's pat what did pat play this week all right so i beat metaphor that's done what else oh yeah so every new stage of development

for your baby is the fucking coolest thing ever um until they become like kids and talk back and shit or whatever but you know you just enjoy it while it's good right uh no i joke obviously

it's always gonna be good But the newest trick is the baby will put his hand on his mouth and go, when you when you say hello to him. It's blowing kisses. Wow. Ready for, ready for the stage. And, and like, so there's like, I love my baby. I'm so proud of my baby.

And then there's like, you're at a restaurant with your. quiet, well-behaved baby, and he looks at an old lady one table over and smiles. It goes, and you see that person? Just fucking dies. Just,

just implodes into a black hole. A hundred percent. And you're like, yeah. Got him. And then Paige talked about it on her stream and I talked about it on my stream, but I should mention it here, that Paige and I can confirm

that we made the first genuine fucking mistake parenting this child. Like, did it and were immediate, like, shouldn't have done that. That's going to come back on us real bad. So, you know, babies need to try new foods. So this means you make dinner or you go out somewhere and you hear you go a little baby. Here's a little piece of food. Do you like it? No, you don't like it.

oh, you do like it. You know, so hey, guess what? Kids like chicken fingers and chicken nuggets. Just fucking shocker, right? This kid likes pickles and lemons and shit like that. Oh, that's crazy. Right. But then we saw like that chocolate syrup that like hardens into like a shell on like ice cream.

Oh, yes. Yeah, the dip. The coating gift is familiar. So Paige's like, oh, you've never had that? We got to try that. so we'll pick up ice cream. We don't usually have ice cream in the house, so we'll pick up ice cream.

And so, like, we've given the kid, like a little piece of cake, and we've given him a little piece of this or that. So we gave him, like, what was the equivalent of, like, a single gram, like, you know, the tip of a spoon of vanilla ice cream.

And the kid, you saw, like, every neuron fire up simultaneously. And he grabbed the spoon. And then, for like four days afterwards. He would pinch his fingers like this and go, ah, ah, and hit his chin. And you're like, do you want chicken nuggies? Do you want toast?

Do you want a banana? Do you want berries? No. He would, he would fucking like, flap this and the arm. And it's like, oh, fuck. He's been asking for ice cream for days. And he's getting mad that there's no ice cream. Now that was last week

He seems to have forgotten What the ice cream feels like right now Because he's back to eating like normal Okay But like there was that There was that fucking day there We're like shit Yeah

Is this kid only gonna fucking eat ice cream now? You know that much God damn it The monkey loves those those cucumber slices Until it sees the grape go by And goes get the fucking cucumber out of my face And so like yeah Okay, ice cream is off the table.

No more trying out ice cream. That is a mommy and daddy food only. But like, you know, bullet dodged but grazed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? There are some food pleasures that, like, you're going to need to wait a little bit. But it's crazy because, like, we gave him, like, a little tiny piece of cake on his first birthday. And he was like, eh, it's fine.

You know, the sugar craziness hadn't locked in. genetically or something. No, you need to save it till you can use it as an incentive to control behavior. That's, that's, that is how you end up with a pat situation. You don't want that. That's how you give yourself a disordered eating. Yeah. In regards to sweets. You don't do that. That's bad to do. No, the good rewards that come from following and doing as you're told, you know. so yeah you know so the only thing that sweets will be for is

every time he does a good job or gets a good grade on a test or any time he's sad just give him as many sweets as he can eat during those two crucial time periods let's associate feelings of success

and reward with unhealthy eating bro dude I was so doomed let's so fucking do that to and put a like marry the concepts together like okay I was a shy child

very shy so when I went out and like went out and did social things or like you know did really well at like a social gathering that I was nervous about here's candy and that may have given me bad habits

you open up that tub and you you peel the foil back and inside is just the word happiness and you just grab your spoon. I once described, Paige asked me once like, why do I like sweet sugary treats so much? And I said, like,

you ever like, like you say it and you didn't realize that it was your true feeling until it's out of your mouth and now it's out of the world? Yeah, that happens. I was like, oh, because it feels like happiness.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That's it. You go from being stressed to just happy. Like, no matter what's happening, you can be stressed and freaked out

and you just eat a, eat a candy, and then you're just happy and you're relaxed. I was like, oh, let's start early. Yeah, no. So no more trying out ice creams for the baby. He had the one gram, and that was like crack cocaine. So no more of that. Let's see.

And he's the most perfect angel ever, and I love him. Someone in the chat brought up getting cheated out of the quarter piece of pie in my childhood. Yeah, no, I'm still mad about it. Anyway, that pie should have been shared. You know, sweets are, they're most effective when you, uh, when you learn that, or as long as there are still good things in the world, then you don't need those, those treats as much now.

You know, as reality, as reality starts to, starts to happen. They, they, they shine even brighter. now I want to eat a bunch of candy just talking about this. Damn it. Yeah, you fucking do. Yeah, I do. Hey, don't, don't enable. Shame. Shame on you. Nick, I got diabetes. What the fuck

you think this is? I thought you were pre. I thought you were pre-diagniz. I hit the real thing. I hit it? That's why I had your best now. Yeah, but I'm back now. But I'm back now. I am back. It's true. Yeah. So like, you know, you taste it for a little while. It's permanent.

You came back off it. It's permanent. Once you have it, it's remission at best. No, it's not permanent. Nah. Yeah. I knew a guy and he was,

he was diabetes, and then he got way less fat, and then his doctor was like, you're cured. Right. I prestige. Well, you know, hold on.

Yep. Let me describe that slightly more accurately. That is what that guy told me. Mm. Mm. Got it. Okay. That, like,

he told, me that he lost a bunch of weight and his doctor said you are cured of your diabetes. I was not in the doctor's office with him at the time. I'm sure that's the exact phrasing the doctor used. Probably.

Verbatim. Got it. Probably. All right. So did you know that the people who made dead cells split off into multiple developers? There's motion twin and then there's an offshoot of motion twin?

I did not know that. So... I did know that Motion Twin did recently develop something I played. Was it Astral Ascent? No. Was it Windblown? No.

Okay. Well, they made one of those. Okay. And I can't tell you which one it is. Okay. So I played Astral Ascent and Winblown. The split-offs of Dead Cell. Huh. You remember how dead cells was 2D, but had like a weird 3D aspect to it?

Did it? Uh, what was 3D? Or like they were, what's that? I don't know how to describe it. I don't remember anything. Like it was sprite based, but it looked kind of like crunchy and fat like a like it was 3D. I don't know how to describe it. The sprites had had dynamic lighting on them in the way that like this.

Yeah. K.O.F. 12 and 13 sprites did. But that was the main deal. Uh, so Astral Ascent. is a lot more like dead cells. Okay. It is a 2D scroller that you go level to level as a roguelite. It's very pastel based.

And you get upgrades and you will get your gadget on your L and R. And you like, it's very much like a successor to dead cells. And I don't like it at all. Oh, damn. I don't like it even a little. And I, I, I, I, I, hmm. Wait, Astral Sent. Yeah, that's the right game.

Yeah. It's 2D art is really good. I just don't like, um, literally anything about every single thing the game does. Holy shit. Let me pull this one and take a look. Now that is not to say it's bad. In fact, it's kind of like, it's got a lot of quality going on with it. What the fuck is the English language, man?

What do you mean? What are you saying right now? I say, hey, listen, I'm using my non-definitive language to describe my feelings. I said, I didn't like it, not that it was bad. For you, that's very important. Most people use these types of words, not. me, though. In fact, I can, you know what that is? That is years of learning and then correct usage of language after lessons have been learned, you know. I am attempting to use my words more

effectively. Gotcha. Okay. Somebody in the chat says, pizza tower feelings. You know what? That might have been the fucking turning point. Because pizza tower, I was like, ugh, I bet people really like this, though. Yeah, I feel like it must have happened years before that, but that was a very strong case of, like this is not bad but it is not for me. Yeah. So I don't, the light, it's really floaty,

and it's very pastel. Um, and I hate it. I click play. And the first thing I saw was someone floating in the air and a part pastel art style as they landed on the ground. Um, and, uh,

it's, it's like all the parts of dead cells that I did not enjoy got split off to create their own game. Huh. Huh. This looks cool. It's a much more colorful game, certainly. Yeah.

Okay. So, I hate it. Wow. On the other hand, windblown. Art style is pretty much the beginning and end of that thought? No,

it's art style. It's the feel. It's the tone. Like, I didn't. I played it for like an hour and I was like, I don't feel any, I am not appealed by literally anything that is going on here. Fives. I'm bored.

My vibes are dead. I had no feelings other than like, oh, I don't like how this controls. Right. Someone in the chat asked the important question, which characters did I try? The two starting characters. I also played windblown, which is some of the, Dead Cells people deciding that they would like to make furry Hades. And that's really good.

The banner for Windblown has almost the exact position and coloring as Dead Cells protagonist like in the foreground. Yeah. Interesting. The music in Windblown is fucking incredible. I really like it's color use. I really like its aesthetic. It is a Hades-like.

That's the clear inspiration. But it takes like a bunch of weird little changes to the formula that make it really interesting. This was shown at a game show recently. I remember watching a trailer for this with something. Yeah. Okay. So one of the things is that I've been testing this a lot lately, which is does this game have Dodge Offset for his combos?

Because I'm noticing that more and more games have Dodge Offset, which is cool. And to those of you who are not familiar with Dodge Offset, that means if you have a five-hit combo, but you dodge in between hits three and four, and you hit combo again, hits four and five will come out so you don't interrupt your combo. Even if you don't actually complete the previous strings. Yeah. So the reason why Dodge Offset is so interesting in Windblown is because you have your Dead Cell-style weapons where they all have like three or four hit combos and they'll act like

Hades weapons but you're picking them up during your run. You're not you're not picking up like staff and running staff the whole time and then getting upgrades for staff like no you're getting or their staff or you're getting butcher's knife or great sword and it has the dead cells unlock progression where you're getting more and more different weapons with more and more movesets. The most interesting thing about it is that once you unlock it very early on is that the game's core mechanic is Dodge Offset because the final hit of every combo

is switching to your other weapon with a unique attack that switches to your other weapon. Stylish. That's cool. So the butcher's knife is the starter weapon, which is like left slash, right slash, and then big overhead slash.

Super basic, right? But if it's your secondary weapon and you switch to it on the final hit of like a staff combo, it will create like a gigantic whirlwind of slashes in front of you for like 10 seconds. Okay.

Yeah. That will interact with all of your other stuff. I mean, I'm seeing some upgrades in the footage here that looks just like Hades upgrades, really. Yeah. Like spinning blade. It feels really good. It plays really well.

Okay. So what you were just describing about art style and sort of a color and things like that, It's funny, like, what I'm looking at here with Windblown going, the color of this game is World of Warcraft. Yes. Like, no. Like, the color of this game is Warcraft 3. Okay. That's a really very tiny distinction.

The purples and blues and rainbow lighting of everything happening at all times right now is very much what I feel like watching, wow. when I see it. What's also really strange, both Astralist set and Windblown are going for more pastel, like lighter colors. Yes, yes. Like they're actually really similar. And in Astral, they're very flat.

And in Windblown, they're very shaded because they have lots of lighting and lots of shadows on them. Everything is glowing. Everything is glowing. And it's, uh, Oh yeah, every single thing is glowing. Yeah, yeah, and flashing.

