Castle Super Beast - CSB386: INTERESTING SUCCESS OR WE RIOT

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/u/5/d/e/2PACX-1vRq6QUHmEXHlh0ZdrEij1PQXAkPM08WN6x4Rk2nJ954-jwHHzWvUP-cduAoDtkDIXfKGkGTjepM-fHz/pub Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive The End of 2XKO For Honor Lived Duskbloods aka Blood Blood City Trial Gamescom ONL 2026 Highlights GTA6 Leaks: Scumbag on Scumbag Crimes NEW CASTLE SUPER BEAST "LEGACY" SHIRT & DESKMAT AVAILABLE NOW: https://www.orchideight.com/collections/castle-super-beast Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster at http://rocketmoney.com/SUPERBEAST Go to http://heroforge.com/ and use code CASTLE to get 5% off on all orders of physical miniatures. Head to http://quince.com/superbeast for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Visit http://drinkag1.com/SUPERBEAST to save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro! Docket: 2XKO ending support less than one year after launch  Patrick Miller, Team Lead for 2XKO, recently made a lengthy Patreon post regarding the game's cancelation and how it came to be in terms of design and target audience; felt it was worth sharing in full. : r/Fighters ONL 2026 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered Announced, Songs of the Past Gets First Look Final Fantasy VII Revelation Ontos No Law Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons Mega Man Dual Override, and a Mega Man skin for Pragmata: TWINKLE GIRL IS FUCKING DEAD  Tides of Annihilation Silent Hill: Townfall Hoyoverse Nodus Fall SNK's financial results for the fiscal year ending December 2025 show a 10% increase in sales to 5.7 billion yen, but an operating loss of 19.9 billion yen, indicating increased revenue but a widening of losses. GTA 6 leaker Cyberleek is now charging a $165,000 fee for a chance to buy ad space on additional leaks Take-Two has subpoenaed Microsoft and Discord for information on the GTA 6 leaker. They are seeking account data including emails, IP addresses, phone numbers and linked Xbox accounts They're not just hunting the leaker. Take-Two got court approval to pull personal info (emails, phone numbers, IPs, device IDs) from ~100k Discord users across multiple servers... including DarkViperAU's 90k-member server. Most of those people are complete bystanders Take-Two Subpoenas Microsoft And Discord Over GTA 6 Leaks  

Light week. Light week. Light week. No news. Didn't play anything interesting. We will be in and out of here in two hours tops. Absolutely. No one is.

No problem. No one has been hungrily waiting for takes. I gotta be honest. No one has been camping in this chat for takes. You can, you can, you can, you can like, look at these takes. You know what else has been? hungrily waiting for takes.

Fucking me. I've been hungrily waiting for takes. Yeah. Like one of the things about the podcast that people don't know about or the rather, we've said it a hundred times but everybody forgets, right?

Is that when like a super hot, like super big topic comes up, I will message you or you will message me like to like, hey, this happened. Or is, right? And that's the whole conversation. The whole conversation is this occurred. Okay, bye.

Talk to you on Tuesday or Wednesday or Monday or whatever it happens to be. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Willie, do you have any super hot takes today? I have the official Woolly take. Oh, yes.

Direct from the source. If anyone wants the official woolly take, I have it for you. All right. Let me hear it. It is as follows. 2XCO by fighting game standards had a pretty healthy life Riot supported it for 10 years

Oh, that's what you mean Right The game had a 10 year life cycle It was very healthy That's what by fighting game standards That's what people hope for That's what people hope for The destiny had a 10 year life cycle

And that's over now and it's like yeah That's what you want with any other previous release When you go, yeah, man, we played that shit for a decade What a banger Yeah, wait, wait, hold on Okay, no, in this case, we only got to touch it in the last year But they support it for a decade Well, hold on, hold on

The people working on it got to play it for a decade Well, yes So for them, for them the game had like a crazy life cycle Yeah, but you know, I mean, that's that's That's what the best you can hope for is a solid banger of a game that lasts a decade. I have to tell you, that's, that's good. I did, I did not expect this particular, this particular angle of hot take. That's, that's, that's real good.

That's what's happening. What are you talking about for people who don't know? 2XCO has announced its end of service. And, uh, this is, that's a weird thing too, because I'm not used to fighting games announcing their death. because usually they Only applies because it's live service Usually a game comes out And like if it goes quiet

Then it goes quiet People keep playing it Maybe it shows up on discords or whatever But you know It's a product It's on the shelves and then it's gone And then sometimes people are still Still playing it

But it's like because it's a live service game And because it's free Riot has to come out And officially announce how much they hate it And then old yellow it In the back of the head Well They'll let you

They'll let you play with the body And it's weird that... For a while. It's weird to be in a world... It's weird to be in a world where that happens. But I will say that I am glad that, like, there is the offline launcher and the idea that, like, yes, the version that exists. They're kind of like the Rising Thunder Community Edition that continue to exist.

It's more like the Roon Terra thing, right? Because you can still play a Roon Terra multiplayer just hasn't been updated. Okay. Yeah. X amount. Or like the Tap-end thing and all that stuff. Like, like, as far as the end of live service things go, when the game dries up and there's no one that's allowed to even look at it,

that's always fucking horrendous and sucks. So the fact that the game exists in some way, shape, or form is, I'm happy that that is the case because it's like still really cool and they did some cool shit, but there's obviously a lot going wrong there. In continued good news for 2XCO, which is good news for all of us and also gives window into what was going on with that game. Everybody got refunds. Yeah.

Everybody got their shit refunded. I got to go check if I actually got mine. I actually got to go check if I actually got mine. But yes, the 2XCO stimmy has officially arrived. And everybody's getting, everyone's getting their stimmy. And that's genuinely great. That is a fantastic move for consumers. It's a fantastic move for everybody who played the game.

It looks good for riot that they didn't fuck you over. It also looks indicative of the fact that they're like, the goodwill is better than, cutting our losses and taking the goodwill is better than keeping what was made at all. Now, to be fair, the bad news to this is the indicative of what was going on with 2XCO. If they were able to just go, oh yeah, no, refund everybody. Dog, that game made fucking zero dollars. Like that, that amount cannot be significant in any way. For the margins needed, which we know are basically 10x for a regular fighting game.

Because free-to-play numbers mean you got to go wider and wider and wider to get the paying audience, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, this has been a game that obviously we've talked about and played and participated in a whole bunch has gone on. and like it was here for less than a year. And by all indications, it seemed like something that like, I guess riot had the more or less utmost faith in that like they were going to just be like,

it's okay, we'll take as long as it needs, let's invest in this and it'll pay off in the end because like we'll be the ones that make it. And that turned out to not be the case. And it seems like, I guess, um, I'm not sure, I'm not sure how long,

ago the writing was on the wall and how quickly that word trickled down to people. For what? The shutdown or the game wasn't doing well? The idea that this was like we're kind of, we're not this thing is kind of cooked in the long run we're giving it a bit more

of a chance to see if anything happens. That was um because that was when the like a couple weeks before the first batch of layoffs. The layoffs was the first point that that thing's like the numbers were supposed when it came into 1.0 and it had it had like supposedly

it had a fairly large pop once it hit 1.0 but then that dropped right the fuck off to like a like a baseline and what was supposed to happen was because it was free that that baseline was supposed to be like a straight line up yeah and and that just didn't happen and the thing is and and as we talked about at the time the the whenever you have a live service team the idea that the actual live team is going to be smaller or so is not crazy, but the hope is that, that's not insane, but the hope is that you have other things going on project-wise at the company or other things on that same project that the people can be moved towards and thus the resources are being reinvested into its own profitability, you know? Um, but yeah, obviously like this is something

that, now, now that we're on, we're on this side of it, it's like, it's, we've, everyone has known how unreasonable the dev time has been on this. I think that's like every time anyone talks about 2XCO at the very top of the of the like byline, like in your, in your periphery of your eyeballs or your brain, it should say 10 years, right? Because that just, that's overscores every talking point about everything. And the crazy part is that we, I think we talked about how some time ago, it was almost, it was unfair because like the timer in everyone's brain didn't start when the game got announced. It started when Radiant got acquired, right?

So, I think that is actually kind of reasonable. Like, the devs on 2XIO have said, we worked on it for 10 years. Like, that timer was accurate. It was actually more accurate than usual. But everyone looked and saw Rising Thunder shut down, and they saw Radiant acquired by riot, and they went, yeah, no shit. Oh, okay. And then that's when the timer in everyone's brain started despite announcement.

Because normally the timer starts on announcement. Normally. And in this case, the timer would have started six years ago instead of 10 years ago. But I think it's fair because they canceled a different game. Right. Right? Like if this had just been like, we grab people from the FGC and they were making a fighting game in secret, you and I would have fucking known about it. Definitely would have heard things.

Right. And we would have to adjust our expectations accordingly because it would be a secret. Now, apparently, the completeness of that original version has been overly grossly exaggerated, and it was not near ready, right? The thing that existed, that was the 1v1 version of the game, was not something that was ready to ship, despite some people saying. Oh, I can guarantee that, because if it had, we would have seen more than, like, fucking five screenshots get out. There'd be, like, a video of a match. But, yeah, I think, I think the, the weirdest of that sort of start time, and then the expectations and such.

And then you have the full restart of the development, which is that's always a not, that's always a bad omen, you know. But like, that's a very riot games omen. With other projects they've done. Outside of the 2XCO team, the MMO that they're working on has gone through a full,

like, multi-year restart. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's dire. For MMOs? Like, we're going to talk about a fighting game and the costs for a fucking MMO. That's crazy.

Crazy dude. And like the crazy thing here is that the end results of like what they made was fun as shit and had some like real like unique. Like the duos aspect of this game is is some of the craziest funnest, most unique experience I've had with the genre. Especially after like, oh, your cameras. Okay. You're a futzen. The top of my head was cut off. Um, they made it, uh, yeah, they, they did something that like, I, we watched like, uh, fucking cross-tech it and a bunch of other games fail spectacularly at.

And they made it work and it was a lot of fun. Um, but now we get to talk about like the cost of that and how you get to that point. So I think, because the, the, we're obviously going to talk about, uh, Patrick Miller's post about it. Yeah. But one of the things that, that, that is in the conversation is, basically like basically 2XCO was a fun fighting game. I really like playing 2XCO. Yeah. I actually disagree with you fairly significantly on its uniqueness and duos. And the duo thing is not to my taste, but that's not really what I'm talking about, right?

Because my personal taste isn't like a, like, I'm not that fucking avatar of good taste on fighting games, right? Choice words. I think that if duos Because duos was the The only thing about that game That was genuinely unique Right The rest of that game was like cool shit

That was like Ah, this is from Marvel or this is right There's a lot of CBS2 in there Cool shit tightened up Right Um Like CVS 2 is like an obviously huge Uh uh inspiration because of all the fuses

Right Um But um If duos was like the pillar of uniqueness that this game stood on, and it was, because duos in this was a really cool idea, I would have expected it to be supported at all in the first 80% of the game's life. So that now, you are correct about that, but now that gets into a branch topic, which is the pillars of what makes it good, and how, how. those things release and the product that comes out basically is not, when it's not good, it doesn't exemplify the strengths in everyone's mind when they see it and go, oh, what's good

about this? This unique thing. Okay, cool. Can I play it locally? No. For the first couple months, not at all. And I'm sitting there going, holy shit, what are we doing? Why can't you do local duos, right?

And it seems like, well, for whatever was happening, priority-wise and so on and so forth, it was something that was either it was like lower priority until people asked for it or things were, they were putting out bigger fires. So I don't want to sit here and like, I basically don't want to sit here and say that X or Y did a bad job. Right? The speculation game. unfair, I think it's speculative. I don't think it's useful.

What I can say is from on this side of the curtain, right? The outside side of the curtain. Talking about priorities and reasonable parts like fires to put out and focuses on development and all that, I point to the top of the screen

again and say 10 years. Like, dude, there should have been no fucking fires to put out. That's a crazy. That's a crazy. That's a crazy, unreasonable amount of time. Absolutely. That is so ridiculous.

In fact, that, that word, that, that's, that 10 years will be at the answer of most questions, you know, when it comes to this discussion. On console, the, the game has, like, screen tearing or had screen tearing for, like, a while, right? Fucking why? And again, because consoles were not prioritized, you know, it was like, and, and so, um, So mainly to finish off, though, the actual story, it's going to be, yeah, so it's going to be basically ending live development and no new content. They're going to keep the servers up. They're not going to be have ranked, but you can play casually pretty much indefinitely for now. Those pools are going to be filled with fucking killers.

You're going to be, so that the casual, they're changing it so that you're going to be casually matched with people in your ranking. So like it's going to keep an ELO thing behind the scenes, I guess, and put you in casual rooms with people relative to your skill level. And then the offline launcher will continue to exist. And they're going to continue doing the patches. They're going to release Lux. They're going to release Samira. And there's going to be one last December patch to close the game out.

And then they're going to, they're doing the money refunds for everybody. So any money of you spent on the game, you're getting back. And then they're going to convert all of the currencies into, to just the in-game currency. The credits, the credit credits, exactly, and they're going to uncap the credit amount so that you can buy whatever costumes and cosmetics you want. And then they're also going to make a $40 bundle

for all the cosmetics if you did want to go buy that with the final version of the game. Which is interesting, because that's almost like a price point for a release that you can go. Bro, that's the weirdest fucking part. It's a price point. Because I look at that shit, and they go, bro, if they had said it's $40.

and all cosmetics free forever. That shit. Well, here's the thing. Ifs were a fifth, we'd all be drunk. If ifs were an if. But no, for real. I have been seeing a lot of people, I have been reading a lot about 2XCO

over the past couple of days from every community source that I can get into. I have seen every permutation of what they should have done. Oh my God. Oh, my God. And it shouldn't have been free to play. The roster, they should have released it.

My personal, like, my personal, like, pillar to tie myself to is no matter what this game was, it should have come out in 2020 before the pandemic, because then we'd have a real different conversation, right? Because they wouldn't have been competing with anybody for net code. But there's a million, right? No, no. Yeah. The most interesting part of the conversation is that every single. one of those takes I have read, my brain goes, yeah, actually, like, a lot of the criticism

is fairly dead on. So, so there's a lot of people with really insane, like, calls on, on what, on the, on the, putting weight on the reasons why it failed because, and the thing is, is that, like, I saw a guy say retreating guard killed this. Yeah, you know what I mean? And it's just, okay, man, like, it's fucking calm down. And, and, and the thing is, it's just like, you know, You, like, it's like a lot of, yes, a lot of people don't like tag fighters, but a lot of people also love confirmation bias. And, you know, you get to. I do. I, let me tell you.

I fucking love confirmation bias. I'm confirmed and I am biased. So there, so now you get to live in a world where everyone gets to give their reasons for what it was that did it, right? It needed to be a one v. one fighter. It needed to have 20 characters. And most importantly, it needed to have glup shito. That's what killed it, you know? So, but I think that's kind of self-fulfilling in a way that's actually real because the complaints you see the most often are the ones that are most likely to be true because they're the ones that people complain about the most often.

And but this is so where it gets hairy now, extra hairy, even more so is because people are speculating in the dark and they're throwing their, their daggers out in any direction. And, you know, understandably, folks are upset because they're like, well, fuck. I'm never going to get to play as the characters I wanted to play as. And then this article comes out. And all of that... Which article is that? This is Pat the Flip, the product design and balance team. And...

By the way, I'm well aware that Pat goes by Pat. For the purposes of this conversation, I'm going to say, Pat the flip, Mr. Miller or Patrick Miller. otherwise this is going to get super fucking confusing. Very confusing. Yeah, now there's a laser focus for everyone's eyeer, right? And understandably, this is something where, you know, off the top, I'll say that Pat the flip has done a lot of good for the community and is a good guy and has done a lot of educational writing back in the day with SRK and has done a lot.

He's a contributor and part of Corey gaming as well. Yep. and has done a lot of good stuff with exert events and stuff like that. So, like, there's definitely a history, you know, of solid work behind him. So that also makes it more or less unsurprising that he would be the type of person to come out and talk at length about the game because he is used to speaking in that context. And I think what might have spurred it on, too, is because in the days prior to the article coming out, there was another article he wrote that was about this crazy,

fictional Mr. Beast game that got canceled. I don't know what that was. That was strange. And I think and I saw people reading that and thinking that that was about 2XCO and trying to interpret like this being a veiled discussion about how things were going. And then he came out and said no. That has nothing to do

a two. And he's completely different thing. Exactly. Right. And so I think in some ways maybe that misinterpretation led to maybe I should clear the error by writing something about this. And the timing of it and the contents of what wrote are just the worst possible thing you can drop when everybody's wandering around going why the fuck did this game die and it's just it's man that's a rough that's a rough read so i uh

i i talked to a pretty at length about this a couple streams in a row okay and one of the the takeaways that i had is that um i like to there's there's like two things that i like to to to preface whenever we talk about somebody making a really, really fucking stupid post and everyone gangs up on them. One is, is that fair? Right? I think it's fair to judge

somebody's own published article by its internal contents because they published it. Honest Man, that's what they wanted to say. Yes. Is it fair to lay the blame of the James' death at Patrick Miller's feet? No.

