Castle Super Beast - CSB389: I Will Never Breathe The Air of a Cursed White Woman Diamond

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Download MP3 | Watch Video Episode Full Timestamps: https://docs.google.com/document/u/5/d/e/2PACX-1vR_GimwY3MIhuNiP0hqCga618zfQm89yngUBQwywg8lLbxvMfzGUd6cMTaV2iiFbwIEGX7D0N5iPJdW/pub Watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@CastleSuperBeastArchive Onimusha: WotS Just Became One of Those Action Games We Never Shut Up About Metroid: Ravenous / Metroid: Girl Dinner / Metroid: HOUNGRY Dadslop Update: Walking! REASONABLE VAMPIRE SOCIALISM: Blood of the Dawnwalker Blizzcon 2026: INVEST IN US, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING PHYSINT: Sony Out, Xbox In 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. One thing to pack, five ways to power! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code SUPERBEAST at https://www.ridge.com/SUPERBEAST #Ridgepod Docket: Nintendo Direct reveals Metroid Ravenous, Kirby and the World Beyond, and more games for Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo Switch Blizzcon 2026: Starcraft Open World Shooter with Mick Gordon Music, New HOTS character Xalatath, WoW Forever and Diablo V Sony drops PHYSINT, Kojima moves it to Xbox Wolverine Developer Insomniac Promises to 'Further Refine the Player Experience' Based on Feedback Jean Grey's fart gas trail is a core mechanic  

Oh, hey man, what's what's up with the, what's up with the Sith boys? I'm tired, boss. Oh, no. I'm just, oh no. I'm just, what happened? I'm just tired. It's just been a long one. Oh, no.

Yeah. You can't start at 10.30 in the morning. Oh, no, it's not. It's like 1.30. 1.30 in the morning. Time doesn't matter. You know, I mean, in, out, day, night, sun, moon, whatever. She keep you up.

I mean, you got, you got stuff like that. You got just the daycare fucking sludge aura that is continuing. Dude, it's. And I'm not. It's so crazy how many germs. For this idea of just every couple of weeks, more sooner back to back, you might just get rocked. It's just not fun. Me and Paige, I want to say a year and a half ago.

I feel like somebody who watched my show all the time could tell me there was a period that like someone was some degree of ill for like a seven month period because like the kid walks around to the item the other kid touched and goes num num num num num num num num num and then they turn to you and they go right in your eyes and you and you can you can feel from the vapor you're in the middle of the vapor you're You're like, ooh.

You know, and it's like, I don't need a new, you know when a status bar starts filling up, but you don't recognize the icon. Yeah. I don't need a new debuff every single day where I'm like, I don't know what's going to happen when that bar fills. I don't know which one that's going to be, man. Oh. What is this weird hieroglyphic that I'm looking at? So, you know, I remember when this started to happen to me, I was like, I need data on this. So I looked it up.

and it's if you are a single person or in a couple and you're both adults, your likelihood of getting sick a year is you'll probably get some kind of cold or whatever for like one or two weeks of the year, which is fairly normal, right? When you have a child, it spikes to like four months immediately. Like just one child, but then if you have two kids, it goes up to like six months. And then I think at the, at the, if you hit four months, four kids, it becomes there is a profound likelihood

that someone in your household will be sick at all times. Every single day of the year. A recursive, just a full on, yeah, Lou. Because any cold will work its way through the whole family and take like the six infections. The moment someone heals the next

person gets a new thing. That's fucking, yeah, insanity. For whatever reason, Punch Mom's immune system is just toughen it way better than mine is and, you know, she's not getting hit with it as hard, but it's not fun. Oh, I heard some nasality just there. Oh, no. Yeah, like I went from, at first I was like, okay, let me just walk with some, some, you know, whatever, a couple of Tylenols, and then I'm, like,

getting the drip spray and now I'm walking with the bucklies in the pocket type thing. Anyways, whatever. Um. You know, all that and other things coming together, just creating a very endless amount of. Would you say you're swimming through a miasma right now? Almost, but there is light at the end of the tunnel and that light is being created by her footsteps. Oh, so these two stories are related. That makes a lot of sense. You see the other kids.

You start moving around different. You start literally, she's moving different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, man. Jealousy. Jealousy over locomotion. A hundred percent. Is a good driver.

And the confidence, it's interesting because, like, it's quite clear that, like, after, like, a couple days of experimenting and then going to bed, processing that, you know, waking up the next day and, like, applying it. Like she's got the skill. She's got the ability. She's moving. She's got it all there. But like there's that lack of confidence. And like, I, she can stand. She can walk. She can take those steps. And then she's like, okay, no way, but I got to hold on to something, you know. And that that feeling of like needing to grab something kicks in very quickly. But she absolutely can and does and has shown like that she, she can do it, you know. But she took those steps and got it. And that's good for you guys. That's awesome. Very happy for you.

That's a big one. That's, that's like, oh, man, is that the biggest one? I feel like it's the one that has the most effect. It's the one that has the biggest effect on your daily life. It is, it is, you know. And I also, like, not only that, but, like, landing on her butt when, when she falls over, putting the hands out, making sure that she can catch herself. And also going into, like, a squat and then going from not sitting down, but from a squat back to up and standing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, oh, you got the wave dash going. Like, yeah, you've got the ability to, I'm just a joke, relax. You got, she can do the full squat and she has the balance from like a squat to like fully lift herself back up without needing to grab anything. And that's awesome, you know, like that's way more motor control than I was expecting right off the bat. So the level of motor control on display like is going to depend, I guess, on like where they're at.

Like how fast into the process they did. Like my father walked before he crawled. So he walked like crazy early. But he walked bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, like, he was like multiple months early. And apparently walking before you're crawling is like, is not good because you're so top heavy. Yeah, you have.

And apparently that creates issues for later on in some cases. So she's literally not crawling at all. She just doesn't want to do it. So she scoches. And she's gotten credible at scooching. Like she... That counts. That counts.

She's butt just like... She's doing this across the floor, you know? But ever since the early days of just like not liking tummy time, she just never turned it into a crawl. But she's, yeah, she's got to shuffle down and then can go straight from that into, you know, bouncing off of stuff. And then now immediately making a break for it where the safety gate is as soon as that's open for two seconds.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome. Well, dude. Oh, oh, there's a fog door. We're going. We're hitting it.

We're hitting it. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Like, stop trying to make a jail break, kid. You definitely babyproofed your house. But like, you're going to find out that, hey, you know what? We dealt with all sorts of stairs.

We dealt with hard surfaces. Right. But you forgot about the final type of surface, Wully. You can't baby proof every wall in your house. those of nice vertical walls you can just balk them sure can and she likes standing at the glass

and tapping and looking you know so but anyway that's that's moving and you know alongside it's really like okay it really helps to have this type of development alongside just the

absolute miasma as being described because it fights back a little bit and you go all right fine you know and similarly we're getting these like food tantrums you know where you're like you don't want to eat this and then suddenly you're back to being adorable and totally fine and you just you lost your mind for a minute and now we're back and yeah we're getting um so she just started doing like we did like we do like a group hug and yeah she started and she started doing a thing where she leans her head forward for a kiss. Oh.

Just without prompting at all. She's just like, because we were like, and then she's like, looks at you and goes, uh, and then turns to mom and goes, uh,

and then she just goes back and forth, leaning her head, you know, like, ah, yeah, and so we do that, you know,

um, again, just, just fully out of our own. And then eventually, and then she grabs mom's face and push, and pushes it towards me.

Oh, okay. That's, that's precious. That's nuclear. That's nuclear precious. It's uncontrollable. So I'm like, okay, fine. You get to lose your mind over food and bring me home all kinds of diseases in exchange for that.

Yeah. That's the deal. As long as you cash out one of those every time one of these happens, then fine. We have a bargain. Constant nonstop. unending illness in exchange for da' oh

so that's basically that's the deal for a while I'm I've reached into the period where hey buddy good morning you want to hug no no I don't want to hug you I'm like oh man and I know what that means

yeah yeah yeah yeah oh man I also reached into I reached into a part of being a parent that I knew was coming and it sucks really bad, which is, hey, we're going out and about, little man. Okay, cool. We're going to the store. Hey, don't put your hands on the closing door.

Don't put, there it goes. Get your fake. Okay. We had a minor crush injury a few days ago where after, weeks. And I mean weeks of really don't put both your hands on a door as it's closing

over and over and over. Got his finger trapped in the door hinge. Yeah. So the only problem I have is that this was a big boo-boo and required big boo-boo treatment, right? Not like an injury, but like

his finger hurt. Yeah. And we're like, did we learn? And he looked at me and goes, no. I'm like, okay. And like, sure enough, as soon as his boo-boo got better, he's back to doing the same thing. Oh, man. Okay. God damn it.

I feel like I've seen moments like that where, you know, with this kind of like walking and balancing and stuff, she's taken, she's taking a bump. She's taking a tumble, you know. At her age, she's nice and squishy. Like, even her head's real squishy. But, like, I've seen the times where it's like, okay, she's. She had like a little soft one where she kind of went sideways and like her, her head like bumped against like part of my foot. You know, and she's like, yeah.

Yeah. And that, I saw her immediately go, okay, not doing that or the thing that led to that anymore, you know. Right. And it was like a complete aversion like was was downloaded there. Oh, did she do the thing where her eyes got open and she looked at like the fall and went, oh. She was like, yes, you know, she was like, she was basically just like the next. time she was approaching that exact same area and that same setup, she kind of just sat on her butt instead. And it was like, no, no, no, I'm just not going to. Ah, smart. You know, and, but it's

also like, I'm like, I don't want you to be like afraid of, you know, all walking scenarios here. Like, you, you, you, you just got her call, recognize the ones where the, the balance is an issue, you know? And, like, I would say, like, a few days later, she had like a, like a, whoa, right? And she kind of preemptively went, uh, you know, and it's like, no, no, no, you're good. You're good. You're You didn't fall. You didn't fall. But it was a little bit like little sense memory that kicked in. So like at the same time as much as it's like I want you to like apply what updated data and learn things. I don't want you to get afraid of the thing the next time, you know? So I retrying it, but with like, you know, us around to be like here's how you do it is what is what would be ideal. You know, so I don't mind a little of what's going on on your side there.

see. Um, what, uh, what else is going on? Well, a lot. There's like a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Busy week. Um, okay, well, here's what I'll, here's what I'll do. I was to say, basically, um, my entire, like LP's scheduling plan, uh, was chucked out as, uh, illness is a foot and we are awaiting, uh, the recovery of the team. Uh, I'm not, is Reggie still ill? Uh, Reggie's, reggie's just got like a couple. He got basically some sniffles and some cold stuff. Did you guys get ill separately? Yeah. That's crazy. I got it from daycare things and elsewhere. Yeah, totally. That sucks.

So, well, at least he got sick at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. It was, well, it was slightly offset in the sense that his was first and mine was after. But either way, it did kind of sync up. But in the meantime, I used. I, that opportunity to grab something that I was going to look at in the future and pull it way up to the present, which is Onimusha way of the sword.

So I got super confused because I would, I would drop into your stream and I'm like, okay, this is Wally's third stream of this game. And I'm like, oh, you're super fucking far. You're like, like, like, fighting Benke is like 50, 55% of the game. Ooh, cool. Like, like, um, which is actually like that I thought it was all. almost about to be done when I fought banque? I was like, no, no, there's still like a a bunch of juice to go. Feels like a great fucking feels feels like they're pushing it at that point,

you know? Um, which is, I'm, I'm happy to hear that there's more. Uh, yeah, the, the deal was basically I was gonna, I was like, gonna, I was gonna, I was gonna wait till it for a future, you know, slot. And then I was like, okay, we got an opportunity. I want to try this out right away. And I was like, let me take a quick look at it. And then because we had further, you know, canceled streams, I was like, okay, fuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just run it

you know. Onimusha Way of the Sword is reinvigorating my love for video games. Ooh. Ooh. I didn't know that you were in a devigoration. It is, it is, it's not so much the devigoration as it is the like, okay, you're, we're going to take a tangent to talk about perceived age. Got it.

You know about perceived age? it's a horrendous stat that we have all discovered that is your the first your perceived age is the age you feel or how fast time moves right? It feels like

when you're young time moves really slowly the first summers you remember every single detail and it feels like the last 10 years went by in a blip and the reason why that is is because the more years you experience, the shorter they seem, right? Yeah, the, the smaller they are as a sum totality of your total working memory.

Exactly. And in particular, there is a median point where the feeling, not the actual time, but the feeling of the length hits the middle, right? Yeah. So that point is about 20 years old. the first 20 years of your life feel as long as the rest of it because of perceived age, right? Horror, horrible stat, but that's the truth of the matter.