And to be fair, in some cases, like, I feel like there's that kind of Xbox 360 glow. It's kind of like, you know. You know exactly what you mean. Yeah. What you mean is Unreal Engine 3 glow. Sure, Fury, you know, yeah, yeah, right. But what they have is awesome hand-drawn slash and hit sparks on top of these. the glows, and that makes them look better.

That makes them look good. So that's a nice touch I'm seeing here. So windblown gets to live in the part of my Steam library where I play it for three hours and go, wow, that's great. On the shelf with you, early access game. I'll see you in six to 18 months when you're done and hit 1.0. I mean, it really does, I mean, coming from the dead cells bones, like this is, yeah, way more Hades and as whereas Astrolacent is much more of a dead cells successor in what they're going for. Yeah, and they both focused on different parts of what dead cells was about. And it turns out I liked one side of that equation way more than I like the other one.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'd have to play this and get the feel for it. But like, I do feel a bit of, um, uh, death gambit in sort of like, uh, how this is, how this is playing out with some, the way the way things are moving and, um, uh, there's another thing that comes to mind. But either way, um, both games are just filling the screen with your abilities stacking on top of each other. And you're kind of like, um, well, you know, uh, a bullet heaven. final form feels like you're running around doing that on the screen

in a 2D sense. Okay, interesting. So, so the Steam sales, the autumn sales has been happening, which is why I've been trying out so many of these.

So have, Willie, have you ever, I don't know if you've encountered this. Has there ever been a game that you love, but then someone ruined it? Or like,

you know, bad patch or like the company was really horrible. And then they said to you, what if you could play that game, but instead it wasn't like that game at all other than the parts about that game that you liked. So, hey, you know how you hate playing Overwatch because Overwatch sucks now? What if you could play a new game that was not Overwatch, but was in fact Overwatch and called it Marvel Rivals? actually I got it right did you like do you see what I'm saying with that

it's like you know all that fucking anger and shit and gross you have about the direct replacement what if what if I just gave you a new Overwatch game that just didn't have the same name on it right that is

wow that's as close as I could possibly get to something that most people here would understand so Destiny 2 is a game I put a lot of time in and Destiny 2 is my most hated game that I have ever put time in because all the time that I put into Destiny 2, I feel like it got thrown into my face

because that game was like ruined under me, like just made bad. So I looked at a game and I said, what is this game? It was called Witchfire. And someone personally edited the old XKCD comment. to be like, what game is this?

Which fire? What's it like? Destiny. What is it, though? It's not destiny. Amazing. That's exactly what I wanted. And I thought, that can't possibly be that on the nose because the store page says it's a first-person shooter,

dark action, edgy, grim dark. extraction rogue-like many words on there and then I load up Witchfire which is in early access it's not done but it's one of those games

that's been in early access for so long that you could just lie and say it's done you know those kinds of things sure sure sure and when people said that it plays like destiny

I expected a game that was very similar to destiny and look and feel. I was not expecting a game that felt identical in feel to destiny down to the buttons. I was not expecting a game that is so similar to the way destiny feels that I can see which guns got ripped off to become which guns in which fire. I see. Where I look at the gun hunger and I go, that's a cross between. Hawk Moon and the Ace of Spades. And it feels, it

acts like Hawk Moon, but it plays like the Ace of Spades kind of thing. So sometimes there are games that are like in a similar style or like things, or clones of or so. And then sometimes there are games that are, I guess, like an Exodus game.

Like, as you leave that, we come here. This is where this is a basket for you to fall into. It is an Exodus game that you're supposed you were waiting for you all and everything is exactly the way you you remembered it. So I'm going to have to go into a little bit of destiny terminology here to get it across for the lapsed players. But the long and short of it is what Witchfire is which fire says go into a little open map that in Destiny would be called a patrol area. And there are a multitude of enemy groups

and chests and, you know, randomly generated type of rogue like things that you can go around interact with shoot, discover little hidden vaults and tombs and micro dungeons and shit like that. As you kill these enemies, you'll get resources and you get a little rogue-like power-up system that only works in for the parts that only does one trip at a time, right? And you're playing with destiny guns, guns that are just stolen directly from destiny down to the part where they have what in destiny would be called an exotic catalyst. But here they're just like, hey, shoot kill 25 enemies with this handgun. Okay, now the handgun

will stockpile power if you do headshots one after the other. Okay, now kill 150 enemies with this handgun and upgrade it in the shop. Now it will stockpile power for every headshot you get before reloading and that

power will exponentially go up per bullet that you do it in a row and then kill 200 with this and then upgrade it the third time. And now it will let you keep that streak going even if you hit a body shot and just roll it. There's a gun that you have to get the heat on and it will burn enemies to put status on. You know, that kind of destiny, gun play, weapon upgrade thing.

And also in Destiny, like the rare gun with the customization and such is the peak of what you're trying to do. It's called an exotic in Destiny. It's a gun that has weird properties that does cool things and feels great. But the point of the entire video game is to get the cool rare gun. And so here what they have done is like every gun that you get is the cool rare gun. And instead they put it into a like kind of rogue-like kind of thing. And if you level up your character like in Dark Souls, then the map re-rolls itself so that enemies are in different locations and special events are in different places. It's really cool and it feels really good.

And I put a bunch of time into it despite the fact it's early access. and it has a bunch of cool challenges to it, but it also has only half the areas that it will have in the full game. So I'm putting it on the shelf. But if you're the kind of person who really fucking likes destiny but doesn't want to play destiny, which fire is over there? And it's a little bit different, but I had a blast playing it over the weekend.

From the developers of the vanishing of Ethan Carter. Yeah, weird, huh? What the fuck? strange. Isn't that weird as fuck? Not what I expected to see there. Baffling. But yeah, no, it plays, it plays excellently. There's, you know, there's no story right now. And, you know, there's bits and pieces missing and it doesn't have half the levels. But it plays incredibly. And so if you're interested, I would suggest checking it out. It's not really on sale. It's like 10% off on the autumn sale. but like it's always funny to imagine i feel like i i can't pull the exact examples but um

giz companies devs that make a really narrative heavy game just go man fuck it we want some gameplay and you just you just make a gameplay loop ass gameplay thing as your as your second thing uh uh when your identity can just go in either direction oh man we've done walking simulators for a while what do you go why guys want to do basketball game Fuck it. Just. Um, so, uh, which fires were the cool? And the last game that I played this week of note is somebody sent me a code for what's

called the Soul Frame preludes, which is a fancy way of saying the Alpha version of Soul Frame. Um, so, so Soul Frame is digital extremes is. not Warframe, incoming, you know, action game, not quite MMO thing. That is medieval and fantasy instead of sci-fi. Okay. I was, in fact, going to, I mean, so on the docket is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, frame devstream and some of that stuff. Was, uh, was this included in that at those announcements? I don't know. Okay.

I, I, I didn't even know. that that happened. So any of that stuff that's in there, I would be new to me. Okay. I just happen to get sent to code. The game's been available to stream for about 30 days, but I didn't have access.

It's like invite only kind of thing. But eventually you get your own invite to send out to somebody. Did you play what they showed at TEDocon? No, I don't know. I didn't. I've been off. I have been off the Digital Extremes wagon. Gotcha.

Okay. for for years now since uh 21 i've been out okay um so uh but i did play a million hours of warframe back in the day so it's a good starting point for comparison for soul frame and um what they're doing with soul frame is really smart so warframe is a third person shooter where you have a button for melee and you have a bunch of, you know, magic abilities, your one, two, three, four, like it's a moba. And you're going out there and you're grinding and you're running missions and you're doing shooter missions.

Soulframe is exactly the same game in reverse. So in Warframe, where most of your buttons are for shooting and you have a melee button, in Soulframe, most of your buttons are for melee and you have a shooting button. Okay. So in Warframe, you have slide, aim, shoot, et cetera, and your powers, right? In Soulframe, you have light attack, heavy attack, block slash Perry, and then the left trigger is for all of your abilities, which does include firing a little bit of lightning out of your hands, kind of like a gun.

but like the the the um the focus is completely inverted from guns to melee also um also uh

I mean the that yeah what I what I'm kind of looking at it's like not much grunts that you're dealing with either it seems like it's very like one on one no you're dealing with way less enemies but they're much stronger a lot of duels

yeah a lot a lot of like you know oh there's three guys they're much more like souls like and like melee bosses and whatnot and in its genuine it's general like structure however it's actually incredibly similar to warframe so like in warframe between missions you go to the orbiter which is your little spaceship that would fly in orbit in uh in soul frame you hit the select button and your character teleports into, I don't know what the fuck to call it, I forget the name of it, but like a mind palace that has your upgrade stall and your character that builds your gear and shit like that. And when you earn a new blueprint and get the items to build gear, it can take eight to

12 hours in real human time to build it. Okay. Because you're going to build it and then you're going to go back out there and you're going to grind and etc. And I remember, so like the starting area is like a fairly large open area, like a field, like a medieval type of village area. And I was like, I wonder how they're going to do warframe style content. Like, you know, like a defense mission or a assassination mission.

You know, the types of missions that you would fly the orbiter on. And then my little bird waypoint brought me to a, you know, the door to an underground labyrinth. And then when I went into the underground labyrinth, I discovered that the underground labyrinth was completely disconnected from the overworld's internalized geography and was in fact a very complex tile set that was randomized. And that is how that you'll be physically traveling to little dungeon areas

that will have your randomized tile sets for your warframed stone missions. Are you online? While you're playing this? Okay. Are there online features that are occurring? I don't know. It's the version that I'm playing is very early. Very early.

Hmm. I do know that in the bottom left corner, it says recruiting on a little window. So that means it will be multiplayer. And that there will be a chat. but the version that I'm playing is very early and very early access. Okay. Because real world hour timers, like for online, I guess that's how those things go for single player offline. What the fuck are we doing?

You know, I was actually thinking about the timers. And I remembered that I was thinking a lot about them and how people hate them so much in Warframe. it's a retention mechanic obviously it's oh well build this that means i'll log back in in a couple days right yeah it's mobile games with their daily usage batteries yeah and it's not about dailies it's just about come back later come back and play again later um and i realize that like when i was playing warframe a lot i really you only interact with the timers once ever in the entire time you play warframe and that's the first time you turn them on because the second time you go to turn on your timers, you're picking up the shit that you set up last time.

Here's an important question. Will this game be free? Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Okay. If I see a timer and a game that I've bought. Two warframing.

I'm going to lose my shit. Yeah. Okay. I would say that this is much more appealing to people like you who are way more into melee combat than super fast running gun combat. But it is. It is a frame game. Like, it's not called Soul Fighter or whatever the fuck.

It's called Soulframe. And it's very interesting because I was really impressed and it feels really good. And it has that really... So you've seen Warframe enough to be like... It has a really weird technology look. Like, it's very strange and, like, Siberian, like, indigenous, like technological... Just a art style inspiration. Yeah, like Warframe's technology just looks like kind of nonsensical and biological.

It looks super weird. Okay. And Soul Frames fantasy setting is the same exact aesthetic, but inverted. where it's not fantasy sorry, it's not technological

with weird biological fantasy elements it's fantasy biological stuff with weird technological elements

and the proportions like the accent is different it's the slight tech accent as opposed to the slight

organic accent yeah so like instead of a robot that has like a weird stag head on it

it's weird deformed stag that has like one weird robot A little robot part. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's really interesting because it's like it's really, really, really obviously Warframe's sister game or cousin

but, and it looks very similar despite being in the opposite setting. It's super interesting. Warhammer versus 40K. What's that? Someone said Warhammer versus 40K. Yeah.