No! But he's, hold on, I got more. He's not in management, right? He did not, and one of the things he says very early on in the article is that he was involved in decisions, like everybody within the top part of that game was, but he didn't make big decisions. That was essentially above his pay grade in the management or the riot scale, right? So Patrick Miller did not go, yeah, we should turn it into a tag game.

And then that's why it failed because it's a tag game now. that and two that's not useful either because when only one member of the development team comes out and talks about the development everybody going that is that guy's fault fucking get him just is it it's a lightning rod right in the middle of the storm where it all just spark drop drops onto this one spot and then it's like the reality of what happened almost like gets eclipsed with the feeling of it because with his own words he frames it in a way that makes it seem like I steered the ship and made the choice to steer into disaster instead of avoiding it. And now that is really unfortunate, man.

All that being said, Patrick's a talented writer. So I'm going to take everything in that article at face value because the guy knows how to write. Like straight up. I would not have fucking put that shit out. I think a lot of people I would not reveal much of that under duress. The specific tone and revelations contained within are so self-defeating

and look so bad at this fucking exact moment in time. If that game was successful enough to continue to live, but be like, you know, an under night, like, you know, a Discord fighter. this would come off as a guy's a little pissed off, he got laid off, and no shit he is, because who the fuck wouldn't be? But this is an interesting read about the development of the game. Also, this was, he was a part of the team that was gone six months ago. Yeah, yeah, he got laid off in the first batch, right?

Yeah. The parts that people have, like, latched on to, I think, like, it's kind of a thing, like, I would say defy context. because even if they don't reflect on Mr. Miller specifically, there are little bits and pieces that I think project a certain image of the way that game was run that looks bad. And so the lightning rock... The lightning rock...

It took forever. And then we had the naming as hard article. Which that was like sour grapes as shit. Lethal tempo all the way. And then we have this. And it's like we kind of get like this insular click kind of view of development. That's what I'm saying is. So the lightning rod moment occurs, right?

And the most unreasonable folks are going to look at that and say what I just said, which is I was steering the ship and I had the choice to avoid disaster, but I did not, right? Steered it right into the rocks because I thought it would be cool. And that is, that's not what happened, but that's what the worst reading of that is. But what you can look at that and what a lot of people reasonably can interpret, is like this is kind of the idea that maybe multiple people on the team also shared, or this was some of the energy that was about in development that led to some of the decisions that made things last 10 years, right?

Now, I'm going to, I'm going to, well, no, just to, um, to, um, to, to point out that, like, um, I think if you look and take it overall and you want to give it the steel man, the most charitable reading of the article. It's basically him saying that he was hired to make the best game he could, and his personal metric for what the best requires means taking big swings without compromise. That is the most... That is, I think, it's like an artistic vision kind of process. That is the most, you can steal man that sort of that sentence and frame it in that way.

But the three points that break down specifically that I think a lot of people come back to is the comparison to working on the game for 10 years as getting a PhD in fighting games? So we have PhD people in our audience and those people crashed the fuck out when I mentioned that because that's not how PhDs work. Yeah. You don't get to work with a real salary as a PhD student.

And the analogy could have been doctorate degree of any kind, whatever, but the point was taking working on this live project, with a lot of stakes as an education for something perhaps beyond this phase that he's looking at, right? So there's that kind of reading of it. I'll be fair to that. I'll steal man that. When you're on your own website talking about your own blog, about your own experience with the game, it is maybe not reasonable but understandable to talk about your personal goals.

And I'm going to keep coming back to the personal goals here because, for real, when you work at a company with a lot of people, some people are going to be there because it's like, they got pulled in because it's like, hey, you're an expert in this. This may not be what you wanted to do, but would you want, is this interesting enough to pull your time? And they'll be like, yeah, sure, I'll contribute. And then they might be sitting next to somebody who's like,

it's been my dream to make it here, right? And then don't forget about third guy. You know what third guy's here for? Money. Paycheck. I have the skills. I can do it and keep the bills paid. And before we go any further, because this is going to come into the discussion later,

I think people demonize people needing money to a weird degree when talking about the arts. The greatest artists of the Renaissance were weird little guys that lived on the dime of rich weirdos and just got to paint and make sculptures all day because a rich guy was like, I want paintings and sculptures, or the church was paying them, right? You need to eat. You need somewhere to live. You need to make a living. Yeah.

If you're talking about selling out to somebody who has never even sold to begin with. That's super good. Right? Like, holy shit. That's an A plus statement. As an art student, I'm telling you to have some awareness, please. Now, the other statement was, the one that

fucking lightning rod I'd rather make an interesting failure than a boring success right bro bro I'm so I'm like triggered by that I'm like actively tilted

the only context where that is a reasonable thing to say is if you are an Indie Dev working solo on your project and you are going gangbusters on it. And let's say you convince a couple other people to work at your indie studio. They all are like, yeah, we're going for it. We're on some wild shit. We're on this train.

Wherever you want to go with it. That's the only context. I have a second context that that's applicable with. So that first one does not apply to 2XCO. No, it does not. The second one is you had a creative vision and some asshole in a suit kneecapped your shit at every opportunity. And you released a market tested, you know, trimmed down pile of slop that you're not particularly proud of, right? But that didn't happen either.

The 2XCO team was given a industry astonishing amount of public grace. in developing this game. And 160 people-ish for 10 and a half years is legit, absolutely unbelievable in terms of grace. On the fiscal side, right? And then on terms of just the IP, goodwill, public-facing side, it's a brand with characters that people care a lot about, right? And they've all, they hung up, they tossed out a platform fighter that was garbage with those characters prior to this, right?

Which brings us to the third thing that everyone focused on, which is, what's the worst that can happen? We all get fired, right? Go for it because why not? And again, if you're taking that, like, we got to swing, we gotta take big swings

and that's the only reading of it, then sure, but this only can make any sense in an indie, you are responsible for your own self, context. The moment you're in a giant production studio and people are next to you and their livelihoods are attached to it and the success of the project and everything else is going on are there, it basically ends up sounding like, yeah, I don't, like success doesn't matter because in the long

run, if this can kind of end up being a Discord fighter that exists that can be played, then cool, the homies can play that indefinitely, right? And that's, and again, like, and it's not to be that callous about it, but it's just to say that it really sucks if, like, that sort of defiant spirit has casualties next to you that are like, I would like a success, please, you know? So I don't know Patrick Miller and I don't feel comfortable laying my emotional accusation at his feet as an individual. However, I am also a content creator in the space and cover fighting games, so I can discuss how that looks, right?

From an outside perspective. These combination of statements read like, it like hits like, dude, what's the worst that can happen? You get fired and just go back to writing books, organizing events, and running your YouTube channel and your Patreon. and that's not an available option for 155 people on that 160 person team. Yeah. It reads like somebody insulated from the life-altering scenario of losing your profession. There are a lot of people on the team who we know because they've been accomplished players in the FGC and they've been sick, nasty with it.

And we have a lot of clips of people on that team being dope as fuck. but there's people on the team whose names we don't know. There's people that have been just, we're just riot employees. There's Jenny artist and Joe programmer. There's a whole lot going on there. And it's kind of wild to think about that statement in the context of other people on that team,

much less to also perhaps ascribe that attitude to somebody to other people that may or may not have had that. Because the other thing too is like if we're saying, talking about the culture and going saying that like multiple people would have thought this way or so, we have no evidence of that because this is just, This is one lightning rod article being written. I keep saying that word.

I'm saying it too much. No, no, it's fine. No, it is. It is the singular staff member. And out there going, yo, I did this or now I didn't do this. So this is the point that everyone's pointing at. And so here's the second part about this. That's also crazy to me is that it creates this framing where people go,

aha, you chose to make an interesting failure, therefore we did not get our boring success, right? I saw a really fantastic breakdown of that, which is, it was somebody on our subred, I forget their name, but they said, before I read this article, I thought it was basically going to be, we needed to go big or go home, and unfortunately, the bet didn't play out. But the actual tone reads like the plan was to go big and then go home. Sure, sure, sure. Like, like, it almost reads, like, yeah, we know it won't be successful, but fuck it, let's go for it anyway. And it's a weird, but that, but that, but even, but like I said, this framing, this dichotomy of like, it would have been one there or the other and we chose the other.

That's also not real because as much as we can think, oh, the game that could, that was, that would have been released halfway through, that was the run, the one V1, Rising Thunder Club. with L League of Legends characters swapped in. Like, there's no guarantee that would have been profitable either because the gamble... Weirdest thing. Because the gamble of being free to play

is already massive, right? The fact that you're coming out and being free to play is something that is pretty fucking new to fighting games because only two or three have tried it beforehand and failed at it.

So, like, that on its own is a big enough thing. There's no guarantee at all that you would have gotten a boring success. out of what we're calling a boring quote unquote success. I think it's hard to criticize anybody for ending in a binary state of you should have done this

when at least one developer in the game also fell into the binary state of I didn't want to do this, we should have done this. Like the mentality of, you know, I didn't want to release a sauceless success. Bro, there are successful games with tons of soccer. And so this is where we are, right? This is where we are.

And this is every conversation that I have to everyone's chagrin about fighting game stuff and about everything with Tokon recently and Avatar and all of this. It all ties into this thing where it's like, we can 1,000% make a game full of sauce and cool shit that people that are fans of fighting games like, right? And also make a game that appeal to new players. and you can do both. So the whole like right now Maximilian versus Giuna

argument happening, it doesn't need to be one or the other like making games for fighting games for the FGC specifically versus who are you making them for then. It can really just be both and we have examples of that. Again, Street Fighter 6 is pretty fucking solid

and is doing good. Can you hold on a second? Just one second. I think the argument that people who make stand-up super popular or fighting games aren't making it for fighting game players, super nuts. Like,

the guys who make Street Fighter in Japan, I am of the opinion that they fucking love fighting games and love Street Fighter. Very much so. Matsumoto and Kru and Nakayama are the biggest fucking marks for the franchise. And so, you know, when you look

at games that are like, you know, when you're talking about like the tag fighter hatred versus it not being, or how people bounce off when they see it and stuff. And then you go, yeah, but look at Dragon Ball, right? A lot of people, the whole, like, Dragon Ball defeats the, the tag fighter dislike discussion. It's like, there's- It's Dragon Ball, man.

It's Dragon Ball. So everyone, yeah, there's a lot of people questioning the legitimacy of that because the IP overshadows the whole discussion, right? Okay, all right. And I saw that happening a bunch, right? It's like, yeah, Dragon Ball overshadows the discussion, so you can't really have it. So you know what another example was? that's way, way less successful than Dragon Ball.

Sure. Power Rangers battle for the grid. Mm-hmm. That game came out, had an extremely modest budget, was a wacky wild tag fighter, and sold 200,000 copies. And it made enough money off of its 200,000 copies, and it's reduced pricing,

to make five seasons of DLC. I think that... So I have been... In the ensuing back and forths, I have been criticized as not being part of the fighting game community, which is because I don't go to events, I don't organize tournaments. I just play and cover fighting games, right? And I think that's somewhat fair, right? I'm not in it. I think Max's point about how fighting games maybe shouldn't be made for FGC specifically is actually wildly too broad.

I think that because Max lives in California, he actually can't see the bubble that he's in, which is I would go so specific as to, I don't think fighting games should be made for the Seattle, New York, or SoCal local scene. I think that that specific group of people should not be making it for the final bastions of local play

in the continental United States. See, I'm not coming at it from that angle, though, I guess. I see that, I get the idea there, and I get the energy because of the fact that like when you pull out your magnifying glass, all you see is the magnified world, and the world outside the rim ceases to exist. But what I'm coming at it from,

and the way I'm seeing this, is that if we got that five years ago, of the game. Let's pretend the version that got swapped into the tag fighter was actually more feature complete. And let's say it had the right number of characters, right? So 10 is obviously infinitely too low, 10 across 10 years even more so, right? And 10, let's say cut in half in emotions by tag? Even sure, sure, right? Even if the game ends up being sick and the content they're in is pretty sick, doesn't matter because you have that low number, right? And let's pretend as well that you have the

1V1 fighter that you kind of want to see and you launch it, right? If that game came out five years ago and launched the way that 2XCO did, which is just the online play and some costumes

going, which is basically the same as Street Fighter 5's launch, there was no chance you were going to get a boring success there either because there's nothing there for casual players to latch on to the way they latched on to Street Fighter 6. So I, like you're coming up.

I disagree on one point. Sure. If the game, so in my mind, this is a fake narrative that I am positing for humor, everyone. They were making 2XCO and saw the corona vaccine get announced and went, God damn it, there goes our shot. Because people having to stay indoors and no fighting game on the planet having good net code was the shot from heaven. The, yes, the COVID lockdown was a moment that changed everything about online play and fighting games in the genre forever.

And the amount of popularity and the amount of that people willing to sit down and play anything. If I had been on that fucking team and the lockdown notices came out, I would have been like ship whatever exists right now. And the idea, and I remember, don't forget, too, that Strive was coming out with shaky net code and then stopped and went, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's fix it. Let's make it good. Right? And they went back and they made sure that that shit played well online. And that helped immensely with the game.

Now, that on its own, now the thing, the important part about this conversation is that that on its own is not the entirety. of the story. No, there's too much. It's actually too many little pieces. But the ability to just jump, the ability of it to cut to animated woolly sitting there going work.

Yeah, right? The ability for the game to work makes a huge difference to everyone, casual and old head alike. I saw somebody when I was talking about it basically hit the nail on the head for like the entire version of the timing

discussion because I was talking about the pandemic and net code and stuff like that. And they basically described that there was an open market with basically no competition in this narrow space. But the game waited until the most popular Street Fighter game of all time would come out to compete with that. Right. Right.

Right. Right. Right. Right. And remember, too, that while Street Fighter exists as this, like, example of continuing success that came out, did well. continue to get bigger and more successful and is continuing to

do great by all expectations they and delivering across the board on not just the bare bones Tio ready fighting ground but also World Tour and also the battle hub and also the all the other features and lots of things that people

are like that they tune into for single player content for casual content all that stuff that's the kind of thing that's the reason why people are showing up to fucking Mortal Kombat games, even though Mortal Kombat games are going out in the same couple of months, they're having the same end of service that 2XCO is getting. Oh yeah, Mortal Kombat games are trash. Right. There's a lot of trash when you pick up that game. There's a lot of bullshit for people to do, so they jump in and they do it for a little bit,

and then, hey, guess what? It outlasts their interest, and then they get a couple of big bloody fatalities and brutalities and call it a day, you know? And like that game, Mortal Kombat that one is in the fucking rearview mirror, but the difference was all the money they took to the bank. Yeah, and Ed Boone is like counting his fucking stacks in the background lying. It's like they were alive for almost the same amount of time it feels like, but one of them was immensely successful and made a lot of money and then was, but never had any intention of sticking around, you know, because they're like, hey, we're good at this part, not that part. and if you have the ability to do so, delivering enough things that people that don't even know that they might fall in love with

in the long tale, delivering enough that they're showing up and caring about what they see right away and then also delivering gameplay that can go the distance is extremely possible. So I hate this framing because it makes it seem like

it's got to be one or the other and it also makes it seem like even with the perfect IP that everybody cares about, even with the Dragon Ball. Like, even like in Dragon Ball's case, though, it is Dragon Ball, but it's still released with a bunch of crazy modes and a story mode and a whole feature list and a whole bunch of stuff. It did not come out versus and gallery only.

I think the framing is ridiculous, but to be fair, it's the framing that we have actually been provided. Right? Like, I think framing it that way, like, well, I'll use, Patrick Miller's article as an example. I think judging like 2XCO on the sauceless success versus

um, boring success. Sauceful failure is unfair to Patrick Miller, the writer of the article. So I think it would have served him well to not describe the game in that tone. Yeah, it's because

it's not even the reality of it, you know. It really does make everybody who's going, well, I had my ideas, but if you're working on this, you probably know better than I do, or you spoke to people that do, and you must have all concluded that you avoided taking the

road to a boring success that was guaranteed. That way when it wasn't, you know? I think that there's a because I went back and tried to find as much details I could find. And one of the things that Mr. Miller talked about in the past is the part of the development process was bringing in

a lot of like super expert pros into the fold for development. purposes who didn't necessarily have a lot of experience making games. But what they did know was fighting games. And so they wanted a team of fighting game experts to help make the fighting game. And so what they then said basically tried to train up people to be competent developers. This is obviously in hindsight a massive fucking mistake. This is why when people say, why didn't they just hire fans?

Like, because fans of fallout or Elder Scrolls or Star Wars or whatever don't necessarily know how to make a movie or a game or write a book. I don't think the mistake is getting people that know fighting games really well to weigh it on how the game should play. I think the mistake is ignoring and deprioritizing everything else we just talked about in spite of that. I think those are like half-half-sies the same. Right? Because, yeah, because what you, because the idea that, like, you're making this to be like that super sick game that, like, is cracked and we fucking love it. Um, in spite of and over all other priorities is an insanely crazy way to develop a game. And obviously, even though I'm talking about shit that I love, it's never going to stand on that as, as its own two legs.

that's not strong enough of a basis for it. It can't be, right? There's two games that I think about when I'm looking at the 2XCO failure. And one is Mass Effect Andromeda. And Mass Effect Andromeda, I spoke to some people who worked there. And the problem with that game is that EA was like, we're going to let creatives do their creative vision. And we'll check in like once a year and see how the game's doing.