Now, when you get into the reasons why, it's because, and it's really interesting, it's because of dopamine and particularly how it hits you on every new experience. So when you're young... You start having less completely. novel experiences. The more new experiences you have when you're younger,

the longer time seems to go. And the less new things happen, the faster time seems to go, which is part of why if you do new things and go new places when you're older, you can feel like life lasts longer, right? One of the things that I should mention is that when we got the little man,

and I'm sure you had this when you got your little girl, is that that first six months, time started to move both incredibly slowly and incredibly fast. Because man, your sleep, the sleep perspective starts to get all crazy. But then, like, he's three now. And I'm like, how can he be three? He only got here six months ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I've been saying that for two and a half years, and it still feels like he only showed up six months ago. That's it, right? There's so many days that are days like you've never had before when, when she shows. up. There's days like that during COVID as well, days that you've never had before. And because of those new types of days, it feels like time slows down. But the reality of the situation is, is that the dopamine generally tends to hit less and less the older you get because the things you've seen, the experiences you've had are already things you've experienced beforehand. So that, this, this big old, interesting and horrifying tangent to say that it's not the decline.

it's the lack of the dopamine hit, right? Yeah. It's the, oh, I'm starting to understand what you mean here. Yeah, it's the lower return on investment versus the first time I went in and had like a really great experience with a game like this. So what you're describing is the difference between playing a new action game and being like, oh, wow, this is really well put together. The music's really good. and oh wow, yeah, this is really hitting. And the way that you and I felt when we were playing Onamusha,

where we're literally kicking our feet going, ooh, yay, woo, yay, woo! Yeah, yeah, the noises and the feelings and the thoughts are all, like, I'm having this moment a lot more these days where I'm just like, this is why I like the whole thing, right? I've been saying this for the last couple of weeks now, but it's like this is why I like video games. And it's been a while since I got that feeling because, you know, even in the midst of like a really sick, let's say, I don't know, from soft boss battle, right?

Sure. Where you're, it's pulling everything, all the stops, and you have to really lock in, engage and use your systems to the best of their abilities. You're mastering a stamina bar. You're mastering all these other limitations of the combat. But that's a game where the combat kind of wants you to suck. it wants you to be way more crippled than the bosses. It wants you to not be able to keep up. And you have to use the inferior options you have compared to the thing you're fighting to overcome them because you have, you're a human and it's stuck on a pattern, right?

But like when you play a game like Oni Musha, you don't got to move that way. No. You can move however the fuck you want. And there's, and like, yeah, there's a stamina bar that can be depleted if you, you know, based on your defense, but like, it's letting you push it as far as you want to go. And that is firing off all kinds of yay-we fireworks in my brain during these fights. Have you fought Benkei, so that means you fought Dohatsu-Ten. We're going to get there, Pat.

No, no, no, no. I'm going to get there in a second. But it feeds right in exactly what you're saying right now. It has been a long time. So Odohatsu 10, for those of you who have haven't watched me in Willis LPs is a mini boss that shows up. And he always jumps out of a portal and screams. And he goes, ah, right? And every time he showed up again and screamed, I go, ah!

Like, I was so ready. I was so ready every time. I'm like, I'm just treating this as a Sparta duel. I'm fighting Sparta is what the way I'm just, I don't care. You know, I'm going to take that and enjoy that until that day comes. And if that day never comes, then this is that day. But this is, I can't believe how much I'm loving this combat. And I've only fought the rival once.

Yeah. Right? That's the thing. I'm like, I'm always looking at this in the threes. We're looking for threes. And you're correct. You are correct to think that. But the fact that he hits that you're, so everything I, so I'm looking at two as a midway point, you know.

You are, it actually takes a weirdly long time for the second rival fight. And I'm, and I'm loving everything in the meantime. And I'm sure, I'm sure I'm, you're like me in this where the first thing you do after beating that boss has hit the run back, right? So, so Onamusha way of the sword is this new Capcom action. game where you do action-based sword fighting. And of note is that I played it on action. I'm sure you did you're doing it as well. And I think the boss difficulty is

like perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. It has like a perfect curve. The escalation has been wonderful. And one of the things that happens is that because it is a game that has you have a dodge, you have a block, you have a parry, which is

blocking with the right timing, you have a deflect, which is parry with an extra button press with the good timing. And then you have an ESN, which is attack as they are attacking you with perfect timing. So there's an enormity of defensive options. And what would happen is I would take three, four, five attempts on any given boss. And then I would go, oh, my God, my hands. Oh, I'm shaking.

Ooh, I'm doing it. And then I would sprint to the rematch in, and the rematch would be a joke. Like, the rematch is. is like I've been practicing all day. Because once you have the tells, once you have them, like, they're locked in, like, when he, when he does this little kick, nah, it's now. Like, and then you just beastorize them, and it feels incredible.

It feels so good. Um, and, and then you get that extra phase because you're in the training mode. And the training mode gives you the extra hard fight because if you want it, here it is. So some of the mini bosses, when you beat them, you go into the training mode to do a rematch and they add an extra rematch, which is the boss in their final phase from the start. And it's like, that's incredible. So sick. They know. They know what we want here, right?

And yeah, as far as the escalation goes, you know, the first, you go from that awesome duel, right? You get your Gan Ryu fight. and Rashogan, the multi-hands is like, like you said, it's the first place where you're like, okay, right? You're doing a little bit of everything, and you're coming in hot, and like you're staying engaged with that fight.

It's really, really sick and fun. It's a perfect duel. The other things you can see, like you get fighting Biakui, the big fuzzy little de Oni. Biakou is awesome. And Biakou is like, I was like, oh, this is quite a step up from the bosses so far because it's meant to be the recurring nag, right?

And it also is like, I'm like, you're doing the equivalent of roll catches. You're changing up your combo timing in a way that is deceptive with how long you're holding things or how quickly you're going into the second hit. So he's coming in showing you like, hey, you must like, don't just, don't just autopilot based on the lifting of the arm. You know, you have to actually recognize what version of a string is coming at you. The, right after that, the, what was the fucking, I fought against the, the, the, the, the first of the two, the brothers. Yeah. Uh, I forgot the name. Uh, Ibu, Ibu, is it Ifu?

Ifu. Is it Ifu? It's Ifu and Burai. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Ifu, where I'm like, okay, this is. a much simpler pattern, not very difficult, but immediately just fun because of like the energy they're given off. He's a fun guy. The Agni and Rudra, you know, a energy that they're given off. And I'm like, yeah, love that right away. Big old swing hits. And, uh, introducing the idea of pulling out your bow in the middle of the fight, you know?

Yeah, to cancel abilities. Yeah. Right. Which is like, interesting. Okay. This is going to be a thing. Um, that comes right into play because when you got to fight the, new A, there are times where time to pull out that bow and hit it, right? You want to, you want to disable the, uh, the tail when possible. Um, when that new A fight, I will say, like, as far as the escalation goes, there is, the feeling I got there was, um, because it's a beast, you're meant to be spot dodging, not parrying or deflecting. Yeah. And if you're not spot dodging, then you should be double eastening.

Um, yeah. But if you're not. double-ecenting, they're really, really squirly. So the fight pacing gets really bogged down. They're hard to damage normally. Exactly, exactly. The fight pacing gets bogged down. Also, the whole thing about when they're, like, you know when we talk about action

games or you're like, oh, if they're off camera, you'll get an audio queue. Like, in this case, you don't always get an audio queue, but you do get a red indicator for what something is, somebody's aiming at you. They're going to get you. But, and so which makes it easier to know when something's coming at you from off screen. But in exchange for that, these two bosses, imagine your Ornstein and Smog type situation, but they're specifically trying to sandwich you. They're programmed to absolutely surround you on both sides and make it hard to see both. It's the only boss fight I can never think of in which, like, one of the bosses or enemies even is attempting to get off camera.

Get off camera. It's actually super interesting. It's crazy. I thought that the escalation of the NUE encounter was one of the best things in the game because, like, I did not have trouble with the first NUE fight, right? And then they give you, hey, here's the double new A. And I'm like, do you think it's going to be that much tougher? Just because there's two? And the answer is no.

And I'm like, okay, whatever, that's disobeying. Yeah, Big New A. And then the big new way was the first boss that stopped me for a while. I, like. So I, it's funny because I saw it and I was like, oh, look, it's the great jagrass, right? I'm like, it's the great new way. And they're like, greater new way. And I'm like, called it.

Interesting. Yeah. I didn't, I found greater new way more easier than the, than the two. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I had a different experience with it. That's so interesting.

Um, the, the, the, just that, again, the, the, the, the. The way I'm working at the ESN timing in. And I think is, and I keep looking at it going, am I? Because there's a part of me where I'm wondering if there's like any lag on my screen or my setup that's making ESN more challenging. Because- Oh, I can talk to you about this. I know exactly what's happening. Okay.

So you're having trouble with the ESN timings, right? I think some of them more than others. Okay. That's because different moves have different ESNs. I heard between two to eight frames depending on the move. So overheads have eight frames. Everything else is two frames. That's it.

Okay. And it's like, okay, two frames is real tight. Two frames is insanity, but it's reactive. It's not reactive. It's predictive. Right? It's predictive, yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah. But eight frames on the other hand. Extremely doable. Like I can, I can e-send everybody's goddamn overhead. Yeah. That's what it is. Okay, because I'm hitting Benke and anything that comes from the top, I'm going, whatever. Fuck off.

You know? But it's the type of move. That makes, because you know what, and I said that last week talking about the command grabs as well. Like Andrew's big jump where he does the huge slash down, that's the easiest thing in the game. That's where they want you to do it. Yeah, yeah. So what, and that's what I had was a couple of fights where I went, I think I see the optimal set play here.

The optimal way to deal with some enemies and deal with some bosses is like to to play rock paper and scissors accordingly to the move set as it comes at you. Right?

If you see a blade swinging at you, then you go for a parry or a deflect. If you see a kick or a punch coming at you, you do a spot dodge. And if you have it

fucking nice, or an overhead, you ESend that shit. And I looked at it and went, okay, because I'm having tighter ESN issues on some of these attacks, I'm going to find the ones where I feel good on it

and go for those whenever they happen in the fight. Yeah, exactly. And mix and match. And that was where, like, it started to flow wonderfully because after the Greater New A fight, which again, like I said, I had the opposite feeling as well,

where the doubles were for me a bigger issue, greater went down. Dohatsu 10 comes out and you've got your like, here's your slow walking sword man. He's going to swing. Here's the guy you've been waiting for. The man of your dream.

Yes. And we're not even talking about Kojero, right? Who I love everything about. We're talking about a demon that's here to ensign your insen. Right. A dude that's here to dash counter and dodge while you're going in.

He doesn't have everything that you have, but he also has moves you don't have. So it really feels like equal. And when he absorbs the souls and buffs up and bloods up his sword, like your gauntlet is like, hey, it's time for you to buff up your sword to keep up with this, you know? It's, it's, it was Dahatsu when I discovered that like, so blazing, you should always be in blazing. The, the state that comes off of perfect. Which is a reason to parry instead of. of your other counter. Yeah.

And so even if I'm doing ESS and deflects, I'll throw in a peri, a perfect parry in the, in the string. So I could get blazing back up. Yes. Right? But it's when I discovered that,

um, if there is an enemy that has like a three or four hit combo and you lock in on it and go deflect, deflect, deflect, deflect. That's like 70% of their break bar. It's massive, right? Mass.

Yeah. It's like if you, if you completely read them to fill, and just deflect everything they do perfectly, the boss fights half over. Similarly, if you're going parry, parry, parry, blazing state, right?

Yeah. If you get a clash and you immediately just win the clash, blazing state in one. And clash timing is, I don't even know that you can force that to happen. You can't, it's real. The clash timing is the actual swords are clashed.

So if you're looking, I'm, what I'm looking at is I'm expecting, like, if you, if you see the startup of it coming and you get the timing right, and you lean into it, which I did a couple times. I said, no, that's what I was going to say. It's like, it felt accidental, you know, and then you start getting it in a place where I'm like, no, no, no, I'm going to hit that Benkei swing right, and immediately get the blazing state. And then you go, now we don't even have to do the rest of that combo. It's super sick, but it's also, it's also hard timing, right? It's a challenge. It's, but you're not going to get it clean every time. but the the what was it yeah so you're doing you're fighting Dohatsatan and you know you're in addition to all of that

he's talking shit in the fight too to just yeah how disappointed but he'll also he'll also like give you your props yeah yeah yeah like if you if you beat him hard enough he goes like incredible

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm just like this is it this is it Like, oh, as soon as that fight went off, I'm just like, oh, man. And it was the feeling of like, okay, Capcom, you're doing it. And you're doing it in a way that's not, it's not devil may cry. And it's not, it's different. Right. It is very accurate to own emotion.

Yes. And it's even, like, there's times from like, you're pulling in a little monster hunter when you want to. But it's, but it's different. You're doing your thing. Yeah. Oh, man. Dude, when you fight the new A and they. turn around and do the backflip

at you and I'm like, I've seen that motherfucking backflip a thousand fucking times. I know that backflip in my fucking soul, man. Or you target the tail and then grab it and swing that shit, you know? Like, um,

yeah, that is, that is a fucking, there's a feeling that Capcom is like, we can reach into our action game library and pull the elements we want to into this, but we're doing something different here. because Onamusha 1, 2, and 3 were always defined by like super, super fucking powerful defensive abilities. Like it's very different from Capcom's other action games, which were all about, like, Dante is an unrelenting psychotic barrage of offense.