It's inverted in the way that, yeah, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K are inverted. But you're hitting similar notes, yeah. Cool. Okay. And this, this would have me into the strange situation where, have you ever been in the situation where someone says every single right answer to your question that gets you to rethink something? where like you're like I don't know and then you ask the five questions that all need to be answered correctly and all five are answered correctly does it have so I go well Steve's on this that'd be Steve Sinclair over at digital extremes sole frame is his new baby right he's off warframe because Rebecca Ford space mom and wonderful lady and fantastic Dio cosplayer is now head of Warframe being promoted up from community manager.

And I'm like, so this is Steve's baby. So how's Rebecca been doing with Warframe? Because the people watching my Soul Frame chat are going to tend to have be people that know what the fuck they're talking about with Warframe. To which they respond, oh, it's great. It's better than it's ever been, which is always fun because when you ask people about destiny, you get one guy going, Destiny's going great. and then you have like 20 guys going, no, it's not.

It's actually shit. But I asked, like, how's Warframe doing under Rebecca? And, oh, it's doing great. What's changed? Oh, they toned down this thing that you hate and they improved the thing that you like. Like, okay, well, that is a good answer. And I go, well, Inaros was my favorite frame that ever happened. Did they ever make Inaros Prime?

Well, Pat, not only did they make In Aros Prime. but they gave him a full-scale rework and he's better than he's ever been and he's more fun too. I go, oh, okay, that's pretty good. And then someone said, yeah, Rebecca and Pablo have been doing really well. I go, why are you talking about Pablo? Because if you're not familiar, Pablo is a guy who would do reworks on some of the warframes every now and then. And he would be of note because you wanted Pablo to be the guy who reworked your frame. Oh, the reworks had specific names attached that people knew, really?

Yes. Oh, my God. I didn't know it went in like that. Like, can you imagine if it was like, well, that was, uh, Mr. Takumi-san was the person who balanced bison. Oh, fuck. This time around. Oh, right?

Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. So we're getting into the, this Gundam redesign was done by Hajime Katoki. So we got the version Ka. Yes. The specific. Yeah.

right, right, right. So you're like, they're like, well, Pablo's doing it. I'm like, well, what? And then what? Well, Pablo did in Ars's rework. I'm like, oh, oh, really? It's like, well, Pablo's like the head gameplay man now. Because Steve's gone.

So Pablo's running all of that shit under Rebecca. And I'm like, but Pablo was the best one. He always did the best reworks. And then at the end of all that, I'm like, maybe I should go check on my Warframe account. Mm-hmm. And so I logged in on to Warframe. And the very first thing that happened, like clockwork,

everyone that has ever gone away from that game for any length of time. How much did you get? How much did you get? And that 75% off-clat coupon shows up. He's back! Every time. It is guaranteed. All the discounts.

Initiate everything. Give it. give him all the feelings. I saw people talking about the way that that seems to happen is that your daily login bonuses will rotate when you're not logging in and it will save the highest value one. Oh, my God. So if you were gone like I was for three years, I was actually kind of guaranteed to come back to that. And it's a great incentive to be like, look, look at all this free money.

Well, jokes on digital extremes because I actually still had so much free money left over from the last time I played Warframe that it would be totally pointless to buy it now. So Inaros Prime is currently gestating in my orbiter's womb. And they will be done in 68 hours. It's not that it's free money. It's that the money you don't spend is being wasted for the bonus that you should be getting. That's right. Um, so, uh, In aros prime is cooking. They got a bun in the oven.

And so we'll see how that goes. Um, and, uh, I, I'm interested in seeing the three years of features from a live service game and what it's like to catch up on that. Um, and what's strange is like, I'm not playing FF 14 at all anymore. Like I, I've completely quit, uh, entirely. Well, until they. You know, drop new shit. No, the 7.1 came and went. Didn't even bother to log in.

That happened quietly. Yeah, I talked about it on my stream, but I was like, I was not super happy with where the way the, the, the Dantrail stuff was going. But the, like, like the future of Dant Trail. But the number one thing, and this cannot be overstated, that there's one thing that Warframe has and so, frame by that measure have over Final Fantasy 14 that cannot be beat and that is the ability to pause the game when the baby gets a hold of the remote or tries to run away and get into

some shit the ability to pause your video game is becomes the single most defining characteristic of playing a game when there is a baby. Because the baby's playing with his toys and you play your baby toy for your grown-up toy and then the baby starts to crawl away and you're like, well, I need to go chase that now. So I thought it was a more online game that was persistently online enough

that you wouldn't be able to. So, Warframe, if you start a mission in a private lobby by yourself, pause just pauses the game. Your instance alone, so why not? Yeah. Okay. And that alone is the difference between

oh yeah, I'll blow a bunch of time on this and not. Because if, you know, if baby, I have a climber. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was curious. I can't not, I can't, I can't be like, hold on, baby. there's six minutes left of this

X roulette. Well, so I was wondering if like the FF14 thing was like how much one baby affects that, right? And second, I also know that like they just started a new story after a real long closing arc of that last one.

And I was wondering if you kind of felt like that was a good exit point. I was. But it was the it was this thing where what I would describe as my, so there's, you know, know, I'm a dad now, and I love hanging out with my little guy. And if he looks at the TV too closely, I turn whatever I'm playing off because I don't

want to fry his brain with screen time and all that shit. Like, no iPad for this child. No, don't do it. So my only quote unquote unmolested screen time for dad is from 10.30 p.m. to midnight. Right. Because that's when baby is asleep. And it's not up too late before I go to bed because I need to get up at 8 because the baby gets up at 8.

Right? And for FF14, I was like running roulette at fucking 11 o'clock at night. And for a class I don't plan on playing just so I could level up all my characters. And I was like, what the fuck am I fucking, what the, I get like an hour or day of, of, of, of, of, you know, not having to worry about, you know, baby eating a piece of wood he found on the ground. Sure. To do this. And, uh, I'm blowing it fucking leveling up fucking tanks. I'm not going to play.

What the fuck am I doing? It's fucking stupid as shit. Okay. Well, um, there's that. And then as you just established, there's a, there's a. also, well, you got to get let that account cool down for a little bit so that when you eventually you do come back, you get these fucking bonuses all stacked up. 14 doesn't do that.

14 doesn't. Oh, they don't do incentives. They don't do a welcome back. No, they don't do incentives. What they do is catch up. The first hit is free? No, no, no. But 14, what 14 does is catch up is that like if you want to grind your character out to

max power in the current patch, it'll take you the whole patch. But reaching that exact same level of character power, two patches later, we'll take one, 100th of the time. So you can catch up to the current patch. And when the next expansion comes out, getting ready for the next expansion, we'll take, you know, nth amount of time, etc.

Susie says having kids cures you of FF14. Yeah, it's, you see, now you have to dodge the danger patterns in real life by moving the kid out of the way of the burning spells that are flying. Here's a really good example. In lines across the ground.

When baby man started to move, move around more, you know, when he went from being potato to, to slow moving potato. Then and there, I stopped playing nearly as much FF14 and started playing Street Fighter way more often because I can just get the fuck up and walk away from Street Fighter and be like, what's going to happen? I'm going to lose a match. Who gives a shit? Less committal in and out, for sure.

Which led to really strange matchmaking situations where I, like, got all the way down to, like, fucking 800 MR. and then I'm being you know geared I'm being matched up with people with 900 MR and I'm like bro when I'm not walking away from matches for full rounds

I'm going to stomp your ass but yeah you know well bad news for for that with the new patch that just happened because the disconnect matches the disconnect messages are now saying that if you disconnect

too many times you're going to be placed in basically rage quit it sounds like. Oh, I don't disconnect, man. Oh, you idle out. I just put the controller down and fucking walk away. Okay. Excuse me.

And the guy on the other end gets a free win. Right, right, right, right. Like, we're in the middle of a pitched round two. And I'm like, well, got to go. I don't know what he's got. What is that? What is that? What is that?

What is that? What is that? Oh, it's a granola bar. Okay. You're supposed to have that. Okay. I've lost the round. Okay.

Hold start to press the baby. currently needs attention. Yeah, like taunt. But yeah, Warframe on the flip side, I can just pause. That's good. And it has the same dopamine release of grind that I so desire.

The Soulframe looks really good, and to a lot of people, it's going to be very appealing to start a frame game at the goddamn beginning of it. Because Warframe lived in this weird place where it was fucking terrible for like a year and a half, two years.

And then all of a sudden it got really good. But by the time it got really good, it had already built up just like a shit ton of stuff. So like it was this massive super complicated game that just seemed to come out of nowhere. Whereas Soul Frame, it's like, it's already in a way, way, way better state than Launch Warframe was. Lodge Warframe was like shit.

I play it in Warframe and Lodge. It sucked. With Warframe also, can you play it in like, I mean, I know there's kind of those daily interactions and little bits, but can you do it in small chunks as well? Oh, yeah. You can play Warframe in fucking four minute chunks. Okay. If you want.

I mean, this is literally what I was just saying about Breach Wizards and Xcom and stuff. Like, I've, my life is already in a place where I, I'm always, I'm always more. prefer, I have always have a preference towards the low commitment activity, you know, like anything that is a, like, yeah, like, it's a, that's a, that's an hour and a half long, like, dungeon commitment of an action nature that it's not something I can just, at least pause or take time or turns with or so. It just, yeah, I have to clear out a moment to sit down and lock in for that. And I just, depending on your progression in Warframe, you can run the diff, that you can run a mission that will last you, 40, five seconds if it's an if it's an assassination mission so it's literally bullet jump to the target shoot them until they're dead and then sprint as hard as you can to the exit all the way up until i bet you i could do a an hour of survival waves on this map and got to get a bunch of good rewards if if i feel up to it and it's your prerogative yeah okay yeah okay cool and i can do either those with people I actually partied with,

auto party, solo, any particular combination of those. Well, I mean, if you, you know, forgive me for being somewhat shocked, but I guess it's like, yeah,

14 never really had a reason to have an explosive, it's all over kind of moment. It was always a, a well-made, addictive thing that ever since I guess the Reborn you know, patch was just going to be a you fade off whatever you want to. So they've built the game like that and they have been incredibly clear in every interview.

They're like, hey, you don't enjoy it? Just leave. And then if you feel like it, come back and there'll be more stuff later, which I think is really endearing. And I think important to that kind of thing. Because like, well, if you don't keep up every single fucking day, you're going to fall way behind. Like, fuck off. I hate that. Everybody hates that.

No one likes that. But you've been playing for... I've been playing since 2015. Yeah. For FF14. Yeah. And Final Fantasy 14, so different people are affected by this at different levels. And some people like it and a lot of people don't like it.

FF14 does have one extraordinary problem that I can't think of anybody else that does, where they are really consistent about the quality of their content. And you would think, what is the problem with that? And you don't know what type of consistency I'm talking about. For 11 years now, you can get together with your friends and you can predict the date of the patch down to the weekend. And you could say it's going to have this many bosses. It's going to have this type of new area.

It's going to have this raid. The item levels for the raid are going to be this. It's going to have this many floors. it's going to have this, this, this, this, this. And you could theory craft that shit out for like two years in advance, and you would be right on almost all of it. And that's comforting. To some people.

Yeah, you're going to grind out 450 tombs of the expensive tome a week. You're going to grind out 2,000 tombs of the least expensive tombs a week. You're going to have this, this, this, this, you're going to run this many roulette. They're going to be cost this, this is. It has been literally unchanged for the entirety of a Rome reborn. Because it worked. Yeah. and it works.