And that was a massive fucking mistake. because that that team needed somebody to put a foot up their ass and be like, you know you have to ship this fucking thing one day. And I see that with Riot into XCO. The actual producer role that would step in and kind of push things along. Like the product manager or senior producer from Riot or whatever. I think we can all lay a crazy amount of blame at this person's feet for letting them get away with the development. I think I think that I can.

only guess, but I have to assume that like when the cannons, you know, brought the project in, they had a discussion that basically laid out that like, hey, this is a community that's going to, it's a weird different thing. It's going to take time, you know, et cetera. And whatever the conversation was, it worked enough and it did enough, it created enough grace that they were like, okay, this will be our slow burn. And in the end, it'll pay off because we've got the time, right? It's okay, no rush. And in fact, someone posted a really quick delete. thread that popped up where someone made a meme saying around ThuXco's like announcement or launch or so saying I hope the riot devs of the riot CEOs are aware that like fighting

games are not like other genres and they need some time or right that's true right and they need some time and then they give them the time to make that work and basically like it was like in the in the meme format um like like it was about like the there was like a SpongeBob meme, I think of a character sleeping, and then being worried about that while sleeping. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the, one of the riot CEOs replied, um, sleep well, basically implying, hey, we know, don't worry about it.

We're going to give this the time and space. I have reason to believe, uh, I can't confirm it, but I have a fairly significant reason to believe that the gist of that conversation was, wow, you. You guys need another year? Going to make a billion dollars? Absolutely. And then they would, and that,

and that was like the whole conversation. So here's, every year. So here's what sucks. Here's what hurts long term. The, the takeaways that outside interest, companies,

people, whoever might look at and go, some people will look at this and go, man, fuck fighting games, I'm out, right? Some companies,

anyone who, like, some people might just look at it and go like, not, that is just, just a losing battle. I don't get it. And clearly they couldn't figure it out, so I'm out. Right? And then there might be some that are like, well, I'm willing to go into these waters, but clearly, the answer is...

These people need to be micromanaged. Well, there's that. And then on, and the answer is also, uh, the game needs to be not sick at all. It needs to be not cracked at all. It needs to be totally like, you know, whatever is the sauce list. It has to be the most boring thing for babies. Right. And, and just create, and it's like, that's not the framing. either, but God damn it, we have these two big takeaways that are easy to buy into as opposed to the product design problem.

As opposed to the idea that if you look at the successes and you look at part of what they're offering to somebody who walks in that doesn't know the genre, there's a lot that the person has to do on day one, no matter what their price of entry is.

I think Mr. Miller's article is damaging to fighting games. He clearly adores them. Like a child. Oh, I mean. Again, like the history and the stuff he's written goes back. But I think he's

what's the word? Like art-brained on this one? Because the takeaway is, well, we shot our shot and a really cool game came out of it and that's all that matters. That is cold comfort to the next team that wants to pitch a fighting game to anyone and their their boss or whatever goes, well, Invincible versus and multiverses and 2XCO fucking crashed and burn like a motherfucker,

so no thanks. And like this is a super high profile failure. And to use to use words from the article itself, to be fair to what you're saying there, like, yeah, he does say like if you have the chance to make big swings, take to take the corporate money and fucking do it, then always do it. Specifically, take big swings with somebody else's money. Right. And the idea of... Which is not a good thing to say in the game development space. And along with the idea of like, it's not my job to sell it. If you were to ask me, I don't think this would have, I wouldn't have approached the sales that way or so, but that's not my job. My job is to make

the best fighting game I can make, right? So like, yeah, in the, in the, in the, in the, the energy of you're saying about like, you know, being a, uh, anti-corporate, you know, um, just full art approach, um, making an impact for history in the long run or so. Um, that's the kind of thing that like, for me, I respect that point of view and that, that approach when you are flagshiping and running your own project in this way.

It's really, really rough when the end result of like that thought process, perhaps is that anyone who's looking going, well, God damn it, I just like these characters, and I guess we'll never get to see the ones I wanted, or this IP is never going to really look at this genre again. Riot pretty much said they're never going to look at the genre again. They didn't, but they said, we're going to move on to the next one. And why would they? And, yeah, and, and like, I mean, unless a bunch of people get together and start working on their own fucking Mugan project, which would be pretty sick, like, I just don't, you know, I can understand the idea that like well we lost a shot at a cool league of legends fighting game.

Oh absolutely. That's gone. That's that's fucking done so. With everything that it could have been. But Wally, it's still here. But it is still here. And you do have the thing that you can play that exists. But it's just, it's the difference between could have been and what is forever, you know. So I feel uncomfortable and I think it's wrong to point at Mr. Miller's article and be like, that's why 2XCO failed because that's ridiculous. He's only one person on a fairly large team, and he got laid off six months ago, right? There's plenty of fucking blame to go around.

I think there's a fairly, like, strong, distributed level of blame to go on anybody in management. But what I do feel comfortable with, specifically, is that Mr. Miller was a senior producer, and he also helped run the live balance team, right? For game balance, right? Everyone with the word producer in their name is not a good producer on this project. The job of a producer is to ship a game.

To get it out the door. Or it was given the pass to ignore pressure. Right. And also, if your job is to ship the game and you going, like, I don't care how well it performs, I'm just here to make the best thing. No, you do care how it performs. Because how it performs is related to your colleagues. it like that that matters it feels extraordinarily weird to be coming at it from this side from the production side as opposed to the dev side yeah this is a rare occurrence in the history of this podcast oh absolutely you know and it's and no one's gonna be like oh boohoo riot and riots fucking you know whatever oh who gives a fuck that's no me it's boohoo people who got laid off and future fighting Game Devs.

I'm just saying that obvious statement needs to be laid out for anyone dense enough to not. I've been accused of like being corporate brain and why my defending riot. Anyone dense enough

to not understand the obvious points of what words of that aspect of like it's not Ruby Riot. It's the team and everyone working on that shit that fucking sucks.

And the IP itself that people cared about. Those are the two things that legitimately deserve better. Now the second thing I know if I was, if we had

Mr. Miller here on this podcast, I would very comfortably say that if you were somebody who worked on the balance team, then you should have done different things with 2XCO's balance because that game had

some fucked up shit in it that got to live forever because it was cool even though it was like absolutely repellent to most human beings. Creating the best projectile that has ever been in a fighting game you want new people to play is fucking

crazy. So allowing Yasuo to exist in the state that he ever did is fucking nuts. Let him Marlon Pie turn Timo into a war crime is insane. If we're getting into, if we're getting into the the nitty gritty and the zoom in gripes of playing the actual things, I, like, Ari and Yasuo are like, some batch shit things to deal with for such a long time. You want new people to play this game and you're going to throw them into the grinder with these people?

But like I understand the part where TimeWinder is like a part of what makes Echo cool in his kit. So it's like coming up with a version of it that doesn't kill his coolness is hard, is difficult. I get that there's a struggle there. But when it feels bad, it feels bad, right? That's, that's a part. Yeah. But this is all got nerfed every patch of the game's entire.

life and I still don't think it's enough. And this isn't as somebody who doesn't play. I hate Echo and Yasuo. I hate fighting them. It's like, I played through those slams and I saw people pick up these characters or die to these characters who were new. I spoke to new players who got hit by some timewinder into bullshit and just left. They just put it down and left.

But that being said, like, this is zooming in quite a bit in the macro discussion because... Well, this is the only thing I feel comfortable actually pointing a finger at. Because whoever the fuck was responsible for TimeWinder is insane.

Yeah, but because I'm going to say that other games that we love and hate have some batch shit in there like Mize fans on version one and a bunch... Every game has some crazy shit that just is egregious that gets to rock for way too long.

But in this particular instance, though, Like, yeah, we just, we kind of have this, this, this weird lasting effect on things. And, um, I, I just, uh, I, this is something where like, to be perfectly honest, the fact that it can go into the annals of history in the way that every other fighting game that has been released does, which is, yeah, it's around. You can boot it up and play it whenever you feel like it from here on out. For now. You know. Yeah. Well, again, the offline launcher even, right?

But either way. Like, it's, I'm happy that that is there. That is, I'm happy that is there as opposed to not being there at all. There's a lot of just random games. You just, you have a disc of, or you have a fucking copy of sitting on your computer and you can boot that up whenever. But, um, I feel, um, I have one more point that I want to grab. Sure. I was just going to say that I could see myself.

I got, I was just got the last thing I was going to say on that is that like, Because of the uniqueness of the stuff that I think is really sick about this game, I could see myself wanting to come back to play it, you know, time and time into the future. There's one, uh-oh, I unplugged myself. Okay. Oh, God. Well, while you plug back in. Oh, geez.

Oh, it's bad. While you plug back in. I've never done it worse than this. I do feel like, and I know like there's, oh, boy. Oh, God. There are some times where some games come out. I'm fumbling, oh. Yikes.

Fucking penises out and everything. Jesus. Okay, hey. There are some times where some games come out and people are only, some people, and if you're,

for some cases as content creators, are only interested, as long as it's a zeitgeist, current, people are tuning into the content. That's the only reason why you're playing because the live is bopping and popping. And how much you enjoy

or don't enjoy playing, the game is almost divorced from whether they're going to pay attention to the internet. Yeah, it's community-driven. Community-driven. Exactly. And I like games because I like the game itself, you know?

So I would say that... That being said, removing community from like a fighting game discussion is like insane. Because fighting games are a community. A million percent. And the amount of people that like were just like glad I never even bothered, it's like, ah, fuck, I hate that sentiment. But, you know, it's almost like, I'm like, it's almost like, I didn't start, I didn't get my, I didn't get hurt by even trying the relationship out or so type of thing.

And I'm like, yeah, I, I, I, if the thing, if the thing, is cool. I'm going to want to experience the cool thing regardless of what's happening around and outside. But it doesn't take the sting off. That's it.

There's one... Oh, fuck. No! Damn it! I'll move to a different point. There's something at the end of Mr. Miller's article where he describes that now that the game is dead, clout chasers and grifters will move on. And I don't know what the fuck he's talking about.

I like, like, like there's a real like, well, now that it's a dead game, only the people who really care will play it. So I think he's, so there's,

okay, there's that part of it, but I have my, I think the answer to what he's talking about is, um, from day one,

there's been a, there's been a vocal online group of people that have been cheerleading the death of the game. Um, that have been against pretty much its decisions and have hated it and have wanted to watch it burn for a long time. And it's, cheered and celebrated very, very loudly

when it did, and a lot of that ended up becoming and spilling into the actual to XKO subreddit. You saw a bunch of it. That makes a little more sense. So there have been a group of enemies of the game that have been around, and I think he's basically saying they're going to move on to something else because this thing

is done, you know? Twitter. Nope. My original post is gone. Great. I lost it. I pulled my shit out and I lost it. Cappuccino, not fans, not fans of the game. So, you know. Was it pertaining to you playing or the long-term?

No, I don't know. It's completely gone. I'll remember it in an hour and a half. Okay. Apropos of nothing. Okay. Well, yeah, just extremely poorly timed on that. And it does, it would have been poorly timed in a bunch of situations, a bunch of circumstances,

but in this case it's poorly timed over the obituary. And yeah, that's it on that, you know. It does certainly, I hope, whatever the impact is, this data is going to affect a lot of what fighting games in North America and globally are going to experience going forward. What I definitely can imagine we're seeing right now and what I can see tripling down on is how much shit is trying to be Street Fighter 6.

Right. You know how everything is trying to be Eldon Ring right now? Based on watching the fucking opening night live. Well, the whole industry is trend chasing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's always been that way. And like, you're watching Melty Blood be like, burnout? Drive Impact? Yes. Everything has burnout now. You know, like we're all going for it. And you can design great games around that stuff, but that's not on its own what's making that game stand out. It's the full package.

You know, it's giving people shit to care about no matter what skill level they're at when they booted up for the first time. Don't think that burnout and drive impact are going to save you. It's not what it's about. Rollback needs to be there, but it's the whole thing. Oh, yeah. No, I do have a- It's crushing force. That's what it is.

You meant to talk about crushing force and you forgot that that's the solution to all our problems. Which is, uh, 2XCO also had like a very specific experience. that I've never seen before in my life, which is absolutely riot's fault. Whoever the fuck at Riot was in charge of this or whoever made the final say,

which was I remember doing both say jam slams, looking into the chat and seeing the phrase, wait, this came out. I saw comments on the closure notice going, I thought this game was still

Alpha. I thought to slash. I thought to shut down when everyone got fired a couple months ago. Yeah. That is, yep, that is disastrous on a level I have legitimately never seen in my life. Marketing annihilation. So at the end of the day, right, we can move to this point. This is a healthy point we can talk about here. Um, lethal tempo, right? The lethal tempo point that is to say the game that's name, people don't recognize when they look at and they have no idea that this is actually related to League of Legends. That's right.

Okay, I know that business-wise, they would never put it on a Steam launcher. It's got to be on the Riot launcher for business purposes or whatever the case is. Still that bad idea. That's where 90% of the PC audiences. You know what I mean? But it's still just like the,

yeah, the amount of people that like would have been interested if only because they like the league characters and don't give a fuck about the genre, but had no idea. idea anything even happened is crazy. Do you remember marketing fucking watch there man? Overwatch was out

and if you logged into Heroes of the Storm or Overwatch it would be like hey dipshit you want to play Heroes of the Storm or Overwatch like the other game. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah hey you want to go earn a tracer skin and Heroes of the Storm which got everybody I knew to try one

match of Heroes of the Storm and here's the thing is like I will straight up say that like I think I had, I definitely will say, I feel like I had some blinders up on, um, I'd like to talk to Reggie about this and see you if he feels it too. Like when we went out to Evo, when we went out to, um, what you might call it, a combo breaker. And we saw like the setups and how involved they were and the fact that they had the cabs in the room. And like the presence that 2XCO had at these events, FGC wise, was like phenomenal. As far as, FGC marketing goes, they did a really, it was in there, and it was like in the mix, and they were also standing around talking to you, talking to everybody about the game. People had questions, like, hey, you want to come, like, you know, they, we got to go check out the build and stuff. But like, even outside of that context, just like the amount of people just being in the alley

where random people walking by, curious, sat down and got to play. And as far as that community side of things goes, they're super in there. They were everywhere in the FGC. right? Counterpoint. And I kind of not knowing what's happening with like, you know, other riot events or things like that. You saw a taste of it. You saw, you have one data point. You have one data point about how badly they botched this.

Why did we go into the Say Jam Slam with a bunch of league and TFT creators who went, oh yeah, I've never booted it? Mm-hmm. What? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the fuck? Right, they didn't know. Why was there no push on those guys?

You know, the guys that appeal to Riot's core audience of league players? Yeah. What was it? I believe it was like, hey, Bricky, they're so cool. They actually added a duo finder. And he's like, wait, that wasn't there on launch? You know? Right.

What do you mean? Huh? Right? Yes. Yeah. So I had the experience of coming into a tournament and seeing like how they were marketed internally, you know, community. wise and the inside

they did a fucking phenomenal job with that but outside of that the fact that people did not know is crazy and whatever role the name plays in that whatever role the spreading of the word or whatever it is the word did not get out

to enough people that would have been interested in the IP and the characters if not the genre you know it's back the thought came back to me let's go we fucking dillyed Daly Dog enough. The, the, I understand being like, this is our vision and this is how we wanted to make it.

And this is the, the, the interesting failure that we always wanted to make. And like, you know, this, we're proud of it. I understand a lot of artists who have that, that, like, idea. Like, I want to make whatever I'm going to make. And it's going to be the greatest thing ever, et cetera. I don't think that jives with the game I got to play during the Alpha Labs versus the version of the game that exists. I that Alpha Lab version did not feel like the stepping stone to a cohesive vision of the game because they were changing big parts of the way that game worked so like right up until the day

early access launched as somebody who used to work in QA I can tell you that like the amount of data you get in the first hour of launch is overwhelming compared to all the data that your testers give you prior to that um and like Like the, I think what we're seeing alongside the like discussions about what the game needs, what would be good, what would work long term, et cetera. Like the reaction to that people getting hands on and such, they, we started seeing it changing even more and more and more. And I think that's indicative of like some of the versions prior to Alpha Lab that we had in the past. You know, yeah, I think so. I think so. So the like the best example I can think of is there was the Alpha Lab.

where the combos were like outrageously long. Like they were like, I remember Ari like running out the clock combing you into the corner, right? And my feeling and all these things feed in to this idea of a bunch of

absolutely cracked super expert fighting game players going, man, this is so fucking sick. Yo! With like absolutely no consideration for anyone that won't reach like top 64. Yeah, there's, there's a, and I'm thinking of the world of, you know, myself where I was like, yeah, online play could be better, but whatever.