Yes. Same thing with Gene from Godhand, right? And Seminooske and Jubei always had like Aeson and they had chain ESN and they had a block and all this stuff. And so seeing this like super, super intensely. defensive oriented action game where defense is more important than offense. Fuck yes. Like offense in this game is filler. Like all of your attacks or even your charge attacks, it's filler till the next defense

exam that you're going to be doing. But I noticed something because I took that lesson in and immediately went, cool, I'm ready for this. I'll play like Royal Guard. Right? And you walk and I took most, and I took most exchanges. as like this is Royal Guard Training. This is where you wait for the swing,

try to get that timing down, internalize their moveset nice and early, and then deal with it handily later on. And you also get the ORA Farm walk back and forth thing with it that's fun. But I started... There's a huge variety of animations from

bosses and your own character walking at each other at very slow speeds. They know. Like Musashi takes the sword out in California. character control and then we'll like barely move left and right depending on your your analog control. Onimusha has the most Larp walking, RP walking, like I've ever seen in a game.

Most bosses RP walk towards you. That's one of the things that I like about Benkei a lot. You just bought him. Benkei just kind of like stops over to you. And like he has no class and no decorum at all. The thing we talked about 10 years ago where you know it's sick when the boss starts walking towards you slowly and he's your size, they just took that and applied it to everything. It's fucking phenomenal. I love it.

And you're doing it too, right? But what I realized as well is that, like, that is only going to take you so far because if you go to fight the new A while being completely passive and in like Royal Guard mode, for example, that fight's never going to move. Nothing's going to happen, right? And the greater new way is what made me go, all right, go in, go in, go in, go in, go in, and interrupt your strings with defensive actions, you know? Learn about what you can do out of recovery and what you can't, because sometimes you're like, I can't ESN, I'm already swinging, you know? Guess what?

You can ESN if you're already swinging. Well, fuck me then. Hey, Wully, I'm going to hold up my control. that's why there's two attack buttons on this controller. Oh, you got to switch to the other? You can use the same one, but it's much easier to just switch inputs. Oh, my God. Okay, okay.

Because I was like going up, I whiffed, I'm going to hold that. And I noticed that I could dodge and I noticed that I could deflect out of recovery, right? But I thought ESN wasn't possible. Ooh, that's interesting. No, it is. Okay. It is. So if you're swinging and they go for the big overhead, switch to the other button.

Okay. Okay. So that's not like a, like a mechanic for like, oh, use the other button. It's just way easier to hit the timing by hitting the other button. So what I read, but that's where I was, my takeaway with the greater new A fight and why that went better is because I was like, okay, that you introduced the unblockable, which like I have to like now learn to like internalize and stop. Really pay attention on. Stop and deal with it, right? But outside of that, get in there and stay in there.

And then when it starts doing its thing, do your defensive action. And keep laying it on, right? Backing off to Oro Farm, you're letting that stamina come back. Don't do that. Right. Yeah, I discovered that you could ESN in the middle of your swings when I was fighting some generic guys. And a guy fired an arrow at me. And I teleported to hit him with the ranged, ESN, by ax.

incident. Yeah, okay. Because I was mashing the button and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I was trying to figure out that I got from Greater Nue and the Hotsa 10 was, so I got the hammer. And I was like, okay, cool, this is a nice item here. Let's swing it. And I was like, when you, I'm like, is it better to use it early so that you can build up the blue bar during the fight?

Or is it better to wait for a moment when you need it and then cash out that crumple, right? For the beginning of the game, I used it for I don't want to have to deal with the bullshit that I'm seeing the boss load up. Yes, right. And then later it became, use it the instant the fight starts and then just build the meter up over time. Because as soon as the bosses start absorbing the souls out of the air, you're like, oh, fuck, I lost meter. I can't do it anymore. And now that bar is gone because I choked, you know. So unfortunately, after beating the game, I'll tell you, the double hammers is like far and away the best of the Oni armaments.

It's not even close. So I made the mistake of swinging them without charging them the first couple times. And I was like, oh, where's the impact, you know? And then I was reminded and then did it. And I was like, fuck, this is eye frames. into massive crumple. And yeah, you just, you go. It's like 40% stamina damage on the final boss.

Like, it's really crazy. Yeah, you're just like, fuck this phase. Fuck this phase. I don't want it, right? Find it and delete it. And so all these lessons kind of came to a head immediately after that Dohatsu 10 fight or I'm just jumping in my chair giddy with head. Because I'm like, this is, this is everything I want.

And then the Benkei fight happened. And that was the last thing that happened on stream. And the Benkei fight is where I went, oh shit, I'm, this is a game that we're going to be talking about for the rest of our long. Like, this is in, it's in. It's in that slot that. It jumped all the way to the top of the action game. It sits in that slot of things that people are sick of hearing us talk about. Like, that was the moment.

Okay, so remember back in Onimus way of the sword, where you have the deflect and the deflect time. Yeah, yeah, no, we're going to be doing that for years. God, man. And it really, I didn't, I was playing it as a new cool thing that was fun. And when it hit that status in my brain, like something just kind of unlocked. I was like, fuck, I need to get on this thing every moment that I can, man. What version are you playing? I'm playing on PC.

You're playing on PC? Okay. How do you feel about the generic enemy fights, not the bosses? So I was going to come to that in a sense. second because I feel like, yeah, I want to talk about Banquet, but like with the generics, it was weird because they introduced some new generics in the, um, the, in the laboratory level. Yeah. And I, the generic one that came in with the like, like, kind of like more infested type of dude with a regular sword, I noticed I'm like, oh, your ESN timing is just not at all

like the ESN timing on the grunts. I feel like maybe I'm, maybe I'm off on this. this or so, but it's like maybe the grunts have like more overheads when the way they swing at you. So, so it is, it's two things. The grunt, the starter grunts have more overheads, but the starter grunts also have a, I hold my sword up over my head, run at you and then do it, which gives you all the fucking time in the world to like mentally prepare. Whereas these guys, their overhead is, oh, oh, down we go.

Okay, that's it. That's what it is. There you go. because I'm doing the same timing on two different kinds of, on two different attacks, and I'm sometimes getting it sometimes not. So there, that's what it is.

I also have to, I also imagine that like, and I'd have to play off of Elgado to see this, but I'm on Elgado, right? I'm on a recording thing. It's going through an extra HDMI. So there's a level of this that is being pulled away from the TV that is,

you know, a little bit of extra lag on it. The, the grunts that show up there, yeah, so they bring, bring them in and then those guys have like different timing. I didn't really care much about what was going on until the bigger guy showed up.

And then when the bigger guy with the brought with the wider sword came in and did a posture regain in the middle of me crumpling him. And I was like, ooh. And then one of the newer grunts did an unblockable because that's now been introduced into the game. Yeah. And so now unblockables and throws are also in the regular enemy cab. I like it fighting against those bigger dudes. I like it in that exchange. I think that...

So I put on the aggressive AI mod because I found I had way too much time to think. The aggressive AI mod is exemplary. I would recommend you giving it a shot. You can put it on and off. It just makes enemies attack you more often. and I beat it with that through and I thought that the game's only difficulty issue

is that the boss fights are in the natural state are like an order of magnitude harder than all of your regular fights. They are. So like I was like chilling through all the regular fights and then I'd have to like really like lean forward and lock out. Yeah, yeah, sit forward. And like I wanted an experience where I actually had to like lock in on like some of the harder

like side quest encounters as well um the only bummer I have out of the enemy roster is that by far the coolest enemy in the game shows up really late. Okay. Like like 80, 90% of the game a new like generic enemy

type shows up and they are fucking A plus like like grace and glory like level like this this these guys are fucking credible. Yeah. But I only ended up fighting like 20 or 30 of them in the whole game because they just show up so late.

Okay. Okay. I mean, that sounds phenomenal. I know that a large part of like defensive character action stuff to is not necessarily attributed like, well, obviously, Royal Guard and then concentration meter are, are the biggest implementations of that in Devil May Cry's case. But Bayonetta puts it largely in your face with which time. You know?

So I feel like Capcom has basically had a way of basically going, no, we want offense forward in most of our action cases. And this is them fully exploring going full defense and giving you every top possible type of defensive action. Like the game's combat is much more complex and interesting and put together than like Sekiro. Oh my God. the obvious comparison. Yeah, with the lore and everything, 100% with the theming. And that's, that's 100% it. And it's like, this is not to, um, not to disparage, you know, like the, the, the amazingness of when Fromsoft has an amazing, a great boss fight.

But it is clear that like, um, there is a lot of Frumsoft's design is based on a limitation on you, you know, uh, to some degree. Although Sekiro lets you go in crazy without the stamina and all that stuff, right? But still, the amount of options and the amount of things you can do here, and then when you do them, it just feels so, so, so good. And the perfect example of that is with that Benke fight and why that hits so hard is because if you watch, like, the way I go through that fight, at first, I'm just wailing on it, trying to beat it like I, like, like, the other last two and struggling to get that armor open and everything. And by the end, I'm like, melting the entire armor off of him before he gets to that first shit talking line of I wish we fought when

you were alive, right? But. Yeah. And I'm like, ascending and I'm doing everything and I'm melting the fight, but I can't get the unblockable timing down. And until you get it down, it's an instant kill, you know? So I, like, I'm absolutely wrecking the armor off of him, getting to phase two right away,

doing perfect ESS into a perfect, into a dodge, um, uh, uh, a spot dodge counter into a burning blade state. And all of that is happening in sequence. And it's working amazingly together. And that's when it also feels the best because you do all three defensive actions. Like, You have to learn them all. You must learn all of them.

Yes. So he starts kicking and slamming at you. You start doing one. Then you go into the other. Then you go into the other. And then the overhead comes and I e-send it and crumple him down. Pick which resource you want to take down. Life.

Do you want life back? Do you want damage? You want to disable a part of them, cut a tail off. I love that part of it as well with each fight. And all of that is like 100% coming together. But then he does the unblockable. And I just can't get the fucking timing down. Oh, man.

You know? And I was like, this is so nuts. This is so cool to have that feeling of like the download is like 99%. But that one last bit is making the fight start over every time. And then I finally got it. and like, and then you got it, and now you have it.

And it's, and it's in. Yeah. And it's in. And then you did the rematch and the rematch went like that. It's, it's,

the only thing you needed, you learned. Like, even when the, um, because it was interesting too because what I was doing was, I was going,

oh, if I do, because you, if the unblockable comes at you, and you're blocking, it'll crack your stamina open, but you will, it'll fuck your shit up and go right through it. Um,

so that, but the idea was that like, the full damage you take for holding a block, a guard up versus just taking it full, Like, it's worse to just take the hit. Yeah. And thus holding up deflect means you go from, like, lower risk holding your guard up to getting the, getting the, it's a lower risk parry attempt, essentially. Deflect is, uh, deflect and Perry, perfect Perry have the same timing.

And I want to say it's 12 frames. Okay, okay. Because it's, it's, it feels about 50% easier than the easiest descent. Because essentially, you know, it's, it's the difference between like a third strike parry and a just defend, right? Where you're already safe by holding block. So the worst that happens is you fuck up the timing on the deflect, but you still just block. You're still blocking. But you're still blocking.

Yeah. Deflecting is very powerful and it is basically risk free. And it almost reminds me of like Expedition 33 with Dodge versus Perry where you're, you're, you. you're kind of like encouraging the player to use Deflect to learn the timing of things, you know, because it's a safer way to go. But yes, you're going to eventually have to take the bigger risks to get the bigger reward.

And with all that, like it turned out that at least for me, letting go and just going full parry on the unblockable was, I had an easier time, you know, doing that. But I just had to stop whatever the fuck I'm doing, let go the controller,

and just look at the timing. of the unblockable. And also, um, I feel like the unblockables, after the pink glow happens, they tend to come faster than most windups do. So a lot of windups are like, because they give you a flash. Yeah. They give you a flash to be like, no, it's coming. Fucking turn your brain on. So you will hear me say to myself during the LP, you hear me say to myself early. Every time I see it, because I have to go, it's pink, it's going to come faster than every other attack does from when the, when the windup begins. And I always have to go just a fraction of a second earlier,

and that's how you stop it, you know? So, man, what a fucking great fight against the dude who, for the record, the lore then is basically like, Banke is so cool and everyone loves him and thought he was the dopest shit, and you fought a ony version of him that is weaker than he originally was when he was alive.

Yeah. God damn, is that sick? Um, so I beat the game a couple days ago. And I, I successfully beat it under the Will Borgor no item challenge. I never used an item one time. I never healed my character once. Which boy, that, have you been using, uh, uh, uh, the flasks or anything like that? I've been doing the estes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, because I, I found that all the, no, I, like, looked over the regular items. And I was like, I'm actually just not interested in any of these at all. The flask. Yeah. no, the flash seems like it would be useful. But, like, the, the generic items is the same way I feel about most of those consumables in any action games. Like, these just aren't, like, interesting at all.

So it's almost like a Neo where you do have a bunch of, like, background consumables that, yeah, I'm just like, I don't want to bother with, like, any of these. So I did all that. And, um, the game ends really strong. Like, it's, it's building up and building up and building up. And then you get some. you get the best duo boss fight I've ever seen. It's way better than the one in Liza P. It makes O&S look like a joke.