And they have, they have like a pipeline that is rock solid. But it means that when you start to like fade off, I'm like, well, I know exactly what is coming over the next year. Almost down to the day. And I'm like,

and then I can look back at the years that I played the game and go, well, I know exactly the time and shit that I'm going to do in the future if I continue to do so. And right now it's just not super appealing. 14 has a problem that almost all MMOs or live service or ongoing games have, which is it is more fun to catch up than it is to be on the edge.

It is more fun to have the whole game out in front of you than it is to have done everything and be sitting around waiting for the new thing to come out. Okay. Yeah, interesting. Like way more. Okay. Way more fun. Well, because I guess that that resembles playing on regular off-line.

an RPG more, right, in a way, as opposed to, like, being stuck with the real calendar and whatever is going on. Yeah, so that makes sense. Like, you know, hey, man, are you more fun, are you having more fun with One Piece at volume five and you look at the 400 volumes to go? Or are you more having more fun with One Piece hoping to get to the scans before someone spoils you this week? Right?

Like, it's just... God, fuck those times. Yeah. Those times are every day. But if you go with this Scanzlation group, they do really good color pages for the Naruto chapter covers.

But like, I guess the easiest way for me to like put a bow on it is like I have more fun reading volumes of manga than I do chapters. Mm-hmm. Um...

I mean, it's funny, because soon there's going to be a decision where if you're into one piece, you can, it's like, do I watch my current? Or do I start the new one that's simultaneously going to be playing? It's so crazy because I'm like, you know, full metal Alchemist Brotherhood had the decency to at least wait one. Was it year before after the other one finished before starting up or so? Like this shit's like, nah, no time. Nah, simultaneous. Two pieces, though. Okay, got you.

And so this cycles back to Warframe. It's like, hey, guess what I have in Warframe? I have three years of content that I did new. Because Warframes, when you hit the wall on Warframe and you have run out of new content islands, God, that game becomes boring as shit when you're all caught up. Oh, man, just boring as fuck. I mean, I know that like whatever, if I had a more relevant connection, it would have come up. But I think the same part of me that, like, you know, feels like the need to go after more,

not newer experiences and play new games and all that, especially now given everything that comes in versus replaying things, would not want that. That sort of stability you're describing is not an appeal, you know? No. Well, so here's the funniest thing. Back when FF14 started, its new MMO journey, that, stability was like, oh, what?

I can count on content for my MMO actually coming out on time? Because the usual way of putting out releases was the whole game is in the expansion. There will be nothing until the next expansion.

Which is like a fucking dog shit way to do it because you would burn out in like four months and be like, well, Time to quit. Yeah. And I, and the analogy of like keeping up with, you know, seasons of like, say, Strive or SF6 DLC or so, it's like, but in those games, you don't really like catch up and be like, well, I've played all the new content. So now I'm done.

You know, you don't know. No, because it's just like I want to play bison. Yeah, you're going to. Bison got nerfed. I don't care. Yeah. But if you do your taunt now, you can get a big buff going. Who is ever going to let you do that fucking taunt?

People having fun offline. No one. Anyone who lets Akuma eat those buns that wants to have a good time is going to let Bison taunt on you now. No, I don't want to fucking have a good time. I want to grind ranked. By the way, so for anyone who doesn't know, now if you put a bomb with Bison on your opponent and then you do his forward taunt, he counts down three, two, one. And then the explosion happens at the end of the taunt. and now bison can actually do his super bison moves like his crazy teleport he's got his alpha

shadow luism psycho crusher yeah yeah so it's great uh but that's it for pat uh played a lot of shit this week finished metaphor and my baby's the best so that's what's going on with me uh this week it's going to be very few streams uh me and page are going to miss the marvel rivals and pat the to launch on Friday because we are going on a little road trip, little vacay, nothing too crazy, just taking some time off.

But we'll be back on either the seventh or the eighth and get back to that shit. But fucking go do something good with your life. Oh! Someone asked in the chat any D&D

updates. You know what, man? I think I'm getting the absolute absolute best Dungeons and Dragons experience playing with this group. I talked about like three, four weeks ago about like, oh, the different kind of stereotypes. I'm kind of running into all the classic D&D things. And that was the last time we sat down to play because we've been completely unable to schedule another session for like a month because someone's always busy or the babysitter gets sick or whatever.

And this is, this is like the truest D&D experience. Maybe, maybe. we'll be able to play next week. Maybe. I'm excited. That is, in fact, it. That would be three sessions in eight weeks. All right.

Campaign on a roll. Cool. All right, let's take a quick word from our sponsors. I love our sponsors. You know it, especially when the arms go up in the air. McDonald's. This week, the podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify.

Cheching. Yes, Shopify, the all-in-one commerce platform for helping you grow your business, no matter what the size is. Yeah, the number one checkout on the planet. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. If you are looking to set up a cart, if you're looking to set up a shop online and you want to get your stuff, your product moving from wherever it might be to anyone who might be ordering it, you want to be able to use things like the shop app, which is a fantastic way to track where your deliveries are going and how they're getting there and stuff. I use it all the time. I'm very big on that.

and if you don't know anything about getting your something like a t-shirt out to your customers, then Shopify is the place to go for that. From your first sale to your millionth, oh my God, I can't believe it's really happening. Wherever you're at with the size of your business, Shopify is ready to scale with that. They are also behind businesses like aloe, Albury, and skims. Yeah. Places that are scaling up.

And if you in particular are looking for something that has a great customer service, whatever you need for your shop, check them out. It's the not so secret secrets. So upgrade your business today and get the same checkout that we used. Go to sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com. slash super beast all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash super beast to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash super beast.

Thank you, Shopify. Shopify. Yeah. They even let you arms up in the air for Shopify. Integrate on your little YouTube thing and you see a little tab for it. It's great. Very useful. This week, the podcast, is sponsored by Express.

ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN, tell me with your amazing copy what browsing the internet without protection is like. Browsing the internet without protection? Uh, well, hmm, there's a lot of ways to go with it. But for example, you know, seeing as none of you watch porn. None of you, because it's bad for you. But you might have friends that do. You might.

Incognito mode does not make you incognito. Check the fine print. It just means it won't save cookies, man. Oh, boy. Yes, tons of third parties are still logging your info unless you're using Express VPN. So there you go. That's one of them. In particular, of course, you are talking about ISPs that are taking your data and selling

them and finding ways to profit off of what they gather from you. It sucks. I opt out of almost every single pop-up window of any site that says like, hey, we want to collect them. Like, no, you don't. Leave me alone. Go away. Stop it. Get out of my face. And that shit persists across platforms when you do it on your phone and then you sit down at the desktop and then you're like, oh, God, it's continuing because it knows. No good. So, Yeah, get ExpressVPN and you can cut that shit out. In particular, you are rerouting 100% of your traffic through secure encrypted services. So third parties cannot see your browsing history.

You can't collect, your ISP cannot collect and bank off of you. Same for your mobile network provider and such. Or the admins of your network or Wi-Fi school wherever you're using it. you get to hide your IP address, track your, hide your ability to get your online activity. Tracked, fire up the app and click one button

and you are protected and it works on all your devices, phones, laptops, tablets, and more so you can stay private on the go. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNet and The Verge. And yes, as described, in particular,

very useful when the streamer service or shop, particularly says, hey, we don't like where you are. You can't access this content until, I don't know, whatever we say. And then you say, you don't tell me what to do. You can just teleport your location on the app, wherever you want to be, and just like that, they can't tell you what to do.

So that's particularly awesome and useful. I like that a lot. So yeah, right now you can take advantage of ExpressVPN's Black Friday slash Cyber Monday offer to get the absolute best VPN deal you find all year. Use our special link. ExpressVPN.com slash Superbeast and you'll get an extra four months with the 12-month plan or six extra months with the 24-month plan totally free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N.com slash Superbeast to get an extra four or even six months of ExpressVPN for free.

Thanks, ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN. Thank you. yeah um still using that on a regular basis on youtube oh it's great to to go watch what i want um all right i need to take a quick break i am required if you'll excuse me brb apologies yeah banana into the news i have a banana i'm a little peckish so i decided to get a banana um You know who else is a little peckish? Oh, fucking what?

It's a stretch, isn't it? Yeah, I don't know. Squirrels. Hey, check out this big acorn. Yeah? That's not all she's got this big. That tail. Why that makes Squirrel Girls so fucking thick?

That tail is bushy as fuck. It's awesome. Hey, Marvel Rivals is coming out. this week and they showed off the launch trailer intro, uh, the basically a music video, anime opening. It's, it's a very well produced. It's pretty good. Launch trailer. It's pretty good. Man, that Chinese armored anime aesthetic is the fucking peak. I love that shit so much. So I love it. So it works on, on a number of the designs. I mean, Iron Fist is looking, he looks okay. He's got the hair out. I do prefer the covering, but regardless.

I kind of get what they're going for with everything. My thing, though, is anytime I see Logan looking a little too cool and young with the bangs for the hair, I don't like that kind of Logan. I want Logan to be a scruffy short Canadian that's just,

with the hairline almost, not receding, but I want it going up and being good. Okay, we'll pay them $12. Yeah. I suppose so. get your cosmetic going. Like,

Mm-hmm. It's, it's, um, there's a, there's a, there's been a couple times where we've seen that kind of like cool younger looking Logan. Um, and I'm all like, I'm reminded a bit too of like, as much as I liked it, like the snicket comic from the, um, the creator of blame as well. It's like, it's just like a different kind of younger, cooler look. And I'm like, I want them, I want them to be a little, little munchkin. Um, I want that witty. Pito's peak into the, into the Wolverine hair going. So, yes, unlock your cosmetics and then you'll be fine.

Otherwise, you're getting anime Wolverine. You know what's awesome about that fucking trailer? That's the launch trailer, right? So first of all, there's characters that are like brand new as of the launch trailer, like Cloak and Dagger and Squirrel Girl, right? And you're like, wow, that's cool. And then there's like a shit ton of characters that we played in the alpha that are not going to be there at launch. Like a ton. Like Thor. It's not fucking there. That's really weird. That's

really weird. Yeah. Um, yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, X-Men Evolution Wolverine is the is the basically the look that I'm describing here. Not, not my favorite, but whatever, it's fine. Um, so when did we saw, yeah, we saw a couple things. So, they showed off three character trailers, um, um, Squirrel Girl, the unbeatable, uh, unstoppable, uh, unstoppable, Slayer of gods, all, you know, great. Uh, uh, so. simple line delivery. Check out this big acorn. Throws a big acorn at you.

What more do you want? Squirrel Stampede. No notes. Perfect. Exactly what it needed to be. Thick with two Cs, no problems with that. Like a bushy tail. Iron fist,

who is the, yeah, martial arts duelist you know who jumps in there and parry god being put in a fucking third person shooter um so he looks like he has like a healing like yeah ability to like meditate and heal or like put up a kind of like a you attack me and i and i heal while i'm glowing and then so he is a perry and a and a full like meditate heel and uh he also has a quadruple jump right yeah the jump in wall run mobility stuff looks really good with him The melee stuff, it looks cool, but it's not as impactful as I was kind of hoping. I like when there's a nice big, like, hit with that stuff, especially as you're moving through a game.