It's secondary to my couch local offline experience, which I'm going to have with people, with friends, and going out to places to events to play. That is way outside the norm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, from years ago, from years ago, right? Yeah. And Oh fuck I just had my point on it

Which was yes The fact that A lot of the time Because again I would say Hopefully I believe this is a pretty fair Postmortem discussion on the game I would like to think so I hope so

And I feel like Something that I hope comes through here Is that I fucking loved it I really liked this game I had so much fun with it And it's crazy to see I played it every day for seven months It's crazy to see

all these flaws while having this much fun with it. And I'm so used to situations where you're like, but the fucking net code sucks, right? So, of course, we, you know, or like, it looks like shit, more infinite, you know, or. Or, or fucking toke on that I want to play now. The matchmaking is so bad, I can't get matches. Right, you can't get matches.

Or even the crazy one, which is the sprites look so good. It was so expensive. They can't keep it up. King of fighters. I saw it's unsustainably expensive. You know? There's an MS paint comic on the fighting game subreddit, which is in a thread called it all,

comes back to throw loops. And it's just two little MS paint guys. And one goes, I'm Street Fighter 6. And then the second guy is listed every other fighting game. And it's them blowing their head off with a shotgun. And like, that's kind of how it feels. It's like, hey, we released a completely. fighting game and it's good and the net code's good. It has single player stuff and yeah, thumbs up.

And everybody else has like this massive like slash across it of like, hey, Tocon, you can't get matches and the performance is terrible and Mortal Kombat sucks to play. And to SGAO has the stuff we've been talking about today. Don't trip over your own dick. Just stand around. Win. Yeah. Yeah, dude. It's, it's crazy. Um, fuck. Tekken, fuck. Tekin's the best example of like just put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger man like just it went from like yeah techin to oh teckin

um yeah fuck me I had another point but yeah it's it's just so baffling to see these to see this feeling on on uh somebody found it oh that's it like the fact that it's again I don't know that it's ever been

so the filing the fact that it feels this pronounced because of the big riot statement and people are able to go and post riot announcing the game less than 100,000 people, you know, like whatever, like, however many 70,000 people like saw it. And then riot announcing the closure of the game, millions, right? On their Twitter. It's just wild that that is the, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, fuck me. We're, I had a lot of points I was struggling. they announced... There's a lot going on in our heads on this one.

Yeah, yeah. They announced its closure and... Oh, yeah. Nen Impact died more quietly and more dubiously than this did. Because... That's fine. Obviously, no one's playing Nen-MPACT, right? Obviously, that shit's done, and it's cooked, and it's fucking insanely busted and bad. But, like, it came out.

It either got your money or didn't, and now it just exists. You know? They didn't come out and go, oh guys fuck oh man okay where'd we go wrong well

you know this crazy thing we're going through right now like I can't believe this is happening we just kind of came and went I um have you ever seen a scenario in which somebody's being

a complete fucking stupid asshole but they actually call their shot from the parking lot, let alone inside the court. There was a meme going around eight months ago with Echo's head slapped onto Superman's body for multiverses. Potential man.

Called meet potential game. Potential man. Yeah. Yeah. And it is basically the conversation we are having now, but like with a really, really mean tone and calling people washed up and shit. Okay, so to be. be fair, what you're describing, that meme is from what I

was talking about, the anti-squadron. The hate, the professional hate squadron that have been all calling this shot out for a long time cheering for it. This is what I mean. Like massive assholes. However, dead on. Like,

dead on. Like, specific copes, specific, like, game design problems. The characters are made fun of it. Like, it's, it's it sucks when the biggest asshole you know is super right about something and that's why some people don't like me because i'm very cynical and that i'm super right but because i'm so smart um but yeah no i i thought of the potential man meme when this end of service thing was because i was like yeah that some the writing was on the wall for this game like it kept being like ah it'll

it'll go like I know Thresh and I know Thresh and Senna moved the needle on the player base Mm-hmm Mm-hmm The double drop But it but it like It like nudged it

Right and that's the kind of good marketing move That like makes sense Like okay there was a point at which Like what they were doing And adding the adding the Climb as well stuff like that. Like all of this stuff was really good, too little too late, but still, like, these are great

additions. And I feel like, um, from that point, because you know the, you know the, the, the, the, the disingenuous bit with like, um, Max's thumbnail where it's like to X-Q is making all the right decisions. And it's just like, well, yeah, like there's a point at which they were making excellent decisions after many years of, of, a fucked up development, fucked up development happened, you know? And things like the double draw.

and things like the climb and things like... There's somebody in this podcast right now saying what Thresh came out. Yeah, right, sure, exactly. And things like local duos and things like fucking Duo Finder and all that. These are all great things that are fucking needed to be there sooner, but like there are great things that were happening. But like there's clearly a point at which it was like, yes, this is after many years of trouble.

I think that, I think that like the wisdom of the crowd is kind of, of useful here. The single biggest complaint I ever saw with the roster. Yeah, yeah. It's what we talked about. It's what everybody used to talks about. And I know for a fact that the Thresh Senna double drop was like the only spark of hope

for this game's future. But then they would have had to do double drops like every every six weeks forever. Yes. But what I was... Which is impossible. Prior to blitz dropping was when you were like when you were in Dumer Town

and I was basically saying like if they can pick up the pace on these characters we can get to a good number you know but yeah it turns out the pace had to be like three times as fast as humanly possible

yeah I think like just unreasonably fast well again I think I think tag game 2v2 or whatever the case is you want to come in minimum 20 you know you want to come in minimum so I'm in this weird place where I feel like everyone is right about every discussion

they're having with this game. And now it's funny because I feel like, I feel like everyone is right and everyone is wrong. And we get to sit here and be simultaneously right and wrong as well. Because we can only speculate as much as we can from what we're looking at. So, you know. I think Miller's Post actually like hurts this discussion fairly because if there was no development in information at all, you could always just go, well, we can only speculate.

We don't know. We don't know what was going on. We don't know. But now we do know, like a little, but like the little we know looks like shit. So people are going to take the most negative possible interpretation. Yeah, and people are going to fucking, like, people on that team are going to get fucking blasted, some deservingly, some not deservingly, and it's, and it's, you know. You just, you'll never, you'll never, yeah, maybe never will.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But it's just a bad fucking vibe and a bad feel. I'm of the opinion that basically the higher up the chain you go, the more blame lies with you. And I think that's the case for everything, ever. that's ever existed. Okay, okay.

So the captain of the ship is responsible for the things that happened to the ship. So giving, giving the extreme lenience and, you know, giving all that grace and not, like, tightening up the belt earlier on, still, still a flame, uh, something you can be flamed for, right? Still, still at fault. Um, I, I, I was saying to myself in the days after it got announced, I'm looking forward to, to, the big write-up retrospective in a year from now. I can't wait, dude. From inside and out, right?

You know what I want? But now, I don't know. You know what I want? I don't know now. There will be someone in this project that is not going to come back to game development. They're going to go to software development

or they're going to go to content creation or something. and therefore they will not feel beholden to the fear of bridge burning with game development. Sure, sure. That is the person I want to see talk about this game because the long and short of it is that like nobody wants to burn bridges in an industry

that you're going to continue to work. Yeah. It's fucking stupid. And to that end, to a lesser degree, riot no longer cares about maintaining bridges with the FGC, I would imagine. Yeah, but I don't know how much I would trust a big picture riot guy to describe how the game went. Of course, but I would love to hear the PR phrasing to get the angle they're coming from on it.

Still, the fullest picture you can get, you know? But again, I was saying that to myself prior to this article dropping, you know? Yeah. Now, what I can say is that in terms of... She's seen the look on my face when I was reading it. I was like, oh, man. You weren't you weren't you weren't smirking a little bit You weren't going like

You weren't feeling the song No I was I was pulling my collar Okay okay okay okay I was like Oh Because admit it I know that if you just fucking hated this game The self-righteous smug energy would power you the fuck up But the fact that you ended up enjoying it I feel like is like

Oh fuck I think I think my my My core emotional response to XCO going down in Miller's post is actually primarily in response to people losing their jobs. It's a fucking bum, man. It's a fucking bar. And I don't like the cavalier attitude

to loss of employment in that article. And unfortunately, that reflects on other people in management on that project because they haven't said anything. Right? Now, this is now the lightning rod, as you so accurately described, for all discussion about the game.

because nobody else is talking. Yeah, it's a very, it's like, I'm trying to think of examples in pop culture where like, I don't know if there's like a war,

Andy Warhol moment of taking the corporate money and upsetting the corp, you know, or something like that. Or I feel like throughout time there must have been someone who did like these examples.

Oh, I know what movie you're talking about. There's a feature film that came out in our childhood or young teens that is, is the pinnacle of, I just ran away with the money.

and made whatever I want. And it's Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered. Yeah, okay, punk. Freddy Got Fingered is a movie about how Tom Green stole the studio's money to make the shittiest movie ever on purpose. Right, okay. Because he think it's really funny. And you know what?

Within that artistic context, it's like one of the funniest fucking movies ever made. Because the whole movie is about how funny he thinks it is to rip off the studio. And it is. Okay. But a feature film that comes out to theaters and then gets sent out, and the only person who lost out was the film, like, you know, the fucking Warner Brothers, who the fuck it was? It is different from something supposed to be providing long-term employment for a live service.

I don't think I ever knew about that history on it. I just remember seeing it as a kid hating it and moving on, you know. So, Willie, the plot of Freddy got fingered is that Tom Green wants to make a cartoon. So he goes to, like, Los Angeles. to do a pitch and they give him a million dollars and then he wastes it the whole rest of the movie. Right. Okay. Okay. Like, when I say the movie is actually about how he wastes the movie. Like, I'm, it's so literal. It's unbelievable how funny that is. And the movie's got awful. It's like one of the most unwatchable pieces of shit ever.

Unless you know the fact that he's giggling behind the camera that he's wasting it. And again, and I know that there are other examples of like, you know, the band. that took the money to do the commercial and then fucking you know made fun of it while doing it or burning the whole thing down you know but um what I can say is that as far as like you know outside of this context

and there you go we can we can wrap it up on that uh uh with 2XCO but when it when it comes to fighting games and you know outside of this outside of this I can say that there are signs that nature is healing you know because um something nice, something fun is that like,

because it's featuring complete right now and there's no ranked in Avatar, most of the time you're getting first to tens with people when you jump on, which is actually pretty fucking sick. Yeah. But there are some heated beefs that are popping up on Twitter. Motherfuckers are getting absolutely heated and coming at each other,

demanding the hottest money matches we've seen since Clockwork versus Neo, you know, and then also the can opener, Yipes' tournament, went off yesterday and grand finals was punk versus bleed and they ended up in a screaming match with each other afterwards that's good i like into a money match challenge and like at point you know and like literally bleed got up and did the money fan out he fanned out the money on camera and shit and it got so the thuggery was so real that you're like yep nature is still in fact healing though right i just feel sad because um as soon as the as soon as

as the 2XCO close of service was announced, my brain went, well, I'm never picking that game up ever again. Because, like, I know the game will continue to exist, but, like, a huge proportion of my personal enjoyment for 2XCO was one day they're going to get to all the characters that I want to play. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I don't have that because I don't know the lead characters. So the hope is gone. I'm just in it for the game that it is, you know? Right. Um, and I think that there's characters that I've liked enough throughout the years. Like, I've talked many times about how playing as Akehiko in P4, A, P4U is so much fun that I miss it and I think about it. And I want to come back to that feeling from time to time because nothing, no other character feels like it's, it's hitting that exact type of boxer. And I feel like Elawi's going to make me kind of miss that, you know?

There's going to be a particular feeling for this character I'm going to want to have. Um, but yeah. Like, I'm now, I'm now retroactively more mad at certain roster choices because now they did take a character I want out of running. Like, hey, guess what? I really don't like Lux. I am aware she's insanely popular. I don't like her. I really want.

She's not even out. Yeah. Yeah. The, the Rising Thunder community edition was the last thing that dropped. case, they're going to do the final patch in December with the offline mode. I have to wonder if hackers, you know, the modders, wistful hopes, and, and, I don't know, that game's pretty locked down with a bunch of super kernel level anti-cheat. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, but, you know, I don't, you know, I have to wonder if, like, there is any energy to fucking find we'll do it ourselves.

Because I've seen people being like, hey, Riot, give us the official, give us the code, the keys, save to XKO campaigns. And it's like, that's not going to fucking happen. Right. But the idea of just, no, we're doing it without permission. It's not impossible. I'd be curious. I think the final point I could ever make about the roster is that Catarina, one of the most popular characters ever and the first character they ever made, never actually got to be in the game. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's fucking weird. It'd be interesting if they dropped that on the last, last, last thing, too. Just like, here's the work-in-progress version of the character. Oh, here's the super fucked-up unfinished version? Yeah, yeah. But even then, the stupid, like, whatever modded version that I'm describing, it's not like anyone, like, the point was that people, millions at large, that love League of Legends, might be interested in playing a cool game that has the characters.

They're not going to be interested in playing a mod-ed Discord Fighter? That's not even remotely in the conversation at all. So it's just, it's a curiosity statement, you know? Anyway. Anyway, I got to go feed this dog and take a small break. We did it. Before we get into the rest of the show. We did it.

I think we were fair. I think that was fair. I did my best. I'm sure you did as well. You know, kind of like 10 years' time is fair. I think it's a 10 year? Just always like. A 10 year life cycle is a game that,

That was a healthy life cycle. You can't say it, was it? They spent longer on 2XCO than we did on best friends, man. I don't want to hear any variation of, but it's hard, though. Maybe the death note date was the same. It was always going to be 2026, no matter when it released. And it could have just been two, three years into seven. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

All right, I've got to take a quick, right? I'll see you a sec. All right. Do you think do you think people are going to start calling things a boring success now? If we saw, we have seen the good functions. Yeah, functions took off.

Functions took off and functions continues to live on. You know, I think a boring success is now in the lexicon. It could be an interesting success. interesting success or we riot I would say most games that do well are interesting success

I would say so I would say so I like to turn a phrase on that one what else happened this week okay well nothing I mean beyond that beyond that

um yeah just continued with the with the FF14 samurai stuff. I saw yeah, that's back on the schedule and you're like, oh,

yeah, I can't be there this week. So the reality is we did two back-to-back Dark Soul sessions and we got way too ahead in that compared to everything else. Oh yeah? Basically. And the next thing I want to start

is not quite ready to start just yet. Oh, can you type it in so I can see it? I'm curious. Um, we're doing This is such a good scone, dude Okay I love scone Oh yeah

Oh yeah, that's a That's an endeavor Um So in the meantime A little bit more samurai going down I'll be taking a look at A couple missions there Um

We're good to do main or sides, whatever Yeah, go for I can catch up I have flight in those zones So I can catch up like that Okay You mad happened this week as well on my channel. I was a little under the weather because of fucking daycare.

Just the day, it's catching up. It's becoming a thing. She's bringing it home. So that might continue to happen at a pace that is out of my control. You, uh, you, I saw you cancel some stuff. And then I was like, oh, hey man, and you're doing okay, buddy? and you went, daycare got me. And, like, my whole internal attitude completely switched to, like, yeah, fucking welcome.

Absolutely no way to defend yourself from germs. Yep. Yep. None. Like, I'm, again, I'm in the middle of giving her a kiss, and she's just staring at me going, eh! You might as well be, like, licking doorknobs at a mall. Like, there's no way to stop it.

Fuck Um So it's happening Do you remember Last year I got sick like five times Mm-hmm Mm-hmm Mm-hmm

There's no way around it Yeah no I had family My cousins was telling me He's like it's like There's no guarantee Just because you get one Doesn't mean a few days later You're not going to get another

Like the timing is also Just absolutely bat shit It's never been like this So I'm prepared We're prepared We're bunkering batting down the hatches So you know We'll see what happens

Um But But a little more of that happening. I wasn't able to make it out to you, Mad, but it was running on my stream. So if you got to tune in for some good tournament action, there was Tokon, there was Avatar, there was 2X, there's a bunch of cool stuff that happened. And I saw Wawa, took it and ran with it across multiple games. So shout out to them and to the Airdashers running pretty much from what I can tell, like perfect event in the church. super sick venue, everything went really well.

Confirmed, Alex, yes. I believe so. This week, going to be... Oh yeah, we also, you know, again, we played a bit of DX2, and I think we talked about Lost Center last week as well. So, you know, we're going to get back around

to that the week after. The main thing is the special event on Saturday. This one's a long time. time coming. I've been trying to figure this out for a minute and the timing just lines up perfectly. You're going to do it? I'm going to be playing for honor. The new character. Speaking of dead games. Very alive, actually. Very alive and still has new characters dropping because that shit's making money.

So no, it has like you you're not looking. I wasn't looking, but it has a lot of concurrence. And it's actually. So let me ask you a question. The last time I played for Honor Yeah Was around the time they had that tournament That just went fucking straight Sideways That was nuts

I remember that happened That was a long time ago Yeah But like how is the Game now So everyone People are playing it It's very healthy

People going game killed By its own player base No it is not killed at all It's extremely alive It's doing really well And people are enjoying Where it's at balance wise And character wise

Because they've been just Adding tons of characters to it like there's been seasons and seasons of stuff so like whatever faction you want to go with whatever style you want to go with you've got fucking how many what's the roster right now for honor like it's apparently been just truck 38 right now you know what it's been chugging along good it's good to play a fighting game with a big roster big roster it is you telling me that has 38 games characters in it I'm like, man, maybe I'll watch your video and maybe I'll reinstall for honor.