You know exactly who it is already. It is the one the game sets up for you in like the first third of the game, and it is way better than I would have thought it was going to be. It's incredible. Okay, okay. And then you get your wife. you get your Wiley's Castle exam.

Yep. Yep. And the Wiley's Castle exam is, it's room, room, room. Like, do it, do it, do it, do it. And you're like, okay. And then you get your final boss. And the final boss is the way final bosses should be. The game has been building up the difficulty curve very smooth.

Like when I complained about the game being too easy, that's because the game, I thought the game was like 12 hours long. No, this is a 35 to 45 hour PS2 game that has the difficulty curve of a six-hour action game. It's just been elongated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Keeps it going out to 40 hours. Hell yeah.

Okay. So the difficulty is starting at a zero and it's going to 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and then 80%, and then you're like, all right, I'm ready for the final boss. It's going to be 100%. No, it's like 200% It is, it is It is way Way harder Oh, man.

It is like more than twice as hard as everything you've done up until that point. It demands total mastery of ESN and Perry timing and deflect. What a interesting way to go where they wanted that all on action difficulty. Like they didn't want a couple of steps up, up, up, up, up. They wanted it all in one. So I played some of Carnage Difficulty as well afterwards. And I have discovered why Carnage Difficulty has to be unlocked.

And it's because enemy damage is so high that even if the boss patterns are mostly the same, you're not allowed to make any mistakes. You know when you like botch a DePerry? you get hit and you're like okay fine i'll heal it no that's you're like you're like down to 10 yeah okay okay it becomes a two hit and die situation and then also i imagine like generating yellow orbs becomes well it doesn't it doesn't matter how many yellow orbs you you you you you heal yourself with if you uh go from full health to 10% in one strike it also means that the moves that would like blow through your guard.

If you don't parry them, they'll kill you. They kill you. Yes. Yeah. You get one mistake. Right. Like I lost the round one rematch against Gunnriu on, on Carnage. Okay. Yeah, okay. So there is one thing about it that's really annoying. You keep all your skills when you go into Carnage and you keep almost everything, but you don't keep any of your weapon upgrades and your health upgrades. And I was like, I actually really

wish that, like, I, the weapon upgrade system was like completely gone. I think it's really lame and I don't think it does all that much to help the game. I kind of wish you just bought everything with red orbs. Yeah. So, wait, like the tree resets, but you have everything on the tree.

No, no. Your skill tree maintains and all your weapon upgrade, all your like only weapons. you get to keep all of them and all the only weapon upgrades. Oh, just the three page upgrades. Just the three bars of weapon damage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like, that's the most annoying thing in the game to level up. I mean, you just, I just, it's almost in the, it's almost like a passive background thing where like every once in a while you just go in and hold a button on the thing and then it goes like, okay, you're a bit stronger, you're a bit stronger. But it's like, it didn't need to be there. I guess it's just to get at a sense of like your character level going up, you know, to It could have all just been skill tree. I actually just wish it was, I wish the statistical part of like the weapon upgrades.

I wish that wasn't there at all. I think it's totally superfluous. I agree. I agree. Yeah. I know some people like that RPGism to games, but I've said many times that I'm like, it doesn't need to be there. It really, it can be something that you progress towards, you know, skill-wise as enemies come at you. But what I'm going to end up doing.

when I go through Carnage is I'm just going to cheat engine in all the upgrade items I need to get from level 1 to 2 and then 2 to 3 as I hit thresholds in the game story because if you don't have your stuff fully kidded out for the final boss in Carnage, it's a one hit kill boss. So they intend you to be going in with with everything next up. The only reason why I can imagine they, the benefit I can see to why they do that, I guess is because they want like any level, any player to if you get. Get it up high enough. You walk back to a beginning grunt swing at once and then it dies, right? To have that feeling of it doesn't matter what counter or not counter you're doing. You hit it once and then the thing is dead and the number is bigger type of thing, you know? I hope somebody is listening to me out there and can put a mod on the Nexus to just turn, like have everything viable with red orbs. I think the item, like getting Tamagashi steel and leather and all that shit, I think it's actually super annoying.

I, as a craft hater, as a noted craft hater, every time I'm picking up random ingredients and things, I'm always going, ah, you know. But thankfully, most of it, like I said, you can ignore most of it and whatever. The stuff where you go into, like, there's the monster hunter menu for leveling up charms and items and stuff as well, where, like, I didn't know what it was.

Someone had to explain to me that it's a monster hunter thing to put a bunch of ingredients down that all have a specific value. and then you choose the currencies almost to build out the monster hunter item, you know, for whatever upgrade. Yeah, I guess it almost, I guess it's a system that feels like busy work for video game. Yeah. Yeah, I would say the, you know. I would say the entire open world section of this game is busy work to pat out the hour count, genuinely. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Kyoto is very, very nothing. It's fine. It's an excuse to get into a ton of random battles. Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of funny, too, because as an aside, right now, Punch Mom is going through Expedition 33 and having a very different experience as you'd imagine. Because Perry it!

Do you just yell out Perry it from the kitchen? I mean, so for her, it's all about story. doesn't care about action mechanics or most of the time gameplay stuff is just not even she wants to get she wants to get through for the narrative and like the the gameplay is in the way of the story you know yeah um well you can put it on the story mode or gen english mode totally totally as it were and and um in those cases she helps she have no qualms about just like pulling out a guide and just being like okay just tell me what to go pick up and where the Picto is or whatever, you know?

And, like, it is something where in the same way that FF7R lets you not engage with the combat systems, if you don't really want to, you can kind of just back off and, you know, level up and just hit things. Or if you want to dodge nothing, treat it like a normal RPG, Expedition 33 style. Like, I think this is, this is all stuff that's in there to smooth out the edges for people that are really just like on story mode or beginner players, people that are not that action accustomed to still feel like they're getting stronger going through the game, even if the way they're playing does not change, right?

Yeah. If their adaptability to the bosses or to the, to the challenge of the fights is not improving in skill, they can still like get through it with the numbers and the percentages. Yeah. And I'm sure there's balance I'm sure there's play test data around that But I truly believe Considering this is the release date we're getting the game in

I really think we're gonna get And the game has been successful We're gonna get a big drop That'll add all these things we're talking about Or at the very least address a bunch of it I truly believe that's happening So I'm gonna tell you this right now I'm gonna tell you this right now

The game does not have a bloody palis equivalent. It's wild that it doesn't have a bloody palace equivalent. It's absolutely nuts. But also, when you beat the game and you're watching the ending, not even in the post credits,

in the real goddamn ending, the game goes, okay, we'll see in six months for the DLC. Oh, there you go. There you go. Literally, yes. Like, it's, I'm not talking about sign posting. I'm talking about characters literally, like, look

at you and going and walking into the sunset going I'll see you later come on let's go like yeah fucking um deadpool's ending in tokon putting on a shirt that says see you in the dLC for the record yeah yeah that level just give that shirt to to musashi um it also helps for me that I'm like hey I love busashi I love this character in general big fan big fan of the vagabond and I'm and I'm glad to see that other people are kind of getting that energy off of him to which they got right where it's just like like hey

what's your motivation here it's fun we do it because it's fun I perfectly synced up with Musashi's attitude for the vast majority of the game where Shizaka would give you like at a boy Musashi you really got

those guys and I'd be like whatever they were shit and Musashi would go they were shit like like and like he's like loading up for a boss fight that's really cool and I'm like yeah yeah yeah yeah and then musashi's like yay I'm gonna do a boss fight oh I'm so excited you're right no look when he walks into the to the Agni Agni Rudra like bro you know he goes after all that talk this better be worth it you know

after all that build up right like he's there this in the same spot you're in he loves the fight absolutely adores it and that's perfect um I I yeah he's absolutely nailing all of that. And, and, uh, I'm curious to see what they, well, whatever, what they do, you know, later on and stuff as things progress. But all I'll say is that, like, in terms of just introducing your side characters and your villains, um, we talked, uh, uh, recently playing through 14 about the villain who's very relatable and how cool that is. And then now on the complete opposite end, here is fuckface has to die. And fuckface loves it.

And he knows that you want to, he knows he has to die. And he's smirking the whole time. Yoshitsune is like a, a character that is just so cartoonishly evil in this super serious, like plot. And he's just like giggling and making jokes and dancing around and beating women and just like, ha, ha, ha, I'm going to be evil.

Like, he's incredible. He's amazing. You've got to go and there's no if, ands or butts about it, you know? So, yeah, leaving off on Banke, I am fucking just through the roof for this game. Onimush away of the sword is phenomenal, man. A plus.

Incredible game. Oh, excuse me. Excuse me, pardon for the audience. On that note, transitioning over to 14, wrapped it up. Wrapped it up. A little golf clap. Little golf clap.

So you beat the filter. You beat the part that everyone says, ah, just rushed through it. It's no good. I disagree that it's no good, but it is harder to get through than the rest. Asterisk. I fought the better version of it.

Yes, very much. Ritalin and Gaius and all those improved fights, Labrea, are, those were the standout best parts of Yeah, absolutely. So this is the first time I've gone through Aramry Born in 10 plus years. And the change, so they ran into what I'd call

statistical problems, which is, ah, we did an expansion and then we crunched the numbers and then we changed potencies for moves at lower levels. And then we reoriented, you know, what levels you get what stuff. and the end result of that is that a realm reborn encounters are trivial. Like, I, I played through a realm reborn when it was current, when it was the only thing that existed. And thus, it was not trivial.

Like, even something like if it normal, people would die on just because the numbers were high. If you made a mistake, you would just die. Right. Okay. Right. So, like, seeing that it has been like, like, so many of those encounters have been, like, just crushed. down into like the on ramp instead of the thing is kind of sad to me because basically the longer the game goes on, more of the game becomes an on ramp.

Right. Okay. To the new stuff. They don't want people to get stuck in stormblood or shadow bringers or whatever. So, you know, in the end, there was a lot that I didn't mesh with and there's a lot that kind of bounces off of me. But what I really appreciated is that the stuff that I did like, which, you know, which, you know, is everything with the Garlians, Magitech, tampering.

Tampering, actually. Yeah, you might as well call it that. Tampering with your brain. Everything with tempering and the entire icon summoning process, I thought was really interesting about the plot. That's the stuff that I thought was really cool, and I wanted to know more about. And that thread led to the best gameplay.

Yeah. And that was really satisfying to watch the most interesting plot lead to the best gameplay that I experienced there. That is lucky because that is the core thread of the fucking six expansions in a row. Like that is that it like, hey, we have to deal with this tempering problem and the Garlians. It is like five games worth of. We have to solve this fucking problem. it's really bad. It's really, really bad. And every variation and twist and possible

shade of change throughout that is explored in a really great way. And it leads to the best encounters and the best most interesting like beats and areas. And then you have your side stuff, which is like, hey, you want to fight all these other side bosses.

You want to go on this side thing. But like the narrative core is the thing that you point it out as like the most interesting thing going on with the story. Yeah. Very, very fortunate. And again, it helps that, you know, you've got Gaius delivering that with like a really great, like the speech, the moment, the motivations.

You got the judge armor. You got all the, you got everything on your side, ultimate weapon. You know, all the cool factors are like trying as hard as possible to be very, very cool. And, yeah, and I did see as well, like some of those, I didn't quite realize just how insane some of those floor patterns looked until I saw them screenshoted when I was playing. Yeah. So it's so interesting because you watched the near raids, but you didn't, and you're like, well, I know you have to not stand in the shit. Right?

Like, you knew that, but you didn't internalize that like, okay, each one of these symbols is a different instruction that you're also managing while also looking at the entire floor cover. Like every single moment and also mentally ordering, okay, these went out here, these went out here, these went out here, these went out here, this is going to do a line on the tank, this is going to do the AEOE, this is going to push that all simultaneously. I never pushed far enough into the MMOs to even get to that point, you know. Now, FF14 is, it's not unique, but FF14 takes the square dancing lines on the floor approach to the highest. It's the most one of those. Yeah. No, I do have memories of like my old roommates and wow running around the platform with a big thing in the middle.

Classic wow is a different, is a fundamentally different beast in terms of this. A lot of wow back in the day was like prep was when and organizing 40 fucking people. Organizing 40 fucking people is hard. Right, right, right. Like by default. And then as wow went on, it got more of that. And that's how you got into the whole weak oras scandal. Okay.