When if things kind of feel a little, a little like just kind of tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, light, it's not a satisfying. For example, when you play as Iron Fist in Marvel, you know, and he goes into the level three with the one-inch punch, you get a nice big, oh, boom, you know. You get these massive, like, quick combos into a big stop, step, big hits, you know? So it feels like that's not really what's going to be the cases here. But you need to make a character that obviously works in a team shooter and make his kit work. It makes sense there. So he looks like the, like, yeah, kind of fast, multi-hitting version of, you know, what is Black Panther's medium-sized and then Magic's heavy-sized.

melee stuff. Mm-hmm. Um, and then they showed off a Black Widow who's, hey, she's got a sniper, she's shooting heads. It's Black Widow. You know? Hey, gentlemen, it is up to you to be good enough to cause this character to get horribly nerfed.

Yes. We will see. We will see. This is the, this is an archetype that requires a fine touch because it can, be just ruin us or worthless and it's real thin. Squirrel Girl might be the Hanzo, maybe.

So, or slightly Hanzo-ish, so we'll see how that works out. But yeah, you can't nerve skill. And if a headshot is one shot, one kill, then that will always continue. I think her alt, just making it so that anyone she hits with it,

she can barely move, so headshots are really easy. It's super filthy. It's super dirty. Have we seen the Hawkeye trailer yet? Yeah. Oh, okay, I missed that one then. He's Hanso.

That's more Hanso. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Somebody, I think it's Bouncy Night 07 in the chat, made a very important distinction where they pointed out that Marvel Rivals is launching with more characters on day one than Overwatch one did the day it died. The day it died being the day of Overwatch.

That's right. Yeah, okay. Of Overwatch 1's shut down. Yeah, okay. That is an unflattering comparison. Well, as we were talking about with your Exodus games, hey, check this one out. It's in third person. You can see your characters doing cool stuff.

You know what? I bet I would love to see like some kind of like statistical. breakdown of can I see my character versus can I not see my character on the purchases of cosmetics because I fucking bet being able to see your fucking character matters when people buy skins wow I wonder I wonder I feel like that's a that would be interesting to see I mean for me it's literally the will I buy the game or not you know or will I start playing the game or it is a much more dire metric for me but yeah

if it's just you know if you can see it at all times certainly I'm sure that's a high incentive um

and did we was there a a Wolverine trailer too no no okay so that's probably going to come out

the day before the game launches okay um any word about I didn't see anything about the micro

about the mini-byes yet. So we're all going to find that out together. We'll find out. The gameplay is good. That being said, the game's free. So. No matter how bad it is, it doesn't matter.

There's no upper limit on terrible. No, what I'm saying is if the characters are free, it becomes a completely different discussion than if you're buying characters and there's also cosmetics. Yeah. Then it just becomes a matter of like discipline, I suppose. It becomes like whining instead of complaining. Justified whining. Justified whining.

Right? But it goes like, oh, damn it. To like, meh. Each costume is fucking $20. Like, you know, like, yeah, absolutely justified. But still the base game and its components are all there, I suppose. Yeah, because like, you know, they're going to come out and the fucking things are going to be $12 or $15 or some fucking. nonsense, right? And

then you're like fucking Overwatch charged you full price and then also charged you the same cost for the costume. And it's like, yes, this is frog boiling nonsense. But it's like, take a win as small as it is no matter where.

I feel like I have an internal, like if I'm playing a free game and I'm enjoying it and I'm enjoying it certainly past the point of like, you know, like a full purchase, I feel like I have a, oh, I'm willing to spend when I care about this thing threshold I hit, you know? Absolutely. So I'm like, yeah, if this game would cost whatever and I'm like just opting in on what I care

about, then yeah, I don't mind. But I'm the tip jar. Yeah. And the thing is too is if you're able to kind of be like, I'm just going to focus on the a few things I care about as opposed to trying to, you know, wail for the whole. set or whatever, then that makes it. Well, from the way that the store was built out on the last alpha, it looks like it's, do you want this costume, then fucking buy it.

Which is as far as mini buy formats, the least evil. I hope that it, there isn't a case of like grind this battle pass into the dirt and then quadruple grind it. and you get this icon, and then after that icon, you get this one time, like, I would like you to do me a favor.

I would like you to hold out your left hand up and keep that hope in there. And I need you to shit in your other hand. And I would like you to see which one fills up first. Okay. I have a, I have an inkling. Counterpoint.

If the venom skin for Mark, Marvel versus Capcom is not placed in that slot, then I'm good to go. If the things that I want are available to me now, then I'm happy. Wully, do you want my most dire of predictions? I bet you. So where was that available, the blue venom on the beta? Okay. That will never be accessible ever again.

Yeah, that could have been a beta-only thing. I got it. I did get it, by the way. Yeah, yeah. So you got it. But I bet you that thing will never be back ever again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm, so, and I already got it.

So I was, I mean, I'm not actually literally talking about that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm like, let's say it's like, okay, what, how badly do I want classic Magneto? Pretty bad. It's not the end of the world for me, you know. but I would like it. It would be cool. I would probably dig a, like, maybe classic Magneto helmet off would be like a bigger cell.

But I'm not going to play Magneto that much, really. So, you know, eh. Not, you know, same like, it's like if I don't play them, if they're not part of my main rotation or so, then I just, I don't think I'm going to end up carrying that much, too. So I think it'll be okay. but I mean we'll see yeah um

but then I was going to say but what if they got the fucking uh Knicks colors on or or they get the get the straight up again they're like they just keep doing Marvel versus Capcom references when some of these costumes I'm like ah fuck all right it'll be really interesting um to see because we don't know a lot about how

are going to do the microtransaction of the cosmetics. Because there's always the possibility that they do the two-stage cosmetic, which is colors and costumes are separate distinctions. Yep. And then there's the worst version, which is costumes with different colors are also different distinctions. But I don't expect that either. Iron Man has the potential to fuck me up. Yeah.

Different levels of awesome Iron Man outfit do have the potential to ruin me, depending on how cool they are. You know, if you're going to make a mini-buy game with characters that have costumes, these Marvel characters have a multitude of different looks already. One might say literally hundreds per character in some cases. This is the strength of the brand that was chosen. Anyway, that's looking cool. Oh, if you, uh, you know what? Mini buy watch, I guess.

I don't know. Sure. But on the same day that Marvel rivals comes out, a Path of Exile 2 is coming out, um, which is a proper sequel to Path of Exile. And they are doing something really interesting. Um, anything you have ever bought for Path of Exile 1 will carry over into Path of Exile 2. including all the cosmetics they've ever released. Wow.

That is very consumer friendly. That's awesome. And any, like, account upgrades or bank space or whatever the fuck, it's all carrying over. And if you fucking spent more than, like, $480, you just get all of the fucking fancy pants, Becker, early access rewards from the, highest money amount. Nice. Fucking nice. That's great.

It is great. Because it means that like the absolute crazies will get rewarded for being the absolute crazies. And like good for them. It's nice when the things you've bought continue to be available to you into the future. That must have been a lot of work because the game looks different. Like it is an upgraded game. So like to carry all that shit forward.

must have been fucking ridiculous. Now, every once in a while, companies might think to themselves, uh, nah, though, how about the thing you bought you don't get to keep? What? Who would say that? What kind of dumb, stupid bitch would say that? Warcraft 1 and 2 are being delisted from GOG, uh, as the remasters are being, dropped. However, good old game says that they're going to preserve them anyway,

handing out a discount and announcing a new policy for preservation of all delisted games on the platform. So carrying this analogy forward, the anthropomorphized version of good old games that exists for the purpose of the story said, I'm not a bitch. You can keep your shit forever if I sold it to you. I promise. As long as you buy it before they're obligated to delist it. Exactly. Wizard literally can't do anything fucking right. Like they showed off those Warcraft remasters and they said that they were going to go back and re-remaster Warcraft 3 and it was like, yeah, you know what? That's good. And now it's like, by the way,

If you bought it somewhere else, you can go fuck yourself because you've got to get it on the Battlenet Launcher. Yeah. So, you know, obviously getting people over to the Battledt launcher or to spend, you know, $40 on the remaster or whatever the case is. Your incentive to go to good old games has been the ability to buy the original version of the game without DRM. and pretty straightforward with its installation and the way it more or less was, you know, back when you first got it. So Blizzard is basically, you know, announced that, yeah, delisting that shit, making it so that you can't get access to it unless you go over to, again, to the remaster or to BattleNet.

And this is one month after those remasters dropped. And so good old games, which preservation and shit has been there, their ammo for a while, basically went, okay, well, as of December 13th, you're going to have to, you're not going to be able to buy the games anymore from G.O.G. Galaxy. So, um, use the discount code, make Warcraft live forever. And you'll knock two dollars off of the already $15 for the Warcraft one and two bundle. Um, and, uh, that'll be specifically for getting it before the delisting day. And then you will be able to play whatever you get from them, even if it gets delisted forever.

And then they also, with that, have announced a policy for the preservation program that's basically trying to make sure that anyone who buys something from the store, the process of getting it delisted does not affect what you own and your ability to play it no matter what. Um, they will always be supporting stuff that was once listed if it's owned by anybody, even long after the company in question no longer gives you access to those things. So that's awesome as fuck. And in particular, it's like, uh, you know, I, I prefer steam in general. But every now and then, I'd go and buy a game on GOG specifically because I want a locked down offline version that will never, ever, ever, ever be fucked with ever again. Like, I bought Dragon Age origins on Google.

games because that's the best place to buy it and you don't have to worry about EA coming in and shitting all over the fucking thing with some bullshit. Because it'll always stay that version forever. And there will always be incentive for said publishers to come along and snatch away the shit you've bought as we go forward in time. Like that's not going away anytime soon. So putting something like this in place to just make sure that like, yep, once you have it, you fucking have it.

is good and important. And also, unfortunately, fucking mandatory in a world where it's not treated like physical, where if you have the disc, you have the disc, isn't that's the end of that, right? Digital is being abused now and we're seeing things where, you know, there's agreements changing terms where you no longer are like, you don't own what you bought digitally. In fact, you own the license to access that thing as long as we say you can and whatever the fuck. So all of this coming from one of the storefronts for,

PC games and for digital ownership is pretty good as far as just like a push back against the fact that fuck you you don't own what you bought is becoming the norm now you know um good shit to GOG

GOG is the best I love them like I've re-bought some of their games on Steam just for convenience but like like I'm very happy that that is a storefront that I can buy games from and I tend to use it for its like stated purpose, which is, I can't get this old bullshit to fucking work. Oh, the GOG version works fine.

Oh, great. Fantastic. And then there's the part of it where it's just like, the shittier you get about this stuff and the less options people get, the more they're going to be like, okay, fine, fuck you then. I'll figure it out. You know what I mean? We're also in a place.

It's like, okay, let's say your game has de novo and it's super locked down and it's super pirate friendly. It's not 1994 anymore where there's like five good games that are coming out on the Super Nintendo that year, right? There are, there are so, so many fucking games that are coming out. Help me help you.

Help me help you. I want to buy the thing. Give me a way to do it. Don't, don't make this harder. It's like, we're past the point of like, oh,

I'll just pirate it. We're now at the point of, like fuck it then i guess i'll just ignore it assassins creed there's other shit coming that could you but my time is could be spent on yeah um no play only remember fucking Nintendo uh yeah so good stuff to that um I am I am a fan of a term that has popped up

for the first time and across my desk a new scrub quote a new like a new genre of scrub quote a new genre of scrub quote has occurred to me I don't know how long this has been a thing

in the respective community that it comes from. All right. What community is this? This is call of duty. Oh, I know what this is. Have you been, have you heard of skill-based damage before? Wully, I have heard of skills. Oh, my God. I have not. Skill-based damage is new to me. What the fuck? So, yeah, we got, we got scrub quotes, a little Twitter exchange going back and forth from a COD Warfare Forum and some poster.