So we're popping it in. The new character is Atacute, who's like this cool looking punch girl that's got like batons and a big mohawk and she's joining kind of the Japanese faction. You know, my style of my energy of character. I immediately am like, okay, tell me more. And I've been trying to get this for honor, getting to fighting games going because it turns out that some friends of mine that are just, just old FGC friends that I hung out with from the MTSF crew and the AirDashers

crew are devs on the game. And so we have a, I'm going to be grabbing a couple of the homies to come in on the couch, sit down with that are like actively you know, uh, programmers and leads on it and we're going to be

fucking getting it from them directly, you know? Um, and it was what you're saying. From what I hear to you, and what you're saying almost verbatim, is that Canadian FGC people are better at developing fighting games than American FGC people. That's what you said, right? I'm saying, I'm saying that Farraner is this weird 4V4 3D weapon combat thing that is just different enough and interesting enough that it's managed to not only survive after that. last generation launch or two generations ago launch,

but it's doing really well years later. Well, that's what happens when you aim for a boring success, man. And yeah, Canadian. Damn straight. Can I say something? This is a really great, like, final thing. I don't like For Honor as much as 2XCO. For Honor is like objectively way riskier and way.

weirder than 2XCO as a multiplayer game. By far. Easily. It is a weird fucking game. It is super risky. It was also, as far as I know, not free to play, which is enough risk on its own. Like, free to play, I can't emphasize enough how much free to play on its own is a risk. And then there's the game itself.

Yeah. Okay, guys, you know how you have the risk of your game being a certain way and that by itself is a risk by default? and you can go save for risky, the free to play slash buy to play thing is a separate entire continuum of risks. Exactly. You know, it is, it is, yeah,

it is a risky portfolio dipped and fucking deep fried in a risky oil on top of that. So, um, anyways, someone in the chat asks, don't you have to pay for most of the characters in for honor? Yes. That is how a game makes enough dollars to continue to exist by convincing you to give them dollars.

There you go. So that they can pay employees. The money. The money is being made with the characters. So, um, and it's, you can exchange money for goods and services. Yeah. Or, and if you're in a different genre that is not a fighting game, then you can sell skins and let that work. Sure.

And, you know, people are interested on a whole different basis for that. But all this to say that, yeah, we're going to sit down with two of the devs and we're going to fucking get into what's going on with that. Because I checked my – because they asked me, they're like, hey, so you, do you own it? And I was like, I'm pretty sure I have it on Xbox. And I went to go look. And I'm like, oh, no, I had it on PC and I had it the PS4 copy. But, like, it says last booted 2017. Last played May 3rd, 2019, 98.8 hours.

Wow. Okay. Huh. Yeah. I played way more of that game that. What's my DLCs at? I have five DLCs. Marching Fire and the first season passed.

It told me, I last played it nine years ago. So there's quite a bit to keep up with it. So right around the same time, 2XCO is starting to get its bearings. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. On the, on the, on the, on the road to, to near release. Mm-hmm.

You were going to say interesting success, weren't you? No. Okay. No, I remember that, um, uh, For Honor has like a, Ubi. So, like, riot, uh, Turks ago had riots monetization, which is skins. It's, it's like the main thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, For Honor has, uh, sieges monetization, which is characters.

You can't earn them, though. But really characters. the like that you know right right right yeah i mean i you know i bring it up every once in a while talking about how tech and revolution was this the free to play weird in between six and seven game that they came out with and their way of monetizing it was to limit the time you could play yeah um anyways shit failed uh gonna check out s for honor on saturday come hang out should be fun see what the new characters are about um i was originally playing the um the berserker i think

i feel like the the guy with the two axes that would do the the fucking continuous combo um honestly from what i remember playing a for honor i played the the bass roster and the the chinese expansion i think i played like almost every character to some degree because they were all different enough that it was like fuck it i'll try so and so but they weren't they weren't like necessarily deep enough required that I couldn't just ping pong around. Right, right, right. Like in a fighter, you get your main, and, like, you go over to like, well, maybe I'll play

this other character, and you're like, man, I don't fucking know how to fucking play this character. And Forer Honor had like a, like a baseline of how everybody works. That, like, yeah, you could ping pong around for goofies. Now I want to see The Berser Eat a Mushroom in a reference to fucking Vinland saga. No, it also was super nuts when like the warden Fuck Fuck, I'm gonna fucking play for honor this fucking week now, aren't I? God damn it.

You're gonna go take a look? Like myself, like fuck you. Put the seed in. I have time for this shit. I put the seed in there. I put the seed in there. Yeah, the warden made it as a guest character into Sam's show. And you're just like, what?

What? Okay, okay, sure. Yeah, that game has been in the background, man. It's been chugging along, you know? I think the warden, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Kense and the Raider are, like, the best Ryu and Ken group of, like, any fighting game I can think of in forever. I, like, I, like, that, that core roster of three guys. Yeah, yeah. Um, oh, and, random side note about Sam's show. I was just randomly going through like, I was making some space to, on my, my hard job

was looking at replays and stuff I had saved and stuff. And I had some Samurai Showdown stuff in there. And I noted that I saved the Bikin ending of that game. And I was like, why did I save this? And I rewatched it. And it was because like, beat off. Hey, hey,

biken is fucking biking is all right. There's nothing wrong with that. No. There's other places to go for that, and the game official sources is not it. We've got websites and galleries. What are we talking about? No, it's just interesting, because I noticed

I saved it, and I was like, why did I say that? I was watching and it's like, oh, this is a guest character that's perfect for this world because it's like, again, Guilty Gear character that shows up from that lives in Japan, but she gets to go to actual Japan. Her ending is that is the happiest she's ever gotten to be in any of the war. Oh, that's nice.

because she gets to just be in Japan walking around the countryside enjoying her culture before she has to go back to the horrible future before the gears ruined it before the horrible future has to happen again so it's this kind of interesting thing for a guest character

to be walking around in the world that they couldn't fathom just enjoying it for what it is you know it's really cool actually in case anyone just didn't know that was a thing it's kind of nuts that they did that anyway for honor this week

week, that's pretty much me. I had a very busy week. I tried to play Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and was attacked by a historical level thunderstorm that knocked my shit right out. The timing after that has been such that, so I decided a couple of years ago when I was in Montreal, about six years ago, that I wanted uninterruptible power supplies for my equipment, right? The full-on fucking generator

pool? No, no, not a generator, just a big ass battery, right? Okay, okay. It's slash surge protector. Yes. And, well, that was six years ago. And you know what's happening? I bought them all at the same time.

All of their batteries have failed simultaneously. Oh. From back when you first got it. Yeah. Within the past week, all of my uninterruptible power supplies just fucking,

started screaming at me and I've had streams go down and so I have a new one to my left and the one to my right has been disconnected and replaced with the surge protector and I need to get another one through the fucking mail they did not get surged it is in fact their age

they are old they are old you know old batteries I do have to say that's just annoying as fuck a weird workaround that nets you the same solution at least for your stream setup is a laptop will go switch to battery mode,

except when the internet goes out because the power went out, because the modem went out. Yes. You know. Right, right, right. So that's happening. I played Dust Bloods. Did you play Dust Bloods?

I did not play Desk Bloods. So I played through all of the Dust Bloods tutorial, and then I played two full matches, and then I didn't play it anymore. And that is not a complaint about its quality. That is me going, the only reason I want to play through this goddamn network test is I want to know what this game fucking is. Like, I don't know what the fuck it is. So I will say, like, despite the fact that you couldn't stream it and no one could.

And I think Max just streamed it by the way. Massively pissed off about that. Sucks, sucks. And Frumsoft doing what they did with Eldon Rang and they're doing what they did with Sekiro. Right. In both cases. It's a fucking dinosaur policy they have on this. and I hope that changes.

In the meantime, what they did do was fly out a bunch of people like Vati and Urbarros and stuff and they put out videos talking about it. Should have fucking flown on it. If you got to go ahead and shake me his backy's hand and play it

then the tone would be a little different. And then they gave you... And they gave you official footage to put out there so they had like some 20 minutes or so of gameplay. They did give a lot of B-roll, yeah, which is good. So everyone had the same footage to show off and then they talked a bit about it. That Oroboros video was really good at breaking down exactly what the game was

and everything happening in it. And it's Kirby City trial. It's Kirby Airwriters. Yep, yep. It's from Soft, blood, blood for city trial. And it's also experimental, uh, Fortnite battle royale, you know, like, TVE, PDP, a lot going on. You're dumped into a big city map, and the goal for multiple rounds is get powerful.

Kill enemies, kill bosses, find secrets, get upgrades, make your character strong. In the second round, an area of the map will be listed as a PVP section where you can get a bunch of points by going in PVPing other people. And each round after the first, people get cut for having a low score. and then at the end of the rounds, the final battle is between the three top scorers and they have a PVP match on top of the big building. Yeah. It is Anarchy Raines.

It is Kirby City Trial. It is a free-for-all moba. Right? But it's actually a lot more understanding. It's a lot easier to understand when you play it than it is to explain it. And something that immediately I was like, okay, so you're just going for the Battle Royale thing.

Uh-huh. Are you doing, is this Battle Royale Night Rain, you know? And it turns out it's actually really well designed and thought out in that, and not necessarily, because you don't really get much for killing other players prior to the PVP round at the end. Unless you're a certain character with a certain goal. When you're given a specific goal to go get them, yes. But otherwise, just just going after other players is not that beneficial.

and there's other ways to make up to get your blood currency, including PVEing a whole bunch. And I like that. That's a smart thing you can do where you can PVEE if you're somebody that's more geared towards that style of gameplay. But then it still does have to come down to that winning round of like beating everybody else, right? Yeah.

And something, I will say, as much as I, it sounds really well thought out in that there's a lot of ways to get the currency that keeps you a lot of... There are a lot of ways to earn score based on your personal, like, talents. Your style, yeah, right. Something that I'm okay with is I've been seeing between this and then all, from all the way from demons through to Eldon Ring and then with Night Rain, you're seeing Frumsoft get a little more hyperactive with their gameplay style, right? You're seeing, like, double jumps, triple jumps, and fast combat. This game has a fucking quadruple jump and a dash.

Madness, it's crazy, right? You are fucking flying like a robot. No fall damage. verticality to the to the to the to the stages you might as well be an armored core for a lot of the fucking game play in this game and okay I don't like that stuff is is different but ultimately I'm okay with it if you design a game to be more action oriented I think that's fine but something that I'm not super excited about is the idea that like everything from soft is going to do potentially has a big timer on your ass so they made sure

that in the interview that they did with Miyazaki that he said like multiple times by the way we are working on a single player game yeah okay okay okay because like even in the context of this setting and whatever's going on there I like taking my time with these worlds I like taking my time with what's going on here

feeling like I have to get in before the circle closes or before someone's on my shit I totally agree is a stressor that takes away from it you know so as a as a a result, I streamed Night Rain the day after I played the beta. And Night Rain stressed me

out so bad. My chest got tight. And it stressed me out so bad for one really simple reason. I was playing with chat and chat is fast. You know when you hop in a game that's like a year old and people in chat jump

in and like grow guys, these guys got every achievement, every platinum and they got like 600 hours on it? Yep. Right. In Night Rain, your party can go so goddamn fucking fast. I was like a child chasing them around trying to keep up. And that made my chest just tight. Just like sweating. Like, oh, where? Where do you go? So the optimal way to have fun with Night Rain and like the last couple of runs I was doing with it were ones where you're not really thinking about the stuff in the map or what's going on. You're kind of. autopileting. Run over here, get to this first spot. Safe boss in there, get some items. Okay,

let's try our hand out at the Hypogee in jail. If we get the godskins, great, and then we're going to make it over. And you're just kind of a running through the motions and hoping that the other people you're with also know that. And like, that is fun in a different way. Sure. It's a very different thing.

But you don't have the enjoyment of like taking the world in, you know? Yeah. And I do miss that. Now, Dustbloods. Um, this is going to sound mean. Dustblood seems it's clearly like more of the company's baby than Night Rain was. Okay.

Okay. Um, everything in it is like, like Night Rain is a game made out of pieces of Eldon Ring. Mm-hmm. Right? Dust Bloods is its own baby. It's its own child. Um,

I only have two complaints. And unfortunately, they're really big complaints. The first of which is performance is, hey, guess what's a console game from, from software? The performance is not that great.

And it's on a switch too. Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. The one that actually sucks is the input lag is for real. Oh, whoa, I was not expecting that. It has a very significant amount of input lags. So my biggest worry about the design of this game is that it's an online switch game, which means a lot of people are going to be Wi-Fiing it the fuck up.

Yeah, no. the internet, the internet like connectivity, not a problem. Huh. The, the input lag was like, it's, it's, it's, I can feel it. And the handheld version, when you play it on in like handbook, it seems to be worse. I was going to say, you played, you felt that docked. Yeah. Wow.

Okay. So hopefully, hopefully they clean it up and lock it to 30 FPS and then get a, get a, get a night. I can deal with a little bit of input lag, but it needs to be. the same. So I saw that... You know, every time. How long did your runs go for? Because I saw there were about half an hour intended.

They're about half hour. Okay. Unless you get eliminated. Right? Yeah. So what's the fastest you can be kicked out and queuing back? You can't be kicked out after, uh, there's, there's, uh, there's four rounds and the fourth round is just the, the, the, the big battle.

Yeah. Um, you can't be kicked out at the end of round one. You have to make it to the at least end of round two. Um, so 16 minutes. Okay. Each round is eight minutes long. And so it's eight minutes, eight minutes, eight minutes, and then a big fight.

And so the fastest you could get out is 16 minutes. From what I saw as well for people that were not getting the breakdown on the game, you pick one of many preset characters that have unique abilities. They're just like, they're all very cool, very cool characters. Specifically design champs type of thing. Um, yeah, yeah. the fucking jetpack robot dude seems sick, the sniper lady. Fucking Zork!

Yeah, yeah, there's some cool shit going on there. You want to talk about mobility. You just literally have flying in a FromSoft game. And then you PVE it or like follow your particular objectives that you've been uniquely given to get your soul's equivalent. My God, the fucking Bafmo Dads and the Blood realms and the Blood Spees. There's a lot. There's a lot. The gibberish speak is crazy.

the words they're making up I can't I can't handle it it's too much and you basically have to you know essentially make enough souls for your character

to you know sort of last and not get cut and then you're gonna have ways to do that that involved not just PVEing but like you can you can enter like a giant boss area and then immediately summon everybody on the map

to help you and you can't fight each other when you're co-opping the boss You're just raid bossing. Player collision is straight up turned off. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Which makes sense.

I can't confirm this. This is just my gut. But in the tutorial, the tutorial puts you into bot matches. Like full scale bot matches. Which to me says, hey, by the way, people who are worried that it's a multiplayer only game. I am of the opinion that this game will have just straight up CPU matches like for when the game

the population moves on or it becomes untenable so the part that I when I talked about like the pace of you know fucking lighting a fire under your acid night rain you did get to slow it down walking around the round table this has a hub area as well yes sir that was discussed

But was it closed off in what you played? There's pieces of it that are closed off. Okay. There's parts of it that were like a little mist fogs. Like can't access during the network test kind of thing. Okay. Because I'm wondering if they're going to do a similar thing where they're like, here's your slow walkabout and lore it area.

And then here's your go, go, fucking go. Probably. That's exactly how they're probably going to do it. Because yeah, that night rain round table did. You did have to, you know, scenes and you go through the memories. And it does play out with a, you need to be able to take. take a deep breath. Sometimes.

Yes. Yes. And, but overall, too, like, the, um,

the deep breath that comes while, the pacing of taking a deep breath and then suddenly getting ripped into something and then back out into slow pace is something I, I like about the FromSoft games, you know, um, and the ones that are, and going decidedly full on multiplayer with it is,

is a change. Hmm. Which is, again, it's fine. Like, like, I just hope that.

We'll see. Yeah, I hope that there's enough there to satisfy that it. Absolutely no news on when it's going to come out. They said it's going to come out this year. I don't know. Hmm. I don't know. Um, who else looked cool.

The, um. The old guy who turns into a fucking dinosaur. Dinosaur man. Dinosaur man looked cool. Um, uh, fucking Kunoichi lady. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah.

A whole bunch of freaks. It was interesting. Did you, uh, like, did you get to try, uh, everybody or did you end up like sticking on? You just what? Oh, man, what a cool cast of characters. Um, uh, the robot bird person, a dinosaur man and a Chinese person. Oh, what a bunch of freaks. I said kudoichi lady.

She's cool. Yeah. Their backstories are freaky. Their backstories are nuts. You know? They are. Go read them. Um.

Oh, she's Vietnamese. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah, no, it's cool. It's cool. I'm looking forward to it. I would like it to come out this year, but I would like it to come out

with a solid frame rate better firster. This is what I would like. Did you get to, did you get proposed to by anybody? No, I didn't. No. Everybody I ran into just attacked on site. Even when it was to their detriment,

which I thought was interesting. there's a lot of that game where it's like it would actually be to players advantage to ignore other players and to just focus on gearing up but during the network test every single time a human being saw you it was just like fucking like on site

okay how did the hyper fighting feel were you felt like a relatively good souls PVP it's just that it needs the input lag was was need to fix that. Did you have double-jumping fucking Otogi battles in mid-air while...