Which was the fucking add-on that people... So there's an add-on called weak oras, and the long and short of it is that people would play the public test realm and learn all the fights. And then they would figure out and they would upload all the instructions to the weak oras. mod and then you would say hey everybody for this raid you have to run the weak oras mod and what the weak oras mod does is tell your character where to stand what to do and it's like and so for a while they made harder and harder encounters with the assumption that you were

using the weak oras mod but that meant that people that weren't using the mod had no fucking shot and it was like a whole thing that's what a lot of dan olson's uh it's rude to suck a world of war the Warcraft video is about, is about the arms race between people using mods to make encounters easier and then them going, well, now we have to make the encounters harder because everyone's using fucking mods. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's so shitty for a community to like have that develop and then become the new expected, you know, and current wow has taken very large steps

to be like, fucking stop that. No, we're supposed to be playing the goddamn encounters. Keep an eye. for me and is his latest video, by the way. Dan Olson's going to be doing a little thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm popping in over there, talking about wrestling a little bit. The thing with, um, I talk about the, this a lot whenever we talk about like preservation of games and, and intended pathways and user paths, the cabin in the woods player who's

disconnected from the internet in the future being able to play your game, you know? Well, this is not a good for an MMOs. No, it's completely. divorced from it because you can't ever do that. But what I have to do is, okay, I have to update that, right, to say the player who logs in, subscribes, has a couple of friends, but ultimately is not in- All their interactions are in-game. In-game. They're not going online into the wilds to find out more. They're just playing the game with their friends. What is that experience like? And if you're telling me- So you are describing the golden age of MMOs. You're talking about every MMO up until about. the year 2007. It's one of the reasons why Classic World of Warcraft has this mythical

appeal in 2004 and 2005. It's because nobody knew how to do anything. And the Wiki, like, the Wikipedia of your specific game, having every answer in the universe being

the case for every game in the world didn't really exist. Like, that was prior to, it the era of ignorance rather, thank you, Tiger Fang, the era of ignorance rather than the era of solvedness. This is so universally applicable.

It's incredible. What you're describing recently, there's a great Seajem video talking about not that terminology, but essentially player expression. Yeah, player expression only works when people didn't know what the fucking optimal combo was. Exactly.

The era of ignorance allows you to player express, because really and truly someone is expressing themselves and differently from you because you're doing it wrong. Right? Take for example. There's an optimal optimal and we live in a world where once that data becomes shared and transmitted everywhere quickly,

it stops becoming your own style of character and it starts becoming the right way to play, you know? So take for example. It's weird and it's not great, but that's what happens with any genre, any game like this. A con. So if I have fantasy, 14 has special mobs

called hunts, right? It's a boss mob. Best era says Reggie. Yeah. When we all didn't know. Yeah, absolutely. When we all didn't know shit. There's there's little roaming boss fights that exist in all the world zones and they show up from time to time. And

if you get a group together in the open world and you fight them, you get some extra rewards, extra currency, a lot of XP, etc. Right. And they're called hunts. And hunts in 14 are my personal favorite go-to of how solving a game makes it

way, way, way worse. So, Hunts used to just show up and people didn't really have a strong understanding of what caused them to come back to life after they had gotten killed. And they didn't really have a super strong

understanding of exactly where they would spawn. They had these large circular areas that they could show up. Sometimes. Right? And it just wasn't, whatever. Well, when Heaven's Word came out, because of the way that item upgrades worked, the easiest way to upgrade your gear was to get a lot of the hunt currency and cash that in for item and weapon upgrades. So all of a sudden, everybody in the game was doing hunts like crazy

for months, right? And what ended up happening is some people, some very smart players, sat down and figured it out. They figured out hunts after being killed come back on an 18 hour timer. And so what they did is they set up websites where when a hunt was killed on your particular server, you would click on it and then it would run the 18 hour timer. And so then you would go onto the website to see, hey,

is it even possible for the mob to be back up? No, I'll have to, I can only get it later tonight. Got to go to this external source to get that info. And then what happened is the hunt locations got narrowed down to it can spawn here, here, here and here. Yeah, yeah. And then over time, we have now reached the part where hunts in FF14 are not, hey, the big goblin showed up. Hey, let's get in the shout chat and yell at everybody to come, come get the big globulin.

Now it's on daily reset at two, at fucking, what is it, like fucking two, three a.m. in the morning on Tuesday. The discord that you, the hunt discord that you're part of will ping you and go, hey, all the hunts, set we're all going to meet right here and a massive massive massive group of players will all join a gigantic party and then the hunt spotters will have marked down every location of

every single hunt on the server for that expansion and then you will run a train that takes an hour and it gets you all of the every single one and all of their rewards for the entire expansion and it's all and get this it's the most

efficient way to get all of your weekly currencies. It is the best, most efficient way to get everything that you want for all of your weeklies. So they're super popular. And it's like, we just talked about why I love video games with Onimusha. You're describing the cancer. Yeah. So, oh my God.

I hate everything about what you're saying. Playing MMOs is a constant battle between the player-based solving thing. and the devs trying to obfuscate them. So when Classic Wow came back out, right? Like Classic Wow got released. One of the issues that people were like, it's just not the same. It's just not the same because Classic Wow

lived in a time period where nobody fucking knew nothing. The only way you found out where some of the fucking ends of quests were, like very famously Mancric's wife, the most famous, I don't know how to finish this quest ever, you would have to go into Shout Chat and ask people in the barons, hey, where the fuck is this guy's wife?

I don't know where she is. And people would lie to you or tell you the right answer and call you a slur or whatever. And you just had to do it. Now, if you type in Mancrix's wife into Google, it will just show you a picture of where she is on the map. Okay.

So we know that this is unavoidable. It's a thing that happens as, knowledge gets disseminated. And, like, yes, the time of yesteryear when we all were discovering was more fun, because guess what? The dopamine would hit more often. Discovery is more fun than knowledge. But once we, but we have to accept that that's going to happen.

How do you adjust for it? And how do you, how do you compensate for the fact that we live in a world where this is going to become just routine, right? So, I think there's a couple of ways. Well, that's the thing is like, like, I, like, when a game. basically goes because I feel like the when you stretch it to the extremes you can have the game that offers every level

of engagement for you if you want to be able to play this enjoy it on its own and not ever have to go into that that level of granularity but still hit credits okay sure and then there's people who are like data mining is not enough I need like

gaster style ARG outside of the code fun to exist as well. I was chit-chatting about people about World of Warcraft in my chat last night. And one of the things they pointed out to me that I had forgotten is that one of the reasons why story and wow can't matter and can't be good is because the public test realm that is the bug testing realm that you're allowed to play on comes out like six months before the retail

release of any given patch. So everyone knows everything. So if you want to be day one rating, playing the raid on day one isn't enough. You actually had to play the raid day minus 90 and get good at the raid so that you can crush it the day it releases. That sucks, dude. That actually sucks a lot. So the answer to your question, how do you deal? how do you deal with the infinite dissemination of information?

So I played a lot. It turns out I was talking about it on chat. I actually have played a lot of MMOs. I didn't realize that I actually put my hands in a lot of them. The answer is the same as it is with fighting games and it's the same as it is with action games. You need to provide an in-game route to mastery. So Final Fantasy 14 right now is a really good example.

Hey, well, you just hit level 100 on Samurai. You've been playing and trying to figure out your rotation. And you've been, you've been, you've been doing fine and you've been working it. Maybe you did a bunch of like harder encounters and you did it. Well, if you go to the balance and look at what the optimized rotation is, the optimized rotation will blow your shit out of the water. Whatever you came up with on the way up. Like, like, just going to the balance discord and scrolling down to Samurai and clicking on the image of samurai

rotation and like looking at that that thing will be way better like 20 30% better than anything you fucking like put together yourself so if you're doing hard content and there's no way to just naturally learn

your better rotation right and so if you're doing 30% less damage than everybody else it becomes like why didn't you look up the good rotation on the balance why aren't you why are you falling out right there's no there's no there's no in game on ramp. And remember, trial of the novice in 14, the thing that taught you how all those

symbols work, that didn't used to fucking exist. So, but learning all that shit used to be die. But, but the thing. And that's, and that's, and that's, and that's, keep dying until you don't, right? But the thing is that this is an MMO and MMOs are trying to, widespread. They're trying to shotgun, as we described. Yeah. So that means that not everybody is incentivized by the really rare item that you get from dropping. That's right. Some people play FF14 like it's a goddamn regular final thing. JRP mode.

They show up when the expansion comes out and they do the whole expansion and then they shelf it until the next one comes out. And then they do all the patch stuff and then they do the next expansion. Which they will, I'm sure Square will tell you is completely valid and in fact ideal. They tell you to do that. They will tell you to do that. Exactly. Right. So for those people, the in-game path to mastery is interesting maybe if they get pulled in by it, but they might not be in for those incentives.

They might be just in to push it to the next expansion. And so, for example, what's a Waffle Mal points out that I'm describing psycho behavior. And yes, I am describing psycho behavior because MMO player populations are super weird. They spike really high when expansions come out. but the people that play an MMO regularly are kind of psychos to some degree, like all of them, right? And so the second solution is that you need to provide a wide variety of things that exists at different levels of intensity. And this is what I was about to say, is that I was about to say that, like, if you have enough content to make up for the fact that if I don't want to be as freak and go nuts like you guys are and go down that. level, there's enough here for me that would keep me interested at the level I'm interested

in staying at and the type of content and the type of things I'm doing, I can fill that time and find that still rewarding. And that's something that's expensive and costly and it takes a huge... Yeah, it takes... Making content... Ages and ages and ages, you know, but, like, that is the only solution I can imagine to fighting back against the idea that the internet will download everything about your game and optimize the fun out of it, basically.

Yeah. So I have a secret about MMOs. So last night, I hit level 100 on every job in 14. All of them. Did it. I'm done. I got a special amount for it,

and I breathed a really long exhale. Congress. And I did it, right? So I have, I've engaged in freak behavior on that. game for many years. And World of Warcraft Forever has recently been announced, which we'll talk about a little bit during the news.

And Guild Wars 3 is on the horizon. And I have a secret as somebody who's played a lot of MMOs to varying degrees over the years. It is way more fun to be catching up and behind on two MMOs than it is to be at the red line and mastering one MMO. It is just way, it is a way, way better experience to always be, like never hit the end, never be at level cap, never be at like looking for things to do in multiple than it is to be like absolutely top 1% in one.

And I think that applies to almost everything. Yes. Like, fighting games is the most obvious. It is way more fun to be in the discovery process, learning new things about your character and trying to get better and trying to improve and get to a level where you feel you're pretty good with them than it is to be at the peak and only now trying to out move and out maneuver other masters at that level and stay ahead of the meta based on patch notes and granular changes of four frames to five frames, you know.

So like, for example, in 14 whenever cold comes out, I'm going to make the decision that I'm only going to level six jobs. Now, that sounds absolutely nuts to somebody who doesn't play the game at all, but six is a way smaller number than 25. Yeah. Okay? That's a lot less.

And the reason why it's six, it's main tank, off tank, shield healer, Regen Healer, Melee DPS, range DPS. Like all six of the core roles so that when I play with people or do Final Fantasy 14 content, I can fill in for anything that people don't have. Like part of that is a streaming consideration. Yeah. Right. If you want to, if you want to like get really, uh, fucking glass half empty about it, that thing you said zooming out is literally the entire video game industry hype cycle.

you know, the anticipation for the game coming out and like that first vertical slice of two hours you play are the most excitement you're going to get out of it before that gives way to the rope middle. And then maybe you get to the end, but probably not. And then the game has never talked of ever again. And I remember having this moment of like these crazy 10 year long things we talk about like silk songs that we spend a decade talking about in anticipation. now they're out. I got every job to cap in Final Fantasy 14 in the time it took Silk Song to come out. And then now, and then we're now, you never talk about Silk Song again. And it's just, that's, it's sad.

I talk about Silk Song to my pillow sometimes. That's it. I love you, Silk Song. That's it, you know? It's kind of fucked up, but that's the way this industry actually works. And so, I saw Dash just ask, like, how do you apply this to fighting games or so? I'm like, well, it's really easy. Well, do I want to grind down on one character until I'm the fucking master?

Or do I want to grind down on three until I'm pretty good? Or do I want to grind down on one or two characters in Street Fighter and one or two characters in Guilty Gear and one or two characters in Tocon and one and two characters in DBS? And what if I only like the one that I like or so? How much can I get out of that? And then it's still like you've got to offer enough things to keep the journey interesting for somebody who doesn't necessarily want to go freak beast motor. on it. And that's expensive. So I don't know. Maybe you got to pay a monthly subscription to a

fighting game to get the money to like, no, not actually. One of the, but I was complaining about destiny a little bit last night because we're talking me and Ecto we're talking about MMOs in general. And, but it was like a broader point. So the worst time to play an MMO, like the worst time, the worst feeling anybody has is when you've kind of done everything that you were interested in, but you still want to play more, but the stuff that's there doesn't really interest you. And so most people will go online and go, dead game.

They don't make enough content or whatever. And a normal human, a normal human, should go to that person and be like, hey, shithead, you're playing this game like a freak. maybe don't.

If I was going to get every class to 100 and then go, man, there's nothing left to do in this game. Everyone in the world would be right to shit on me from a great height for acting like a freak and be like, you're not supposed to play the game that way. There's all fucking weirdo.