And, you know, seems like the poster is being salty about being bad. And the COD Warfare forum account is basically being like, nah, it's on you. Stop playing bad. Play good.

And then poster says you do realize there's a thing called skill-based damage, right? I'm not the only person that goes through that, which is like, wait, what? Do you want to know what skill-based damage is? Well, fortunately, there is an article that's breaking down Call of Duty Black Ops, skill-based damage theory, and gets into what players, are, like, they're theory crafting the idea. Players are reporting that their damage is being adjusted to accommodate for their high skill.

So I thought here that copium was a gas, and it turns out if you concentrate it hard enough, it can become a solid. It can become a thick block solid of copium that you can fucking, that's undiluted, where you believe that... You're so good.

You're so good. That you are now, according to the servers and the game's design, you're going to do less damage per bullet in each of your matches because your skill... We've got to tone you down. is so far beyond that of your opponents.

And your opponents are so bad that their bullet damage is being boosted. All weapons damage across the skill level, apparently. Oh, um. So when the fuck? So there is something that goes on with first person shooters specifically that leads,

to this type of mental mistake. Is it the AI matches that you onboard with? No, there's a technical reason for this, this perception error. Okay, because that, that and fucking, um, the gears, gears of war super account when you're new are, are setting you down the pathway. It is, it is a technical situation. Um, so, uh, there's a lot of different variabilities. but one of them became very popularly known

due to the way that Rainbow Six siege works and it is a concept known as Peekers Advantage. Are you familiar with Peekers Advantage? No. So fighting games are new to rollback, but first person shooters have been using rollback and hit detection and all this shit for ages. And what Peekers' advantage is

is that if I am staring at a corner and you Wully are coming around the corner and you peek around the corner on your screen you have the time in between the server sending your movement

to me to see me and shoot before I can see you and shoot therefore giving you a extremely tiny perceptual advantage okay

So are you talking, first of all, are you talking about using like a peak lean button or you mean just moving? No, literally anything. Literally just walking around the corner. Like when I am unmoving and you are moving, you are moving through, because I'm stationary, the server is going to display me as stationary. But your movement has to be sent to accommodate. So you will get that tiny time period where you can see me. and I can't see you even though you are actually

visible beyond the corner and if we fire at the same time if we both fire within one millisecond of seeing each other because you actually saw me slightly earlier you get peekers advantage. So this is

really popular, this is really prevalent in Rainbow Sixth Siege because people die instantly in that game and you're peeking around corners all the time and so it becomes this thing where staring at a wall defending, you are in an active disadvantage to the guy whoop poking his head out to try and see if you're there. So that is the Peekers version. Sorry. No, like anything rollback related, it continues to guess what it thinks you were doing

based on what you were last doing. So if you're stationary, it doesn't have to guess. You're locked in. Right. And so in Call of Duty where everyone's flying around all, over the place. If the server tick is a little off or whatever, you can get situations where you're like, you know what? You did totally shoot that guy, but the game said he killed you because your like client-side experience did not quite line up. And if you're a baby, you'll go, they're out to get me.

That wasn't a bug or just like. a mishap. That's on purpose. And why is it on purpose? Because I'm just so good. Okay. Okay. See, I also heard about skill-based fall damage where people were effectively self-reporting because an anti-cheat system was if you fall from small distances, you die irregularly. That's awesome as fuck. And people who called that out were just clearly cheating. But, but. But, but. So, um, you know, ways to solve. There's all, there's all sorts of versions of this. In FF14, there's a version of this exact problem, but it's not called peak advantage because you're not doing PVP or shit.

It's called the latency shuffle. Um, and it means in order to guarantee that the game recognizes you as having moved to the safe location, you should wiggle around in the safe location. Oh, man. So you make sure to ping the server with your movement from your current location. Because sometimes you lag and it still says you're in date. And it'll be like, well, I counted them moving. And so now they're moving off the edge is where I say they are.

God. Fuck. Get like, yeah, that classic, getting eating a flash kick and then flashing back to, nope, it was blocked. You know. Yeah. Yeah, that's the latency around. I see. I see.

And people, people, there are people in the chat right now that are like, is that why I see people do that? Yes, that is why you see people do that. And the worst your latency is, the more pronounced the problem. Well, fuck those clowns with these particular issues. Fuck those actual real confusing issues. These clowns are bad and are actively, you know, blaming it on. They're living in a fantasy world in which the only way they could lose is if there's a concerted effort to undermine. them. Again, copium in solid form now being sliced and served on a plate with a knife and fork is, is, I can't believe it. This is, this is wild shit. Um, good stuff. Incredible. Love to see it. Um, yeah. Um, yeah. We, we, we, we touched on it a little bit earlier, but, um, yeah, Street Fighter 6. They, they, they, the change list came down. And, and, um, and, um, we, we, we, we, we, we touched on it a little bit earlier. And, um, um, um,

And it's a minor patch. No, it's not. The wild part is they chose to do this in the middle of Street Fighter League. So there are events that just passed in upcoming events that are all. I watched a goddamn, I co-streamed the Pagoda Snack Champions College fucking tour last night, which was hours after the fucking patch went live. Yeah, it's kind of nuts to have official events like that soon because you, I would expect that they'd try to clear a space around anything official. the very least. Nah, fuck him.

From one day to the next, the game has changed. Adapt or die. Changes now. So it... Absolutely ridiculous. It is interesting to see as like, okay, so Akuma got touched. Bison got toned down a little bit. Yes, yes.

You don't get free meter drain off of that knee anymore. That's fine. That's fair. Every time you do a stomp and you're moving and you're getting out of there. If you fuck it up, you should be able to be punished for it. You don't get free escape for going for a trying to stomp. And then we get shit like, Ed, go fuck yourself, Ed. I mean, Ed. And you're fucking backdash. Ed, Ed, at highest levels was again, was being considered top one by, like, by, you know, the best players because of, yeah, a lot of shit. What's wild is

inconsistency, though, because things were Ed's level two, they'll take away its ability to, like, generate meter, you know, while it's active. So he puts the fireball out and then, you know, they've nerfed that. And across the board, that makes a lot of sense. But for some reason, Rashid can put out his level two tornado. You know why? You know why? Because Pablo was fucking nerfing Ed.

And Jimmy was not nerfing Rashid. The Rashid, like, yeah, Reggie was talking about the Rashid meme continues of just like, he will never get touched. Rashid gets to do whatever the fuck he wants from day one, from Shoe, or five forward. They made a change, like a system-wide change that specifically NERF's Geif. And, well, Geif and I think jury where, but Geif, you could do, you could start a jump and then cancel your pre-jump frames. So like as you're starting to jump, you become throw and vulnerable.

And then he could cancel that into like, you know, his SPD and jury, I think, can do something else as well, where they made it so that no, now you don't become. throw in vulnerable there, you get thrown. So that's consistency. Consistency is good, right? And then you get weird shit. Like, you know what? Jamie can just fucking heal his drive gauge whenever you fucking. So that's wild.

Because Jamie, they've been trying to fix for a long time. And it's like, let's give him some more. Let's give him some more. And each time they've done something. Just give him more and more and more until he has enough. But the thing is that the Jamie players are like, but sober Jamie is the problem. And they're like, drunk Jamie is even better now. And they're like, but, oh, it's, you know, it's more like now that you can, when you're drinking,

which you're going to be drinking, you have more drive gauge to defend yourself and to drive rush. And before you used to only get that after you were fully drunk and now you get it right away. So he just gets more drive. So it's over. Jamie is stronger now. Incredible. Because you don't give up your oki as bad. That's really good.

Drive is so important. And the fact that he gets it back every time he gets a sip is, nuts. And Kimberly, just getting a full, just right across the board, upgrade of just about everything. She was struggling for a bit too, so, you know, I can see how they went and they went, all right, we want her to be competitive as well. Her and Ryu are, it seemed like, the winners of the patch that are eaten the best. Yeah, Ryu in particular, they just made donkey kick like a whole lot better.

Marissa, didn't wait in to see what they're going to. do them like surely they know the problem surely they know there are issues here surely they know that her her damage doesn't mean anything when others can do that same output and now she's just got the downsides no reversal etc and yeah they gave her better um charge buttons so if you do the bigger slower hits you get better results whether it's you know retracted throwability on one on wow that doesn't address that problem at all or juggle or or plus you know frames on especially on Superman Punch, they made it a better move overall. But no, her anti-air is what she needs and she still doesn't have it.

So, nope, doesn't really fix the problem. Eh, you know, it is what it is. This is what's happening. If Kimberly can go some four or so patches without finally getting this around, then maybe Christmas comes next year. Who knows? I think, yeah, Blanca just got like a little touch to like his double knee, so they kind of left them alone overall.

But it feels like they're really going like, okay, it'll take a couple rounds of patches before we, they're like, let's give it a little bit. Let's give it a little bit. And then after three or four, they're like, they're still not doing shit, Captain. Like, all right, fuck it, juice it. Kimberly's got a million things now.

She can go nuts. I feel like that's kind of the Jamie situation where they're just going to buff Jamie every six months until complaining stops. Until morale improves. Yeah, like... Yeah, so Terry, for example, Terry Bogart is kind of going through that.

Like, he's currently, he's just not good enough to compete with, you know, even the middle of the game right now. So they're like, sucks because I love playing as Terry, but he's bad. So they're like, all right, let's start here. He's got his fierce punch, which now goes from being minus one to plus one, right?

And it acts the same on blocker hit, Which is the really weird part to me. But if you're in burnout, he can terrorize you, you know. Giving someone more like Terry rising. Giving someone like a little, like a, I mean, this is getting granular or so, but like Kimberly as well got like some changes of stuff that went from being like plus two to plus four. And that means you can do new combos essentially that you could. Yeah, that's a big difference.

Anytime you give somebody the ability to just do brand new combos that they couldn't do before, like that's a huge change. So, uh, we'll see how things shake out. But I appreciate the willingness to, you know, have these DLC characters come out and be all like, ah, party time. All right, party's over. Yeah. Now we have to, we have to roll them.

Okay, everyone bought them. You bought them? Okay. Let's tell them about. Let's tell them down. And hey, you bought Terry? We're going to, we're going to work on. We're going to, we're going to, hey, come on.

And important to note, too, that for all the winning, for all the winners and losers of these, these. these patches. It's still fucking best launch version balance of a street fighter game ever made. Absolutely.

It's fantastic. So in conclusion, balance is important and designing your game around the way it's played optimally is a good thing to consider. Especially when you're going to have

official tournaments for it. Well, wait, how long? why would you have I mean after everyone saw what happened with For Honor why would you have official

money having tournaments for a game that you at the development level know to be a completely broken piece of fucking shit because I think if you acknowledge deep inside in your corporate heart that it's a broken piece of shit there's something inside that's like

but then how to do we market and get the excitement going, you know? Dragon Ball fucking Sparking Zero is like letting people bet money on a fucking Harlem Globe Trotter's fucking game.

I mean, God bless. I will repeat the praise I gave for its awesome menus, the fact that every Goku you could ever want is there and all the love and all the detail and every

single version of every character in your Goku toy box simulator. It's incredible. Absolutely. That's what it is. You can pick every Goku and you can put them in the sandbox and watch them go. And then you decide. You don't have to use your imagination because the voice actors are there and it looks great.