No, I just rolled out of the way when they came down. Okay. The way the people triple jump to try and like slam you on the ground feels a lot like Fortnite players gentrifying their fucking... Yeah, yeah, okay. And you got to crank the camera up to see what the fuck is going on. Yeah, just roll. Just roll when they come down. Did you make it? You played Zork?

I played fucking Zork. Are you kidding me? Yeah, okay. Zork forever, bro. No, the fact that the, the fact that the rocket dash has like a hit at the end of it sells that whole character free. Yeah. That rocket dash is for sneak attacks. Oh, you can? If somebody's looking at you and you do it, it ain't happening.

They can, as soon as you start to shoot, they just roll. Okay. But the main thing is that when you do it, it goes really fucking far, like really far. So you can see somebody like 80 feet away and when they're doing their own bullshit. Ambush from. And then you just beat them and they're just like, oh, I'm in a fight. Yeah. This is weird, but like bid for power had that.

Oh, yeah, a million years ago. You'd just slam it. Like, you had some attacks that were too slow to use in a fight with someone looking at you, but they were perfect for like ambushing of someone who's the third party not paying attention. Interesting. Okay. Okay. What else I do this week? I was invited by Garrett and Kyle grinding gear over a grinding gear to do some occult Crescent North Horn in 14 on the last day of the pony promotion. And that similarly, grinding gear is starting to become like a nexus of the Final Fantasy 14 content creator community.

Oh, yeah. So loaded into that at 7 o'clock. in the AM because everybody's on the fucking East Coast and life isn't fair. And that became, there were so many Fugies I had to make two rows. Are you guys logged in while you're, while you're chatting? Yeah.

Okay. So that was with Kyle and Garrett from Grinding Gear. That was with Mr. Happy and Sly from State of the Realm. That was with Jesse Cox. That was with pint, girl DM, sham pie, joe cat, and wrath. Wow. Okay.

That's nine. Yeah. So Accult Crescent is a enormous, you know, 48 person multiplayer space, which works for this purpose. That was, that was a mess of a stream. Fun mess. But like massive mess.

We got to, we got to, we got to chitchat about anything for like, it's fucking eight hours. Um, and my personal highlight is finding out, uh, who can and can't do math in that group.

Because there are encounters that ask you to figure out what a prime number is or what numbers are divisible by four. And some people, Silent Hill puzzle shit. Yeah. Some people are just better or worse than other people at knowing what prime number is. Okay.

The phrase, why do I need to know what a prime number is? Yeah. I, listen, I'm not a... Like, if you design a game that's meant to be that kind of puzzle game, that is extrinsic in nature, that's okay. You can do it, Laurel Eye and the Laser Eyes

type shit where you're staring at a puzzle that is genuinely checking into your knowledge of history, context, and math and a bunch of other things. But in most cases, if you're playing a different genre of game, like again, Silent Hill, horror, whatever,

Final Fantasy, the puzzle should be contained within the world. It shouldn't be like some fucking... It is contained within a world. You know how will he? The world. If an enemy is casting level five death, a very, very classic Final Fantasy spell,

you look at your level in game and go, is it a divisible level five? Sure. That, like, forcing the player to do math problems is going back decades in Final Fantasy. That's a lot of people. Name a prime number. Go.

Five? Yeah, see? Easy. Okay. The fuck, you put me on the spot? What the fuck? All right. Yeah. There's a lot of easy early prime numbers. But hey, it's great.

So did that. Then we watched, me and Paige watched, what do you call it? The Gamescom Live, which was fucking weak as shit this year. Yeah, that's the news. That's the news. We'll get into that.

And then I played some Mortal Shell 2. Now, I know you played some Mortal Shell 1. Beat it. And Mortal Shell 1 was flawed. Mortar Shell 2, still flawed. But wow, what a fucking enormous step up. Interesting. Okay.

Like, absolutely incredible step up. Because what I would, my takeaway for Mortal Shell 1 is I wish I could take this class of character out of this game and put it into a better one. That is what they did for Mortal Shell too. Okay. They took the core concept of the shells and the weird types of blocking and stuff like that they had going on. The defense is awesome. Yeah. And it is like, it is just a massive improvement in like every respect.

It's more responsive. It's more interesting. It's better looking. It has more interesting areas. It has better versions of the existing systems. Okay. It's super cool. Now, they are like, they are like, I would say, hard patching the game.

So they're looking at feedback and they're like very significantly changing aspects of like some of the guts and the balance. So I'm going to wait off on it for a little bit. But I was crazy impressed playing Mortal Shell too. Are they going boss heavy or exploration heavy? Both? Yeah, okay. Balanced them out. Okay.

Like one of the things that I, I found, like, remember in the first game, you would get, like, a consumable item, and then you would use it and it would go, this item will get better after 10 uses? Yeah. Well, they have that now, but instead it's not use it. It's find them. It's, hey, did you find a mushroom that cures poison? When you find nine more mushrooms, it'll upgrade itself into a better mushroom that cures poison and also heals you. Okay. And all items in the game can be equipped to your active slot where it's like cure burn, cure, cure, or like, you know, give yourself MP.

Or it can go into your passive slot where it gives you like just a buff. So like the mushroom that cures poison, if you equip it to passive, it increases your poison resistance. Oh, interesting. Okay, okay. Because yeah, the problem with forcing the player to use everything multiple times is even the things you don't need, you might need once. Like you want fire resistance against something that's fire related, but you might not have the rest of the game to do that. So why go wasting it in these circumstances when you don't fucking need it, you know? So all items in that game are now like restorable at bonfires.

Okay. The game, the game loads you up with three types of parries right away. You have the standard block that has a perfect parry. You have only a perfect parry that does way more guard damage. And then you have the, I've turned to stone. The shell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it regenerates.

But if you do it perfectly, it regenerates instantly. Okay. That mechanic is so interesting because it's like in the middle, in the middle of attacking, you turn to stone and can block whatever is about to hit you. And then it's unstone, unpetrified. and continue the attack. They also have like a basic system

where you unlock these runes that you can equip to your character that are just a bunch of weird effects. They're basically like they're basically like Eldon Ring rings on crack. Okay. So it's stuff like, hey, every enemy that you kill will increase your total health.

And they all level up as well. Or the infusion system where you put like blood on your sword. Okay. That also just regenerates at every bond Also, every bonfire equivalent is also a secret dungeon. Like, you sit at it to rest and level

up, and then it goes, do you want to cleanse it? And you say, yeah, and then you go into a micro dungeon. It's super cool. Big gun, dumb cannon. Slow. You do shoot guns. Big slow cannon. And the way you get ammo for those guns is by hitting people with melee attacks.

Okay. Mm-hmm. So, and also the perfect guarding in that game is Sekiro. Like you perfect guard. like bang bang bang and then and then they become stunned and you so um everything about the game is defined by uh consumable items are for chumps no one uses that shit ever ammo is for bitches um and like also are there many more shells to pick from that are very uh there are 12 and then i think there's probably some secret ones yeah that's quite a bit more than like the four or five i you originally talked about.

And also, like, the games, like, primary unlock is that they give you a big map, and then they, you go to, like, the little room of, uh, of shells, and you spend your level up currency on the shell, and that's when it

pings it on your map and says, all right, go get it. Oh, interesting. Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah, that all sounds a lot better. Now, admittedly, like, some of that stuff was, like, mild annoyance territory. The thing that turned me the fuck off with that first game was when you get to the big open onyx area and how completely desolate and empty it was. Terrible. I would get lost in there

all the time. It sucked so much. It felt so unfinished and it really just felt like they got to the halfway point of the game and then just gave up. Yeah. I'm super, super impressed by Mortal Shell. I'm waiting for them to patch it a little bit more before I go into it. Um, I, it, it, so, you know when you just get it your hands on it and you're just like, this is, this is, ooh, ooh, ooh, I'm holding something special. This is, like, I felt the same way playing this as I did when I was starting to play Lies of P. Right. Okay. Okay. Where I'm like, oh, some people are catching right the fuck up to From software. They're going in their own direction. Yeah.

They're doing their own thing, and it's obviously a Souls game, and it's obviously its own thing. But like, like the Liza P guys, they caught up, and they made a fucking great Souls game. And these guys, like, ooh, it's really good. Yeah, I guess, like, sometimes it takes more than one try, you know, to kind of figure it out. Sometimes it takes however many Lords of the Fallen that has been doing. This game is improved in the same way you would expect a sequel to a game on PS2 to improve. uh... PS2 to what

PS2 you remember PS2 games how you'd have the game that was like kind of mediocre and then you'd have the sequel and you'd be like oh shit oh oh like okay a game within that same generation

yeah yeah yeah okay okay okay so like I have not played enough of it but considering how much shit was jank as fuck about Mortal Shell 1 this feels like a zone of the ender scenario okay it's funny because of these souls like it feels like you know

there's the ones that come along disappear into the ether. Like I haven't heard anyone talk about like the surge ever since it's off. The surge was all right. Yeah, I guess. I was sponsored to play The Surge and I thought it was all right. I thought it was pretty good. Okay. I just, I don't know how people ended up feeling in the end.

Kazan, no idea what ended up happening. That game is really good. It's also like legitimately crazy difficult. Hmm. Okay. So there's a couple of these Soulslikes that have been solid and just kind of quiet then. Okay, fair enough. I might go back to Kazan because you can play as a lady,

and I feel like the Lady Berserker looks way cooler. Yes, I saw that. I saw that update, yeah. But in this case, okay, search two is really sick. So there you go. That's the thing. It's like the one that comes after where you really come into your own and figure out what you're doing. I played a game on Backlaw called AI Limit, which was very solid.

Yeah, there's a bunch of these, like, flying around. Lords of the Fallen and the other Lords of the Fallen, a game I was sponsored to play, which means it's really good. Didn't seem to make the same impact as other games. They're on Lords of the Fallen 2-3 now, 2-3? I believe they are calling it Lords of the Fallen again. Lords of the Fallen.

Are they calling it Lords of the Fallen again? They are calling it two? Okay, it's the third game, but it's called two. Two-three. To let's get yes, okay. Learns with the following. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, yeah, all right. Very strange.

I don't know what they're doing with the, the naming shit on that. New text document bracket one bracket. Yeah. Okay. Um, uh, that's it for me this week. Uh, I'm going to be streaming a lot this coming week and the week after and the week after and the week after. Um, um, because September is going to be upon us on the 28th.

That's Friday. So I have a number of sub-goals of personal embarrassments and interesting ideas for streams going forward that I will be talking to you guys about on the 28th. One of those goals is an embarrassment to be done to me on this podcast. Again It's not clown though What's not clown? What am I getting What am I getting ripped into here?

You're not getting ripped into nothing What is all on this side of the camera? Okay Okay What is this tornado effect here? I mean either about that Either way it has to be engaged with I have to confront it

Yeah you will have to engage with it a little Probably Page is streaming in a couple of hours Three o'clock today I think it's Mass Effect tonight. I'm going to be playing 14 with the girls. We're going to go grind some paste. Tomorrow

morning at 10 a.m. I'm going to be doing Noita with Girl DM. That will be interesting because I don't think I'm any good at Noita. Noit is the rogue-like Wizard game? Yes. Not Noitu Love 2. Yeah. Okay. And on

Friday, which is the start of September, we'll be talking about the goals for this September. And I will also be doing a big stream starting at 10 in the morning where we're going to play a Metal Gear Solid 4 and the new Star Wars Xcom game, Zero Company.

Then I'll stream some more stuff on the weekend. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Cool. What does Noitu love to? Oh, fuck. You look that shit up by Conjax. Super Bowl. I will grab the goal for

you so you can prepare your shit. I appreciate the preparation. I appreciate it. I got to scroll up. Okay. While you do that, let me... Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. Whom we love?

But you know who we love as well? Ourselves. I love myself a lot. I love myself. I love myself. It's important to love yourself, and that's why it's important to go get a Castle Super Beast shirt. from the hold on a minute

uh-huh at this goal you will yeah man okay all right all right yeah um you see what I'm talking about okay one of those one of those is in a tier of lunacy far beyond the others the other like they're all pretty wild

but that one that one right there that's that one that one Bat shit nuts Yeah. Do you want to You know, I'll send you, I'll send you The last one. Okay. The one At the top that no one's gonna reach. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That, that checks out. That, that's, yeah, No one's gonna reach it. But if you can, fine, fuck it. Oh, you just want to hurt yourself. No, I don't want to hurt myself. that would be immoral.

I want to do things that are funny. It's important to love yourself, which brings us back to Castle Super Beast merch over at Orchid8.com. You can go get the legacy shirt and the legacy desk mat as well as the clown tea. Apropos, timing-wise.

These are all up on Bricky's shop, and the shirts are, as far as I can tell, on the way for anyone who made that first batch of orders, you're going to be getting those. The mats have already arrived as well. So these are the shirts that are basically including every title that the show has had so far. And you know what? I have worn them in public.

I have put my money where my mouth is. And I have worn the Castle Super Beast Legacy shirt out and about where people had to confront it. Now, was I wearing it one day when I had to go? go to daycare to pick up the baby? I thought about it. You thought about it for like a second. And then I took it off. But maybe we'll build up to it.

Willie, you should have a sub-a-thon goal, which is wear the CSB shirt to the airport to catch your flight. You know, I think, look, we're in the phase. I'm just, we're in the phase where everyone at the daycare is getting to know each other. And maybe when the time is right, I'll roll up and be like, yeah, that's, what I'm about, you know? Bro, I took the little man to like a new, like, child activity center style thing, you know, like for the kids to learn and,

and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and I started taking him to the new place in my neighborhood right after the last sub-a-thon. So I was, like, the last purple day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I had to, lost a bet. Okay. Yeah, there you go. That's it.

There you go, yeah. Which I might have to do again this year in terms of like, why are you, what the fuck? I'm like, ah, I lost a bet. It's a long story. No, real talk, actually, I just didn't want to sweat it up on the bike with the fucking, with the thing. But either way. You know, as I've gotten older, I'm changing shirts more than like once a day or twice a day in some respects. Because if I have to do something, I don't want to sit down in this chair for stream and just be like, yeah.

Yeah. But either way, Orchidate. com Castle Superbeast collection. Go click on it. Go get one of them. And yeah, enjoy. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by Rocket Money.

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Thank you, Rocket Money. Thank you, Rocket Money. Uh-huh, this week. All right. Yo, if you're getting your tabletop together, Hero Forge, that's where you want to go. Hero Forge lets you make a character creator right there in your browser, and you can get all kinds of cool shit printed for your tabletop needs.

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but I'll definitely say that this is mastery of it where is it here we go sorry one sec look at this fucking cool shit right here

look at that oh hold on I got a bit look at that this how do I How is it? Ooh Right

That's good Super sick That's a Joe Gunn's miniature Made That pose looks really familiar It's a monk pose Do it's a cool I asked for some cool

Kind of like You know Munk shit I sent like some cool Like monk you know Shaolin style stuff Um Got one of those going

And Uh Over here There's also So, well, there's a cool, there's a cool samurai one as well. Super dope. So, yeah, check it out. I think is, is it a Jetli?

Is it a Jetli? It might be a Jetli. Anyway, um, Hero Forge, a place to go for that. And you can, uh, go nuts with your creations. You can add tons of details by adding, um, the kit bashing feature as well, which lets you add like 20, up to 20 different accessories and models and things like that all together. get really elaborate with it. You can print out standees,

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Thanks, Hero Forge. Thanks, Hero Forge. That Joe Guns looks sick. I think I want to get that printed. You should. I have a permanent reminder of, of this fuck, the fact that the glass has been broken. Yeah, no, my, my favorite thing is, is when people,

Like, one of the things about, like, because you're so on the outside of the MMO thing. It's like, making pictures and figures of your blurbo is like a fucking key part of the fucking experience. It is absolutely vital. I am really lucky I like my blurbo a lot. Yeah. Yeah. That's doing a lot of heavy lifting. My tune.

I fucking love the term blorbo, man. I was going to say it's either that or my, or your tune. you know. Oh, man, nobody uses that anymore. That's actually falling out because it's so old. It's,

it sounds, it reminds me, it's a term from a, it sounds like it clearly comes from people who are so outside of games, but just jumped into wow only. No, that's not where it's from.

Really? Toon is from Toon Town. An ancient pre-MMO, MMO. Oh. It's actually from people. way way on the inside of games.

Oh, wow. Okay, on some neopet shit. Yeah, that's why it's fallen out because like that was for like people our age playing wow and referencing old old shit. So their characters were their tunes. The people who say tunes are like in their 60s now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Fuck.

I thought it was just. some weird like, I don't play any video games and I played wow and I'm just calling it like a cartoon. No, no, it's, I play, I play way too many video games. Actually, it's the complete opposite. This week podcast is sponsored by Quince and that is the cozy comfy sweaters and shirts and they got lots of great fits to check out. I have been rocking the Mongolian cashmere sweats. which is a wild... It sounds fancy.