There's always a falloff. There's always a fade-off point. Even a game like Ballotro which hypothetically should be randomized and insane enough to last you forever and have you constantly engaged. At some point, you're like, okay, did I did it? Did I get NANF? You know, did I get all my, all my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my own stopping point, you know, I, I hit, I, I, I created an, all, my own stopping point and hit that and went, all, right, I'm good for now, you know? There were, there were, there were, there were, would stream the game, and they'd be like, oh, they got to do something. something. There's not enough content. You know, I've, you know, there's nothing left to grind. And it's like, brother, you have been grinding as your primary profession for eight hours a day on this shooter

MMO. You are playing the game in a profoundly unnatural way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is this is not the way it was intended to be played. You're, you're behaving like a freak and then complaining that your freak behavior has caused you to be Why can't they keep up with it? Like, yeah, for real, it's so nuts. And I already, we said this last night, last week, too, but it's just like, the other insanity of like

playing a single player game, walking up to it and going, dead game. They're like, dead game. What do you? Well, is it like, single player? You don't need a watering hole. It's single fucking player. You can check the Steam DB and be like, wow,

next week, all, look, Onamush, players fell off dead game like no they beat it you're yeah where he's like you're only here to stand around the crowd got it okay doesn't matter what the actual thing is you know it's so strange so so whatever we jumped all over the place with this one but it is it is a really interesting thing to learn about ff 14 uh in going through this and um no i i i i definitely feel the most this is the most understanding I've had of an MMO since Grawl. Yeah. And you know what? It's interesting because

14 is actually not that typical. Like it's like wow is the most typical because everything spread. Everything is a branch of wow of the 2004 version. Everything is like is doing their own thing based on World of War of Warcraft except for runescape. Old school runescape is its own fucking beast. That thing is so weird. But like, yeah, no, it's like a genre I've been dealing with for decades.

And it's like it is so fundamentally different from everything else because of the ever-present human mass that is always, always, always there. And yeah, I guess it's also kind of interesting to learn about, you know, server cultures and fuggies and. All just, would you like to know something about server culture? Yeah. You have learned about server culture at the end of the life of server culture. Server culture is basically over as of right now. FF14 is getting the regional duty finder in a month. We're going to talk about it a little bit, but Wow forever, the new version of Wow,

is using something that Guild Wars 2 invented called the Mega Shard. Cross server. Which is the one server. Okay. Okay. Which is, and the only thing is, is if a given area gets too full, it'll splinter off a new instance

to accommodate new players. Okay. So, Guild Wars and 14 and World of Warcraft are going to be using the one, one play, one server, one thing, architecture. So having like very distinct cultures from your given server is basically over. It's just going to be population based.

Like you're basically looking around an arcade in 2009 going, wow, all these arcades are really different. Yeah, but everyone is at home playing online in the big matchmaking. And that's all we're investing in from here on out. Interesting. Interesting. All right. Yeah, more on these announcements in a little bit. One other thing I did as well was I popped in Zcom, aka Star Wars Zero Company. So that games really good. Yeah, so I watched. I was part of the Xcom playthrough back in the day, but I never really played Xcom on my own or anything, you know.

And I've always loved the, you know, into the breach style, perfect information, you know, puzzle tactical, um, games. But,

uh, what I kind of got to learn within that first session and why, I guess I imagine XCOM is so fun is, because like, it's taking the, the parts where you don't have control over the situation, applying the dice roll and asking you to roll, with it no matter how it goes.

You're just going to have to figure it out. Yeah. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know how it's going to go. You don't know if it's going to work or not. But you just have to roll with it. But what makes it fun is that that works in your favor as well as against you. And if you do really cool things with your team that has a lot of synergy, it feels amazing.

I got the first couple missions in with the crew. So I, first thing I know. is playing Zcom was if you are not a human, your alien customization options are disturbingly lacking. It's really just like, that's a bummer. I want a character creator. I mean, yeah. More here, you know.

And would you believe that human beings have more experience, like making customization options for human beings? Like, you know? So like the whole feeling of, you know, You know, going into it being like, man, only cowards pick human. And it's like, or people who want options for their character because you just... You know what, Wully? As we're going to have a World of Warcraft discussion in about a half an hour, I would like to point out that yes, only cowards pick human.

So you got your, but you got your, your, your, your hawks in there. But then trick, the clone, trooper and cabby are great. and you have a really early, like, introduction to, I guess, how your team synergy can work. And, you know, the idea of, like, setting up Overwatch, pushing someone into Overwatch, uh, Cabby can do an uppercut and get his action points back. And then, you know, you can really just set these plays up. By the third or fourth mission, I think I did, where Jay joins the group,

um, I had a really fun. time where I basically like, what did I do? I set the co-op assist shot on Cabby who had no AP left. Which is always 100%, which that is a genius move by the game. Yeah. The assist shot is always guaranteed. And furthermore, you get the bonus of like your buddy bonus for the X link up for doing it. so always do it even if there's nothing to do.

I threw that on him. Then he wouldn't, and then I think I like, I went over to my, my hawks, used Hawks to give him an AP. With that AP, he was able to take a shot. And he only got into position after doing the upper cut, which allowed him to cross the field again. Yeah. Took the shot, allowed, and the shot did nothing,

but it made the Hawks have the ability to help and fire a real shot that did the damage to take out the character. you know, and just set up the dominoes all in really far in advance and then go back in and like knock one forward and watch the effect play through. That's really, that was a really cool feeling. And I was like, okay. Yeah, when it, when it, when it hits, it hits. And when it goes bad, it's the most miserable fucking experience.

No, like just, oh my God. And you're also like, it's not a, a asymmetric grid. It's a 3D environment. So there's weird places to stand. There's moments where you're. in cover, but you're, I mean, in cover is like a, is locked onto a wall. But, you know, I've had, I had like

moments where, like, Trick was like taking up two spots so I couldn't get two people over there and I'm like, why? Yeah, I would, I would prefer a grid myself. That's, a grid is clean. A grid is simple. Yeah. And so, but I'm, I'm, again, I'm thinking that like, the appeal of the XCOM game is that it's not clean

maybe. I don't know. But, um, rolling with whatever the fuck happens, you know, I did have some fun with that. And I was like, I like, I like what you're doing here. And if there's more, um, if it, you know, as it gets harder and, and more challenge comes in, if you add more co-op options, more dual techs and ways for your, your, your team to work together synergistically, um, you can fight back against the randomness and fight back against the odds being not in your favor, you know, um,

I'm used to, you know, oh, the enemy's going to appear here. Okay, cool, I'll go block it. And in this case, it's like, well, yeah, they're gonna. You don't know how many. You don't know what. You don't know, you know, and when you're looking at this map, that looks like they might come from that side, but you have no fucking idea, you know, it's just a more dice rolly wild way to play a tactical game. And it does, I will say that it does kind of fit into that slot of like turn-based chill fun, you know, that I kind of get a craving for every now and then. I still think I enjoy it more when I get. I, I get. I, I kind of get a craving for every now and then. I still think I, I, I, I guess. I, the grid and when I get the preview and then I kind of am like solving the puzzle but like I have to go further in to kind of see how this shakes up but I really like that first look at it you know not to mention

I didn't this is not a typical XCOM thing right but you get to walk around the base talk to your characters you know get to meet your crew and hang out with them and there's a whole lot of like downtime between missions you know socializing with the party

and that's a nice touch as well I think that game is is fucking great. I think that there's a couple little details that I'm not a big fan of compared to Xcom and the number one is just the grid. I just miss the grid. Yep. But like all the things they've done to like mitigate randomness. Like randomness is a core part of that formula, but they're like you have ways to to judge it to fucking just nudge it over. right i'm a big fan of the have you unlocked the droids yet not yet so the little the little like r2d2

droids they don't have an attack they can't attack okay so it's it's very but what they can do is use every gadget three times which means they can throw three grenades oh wow okay um and their core ability is to give other characters extra api oh great so like they're fucking awesome Hell yeah. Like, it's, it's like you're playing a game with three characters and something that will just solve any problem you have at any given moment. Because I chucked the force grenade out that like, a concussive grenade out, that like less damage, more knockback. And then it knocked two people off a roof. And you're like, yeah.

And I'm like, oh, I can knock you into my Overwatch that has been set up and then get that to go and then trigger the co-op thing. You know? Like that particular. is like where I'm like, ooh, juices are flowing here. Yeah, yeah, love that. Yeah, no, the game's super great. People were very unhappy because the game only

the game only goes for 50 cycles and then you beat the final boss and it's over. Like as far as an Xcom game is there's no like long term strategic thing. People just modded the timer on the final mission to just be infinite so that you just keep playing missions forever. But will missions

pop up? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, okay. Yeah, it'll keep going. But like, yeah, people, people were very, very annoyed that, like, the game has, like, a conclusive end, but it doesn't have, like, a large, like, strategic layer. I would like to see an endless version of that thing work out. But right now, people will fix that. I think that game is still. I also think it's such a minor detail, but putting your guys on the ground to explore an area just a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. spec style level before the mission pops up actually adds like a lot yeah yeah you feel like like you're in the environment you're seeing it close up and then it turns into a fight you're less disconnected and doing like a bunch of little missions that that that that one i did where you're on that like whatever kind of like slum planet area you know when a bunch of gangsters are like get the fuck out of here that's that's the one i'm thinking yeah and you're like oh yeah i got to see it like straight up grime on my boots and now we zoom out to the isometric level and just treat it as terrain but if you just always drop into a terrain view of everything,

you don't get a feel for it at all. It doesn't feel super real. No, no. That's a really nice touch. That game's super cool. They recently patched it to run a little bit better and fix a couple little foibles. Nice. Okay.

Hey, I got to take a break. He jumped up into my arms, which means, are you hungry? Are you, oh, my God. Are you hungry? Oh, he's going to attack me. Excuse me. Yeah, ah. Yeah, B.

All right. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. I love our sponsors. I love them. I want to kiss them. This week, the podcast is sponsored by us. Once again, you've got the legacy shirt and desk mat available over at Orchidate.com. And you go to the Castle Super Beast section. And it's important to love yourself. I think that's very, it's important to help. help and support yourself. I agree. Yeah, you can go get that legacy Desmat. I'm starting to see the photos of people

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You can let it help you reach your financial goals faster at join RocketMoney.com slash super beast. That's rocketmoney.com slash super beast. Uh, R-O-C-E-T-M-O-N-E-Y.com slash super beast. Thanks, Rocket Money. Thank you, Rocket Money. This week, the podcast is sponsored by Hero Forge, one of the sickest ways to get your tabletop game taken to the next level. You know, I've talked many a time about how you go on and it is a

character creator in a website that lets you build out a miniature and have it ready to go. If you want the 3D file to use in 3D on your computer, that's fine. If you want a 3D print it yourself, you can do so. Or if you want them to print it for you and ship it to you, they can do that as well. Not just 3D printing. They can print out color plastic, acrylic standees, and bronze as well. Lots of materials to pick from. and the detail you can go in for these miniatures is super cool.

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Super cool. In fact, like, yeah, like here's the little let me see if I can get the spinning rotation. Yeah, there it is. So there's the, there's the woolly miniature with my monk stance. It's so cool. It's so cool. It's cool enough I don't

mind being cut off. Hey, I'm still here. Get cut off. Get cut off. There you go. Oh my God. I haven't seen this one. Oh, no, you're out. We're replacing you with this, actually. We're going to talk to this gift from now.

Oh, no, when I didn't see this one. I don't know how he got Boos. Yeah. Like the pug thing going on. That's unbelievable. A little Boose familiar hanging out, standing on the chair. Super sick. And then, like, yeah, check out some of these.

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Yeah, it's really incredible. Here you go, just a little two poses on Hina Mintonecta over there. That's so cool, man. Yeah. And there you go. as well. I love it. So if this is the kind of detail you want to get going with your miniatures, Hero Forge is the place to do it. Check that out. Look at, look at, look how fun that is, man. So good. I imagine the physics on this type of pose would not be easy to print. So you'd

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And check back often because new content is added every week. That is true. You can use the kit bashing service to, add a ton of detail and go nuts with your models and mix them together and do everything you want to. So thank you, Hero Forge. Be sure to check them out. Very cool. Thanks, Hero Forge. And this week, this podcast is sponsored by Ridge. I have shown off. I have my, my Ridge Kinsugi wallet. I have my Ridge wallet. I don't have it on me, but it's in my pants pocket at the house. I really like it quite a lot. When I was, I was playing Onimusha and I went to the

Demon Realm and I saw the gold lines on the stage. I was like, that's the Kinsugi and the map because it's, it's highlighting the anyway. No, but it's a nice, sleek, simple wallet that you can use. That's not a big leather brick that's destroying your back. I had a big classic leather wallet for about 10 years. And one, that thing was disintegrating. And two, like my whole body was like lopsided as a result.

Like there was too much stuff in there And I went through it When I switched over to the Ridgewall And I was like man I'm carrying around receipts for like shit From six years ago And I mean look

You know there's I did see I did see a A short A TikTok I got called out by And I think everyone else did We're just like Hey millennials Here's how you dispose of the packaging

For the electronics that you bought You take it You fold it and you put in the recycling. No. No, I'm not. And I'm like, but what if I need to return it?

What if I need a very specifically sized box? What if I need to return it and what if I need the receipt inside of the box that I placed it in so that I can get that back to future shop, no problem. Leave me alone. Anyways, we have a problem with hoarding things that we don't need. So the Ridgewallet is nice for sleek, cutting that down and it fits very nicely into your pocket. And you're going to feel a lot lighter without all that extra junk in there.