And if for some God forsaken reason you decide to hold an official tournament for this thing, you can't act surprised when people play the optimal way when the optimal way turns out to be to fucking not play at all. So in Dragon Ball sparking zero, a couple of characters, I think it's 18 and 19, the Androids, the androids, can get a life lead and just literally run away for, what is it, like 10

fucking minutes, just fly straight up, straight down. About, about 10 minutes, about a little, yeah. And there's no timer when the match starts. Mind you, you only know when it's down to like the last two or three. Yeah, you got to go nine minutes before you see anything. So God bless, you know, Tyrant and the other commentators are just, there's a point that where the matches are playing and the way that you're optimally seeing the grand finals go down is just shoot a little pew, pew, pew, and then fly up and fly down.

And if the other player approaches you to attempt to fucking fight, nah, run away at Dragon Ball speeds and get the fuck out of there and then occasionally pew, pew, pew for 13, 14 minutes or so. I see someone in the chat saying that the France match was fucking 16 minutes long. Yeah, I remember, so I, there was a, I, I checked on the timeline and I watched a match that started

at like, it was like, whatever, like, 2.33 and then went up to like 44, 45 or something. Like, it just, for one, for that one game, because you also have multiple team members. teammates that you can tag through as well. And the commentary, they just stop. Yeah, well, what are you supposed to fucking say?

They just straight up stop, but they're clearly being professional. And God bless, because when it cuts back when the time is over and the match is done, it's like, and there you have it. There's your winner. And stay tuned for more action.

You know, like, what are you supposed to say, man? So what do you think is happening on the dev side? Do they not know or do they think people don't know? Well, any moment that was spent perhaps going like how to balance this feature or so was, fuck off, put another Goku in because we can get more in there, cram one in there. And the wild part is that like the two funniest things are that like this is a system where

when you go through the tutorials, there's so many systems that have evolved over the series lifetime. And in the tutorials, you learn about tons of counters and setups and ways to cancel strings and dash and follow up and teleport. Like, there's all these subsystems that they built over the course of these five or however many games it's been. And none of them matter because it's just not built for real actual competitive viability. Like, it's about, like none of that is being considered. You have characters that can fly anywhere and you have no way to force them to be close to each other. Flying anywhere and teleporting and doing the shit you're doing to.

to feel like a Dragon Ball episode is the goal. And they've accomplished that goal. And please don't put a bracket or money on the line when you know that that was your only goal. This was a mistake. Yeah, the players are then, there's like things of chat log, of Discord blogs where players are like,

the producers came in and the Tos were like, you're going to have to, you can't play like, you have to play for real. And like, the rule changes were coming in, like, off stream and stuff.

And it's like, You can't just fucking arbitrarily, like, what, you know? Like, you have to play for real? I am playing for real. I won. This is the way. It turns out this is the way to play to win. What are you supposed to do, you know?

No, make it fun, though. You change the game now. Make the game so that this is not a thing then. How about that, right? Know what you're fucking putting out there. It's wild. I love my favorite part, though, is that the tournament is called Dragon Ball Sparking Zero. dramatic showdown.

Oh, that's so good. I missed that. I didn't know that. Oh, that's good. Oh, that's good shit right there. The dramatic showdown, maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

It's fine. It's fine. Know what you are. Know what you're meant to be. And don't try to be the thing that you're not. You know what I love about stories like this? Like, absolutely. I'm just,

it gives me like a, warmth in my heart and like a flutter in my stomach is this is this is someone's fault like this embarrassment can at some point in the process be boiled down to someone who either said it's fine don't worry about it or should have said hey man that sucks actually and didn't well because a part a bunch of this is also like it's sticking shit. shit on the wall, you know, and seeing what happens, Gadgerobi could heal himself forever with the Senzu beans. They nerf that because they saw that happening when the game launched. But they didn't see this happening, you know, where the androids don't use key and therefore

they can just stall it out forever. Stupid shit forever. You know, and it's like, yeah, the whole game is not, it's like they, when you have that many characters and that much shit going on, like, it's never going to be balanced. It's not that. You know, why try to do this? or or make a commitment to actually fucking, you know, consider that part of the game. We're a real fighting game developer making a real fighting game and actually balancing it.

And that, that game ended up insanely fucking unbalanced. But at least you could fucking watch people play it. You can play it. That's it. You know, it's just, whatever the lesson here is, it's just know what you are. If you want to be like not at, if gameplay is an after. afterthought, then cool, be that thing. But then don't put on a fucking bracket here.

See this outcome and then go, hey, no, stop it. You can't do that. You made it this way. They're doing what the game allows them to do. You made a system that incentivized this behavior. Why are you mad at people for doing that behavior? Yeah. You know, and you give these types of games long enough,

and eventually the players have to come up with their own. Smash Brothers rule set for what's viable and not viable You can only run for 30 seconds So that means every single person Is staring at their fucking watch While running to stop at 29 seconds Throw a single hit and start running for 29 more seconds

And for what it's worth Like whenever, when there are like bugs in games That allow somebody to like stall out forever and such There are rules that are considered where they go like Yeah, that's actually not allowed. You can't. Hey, fucking stop that. You know.

Anyway. Like cross-tech and comes back. It's back, baby. Fucking lame it out like cross-tech and fucking get that Mega Man. Like it's even the same fucking thing with fucking Boxart Mega Man floating into the sky. He looks like Android fucking 19.

Yeah. It's the same fucking thing. Shoot your opponent and float away to win. That's it. Unstoppable. Oh, man. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

If you have put that into your game, you have massively fucked up on a huge level and you need to take it back to the drawing board. But it's accurate to the source material. It is not accurate to the source material. Is he not called jump and shoot, man? He didn't jump like that. Okay.

Well, that's all fine and dandy. The only other thing was that there was a devstream for Warframe where they talked about new game mode, big updates, and Warframe 1999. So I don't know what the fuck 1999 is. Apparently, I thought it was going to be like a separate thing, but it's not a separate thing. It's like an expansion,

and it's going to have shit from that version come into the goddamn future or some shit. I don't know. That shit's weird. Ben Star is there. Okay. And so's Neil Newbond. There's a new mode called Face Off. That's like PVPVE.

So. What? Not PVP, but I'm so, I'm so shocked because Warframe PVP is the worst thing that's ever existed. And I remember you saying that, which is why it's like, okay, so another crack at it. 4V4 fighting waves of enemies. Oh, someone in chat says it's PVE, but it's a race. So that's how they do. Okay, okay.

That's smart, actually. That dino game that came out the other day. Yeah, yeah. Right, okay. What the fuck was that called? Dino Crisis. Dino Crisis Evolution. No, X-O-Primal, but I only knew that because someone in the chat said it.

There you go. I did not remember that. Ubisoft just announced that X-Difiant is shutting down and two studios are closing. Wow, it's all coming up roses for Ubisoft. Put a pin in that. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like that that docket point is going to continue across a couple, a couple weeks. I love how long the conversation between you and me has been going about Ubisoft both on and off this podcast. It is funnier and funnier every week.

it's just it's not often that you see stories happening from different angles entirely that all kind of just position you know like you see like oh look here's a story

about the wolves are now outside the door yeah here's like it's always this fun thing there's a leak in the basement huh it's the situation where it's like here's the version that's in the newspaper

here's the version from Jimmy's next door neighbor here's the version overheard at the grocery store 10 days later and then they all converge into like oh this is kind of oh oh

not good not good sell your stock if you own any that's my advice I mean I anxiously await the final story that is they have found a new bunker to move all

the sexual predators too. As the final bastion. We're out of places and offices and studios to move people around to so we've created the final protective bunker. We've sealed off

the basement of the Rainbow Six Siege developers and we're just going to have the sex predators fight each other down there. Bringing a new meaning to peak advantage. Let's take some letters Oh before we do that actually There is a piece of news that we missed

So you know how I've made jokes in the past About when's the good time to start a computer role-playing game Such as Path of the Righteous or Baldersgate Did you see the Baldersgate news? Oh no I'm sorry, I just a thunder dome It just becomes an Ubisoft Thunderdome The Ubidome

Oh, no, tell me more. So Balder's Gate, the Larian said the patch 7 was going to be the last patch. And then they said, fuck you, we lied. The next patch is going to have crossplay photo mode and 12 more subclasses, one for every single class in the game. That's a lot. That sure is. It sure is a lot. that's 30% more classes in the game.

Jesus Christ, man. That's, is that an expansion? No, that's patch eight. At what point, at what point do people start going, okay, guys, guys, hold, hold on, right? Just the, uh, just, your plate is, is, is, is, just more food coming from whatever that picture is of like the person with all the food and just more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like,

what? How many runs do they expect one to do? Well, his new millennium in the chat, because he could tell you. I think he's up to 14. He's got a sickness, though.

Well, okay, but like, you're also 20? You're on 20, you fucking freak? Stop it. Okay, but like this is at like very clear decision to not play anything else, right?

All other things are just not happening. Right. Why not just play Boulder's Gate? It's got a season. Oh, Jesus. Sorry. What the fuck? What are you doing?

Sorry. What the fuck? You're just done with this podcast today? My finger hit the, hit the button. Sorry. Excuse me. excuse me um anyway

uh that's what larion should be doing that's what they should be doing wrap it up guys it's too much oh fuck um anyway yeah no uh that's that's crazy

that's a crazy yeah it's ridiculous and a bunch of those subclasses are ones that people were asking for and I'm like disappointed that they never made it into the original release like Haxblade Warlock and Giant's Path Barbarian and shit like that. I mean, it is a design philosophy to take your product and basically go, we are making this as if no other game exists. So I think what's happening is that the narrative people are all on pre-production on their next game

because this patch isn't going to have narrative stuff. It's all technical or gameplay stuff. So those people want to do something. So they're like, fuck it. why don't we just throw a dozen more classes into the game? Okay. Well, okay. I mean, in a, in this type of industry environment,

if you can find new work and your thing is making money and everything is going well, then by all means, find ways to keep busy and quality of life, the shit out of whatever you're doing, then. I will say, though, that they, um, Larry in earlier today I talked about how Josh Sawyer talked about Larry in with Divinity. made it so that full voice acting became the overnight standard for all of these types of games. And there was an article right when Balders Gate 3 came out was like, you can't use this game to set a new standard for RPGs and everyone mocked it.

And that article has now been retroactively proven super accurate because nobody is going to be able to put out a game like Baldersgate 3. I don't think Larian will be able to put out a fucking game and support it like they did with Balthersgate 3. Well, we just got finished saying this with Eldon Ring, right? Like, and coming off of like a studio that's being really successful with their previous releases and people are used to like more bite-sized morsels by comparison, which were also really big. If you're going to go forward like this, I guess it's almost like, all right, these games are going to release as platforms that exist for. you know, MMO lengths of time and just get treated as such

even though it's a single player game. You know? Because they, yeah, I don't know if you remember, but there used to be like this thing with BaldurScape 1 and 2 and Planescape

where there'd be people that replayed them every single year. Because, you'd roll a new type of class and you'd go through it and it's a classic and blah, blah, blah. And like they've recreated that situation

in like one year where people are replaying a fucking hundred and, 50 hour long RPG back to back. And then by the time they're done, dude, I know people that beat that game twice before the epilogue came out. Yeah, well, you're talking, I mean, shit, during the early access, even. Right.

Yeah. Like, yeah. I just, well, yeah, when you describe, you know, the person who's on their 20th, it's just like, okay, so like, well, that person's sick. Well, it's just like, you know, what we're. doing here trying to keep up with hundreds of games coming out every year. Yeah. There's no way you're doing that.

You can't argue with that value though. Holy fuck. Yeah. I remember I was describing to Reggie some time ago about like the feeling of the person that you're talking to on the internet that knows everything about the game that they know. And you not knowing about that thing means that that's a blind spot for you. but you can't see all the other things they don't know because they're just locked into that one.