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All right. To Germany, we go. Oh, though we're doing the show with the Germans. There were very few people that came up on that stage and went, hello, welcome to Germany. In fact, there were none. I think it was surprisingly stupid of them to do the cutaway to the in crowd were using the lighting of the stage moment to then just hype up nothing for Gamescom itself. It was a big, it was a big reveal moment where everyone's like, oh, something big's coming. And it was like, no, no, nothing's coming.

We were just showing you Gamescom actually. And then you train everybody to get excited for nothing and then they are not excited the next time. Also, there was a really funny vibe to it because it was like, welcome to Germany. We will show you all of the games we have from China. And guess what? China's making...

China is like... China and Korea are going nuts. China has basically decided, yeah, platinum games, we're doing that. That's us now. And they're just... They've picked a genre and they're sticking to it. And, you know, the, we've been...

I never expected to get... Okay, the wildest title... The wildest dev company logo drop I've ever seen was Quantic Dream on Star Wars Eclipse. Sure. It broke my chest. I couldn't breathe. Well, don't worry. You're never going to see that logo next to that title ever fucking again.

Watching what appears to be Beldenbring and seeing a Hoyoverse logo drop. That was actually like, what? Batchit. They have also clarified that notice. is not going to be gacha for characters. Oh. Which people now think means

it will be gotcha for weapons. Yeah, yeah. Worse in a lot of ways. If they specified for characters, then that says a lot. So, no-dis-fall. The Ananta, the anime GTA game, has specified that it is not going to be

gotcha for characters. Yeah, I'm calling it Anime Saints Row. So let's just hold up. I'm going to do this. Sure. Okay. So, Hoyover's announced a bunch of shit,

the Petit Planet and all that stuff. They announced like six fucking games. And it feels like their thing, because, you know, they've got infinite money, right? They've got the fucking money glitch.

So now the thing is, we're going to just do every genre that is, that you love, and we're going to put gacha somewhere in it. And now we're going to, like, scroll down the list of art styles.

Also. Yeah. Covering all ground, and just making that role for SSR money. Pretty smart strategy because hey guess what? Gambling works.

Fucking, you know, I get it. It's crazy how on the nose Eldon shit looks though, you know? Between that tides of annihilation and I want to say at least

one other game that showed up there. I'm like, that is just millennia. Like you're not, like it's, okay, there was an era, I was talking about this a little bit while I was streaming,

but I was like, there's an era of things are doing from Soft, things are doing Soul. and we've clearly moved into not just souls, but like Eldon. I think there's an even better example of that.

There were two games that were shown off there that were rip-offs of Powell World. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They weren't rip-offs of the rip-offs of Pokemon. They were rips of fucking Powell World. Like, yeah, fucking let's go. The floodgates are open. It's just so interesting how the like imitator mind

kind of works or imitation design kind of works because like it's almost like you know that you can make a game with you know complex character building a corpse run bonfires and hard bosses with cool mechanics and weapons and get people if it's really fun to play but you're taking it a step further to be like

no no no it has to be kind of golden aura it has to have things dragons with the type of scaling and armor and kind of skinnier lankier designs the designs themselves, the aesthetic of the world, is also leading Eldon Ring, not just the mechanics. This actually makes perfect sense with like Chinese production culture.

So like we've lived, our lives have been lived in the specter of Chinese production and like the quote unquote Chinese knockoff, right? And there's no reason that that shouldn't extend to art, right? And at the end of the day, a lot of that like production, is like we're going to make something that's very similar to something else, but it's still going to be good,

and we're going to make it on budget cheap. And that's a viable path forward. And it's difficult, and I know a lot of people like, that's unfair or whatever. Like, no, that is the path to ensuring a successful industrialization of your economy. Post-war, Japan did the same exact goddamn thing from the 40s to the 80s before they transitioned into high-end versions of a lot of like electronic goods, right? where they made in the in the 40s and 50s Japan made knockoffs of existing electronics products

that's what they had available that was what their industrial capacity could do that's what they did we're looking at that but now we're now so we're going to see Chinese knockoff video games for like 30 more years before the goal to like the super high end

internally consistent whatever comes out but like that doesn't mean that these ones are bad they're just highly similar. Getting, speaking of China and Japan and getting their own versions of things, I saw, so the trailer for The Defiant was the World War II game. And it wasn't the one I was thinking of, because I was originally thinking, I thought it was the other one. Fourteen years of flames. It's not. Yeah, there are two. There are Chinese coming. World War II games about fighting the Japanese in 1942. Like, all I can say is like, okay,

China, you get to tell your story because nobody else is going to do it. And he's going to tell a story of the insane Chinese soldiers in World War II. The insane super American propaganda style war film movie thing. Yeah, you all get to do it. You get to do it. And when you do it. I can't fucking wait. I can't wait for, oh my God, how come people are playing this Chinese propaganda.

Hold on. Let me load up call of TV or Pell. I'm seeing it and I'm watching as you're as like it's like a Chinese viewpoint of World War II with like super jingoistic propaganda style like FPS call of duty shit happening and you're seeing the soldiers like crawling up to the imperial soldiers and fucking getting and it's taking place in a setting that looks Nan King esk and it's just like yeah you get to do that because again no one else will tell this story a shit happened

And Japan ain't gonna like the fact that this game is coming out, but fucking go for it y'all And everyone's gonna breathe real heavy while they play it like I would you know what man, but I didn't see this coming I didn't see this coming and I'm like you're allowed You're super allowed to make this Medal of Honor rising sun Which one was that? So Medal of Honor did a bunch of fighting the German World War II games. Okay.

And those went out to Germany, but they had changes. Like, you couldn't show swastika, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. But the Medal of Honor Rising Sun came out, and that was actually sent and shipped out to Japan. Yeah, in fact, sorry.

And it did fairly well, despite the fact that you were playing American soldiers shooting Imperial Japanese soldiers. Like, to the first person, shooter, Japanese guys credit, they were like,

yeah, cool. So, um, we QA'd, I want to say Medal of Honor three in the office

for like a weekend. And I remember the, there was a build that was the European and the German built specifically that they had to do a pass for all swastikas

being edited out and all references to Nazis being edited out. Um, there was a podcast titled called We shan't see the ghost of Nan King.

I take it back. We are about to see it, but it's not the ghost of Nan King, it's call of Nan King. Bro, I... There was a comment that scrolled by my Twitch chat that cracked

me up so bad I couldn't even respond to it in the moment during that trailer and I looked down, it was during the Chinese World War II game, and I looked down and I saw somebody say 1942, man, Japan was wilding back then. Wilden.

Yeah, it's true. It's true. And the thing is, is like, you want to talk about history that gets buried and fucking unacknowledged, and we barely, and people get mad if anyone even kind of brings it up in some cases, again, because of nationalism and shit.

Yeah. What if this game comes out and starts talking about all that buried history and all that shit? But it's really good, though. but it's actually really fun and well-made and is like, oh shit, it's the word is spreading because the game is really fun to play. Like, that would be crazy

if the way that this actually gets fucking talked about is that. It would be very interesting. It is a head-on confrontation culturally with like, it is like, it is a, it is China pulling up to Japan going, yeah, now what? What are you going to say? What are you going to do?

You know? and I'm surprised I didn't see coming but here we are. I foresee a Japanese politician holding up a copy or a picture of a copy of the game going yo this shit didn't happen.

Right, right. It never happened. We were never even there. And also don't play it. You know, to which people are like, I'm fucking loading into lobbies right now. Shit is dope as high.

No, that's crazy. Alongside these announcements, we also saw I think the craziest thing is that an unlockable weapon for that game would be like the doohickey I mean shit depends on how far into the future

you want to go just really just really to just boop just I guess if you want to bring in all potential weapons related to the controversy and related to the fallout of everything that happened then yeah yeah there's a there's a throw

there's a through line true um and it beats the katana. Yeah. Anyway, what else did we see? We saw another trailer for Townfall. Not much to say there, except

that looks like a cool Silent Hill game. I am looking forward to that very strongly. Yep, I am telling. They showed off a very long gameplay preview a little while ago, and the gameplay preview featured you wandering around the town with absolutely no map at all

but you would get like a little CRT that would show you like a weird like ring style video that would show like the exterior of a house so you had to line it up with like by exploring the town like oh it was that house and then once you go to the house it's then like oh and it was this

path and so you're like a very very interesting way to navigate you Hmm. I'm really curious about how, and this is kind of in general, how media handles a topic like school shootings, right? Like, how are you going to get into that? And in this case, like, with a horror element to it, you know? Let me ask you, who, do you remember what team is making townfall? I, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a question for you, buddy. That is silent hill townfall is being made by screen burn. Screenburn. Screenburn is, basically, based in Glasgow, Scotland. Okay. Because the question of how a video game handles a topic like school shootings is going to depend very profoundly on where those developers are based.

Right. Right. Scotland. Okay. Huh. Well, we'll see who's writing and how it's going. I was, um, yeah, I, I, I, I was kind of watching the time. trailer and I forgot what the original conflict or so was so was and what everyone was talking about.

And then I was reminded it's like, oh yeah, it seems to be implying that there was some kind of like mass shooting. And then that's what like the protagonist is talking about. It is very likely going to be based around the, I believe it's a Scottish mass shooting that was the prelude to like the UK locking down a bunch of guns way back in the day. There is, if you want to talk about just like, well, whatever, like writing that can be fucking super heavy. There is more than enough material to work with there. I'm curious to see how this

goes, but so far it looks interesting. We also saw, hey, Mega Man Dual Override. It looks cool. M.M. Doe. He's back. He's there. And it's the reveal. In a Funn A stink is finally gone. We can make a new Mega Man game. And the reveal of Twinkle Girl.

There she is. Oh my God. Twinkle Girl is fucking dead. Kill her ass. Twinkle girl revealed. Twinkle girl is dead. And you know what? I mean, she's fine. I'm not going to say good riddance, but like, again, there's Twinkle girl and then there's

Splash Woman. Woman. You know? There's Quake woman. Yeah. Twinkle girl. We'll see. Yay, more Mega Man. Yeah, he's alive.

Yay, 2027, I guess. I love Mega Man. I love Mega Man. I like Mega Man. I would like to give Mega Man a hug. I think he's cool. He ran, he jumped, and he shot. The trailer for Warlock D&D did, I was describing how, as I'm watching this, I'm like,

when I see the D&D logo, it's actually like a negative to me in a lot of cases. Yes. Yes, it is. Absolutely. Do you have it for the same reason I do? I have it for the reason that there have been a lot of D&D games and a lot of them are really bad. Okay. Because I'm looking at it and I'm like, it's not fucking Dragon Lance.

You know? Oh, no. It's a lot. There have been a lot of really bad D&D games. It is a mark of shit rather than a mark of quality most of the time. So as that trailer went on, I was like, okay. But what I will say by the end of it was like, it looks okay, it looks okay, a little rougher on the edges. Very directed is what it looks.

Yeah, that was a vertical slice. Oh, that was a vertical-ass slice. It was a-demo might not exist. No, no. There's no, it wasn't a bullshot. It was a demo, but it was a guided slice, you know, pulling up the rain and all that. What I would say would make a game like that interesting

slash the point of its existence ought to be a world where the full spell chart list is available to you and you can go nuts with it, right? So. I don't think you're going to get the full spell list, but I think you're going to get like a curated list of all the greatest hits. Whatever you a two, whatever warlock spells you're getting from whatever source, you know,

being is giving them to you. If you have a giant list of spells to work with, that's the thing about the game that would be the most interesting, especially if they're all spells that you could look at a fucking, you know, D&D guide and see and be like, oh, yeah, there it is. And then making them interact with each other and stuff.

It would be really interesting because warlocks and Dungeons and Dragons. They don't have as many spells to go. They get a very small list of spell slots, but they can regenerate those spell slots on short rest, which actually works really, really, really well for an action game because you can just define short rest as any period you're not in a fight. And be like, well, yeah, of course she's regenerating her spell slots. She's not fighting people every second and she's buying people every second, you know.

Um, so on top of that, um, the, those warlock spell list is very good and, and has some, some, like, you see, you see, uh, Eldridge Blast and you see, uh, Misty Step in there. Mm-hmm. Right. And like, yeah, those are cool. Like, you can just immediately say that, like, ah, this is a particularly strong warlocks. They get to do their, their spell list more often. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If, if they, if, if, if, if, if you only have a few slots and you have, like, every possible choice, then, like, that could be interesting, you know? but, you know, that was pretty much it. It was so weird, so weird watching chat split down the middle where those who played Mugenics were hyped for the Gillitina song and those who did not. That performance was great, but unfortunately the mixing was terrible. Yeah, well, yeah.

You know, I guess that does happen. It wasn't quite the flute man, you know, mixing. but um it was i i i'm really it just reminded me though how much how much i fucking love that soundtrack and i think meugenics has one of the best like game osts of it's it was unexpectedly incredible yeah um that like it's it's gonna that's gonna that's gonna be like a sleeper one people are gonna forget about but the muigenics soundtrack is like one of my favorite in fucking i don't know how long an incredible amount of time um and also i'll even give credit for something too. Sometimes there's

like obviously FF7 remake is an amazing OST but there's a thousand tracks on it and you know what I mean? Like some of them are getting lost inside of each other so it's like it's good by virtue of there's infinite music to listen to there. Yeah I would

say that when I would play through remake and rebirth I was overwhelmed by the amount of tracks and not very few stood out because it was just the feeling of the whole time I'm playing the game going man the music in this game is really good. Yes. But when I played Mugenics and we got to the vocal songs, I'd be like, yo, I'm putting this on a playlist. Exactly, right?

Same thing for Okami. It's five to six discs of music that you can go through. A lot of it's great. But like Mugetics has a particular list of maybe like 15, you know, and they're all just incredible. Like there's something about the curated revengeness, maniac agenda style list of songs that are all incredible. Remember hearing about that song about it's the rats? And I'm like, oh, this fucking game has some fucking kick ass. All of my nights.

I'm chasing rats. Yeah. So, yeah, she came up and said you'll be mine. Talking about things, aping things, that no law game is like, okay, cyberpunk is a genre. It's not just a property. But like I was just saying about the Eldon Ring thing, you appear to not just want to be cyberpunk.

You want to literally be cyberpunk. You want to literally be cyberpunk. punk 2077. You want your backgrounds and buildings and the types of mods and Chrome that people have to look like it is from the world of cyberpunk 277. And that's, I all, again, I'm just like, why not make a cyberpunk genre thing, but...

Because it's hard. Just pick your art cues from yourself, man. No, it's hard. Shut up. Parent confusion marketing redux. you know. Anyway. It's hard to do.

Then you, like you want fresh ideas. I'll say fresh ideas coming off of, uh, on toast, the,

the rat brain fucked up. That, that, did you play Soma? No. Um, this game. Soma has the

highest level of body horror I've ever encountered in anything. Yeah. And this looks to be trying to one up that. I feel it. I feel it because my impression is, this game will have an ick for everyone. You will discover your ick

if you didn't know about it yet. Feels like they're trying to cover all bases. We have offloaded this gentleman's brain to a rat server. All right, I'm going to buy it. You have completely sold me. Just, I don't know, like, whether visually or conceptually, they'll find a way to make your skin

crawl, probably. Super weird on that. And yeah, a couple other things. things, but, you know, what was big was, hey, you know what's cool when you take the weapons in FF7 R3 and make them really look and behave like kaiju? That's dope. I love that. Because they are.

Because that's what they always were. Yeah. Instead of just giant models that you stab in the toe, you know, it's pretty sick to see them as these like Godzilla fucking threatening things. And then, yeah, The Witcher 3, just coming out and going out. It's been long enough. There's a remaster coming, and everything that we've released until now, you can grab for free if you own the base game so that you can catch up and buy our new DLC songs of the past. So, Witcher 3, the remaster of that is particularly crazy.

It's way crazier than I thought it was going to be. So first of all, secret. Like, actually kept it under lock and key. Nice. Second of all, this is the second remaster. Hmm. When they put, the game came out, Witcher 3 came out on the PS4, right?

Okay. And that gen. And then they put it out on PS5, and on PS5 they did a next gen version where they remastered and patched a bunch of stuff. Okay. And this is the, this is another remaster,

which re-engineers the graphics again, and then they put out this massive, massive list of things that they're going to change, including basic controls, movement, mount movement, combat, animation, like just, just like, full-blown what you would expect a different publisher to charge you $60 for remaster. I wonder if it's like the new DLC warranted the revisit to the revisit to the whole thing or the revisit

warranted the DLC. You know, like... This whole thing is Witcher 4 is two or more years ago. And Witcher 3 came out in 2015. They need to re-engineer

the entire Witcher hype cycle from scratch. And I'm... The other thing I said was I'm expecting this will have a direct lead-in to straight into the the baton pass, right? Well, there's a clip in that trailer that says there's no,

there's no ending for a Witcher that isn't a new beginning and it cuts from Gerald to Siri taking her sword out. Okay, because Siri is going to be the main character of Witcher 4. And it's like, okay, yes, no, there will be, there will be a stinger in Witcher in Songs of the Past that will lead into, what are you going to do now, Siri? And that explains a lot more why this wasn't, a Witcher 1 remake being advertised. Which is also coming, by the way.