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it can just fit right on to the back of your phone and keep that juice going. Again, it's important to, I think, to have the utility, but not the bulk. And that's what Ridge kind of specializes in as well. So you want to get in there with your Ridge wallet or your Ridge Power Bank, get a full charge and then some. And you're talking about three full phone charges wherever you go. And it's MagSafe compatible. So you don't have to worry about the wire. You can just stick it right on the back of your phone and get that thing charging. I've been basically using one in my pocket the whole time. So one thing to pack,

it's one thing, yeah, one thing to pack and five ways to power your devices. So you can find Ridge's Power Bank at Best Buy or our listeners can get a 10% off their order at Ridge.com by using the code Superbeast at checkout. So if you hit to Ridge.com and use the code Superbeast, you're all set after your purchase.

They'll ask where you heard about them. Please support the show and tell them that we sent you. Thank you, Rich. Tell them that was us. Thanks, Ridge. yes um anyways so uh just ending off the weeks i i'm not sure how it's going to go based on how sickness is spreading and feeling but um whatever reggie feels better and uh we're feeling good we'll come back to it and resume the lps but um in the meantime ony musha is fill in the spots

whenever that's the case and hey guess what when reggie gets back there's still going to be ony musha so whatever because fuck it that thing is sick as out you're too deep into it fucking now you're way too deep into it now what are you gonna just fucking all right guys reggie's back where on a moose is gonna just live at 70% and that's it but but um we are we are touch and go based on on the the day to day's feelings of so like yeah no when reggie comes back and you go through like the final sequence and he hasn't really seen you play a lot he can be like wow well you're so strong oh my god so Oh, my God. He has actually been, he has, but he has been watching. So, oh, no. Because a lot of the time, you ruined it. Yeah, yeah. A lot of the time he goes through and, and, uh, make some notes. And we, we have our whole process for how I title every episode and, and he goes through and stuff. So he's already, he's already up to date on everything. Um, but yeah, that's, that's, that's Willie versus, uh, Twitch and YouTube for more of whatever the fuck we're going to be doing this week. All right. Uh, I guess we're, we're, heading over to Pat. Hello, my name is Pat. Yeah, we covered a number of mutual. We covered most of what I was actually going to talk about because this was like a week of like very surprising overlap. The only thing I can really think of that is not is I played Welcome to Elderfield. Okay. Which is the spooky Stardue Valley. Oh. That's that's not about the depression girl. No, it's a different spooky Star do valley.

Well, let me get a Steam link for you. And what an incredibly charming game. What an absolutely fascinating, charming game. So the first thing that I did not realize, turn-based battles for its battle system instead of like a top-down little Zelda thing. The other thing that I did not realize is that, like, its primary inspiration is obviously Starter Valley.

its other primary inspiration is fear and hunger. Oh. Can. In what way? Well, it's significantly darker than it actually leads you to believe from even the store page. And one of the first things that happened is I went to bed and it rolled a dice for bad offense. Yeah, that's a fungerism. and then when I went out

into a random battle I was I was tilling the fields as you do in Stardu and I hit I wanted to clear a rock and I got in a random battle with like an evil goddamn jackal lantern and it killed my ass which caused me to run all the way home

and like displace me from my game like it doesn't game over you but it does like move your character in advance time it has a bunch of like little mysteries which are like dice rolls for like very good or very bad events. After I had played for a couple of days,

um, the, the town was enshrined in evil tax fog. And then I went to the farm and discovered the taxman, which is this gigantic Eldridge beast with like a big note pad saying that I owe back taxes on the farm. How much of this? And then if,

how much of this is background to your farming tasks or foreground to it? So the interesting thing is that in the, I played it for four or five hours. I actually did very few farming tasks. Ah, okay. Like, I, I cleared out, like, six or seven spots of gravel and then, like, planted some trees, planted some weeds and watered them. And that represents, like, 5% of what you do on a given day. I then explored around. I checked out the dungeon underneath the town.

I checked out the evil mall that's 2,000 years old. I tried to learn how to do fishing. I tried to check in on cults and do a side quest for a guy who wanted me to build a wife out of a coat rack. Oh, this is like this character is dressed very modern. I was not expecting that for what you're describing. Welcome to Elderfield. And she's got overhauls in a pat and a home. You check the television in the morning.

And in the morning, the television tells you about a spooky thing happening around town that opens up, like a side quest. It's super, super cool. The soundtrack is like pervasive and ugly and grimy. It sounds kind of like a silent hill, Fear and Hunger kind of thing. It's just super charming. Like it's super, super, super cool.

There's a bit of a Tim Burtonism going on with some of the designs and how everyone has deep mascara or like dark eye outlines. Yeah. Almost chrome-like. It's an, it's an RPG, G maker game like Hunger or like Funger or like look outside or that stuff

and it is just super slick and super cool and super weird Yeah, ginger into stuff. Like at the very beginning of the game they're like hey the farm next door is looking for work because it's not your farm right so you go next door and you walk in

and the reason why the farm looks for is looking for farm hands is because the owner of the farm had really itchy skin so he tore off all his skin to become a skeleton but for some reason that caused him to grow and so now he is a outlandishly sized skeleton who is jammed between the ceiling

and the floor of like the corner of his staircase and can't get out and it's like can you handle the farm because I'm stuck here I can't fucking move anymore. Interesting right like it's it's super super super cool okay very spooky very awesome. By the way, speaking of spooky, my wife brought this up a few days

ago, and I have been watching it progress. So if you're not familiar guys, Paige has gotten the idea in her head. Nope. That when she passes. We're not. Uttering it into

microphone is giving it more power. Oh, you want to talk about more power? Let's wait for this. We are not. Paige wants to be melted down into a big diamond. And then she wants the diamond cursed by Etsy witches and then mailed to one Woolly Madden. And that, Wully, steps have been taken. Like, that diamond will be delivered.

Solicitor. Solicitor has been contacted about feasibility. that like human human melting diamonds operations have been researched that diamond will be delivered

to an empty house and also if I see fogg is in the street I'm kicking him and I'm running the other way I don't know if it'll get that far

but like it's got it's already gone significantly farther than I thought the joke would I am kicking a motherfucker in the shin and running. There is a possibility that this podcast will start one day with me bawling my eyes out as I

explain to you that my wife is gone and then you hear a knock on your door. Like, it's not inconceivable that this actually comes to pass. If you save that, that balling for when the live button goes on, go fuck yourself. How about that? I'm a strong man and I know, I know how to work the crowd. I'm just going to hold it back. Oh, God. So the only thing up, up now is what form of curse she wants placed on the diamond.

She hasn't decided. Get your fucking return the slab-ass white woman bullshit. Out of my fucking property forever. Gone. House is done. Abandoned. Forfeit. I will pick up and restart elsewhere.

we will get in the car and just start driving. You're gonna want the diamond in your house so that you know I didn't sneak it into your food. Okay. It's better for it to be, it's better for the cursed white woman diamond to be placed in your home than inside your body. I will not look at it. I will not touch it. I will not breathe its air.

Anyway, well, that's what's up. That's what's up with that. I played I played I played elder field hold on let's show what else I do

I beat Onamusha which is incredible oh I I played and beat Blood of the Dawn Walker Oh on stream okay

yeah how was that I started Blood of the Dawn Walker and I beat it in five hours um just rushed it

just rushed it it super fast and hard and just beat it and got the got the ending um So the thing is, the game has a secret ending where you just leave. Your family gets kidnapped by vampires and your character goes to the edge of the map and just goes, I don't care.

Wow. And just walks away. Wow. I joke about that from time to time in games, but actually just letting you do it. So of specific note and apologies to anybody watching my show at the time, it is a real ending. It gets you the achievement for beating the game, and then it shows you the post-credit scene. It shows you the sequel set up in the post-credit.

Which is the same? No, it's the main character in modern day. Still doing vampire stuff. Okay. So Blood of the Dawn Walker is the long story short. It's made by X CD Project Deves who worked on Witcher 1, 2, and 3. And boy, you can feel it.

You can fucking feel this was made by people who worked on Witcher 1 and 2, bro. I mean, I imagine more Witcher than Cyberpunk. Yeah, you can feel the Poland. You can taste the Poland in there. It is a very, very, very interesting game. It's an open world RPG, very similar to Witcher 3. but its main conceit is that you are given 30 days to rescue your kidnapped family.

You're the vampire shithead that's invaded your family and taken over the government, wants to eat your family during a big coronation event. So you have like a 30-day timer before the coronation. And every single thing in the game takes time. Time does not progress with you standing still and like the moon, the sun going across the sky. time progresses when you level up clear a bandit camp

do a quest open up a buried treasure and walking around and exploring doesn't do it but engaging in things moves the timer forward like a way disco does

like when you talk to people in disco and it moves at the timer I would say funger 2 right and Funger 2 interacting with things or saving is what moves time forward I don't know if I like that So here's the thing You know me and you know my completionist's

Like brain stuff I already knew that I'd be like But we play persona games And those actually work on time Yeah yeah there's clearly defined time to go to bed moments That I think help there But like you pick an accident And

So the core of it is that, you know, you start the game and what you, the very, the prologue is like a little microcosm of the whole game, right? And in the prolog, your quest is, hey, your mom's not feeling well. You need to go get moms some medicine. Right. And, uh, you have eight time slots to do it. But it's time limited. You need to do it before midnight, right? And I walk out the door and there are five quest exclamation points on my mini map. And I already can tell from just a glance, oh, I can not. So I'm like, okay, I'll do the first one, which is I'll help my family go down to the river and fish. Right. So I'm going down to the river with my family. And when you click on the quest to do it, it has one hourglass. So it tells you, hey, it'll be one time. And on the way there, my little brother and my little sister are being little shitheads.

And they're like, wait, I want to go to the fish. And like, and your older sister head says, can you fucking deal with it? with them and you get two options. One is play tag with the kids to calm them down. One hourglass. And the other is yell at them to shut up. And I picked,

shut up and listen to your sister. Right. Yeah, no hourglass. No time on that one. Shut up and listen to your sister. We don't have time. We don't have the patience for this. And they go, okay. And like, I have already made a role playing decision

based on the. clock even though I have never spent any clock time yet. That's good. Yeah, okay. Right. So I was just realizing as I said, oh, funger two, I was like, oh, man, I remember hating that. And I was like, wait, no.

If you tell me it's going to take time and say, hey, it'll take time. You have the option. Then I'm good, right? But that game is based on ambushing you with moments where you didn't know it was going to take time, which is what led to me disliking those parts. So then I, you know, I do the fishing quest. and then a guard comes and hassles my shit and basically explains that they know my dad's planning a rebellion against the vampires, right? Then I go to get, then I'm like, oh, I don't want to run out of time for my mom's medicine.

So I go see Anka, the village lady who has, you know, the medicine. And I get to that. Okay, sure enough, one pip of quest. Okay, one time. Okay. She talks to me about my mom. We flirt a little bit, yada, yada, yada. And then she tells me how to fix my mom's medicine.

and then yada yada and then she goes hey do you want to stay a little later and we can read some books together and there's kind of like a little you know like oh there's some tension there and then the the dialogue choice of stay and read books with her it has the icon one hourglass becomes two hourglasses interesting and so I'm like okay I'll stay and we'll do the you are you're choosing we'll start we'll start the little romance thing and we'll teach Latin. And in that process, the tree falls over and breaks her house and you have to save all of her herbs. And I immediately clock, oh, if I hadn't stayed here and spent the extra time, there would have been the outcome of her not having these in the future. So then, okay, fine.

We did the two hours. Okay, I'm going to go back. I'm now three hours in to an eight-hour timer already. I've done one quest, right? I'm on the way back to my mom's house There's a guy Outside your house Screaming that your mom is like mentally disabled

And when you go Yo what he goes what You need to help mop up or drool And runs away Okay So I chase him down and beat his ass One hour Another hour goes by

So then So then I go into the house and I talk to dad and I say, hey, dad, here's the medicine. And he goes, how do you, how do you prepare it? And the game goes, okay, well, I hope you fucking actually paid attention to when she told you how to prepare this medicine because it's going to ask you what temperature water and how many spoonfuls you're supposed to grind up into this shit. And I'm like, fuck, I wasn't paying attention at all, dude.

I was like, I was like, listen to it. Right? And so you do that. And then your dad asks you to come talk. and in the ensuing conversation, you have dialogue based on the fact that the guard told me they knew about the incoming rebellion that I wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't have done the fishing quest. And then that takes up two hours.

Interesting. And then I have four, then extra quests showed up on my map. So now I'm back up to five with one hour to go. This is just the stress of my everyday life. I can't like, hold on, hold on, hold on. We don't need to gamify this shit.

Hold on. And then, And then I went and took out a bandit camp and then it just immediately kicked me to the final thing. And it gave me like the midnight mass kind of story mandated thing. And in the midnight mass story mandated thing, I walk in there and there's immediately an old woman hung from the rafters. And I'm like, oh my God, that's the lady in the middle of town whose quest I did not do to help her get out of trouble. So like the game is offering you a hundred. different things and saying you

will fail some of these quests. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You will fail these. Can't save everybody. You must choose what you value. And on top of that, you get the mask, the Majora's mask. Rebellion goes

down and there's a whole thing and I get injured and we're trying to, you know, the vampires take everybody out and I'm trying to find my dad in the mines and there's a guy horribly dying underneath a pillar and it goes, do you want to try and save him one hourglass

while you're trying to save your dad and I'm like fuck so I saved him and then he died anyway and I got nothing out of it other than missing an hour and I was fuck so then you find another survivor and you go okay okay

okay we're gonna save this guy and you're giving a bunch of dialogue to like help staunch the flow of blood on his leg and that kind of thing and Cohen your main character starts to freak out because he has been turned into a vampire off camera. And this is when the game's most interesting mechanic comes in. There's the time mechanic.