Dude, I, okay, I had a perfect example of this where I was talking about how I really like the changes that. I'm not going to go to the specifics, but I really like the change of the Path of Exile, too, is making compared to the first one. Because, and I said, as a new player to Path of Exile, never spent more than 20 hours in it, re-specking in that game was really hard, right? it was very punishing. The skill tree was very extreme. To which person in chat said, actually it's totally easy.

You don't know talking to me what you're talking about. I have 35, 40 hours. To which I go, I don't know if that's true. To which people who put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it go, no, you, that guy, don't know what you're talking about. Respecking did used to be really hard. It's just not hard now. and you don't know that because you only just started playing.

And just this circling fucking level of varying expertisees, just all bouncing off of each other. Oh, my God. And so the gentleman in our chat, who's beaten Balders Gate 3 20 times, says, oh, you could get a playthrough down to 40 hours easy. Yeah, bro, you don't even look at the dialogue anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and only you can experience that from the seat where you're seeing it from every direction, you know, in each different genre and each different thing. It's a wild one. But yeah, no, we had a big talk about that. All right, let's take some letters. If you want to send a letter in, send it to Castle Super Beastmail at gmail.com. That's Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com. All right. We got one coming in over here.

no name Okay Yeah Don't mention Don't mention my name Because I'm not sure This information's public Ooh

Last episode about Gold Masters reminded me of a story That was mentioned Um Bapapapap Bha Pha

Okay So So coffee stain publishing was talking about satisfactory before it was announced. And this must have been around 2019 or so. The reason they got into publishing to begin with at all was because they released a previous game, perhaps Sanctum 2. It had a publisher for the console versions. They had multiple issues, but it all culminated in the publisher sending the goldmasters for PS3 to the wrong. address delaying the release of the game.

It was just mailed it to the wrong fucking building. They were so incompetent that they just decided fuck it, we're going to be our own publishers after this point. You know, that's crazy. This is a little out of date. But I remember a long time ago

back in the early 90s, gold masters were often not sent in the mail at all. Someone would get it and put it in their car and drive it over. Yes, yes. If you were, if that was possible, that was a thing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because, because it would also just be faster if you were in the, in within driving distance versus going with the mail, you know? But like, it also gave you the, the certainty of like, safety. Did you put it in the guy's fucking hand? Yes. Yes. Courier can do the job, but sometimes you just, you do, they would do it themselves. A hundred percent. That was, that's a thing. that's a really good reason to create your own publishing arm. That's a bunch of bullshit. Oh, man.

All right. Alculator says, Dear Watt and Pooley, I've met multiple people that say that they don't re-watch movies or TV shows or reread books because they already know what's going to happen. My first thought, as always, do they not re-listen to songs? My theory is that they're too proud to admit that they're getting a worse attention span.

You two are normal consumers of media. What's your opinion? Yes, the most normal media consumers. We are highly, highly atypical media consumers. So, I mean, I've talked about the fact that I don't re-experience a lot of media, especially these days. If I did in the past, it was more minimal,

but now it's like very, very rare. And that just comes from the fact that this atypical. career has led to me every week keeping up with what's going on releases, so on and so forth and all and with every, with the overall keeping up with the industry

means trying to keep your finger on the pulse of so many things. So when I replay something, if I'm replaying something or choosing to go back over a particularly long game that I know I enjoy, I feel like I'm could be better spending that time

learning more about a new thing or re-experiencing something or experiencing something that I haven't or uncovering something else that I'm curious about or that people have recommended. I love 13 Sentinels. I really think that's a highly recommended

game that I would tell a lot of friends to play. I can't think of a time when I'm ever going to do it again. I think I highly prioritize some new shit and seeing how that goes, you know? So, uh, Wully, you and I both have elements particularly strongly in one of the other about that would lead to this type of scenario. I'm obsessed.

I am like a proud member of the cult of the new. I am just, I want the newest. I want to see it because it's now, because it's soon. It's immediate, right? And you have a, uh, a general, like you just stated like a, well, why, why, why, you not, you know, have a new experience rather than redo an old one, right? But at the end of the day, I feel like when you talk to somebody and go, well, why would I rewatch that, reread that or whatever? I know how it ends. There's like a bunch of things going on and they can be all of them

or they can only be a couple. The number one thing that I see, um, and it feeds into spoiler culture and it feeds into the insanity that is like hyper specific anti-spoiler. And I have to talk to everybody about this within minutes of it coming out is that shock and surprise for many are the primary desire they're trying to get out of their media. And media has reflected that to become way worse with stuff like Game of Thrones and shit like that. Or it's like, we have to surprise the audience. Like, how about you have the audience enjoy themselves?

shouldn't that be the primary thing surprise and shock are disposable so like a lot of a lot of the same people who are like well why would I rewatch this um I already know what it has are the same people that are fucking going on to social media within minutes of a TV show ending so that they can argue about who they're shipping in the finale of arcane and spoiling it for everybody that happens to follow them. Because going through the... Because that's the real goal is actually just talking about it and talking about

how surprised you were rather than actually engaging with the media at all. And look, sometimes, you know, my approach is not perfect and obviously there's going to be flaws in it, one of which that people will... I will be glazed

forever over is like something like transistor, or I forget too much of that for something that I really enjoyed when I played it. Well, if you forget all of it, then fucking just go back. And then that would be a great thing to go and replay. So it's not a perfect strategy or solution, nor is it great for everybody.

And it's, you know, but regardless, I think that that the job and the way we go about this is going to kind of leave me often seeking out new experiences as a priority, just on Instate in a lot of cases. And every once in a while, I'll, you know, maybe pop something in or so.

But I even find times where I'm like, well, okay, games where I'm trying to rest and I have like a period of downtime that I want to relax in is where comforts come into play. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like, I'm like, I'm hearing enough good things about a thousand times resist. And I'm like, okay, here, let's go. Let's let's let's let's let's let's see what's going on. And then there's your, yeah, there's your, your mouth. washing style game where it's like this I'm never going to play but I will certainly recommend it to somebody and sit through them playing it you know um that yeah so I'm probably going to see

that game again watching a friend play it or two you know at all the stuff that I said before like I think it all combines into uh there's a certain genre of person and I believe that is like half or more of all people who feel no desire to engage with any of the media that they're ever watching or interacting with in any way whatsoever. People are watching serialized television dramas with the same level of emotional investment that my mom watches house flipping shows on HGTV, where it is something to watch and pleasantly tickle the neurons and relax and have no actual meaningful involved. in your front of your brain at all.

Just all lizard brain, all back here. Because if you have no desire to ever even think or talk about something after it's done, well, because I know what I happen, that means you're not actually interested in the thing you just experienced at all. You don't really have any follow-up thoughts because you didn't actually care about it when you were going through it at all. I have friends that kind of consume media like that. And it,

it's, it's okay. You know what I mean? To like just kind of, it's a personal choice. It's not worse or better. It's just, it's just less involved.

Yeah. That's that like, that's it. Like, I mean, your personality will determine whether or not you give a shit about these things and or you're like, ah,

spend my time doing other things or stuff. And they're like, that's okay. Like for me, I'm going to watch a, uh, uh, David Lynch shit.

And I don't want to walk away from David Lynch shit going, oh, weird. And then go about my day. I want to go back and look at some of the weird shit and be like, what the fuck is going on in this? What was he thinking? And I'll go and read fucking interviews or watch interviews with Lynch and be like, what the hell was he getting at?

And I'll look at the scenes around it and be like, because I want to grab, I want to take all the little pieces and appreciate them. I would also. Instead of just going, ha, the baby was deformed. I would also argue. as well, not even argue.

I had a thought that is our parents who, you know, are the people who kind of consume things this way. Because we are, we grew up in a generation where like media consumption had already been a normalized thing and the newer generations are also more and more experience to that. So like how to watch something, quote unquote, and what to think about while you're doing so was something that, you know, if you were around when the TV came into existence, you know, you don't know how to think about these other things.

You're like the medium, the medium and everything associated is kind of being figured out as it goes. So I feel like, you know, when I think of my parents watching like, you know, the sitcoms they grew up with and then like movies and stuff like that. Like there was a,

a framework of analysis that was just like, okay, well, you look at books with that level of like specificity. That's not true. But that, well, for them,

for them, There was a feeling that, oh, no, books deserve this and, you know, maybe even old plays or so, but not TV and movies and certainly not video games, you know. It was just the norm to not look at it as a medium worthy of that type of dissection. I think my parents fulfill like a really good example criteria for the various steps on this. My dad would watch a lot of movies, but most of the movies that he would watch were old movies because they reminded him of watching the old movies. They were nostalgic and they were relaxing to him and he was tired because he worked a lot. And one of the things he told me was like one of the most insane. He has the weirdest most insane subtitle take I've ever encountered in my life.

My father hates subtitles so much that despite the fact that he does not speak Italian or German, he would rather watch a movie in Italian or German because he knows like four phrases rather entirely without reading the subtitles because that's preferable to him and as a result he would never ever watch any like Asian cinema

that had to have subtitles or anything like that I mean like in in fucking Game of Thrones there's scenes where they're speaking a high valerian a fictional language oh yeah it's just like yeah I just want to hear the noises yeah um and then I I think about my mom. And my mom is like a stereotypical suburban mom when watching movies.

And it's like fucking get that pause ready. Because every scene will be accompanied by the questions. And the questions are the things that just occurred in the scene. And what's happening is my mom isn't actually just paying attention. Yeah. Yeah. Other things are happening. Like there's a bunch.

There's a couple things that she would watch that she'd pay like wrapped attention. because there were things that she was interested in. But like most of the movies that my mom watched, like she was just watching it just to watch it. But then she would get lost because she wasn't paying attention. Other priorities. So you would have to have the fucking mental cheat sheet of who that guy is. I've watched a friend of mine in particular struggle with like trying to resist the phone

during any movie or anything that's like over an hour, you know, or at least an hour. like and just like it was and it's like every 10 got it that's like and just like and she's gotten better at it you know which and it's a bit more it's also like ADHD kind of related as well and stuff but it there's an element of like like the the that even when you're thinking oh I wonder what's going on it's like you've already just you've already disconnected with whatever is happening on the screen you know you know it's funny there is one thing when I'm watching a movie that will overwhelm me like intensely and I will have to pause it and pull out my phone.

And it is, who the fuck is that guy? Oh, the face I recognize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that guy, but what's his fucking name? Yes. What did I see him in? Who is that guy? Do you know who that guy is?

Oh. It's Ray Fines. Oh, I was Ray Fines. Ah, I was. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, all right. Right. Actually, you know what, actually? Like, that has happened like two or three times, and it has been Rayful. Yes, that's why I say. I like, it's specifically that fucker. I don't know why. It's specifically him. Yeah, yeah. He's got one of those faces. Mm-hmm. All right. And we got one last one here coming in from Julian. Hey, Batman and Robin. Ed was trained by Ballrog. Hardar, soft A. Does he say it? Does Ed say it?

No. I'll do you one better. No. Ballrog would just beat the fucking bricks off of. No, no. Here's what I'm saying. Ballrog absolutely let him say it. He did not curtail that one bit.

And then one day Ed came home with blood on his knuckles after a fight that he won as a kid beating up an adult. And went, yo, what the fuck? Why didn't you tell me? And Ballarat just went, eh, he, that's pretty good. And now he doesn't say it.

That's canon. Yeah, okay, I can see that.