Yeah, I asked about that. Yeah, that was soft confirmed on their website. Which means Witcher 2 will exist in the weirdest state as the jankiest one they ever put out, and the only one to not be returned to. Maybe with time, but not anytime soon, I suppose. Oh, it'll be a long time. Witcher 2 is so fucking weird. Like I've said that Witcher 1 is a fucked up game for weirdos.

Witcher 2 is a fucking weird game. It is so strange. Nothing about it works like a real video game. And it's the only game I've ever played my life that has a structure that's a why. It's the first chapter is a straight line. That's your first chapter. And then when you get to the middle point, it splits into two completely different games for the whole rest of the game. Okay. Different quests, enemies, characters, zones, main story.

I remember this. And then you had to consolidate this for the third one to make it. Yeah, no, that game is 140% of itself, which is fucking strange. And there's a reason why nobody else has ever done it, because apparently that was a massive pain in the ass. Yeah, yeah. No, it's like seeing stuff like this, it always makes me go, huh, is this, is, is there any feasible way for me to figure this out? and the answer is still a question mark. But I, you know, maybe one day I'll learn about the adventures of Czech's notes. Gerold? I saw you saw that thread.

Gerold? Gerold? Gerold. Gerald has one of the most mispronounced names I've ever seen in anything, which is pretty funny because his name comes up an absolutely insane. amount of times in his games. Like, everybody...

That person was fucking insane, by the way. Yeah, of course they were. That individual was completely batched it nuts and crazy. Hey, Willie, why are you... Why are you subjugating your Caribbean roots in order to accommodate white America?

Why is that? And so the... And also with The Witcher, another thing that I saw here, and what I would say is the trailer of the show, in my opinion, was that fucking control resonant trailer, dude. Control Resonant is so...

Fucked, so hard. The Prodigy drop? Oh! You know what? That looks like so much. I think I said it last time. That looks so much like Devil May Cross. Devil May Cry DMC without the baggage of a developer

shitting on Devil May Cry. Like, if Control Resonant came out and had Dylan be like, Alan Wake, what a pussy! It would approach the same, like, level of fucking tone. But instead, it's just super cool looking.

So here's the bargaining that I was basically having with my, with my chat when it played because I'm like, fuck me, I already was interested in this and that trailer did some wonders. It looks great. And Remedy makes really good. As somebody's played nearly every Remedy game, they make

really good stuff. Now here's the thing. Because we played a bit of Control one. Played a couple hours of that, right? And that was my experience to it. As much as I know about the good shit you've been talking about with Alan Wake and with control and the entire

Remedyverse and all that. I have to say as curiosities, that has been there, but I'm actually drawn towards the gameplay I'm seeing of Control Resonent. Oh, absolutely. And it's enough that I'm like, I get it. I know Control One's a great game and I know that the Allen Wakes are great games, but I actually am willing to go for the gameplay to play the new thing. And I kind of am like, I can learn about the story. else how. You don't need to do homework. I'm going to tell you right now.

As soon as you brought this up, my brain was locking all the little bits and pieces into place, and I have it for you. Okay. For Control Resonant, what you need to know is that Control One happened and exists. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah.

You need to know that Alan Wake is a person and that he is a writer. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's the gist of it. I could give you like a fucking 90 second breakdown of what you need to know in Control 1. That's it.

Alan Wake 2 is the game that kind of demands that you went through the whole catalog. Alan Wake 2 is the Metal Gear Solid 4 of Remedies Output, where there is a enormous amount of value to having gone through not just Alan Wake in control, but also Max Payne 1 in 9. to. Because a lot of people, a lot of people bringing, or like, Wully, you should just play control. It's really good, really, really good game. You'd like it. And I'm like, no, no, no, I know. I know. They're correct. Yeah. But this looks so much cooler and I'm magnetically drawn to this. So, what you'll do. That's it. What you'll do is you'll play. I'm drawn to what I want to play. That looks, I want to play that. You'll play more. Because it looks super sick. And at the end of control resonant if you have follow-up questions about things that you have burning need to understand.

And the answer comes back, well, that was actually from so-and-so. Then it would be upon you to decide whether or not you wanted to chase those answers. If they were all genres, the same genre of game and it was improving iterations, I would, I would, I would, that'd be one thing. But it's not. But it's a completely different genre that I fuck with. And I fuck with it way more than every other. the character action baby. Yes.

I care about this genre and this gameplay way more than the gameplay of control and of Alan Wake. I just do. So that's how you pull me. Alan Wake highly unlikely

to show up in Control Resonance so I don't think you have anything to worry about that. It's the other way around, right? The container or whatever. No. It's not like Jesse showed up to talk

Allen, it's like they exist in the the games exist as two circles and there is a portion in the Venn diagram that overlap. Okay. Right? There are people from,

that you didn't see in control that know the characters in control that interact over on the Allen Wakeside and vice versa. Okay, okay, yeah. It's always one degree of separation. Yeah, I want to just... And the other thing,

is that both, like, both branches say that they are the important branch. Right. Okay. Which I think is really cool. Like, the control says that Alan Wake stuff is a footnote. And Alan Wake says no. The control stuff is the footnote. Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm showing up for some fucking sick air combos.

And if the story happens to be interesting, too, then that's cool. Um... Oh, can I take a... two minute. Yeah, yeah. That was pretty much all it was for the O and F, uh, O and L anyway, so all right, give me two seconds. Beer, be it. All right. So,

the only other stories to hit on were, um, hey, just a, just, just an, just an FYI.

Um, SNK lost 126 million, aka, uh, 20 billion yen. Darn. So, um, the fighting game's doing, it's great. Well, the, well, the, the difference is whether or not you have a budget that's going to tank it and just keep going no matter what out of spite or, um, whether you're going to, you know, eventually have the 10 year paycheck come due. Uh, it feels certainly feels like city of the, well, you know, so they're releasing their new season and stuff.

I mean, fucking Rick Stroudhead, Duck King, all that shit's coming out. But like they can, there's a, there's a, there's a person. personal, like, they can just sit there and tank it if they want to. And it seems like that's what they're doing. Well, if Daddy lets them. Exactly, exactly. That they're in a very much like Daddy is it okay situation over at S&K nowadays. Which is why it's crazy to hear about them spinning off into films and into the versus Herada studio and stuff because, like, that's not the news you want to see right before

new ventures are being announced. Anyway And then there's all this GTA 6 shit Bro You know I The long and short of it Is Grand Theft Auto

Somehow This dude got a hold of it And he got a hold of like The whole fucking goddamn thing And it makes sense to me That so CyberLeak is the name of the leaker And the gun the gunnest and ballest game

will have the gunnest and ballest hustle ass fucking scam Go buy my crypto! The biggest hustle scam bro leaker for the biggest like gunball game makes a million percent sense because it's like you want to

you want more leaks pay me and if you pay me enough I'll advertise your shit in my next leak. It's fucking nuts like monetize. the leaks. Holy shit. So everything about this game.

Just scumbag activity on top of scumbag activities, bro. So, I'm going to say something really brave. I'm going to say something really brave. I don't think this is a good thing, and I feel bad for the people who work on the game over at Rockstar. I do, however, think it's a,

really fucking funny thing and an incredibly poetic thing for the game that has shown nothing of itself and asking for $100 pre-orders on digital storefronts and is not allowing you to buy the game

physically to prevent leaks to have its shit leak off super fucking hard. I got a TikTok ad telling me to subscribe to Netflix to see the gameplay reveal and when man, fuck this and fuck them.

I'm glad all this shit leaked out. This is crazy outrageous. The clout, the cloud of name only. And remember, you and every human being on earth needs to buy three copies for it to be profitable. Lest we forget. And also, the leak is like super disastrous for Grand Theft Auto because their entire marketing campaign for this game for the longest time has been, oh my God, it's the new Grand Theft Auto. Auto. It's the most almost the most incredible thing that's ever been.

And then we're going to show the gameplay breakdown on Netflix and it's going to be a massive event. And oh my God. But what's the first footage you see? Driving around a gas station and like hitting a guy with a baseball bat and then like crashing the car and like, oh yeah, right. It's just a grand theft auto game. Right. Okay. Like it's just it's the mystique. Funny enough. It's fucking evaporated.

Around all this story. I haven't actually watched any of the footage or seen any of the It looks like a fucking GTA game, why? It just looks like a GTA game, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, for all the way, for all the shit that gets ruined for them, for the marketing and, or lack of, take two has basically been exploding, beginning with going after Discord to get information on the leaker,

seeking data, including emails, IP addresses, phone numbers, and linked Xbox accounts. Oh, yeah, they went through all of our, emails and phone numbers and shit. Also then subpoenaing the to get the everyone in the discords,

over 100,000 users that were connected in servers that were just like bystanders all getting their IP, phone numbers, device IDs, etc. All under subpoena and then subpoenaing Microsoft themselves as well

to get all of this shit to find this fucking cyber leak dude. And it's like... And guess what? No dice. No dice. They're putting more work into tracking this dude down

than like the government puts into tracking down PDF files, man. Like it's crazy. How much fucking work they're doing, dude. And they did not find him yet. And he's in the meantime going, pay me $165,000. I mean, they don't really have to work all that hard,

bully. They just need to look around the office and start pointing. Yeah, well, that's implied now, isn't it? But literally, like, pay me $165,000 for a chance to get ad space on my next leak is fucking crazy. And he's doing it through crypto, which means it's actually difficult for them. Like, if he was like, send it to my bank account. Like, yeah, okay, they'd be able to, you know. It's just the funniest shit ever.

This is, like, legitimately the funniest shit ever. No, scumbag on scumbag activity. Like it's just... And you know what, dude? Everyone in this is a dirt bag. Do you remember when Modern Warfare 3 leaked out like crazy? Like tons and tons of footage? And Activision said, oh, oh, fuck.

And then they changed their whole marketing campaign. And then they put out a ton of footage and trailers they had ready to go. Like the following day. Right? Because they're like, well, we can't let this dip shit ruin everything. Fucking run away with it. And they can't do that because they have an exclusive scientific scientific. deal for the reveal on Netflix.

They can't. So for this like week plus long period, the only place you could go to get Grand Theft Auto stuff is this leaker. And all Rockstar can do is like, don't.

No, don't look at it. Come on. We're trying to catch him. As you said, it sucks for the game overall. But like... But they made this bed for themselves.

That's it. Enjoy, enjoy the taste a little bit. Enjoy the pie there. Again, it's fine. The word will get out. And I'm sure that 9 billion humans will buy copies. I'm sure it will ship 10 billion units. Bro, we're not...

It didn't make as much money as we thought because of the leaks. It was because of the leaks. Well, okay, it turns out... It's the only reason. It's the only reason. It turns out a couple babies were born that didn't pre-order a copy. And that's no good, according to our projections. And they're digital copies at that, mind you, right?

So, anyways. Yeah. Let's take some letters. Let's take a letter. Hey, if you want to send it a letter. Send it to Castle Superbeastmail at gmail.com. That's capsule superbeastmail at gmail.com. an electronic letter, granted.

All right, let's take one quick one over here. Sandi says, Dear Father and Daddy. Oh, shit. Well, that's up to interpretation. That certainly is, isn't it? Exactly. Exactly.

With the recent Gamescom opening night showcase, it made me think about whether games are becoming too standardized. Most of these games will probably be good, but the general viewer's eyes glaze over with the fifth third-person action game with a parry shown in the last 15 minutes. Seems like most games nowadays

follow a standard template to rarely deviate from it. For example, the cozy genre mostly produces Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing clones, action games or DMC are Soulslikes. Is game design essentially solved or is the general gamer just more risk-averse? Much love from Sondi. Parts of it are. Parts of game design are solved.

There's been like a lot of button things that have been like very clearly standardized because they fit the person's hand very well. Yeah, and I've discussed many a time when, like, I'm watching a trailer for something, and it's just a FMV playing, and then I'm like, wait for the camera to pull back to the isometric view and watch me just glaze over and not give a shit. But there's more reasons. One, games cost a shittillion dollars to make, so they're risk-averse by default.

But on top of that, there are roughly now, there are enough games coming out today. across all platforms that would have been an entire year's worth of output like on the Super Nintendo. Yeah. Like there are like literally three, four hundred times as many games coming out. Again, like, so again,

having a friend that was doing working on an indie game and just pointing out some things are like, there is an amazing Steam indie game that you would love that comes out every single day that you will never see or play. Because that's how the way... I need to give a big shout out. So I will glaze the... Steam platform until my dying day, or rather till it's dying day. But the Steam calendar

is the best solution to discoverability I have ever seen in my life. Have you tried the Steam calendar? No. So are you logged in on Steam right now on the computer you're using? Can I use it on the phone app? I don't know, actually. Okay. I can try the website. Um, uh, but basically you go to where is it? You go to recommendations on the Steam store. Okay. Right?

And then there's a tab that says calendar. Explore my calendar of my personal calendar. And it is the next three months. It defaults to like 100 games of everything you could possibly be interested in

and the dates that they come out. By wish list or algorithm. algorithm. By algorithm. Okay. It goes by tags. It goes by recent played. It goes by people also like this. You know, that kind of thing.

Interesting. Okay. The amount of shit I have seen on this that I've gone, that looks really cool that I have never heard of, is astonishing. Okay. It is crazy. I'm not logged in, so I'd have to check this out after. but that sounds interesting.

Is it just showing you the stuff that would pop up in the store feed on your front page anyway, though? Kind of, but it's it's, it will, it will take your wish list into account, right? Here, I'll send you a screenshot. Okay. But, like, it takes your wish list into account and populates that. Oh, okay, here we go. I have it on my phone. It is in the app.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And it just shows you, like, you. you can put it to like 50 or 100 or 250. Yeah, okay. And it will just show you everything you could possibly be interested in that'll be releasing on Steam according to your tags,

your wish lists, etc. It is extraordinary for finding new stuff. Okay. Last seven days. Upcoming. Huh. Yeah. That's a pretty good way to handle the infinite flow of releases because it,

otherwise you're just like, yeah, there's just no way to keep up. It's just impossible. You're going to get lost in the tide. Pretty cool. I mean, when I took a look at mine, I'm seeing, what, released in the last month, available

now, and then last seven days. For upcoming, it's showing me Blood Dungeon, Amsterdam, flight simulator, tough love arena, MGS2, Resonance

Divinium Okay, some of these are not good fits for me at all The more you use Steam, the better it is. Sure. So I have like hundreds of games on the wish list and like thousands of games on Steam. The release, the previous release stuff makes sense. Like I'm seeing Beast of Reincarnation, Big Walk, Tocon, Tricet Tower,

So yes, here's a really good example of the, of the use of it. Somebody in chat just went to their thing and went, wait, resonance, a plague tale is tomorrow? There you go, there you go. I forgot. Wild blue skies. Oh yeah, wild blue skies.

The fucking, you're right. The Star Fox. True. Yeah, that thing. Okay, that's cool. Got to play that demo. Okay, that worked. I was just going to say that when it comes to the, you know,

everything in the industry being risk-averse and kind of copying itself, Yeah, perfect example is, um, the thing is that it's been doing that for years, even before it became super expensive and a bad idea to like, uh, take a huge risk and then watch your game in studio crash and burn forever, which is the state of things now.

Even if you're successful, you might still get shut down. But even back 10, 20 years ago, what you were watching is like, the big genre is all kind of like stabilized. And then what became the breakout hits were things that amalgam, your favorite parts from other genres into a new thing. You know, taking a little bit of what do you like.

You like some crafting. You like some team-based, you know, a 5V5 or something. You want point capture. You know, whatever it is, you're watching as your StarCraft becomes your hero or your Warcraft becomes your hero-focused version of the game, becomes your MOBA, you know, use map settings, games become the standardized version to play. counter strike, mods end up becoming the main thing. Fucking Fortnite, the side mode becomes the main thing.

We start getting Battle Royale features and everything else. The standout features just get lifted and amalgamated into other genres. And we're going to keep doing that for a while. And then something big and impactful will hit, like an Eldon Ring or so. And then everyone will gravitate around that, start lifting things from that. but oh and it'll be that it'll stop breaking it out piecemeal and bringing those features into their own genres but that's what it's been for the last 20 years i feel the blending has been happening for a long time and that seems to be the best way to not just be successful but like be a standout thing that

everybody wants to get on board with you know i don't know what the lifeline the through line is to get to games like marathon and tarcov but i have to assume that along the way extraction involved Daisy and PubG and... Yeah, there's some Arma guts in there. Arma, exactly.

You know what I mean? Like all of these guts start rolling forward to become this current thing that has all the things you liked about these ones rolled into this now. There was an old quote from a developer that I cannot remember which was that every video game developer

just wants to make Lord of the Rings and the only ones that don't are the ones that want to make aliens. and that was from like the aughts. And now we're at the point where every video game developer doesn't want to translate a movie, they want to make their own favorite video game.

Like it's not from a different medium, like film. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Expedition 33. Yeah. I want to make my own favorite. People making Expedition 33, they're like, God damn it, we want a new Final Fantasy game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to make my own favorite. 100%. So that's what it's been for a minute. And it's going to feel this way for a long time. The only difference now is that the stakes are higher than ever, and the ones that do a good job of it are still going to crash and burn. Good luck. Good luck, everybody.