And then there is, if you are at 50% or less health, the hunger starts taking over your dialogue prompts. So you're a vampire. And if you're at low health, dialogue prompts will go from, hey, are you okay? and it will flicker into feed the hunger and then flicker away. And the lower your health is, the faster it'll do it. Wow. Okay. And the longer it'll stay. Dark urge.

So you are actually, you're losing control of your ability to make your own decisions. Cool, cool. Dark urge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're low enough, you will just attack the first NPC you talk to. Like if your health is low enough, the options just lock in at give in to the hunger. Interesting. And your only option is to eat them, no matter who it happens to be. Okay, so you're described, it's almost like a way of the samurai type setup where you can redo it with better information, perhaps, and see a different outcome. The game also has, like, once you get out into the world, also has an infamy system, which is basically it gives you this big chart of like all the vampire lords and their infrastructure.

And as you take them down, you will get buffs and, you know, abilities and merchants and stuff like that. But you also increase your level of infamy. And at higher levels of infamy, guards will recognize you on site or there'll be a curfew. Or characters will start to recognize you on site. Like I was scrolling through TikTok and saw a guy break down that like one of the vampire lieutenants is like holding a fighting tournament. and when you win, you take your mask off. And if you did this first, he's like, I don't know who you are. You look kind of familiar, but whatever.

And then the quest goes off without a hitch. But if you've been playing the game for a while and you're infamous, you take the mask off. And he goes, oh, it's you. And you get into the boss fight right then and there. It is so interesting. It is so, so, so, so interesting. It's also jank. The combat is jank.

And the game runs okay. And I know there's some quests that are like significantly bugged. But it's, it's very Polish. It's very ambitious. It's very cool. So is it like a small environment that has just like multiple layers baked over it? No, no. It's like a fairly large open space.

Okay, okay. But time is still applying all these variables. Because usually you concede one or the other, you know? So you have seven days. So you have 30 days. And to leave the prologue, you need to, like, you have to push out the rubble from like the front door of the village. And it's, and it just says it takes seven hours. And you're like, are you fucking kidding me?

Like you, you don't even get out of the first day of the 30 day timer without wasting a full half day entering the real game. Okay. Okay. Okay. So it sets up that like, yeah, oh, leveling this up will take one or doing this quest will take one or maybe doing this will take two. But this fucking thing, full day. Like you have no idea how, like before you get the things, you don't know how long they're going to take. And you can always back off, but like it's fascinating. It's so fascinating.

I would love to know if there's a like, okay, a perfect run, you know, or if there's any sort of like, you know, or if there's any sort of like, no it's just yeah like or so I was curious and I looked up the prologue guide and you can get you can get six quests done I got two wow like if you just go to them all in like the

right order you can get but you still can't get them all you can't get them all it's just not possible there are too many quests that have mutually exclusive countdown timers on them. And the fact that your character also has to be a certain level of strength.

Now, also, to the game's massive props, they have you fight the vampire lord Brencis in the tutorial. And it's a real fight. Okay. And if you beat him, you skip the entire game and fight the final boss at level one. And if you beat him, you win. You win the game for real. it just yeah okay okay sure in addition the game has the the leave ending and it also has a bunch of endings where your character is like i have decided to beat the game now like you could walk into the big bad's castle as soon as possible and destroy ganon if you felt like it and there is dialogue for every character going did you really just come all the way here immediate, like really, you're going to die. You know that, right? But you can do it if you're just super fucking good at the combat. That's really cool. That's really interesting. Yeah. So, and on top of that, I guess, I was joking earlier, but there's no song of time for your perfect, like, no, you can solve all the problems and save everybody. No, no. The game is built around, hey, maybe you'll actually want to replay this game because there's a bunch of stuff you can't see. Okay.

Right. Interesting. Maybe there is a perfect run in the same way that a persona game has a max social link guide that requires just idealized perfect routing. But like that's not how you're supposed to and it's not like the intended thing. They want you to make mistakes. They want you to fail quest. They want quest to just not happen. It is optimal to yell at the child.

It is it is optimal to scream at them. and instill the fear. I was scrolling through TikTok again, and I saw a gentleman getting mad that a main character died. The love interest died. And the reason why the love interest died is because they were exploring a cave. And she said, come back for me soon, but I'm scared. Can you please make sure it's safe?

And if you don't examine the two or three rooms to the left and right of her before going forward, there are monsters in those. And as soon as you leave line of sight, they come out and kill her. And that is a major, major NPC that is just cooked because you just didn't decide to pay attention. So you said it's about six hours to get to do a run? No, it's it's about five hours to leave the valley and be a big pussy. The main game is apparently between 30 and 50 depending. Oh, okay.

Oh, like it's a, it's a big boy game, but there's also the I'm out of here. But every, and every choice and variation is going through this system for the course of 30 hours? Yeah. Jesus. Oh, man. Okay. So I, so I, so let me tell you, I left the prolog and I was in the night of the first day. So I've already blown the full first day, right?

And then I'm like, well, I'll climb the tower to get the points of interest. one hour. Then as I'm wandering around, I found some little flashing lights that led me to a treasure chest. Looting the chest, one hour. Then I got no fight of the bandit camp. One hour. Then I tried to, like, by the time I even reached the secret, like, leave ending, I had already wasted a full half night just traveling and doing that stuff. I didn't do a quest. Yeah, yeah. No. I didn't even interact with something. Because even with the knowledge that like you're gonna fuck up and not be able to save everybody or do everything ideally, most of the time a game will give you, um, it'll, it'll give you an out by, by basically making it like, well, the game will be loopable

and you'll get another shot at this in a little bit. But like, it won't ask you to commit that much time to it. But if you're telling me, it's 30, it's a big boy game, like big boy hours. Yeah, it's a whole, yeah, it's a big boy game. No, they, they, then you, you got to hold your fuckups for the whole run and just they want you to so in which are one so i i can see the exact like you know when you can see that the person responsible for a is responsible for b even many years later in which are one there is a quest where uh some shithead asked you to guard some some some packages outside his house so you do so from monsters and then a bunch of squietel which is the elven and dwarven supremacist

rebellion comes around and goes, hey, those packages are weapons for us. And you go, well, that guy didn't tell me that. All I know is he told me to protect it. And so you can either let them have it or you can fight them off, right? In Witcher 1, engaging with that quest at all causes a negative

reaction along one of those two lines. either one character will get killed in a terror attack by the guys you gave the weapons to or the Squoietel will hate you later when you run into them in a mandatory story thing. It was part of a thing where Witchers are supposed to be neutral. So the game says by taking this quest at all, you failed your neutrality and the world will like bite back on you. Right, right, right. Okay. So that only happens three or four times in which are one. But I can see that someone who worked on that game was like,

I want to make a whole game out of this. I want to make a whole game that it is impossible to always make the right decision. It's impossible to even make every decision. There are decisions unmade by just not interacting with it. And in many cases, I imagine like a dispatch style telltale game would put that up at the front and at the forefront, but it wouldn't have a full like proper, like whatever, full exploration game alongside that, you know, that's, that's really ambitious. That's crazy. Wow. Impressive. It's, it's super ambitious. I'm going to wait a little bit to see them

clean it up a little bit, a bit more. Like I keep asking, like, where's the shortcut? Where is the, where is the compromise in this approach? You know, there has to be some somewhere. And, I'm sure there is. But it's one of those things like, okay, you know, I'm sure that there's a situation where, hey, I want to get into the city. Oh, well, you have to spend X amount of time questing to get the money to bribe a guard. And that means it's eight hours to figure out how to get into the city. And I'm sure then that there's actually a secret way to climb in that you can use that takes zero hours, right? But learning that 80% through the game is also its own value.

And where you're like, wait, I could have just walked in through this scaffolding, or you know, whatever the fuck happens. Which is why it's crazy. I'm seeing there's no new game plus. And I'm like, well, surely people want to see the outcomes. Within an hour of the game's release, the Nexus had a mod to extend the time to 90 days. Okay. Yeah. because people are cowards, because people can't take it as it is. Well, it's more, no, no, if you just want to make it, like, if you want to extend the time to do more and have that stuff, like, all come out safer, I, yeah, I get the problem there. If it's, I want to do it again because I want to see more of what this game has to offer, then that's fair. But allow a new game plus at that point.

The other thing is that the game offered, like, a very wide variety of people. that I could attempt to attack and kill at my limb at my leisure. So you only turn into a vampire at night. But if you are a vampire and your health is low, it appears that every single NPC you can have dialogue is at threat for you going nuts

and eating them. Which is fucking nuts as something to deal with in the story. Because what the game offers you very quickly is dialogue with character after getting into fights. Like you finish the fight and as soon as you finish the fight

you go right into dialogue with a character which means if you had a hard fight you are way more likely to be out of control of your character's actions which means that when I play it again I'm going to kick the fucking difficulty up because I want that to be a threat

I want to beat a boss And then Uh oh I ate my love interest Because I didn't beat the boss good enough I uh I do think though that like You know we having this discussion with Undertale and Toby Fox games where you're like You want to see the neutral route

You want to see the pacifist route You want to see the the The genocide route You want to see the content that the game has to offer I would like I think that It makes sense for a game game to design a thing that like commits you to your to your choices but at the same time once you

are committed to that path and finish that path you know you can see what else the game has to offer there's a there's a very prophetic tweet by toby fox right before undertale came out that is a massive shot call and good on toby because he did it where toby posted hey my game Undertale is going to come out. You should probably play it right away before it gets really popular and people ruin it. And

he's completely right. People have absolutely ruined the reality of playing through Undertale. You are not supposed to do the perfect pacifists available run of Undertale your first time through. You are supposed to make mistakes

playing Undertale. And then the game is supposed to point at you for those mistakes. and go got you. Yep. Yep. And then the second time through, you go, oh, I've learned from those mistakes. Okay, cool. And then the curiosity gets the better of you. And you go, well, what if I fuck it all up? Right. What if I return to the site and destroy everything because I need to know? And that's a great, that's a great proposition. I think that's why Delta Rune is releasing in the way that it is and Delta Rune is getting patched the way that it is. It has been, so every time a new chapter of Delta Rune comes out, the criteria that people put together of what. may or may not be the perfect route changes, and it has become extraordinarily complex and requires you replaying the chapters over and over and over and over again to the point where for the average person, and even the average fan, it is infeasible and stupid to try and get the perfect run of Delta Rune the first time through. Or just guess your way through it by sparing everything or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it feels very, very, very important that, like, like,

Like, no, it's fine to play the fucking game, dude. You don't have to go find every egg. You don't have to get every, you don't have to everyone get the Star Walker on every single fucking thing. See, because the problem is when you feel generally, we were, games have introduced the concept of the perfect engine as the true ending, you know. So the feeling that you're doing it wrong until you get that has like basically. There is a threat about this.

Oh, yeah. Because it just, on the subreddit. It creates, we have habits as, as people. that play video games that have like been we're expecting something to fit into the archetype of what comes before yeah so true ending is correct and every and the others are not at smt um s mt three nocturn right um it has like as a bunch of characters arguing about philosophy and each of them has a given ending and they they're all very interesting except for the fact that smt nocturn uh how also has the true demon ending which has extra content extra levels and more bossy

and is the ending that other games treat as canon? Sure. So... Neutral path in... So all those other endings are by default devalued in there. Interesting. Yeah, no. In SMT4, literally you do not get the final dungeon if you don't take the neutral path.

You just don't see the content. Yeah. It is clear that this is where you're expecting, you know, things to go. And then similarly with five, right? Same kind of thing. Like there is a way that your choices lead to more content to a bigger bad and a truer evil. And if you don't pick these paths, then you roll credits way beforehand. Thus, you're not, it makes complete sense to think, oh, I did it wrong.

This was the real pathway. But if you're trying to get a point across that, like, actually, no, those choices are not inferior. They're simply different. You've got to explain that or at the very least make that known. I don't think games should mix different endings and better and worse endings. I think that's a way to make it suck horrible. Like, I don't think games should have like, well, this is the ending where this happened and this ending where this happened.

But also there's the bad ending and the good one. I think that makes all the alternates terrible. I think persona four is the best one because there is a dog shit loser ending, a pretty good ending and a great ending. There's not like, oh, I wonder what happens over here, I wonder what happens over here. Like those endings don't matter when there's a best ending that requires the most stuff at the end of it.

I'm thinking about how I feel with these moments and I think I don't mind playing around with getting an early ending or a bad end. and different outcomes as long as I have the ability to go in my save and you know change that up, swerve it, point of no return, etc. Right? Like, like, Sechiro has those moments where you kind of have like,

okay, do you want to just hit credits right now? Oh, man. Right? The Sechro shit was so ass. And it's like, I hope you loaded your save up onto the fucking cloud and pulled it back down in order to enjoy your. game here. Otherwise, fuck your whole save file. I hate that shit.

I think Don Walker is really cool in that respect because Don Walker has vast endings and it has endings that like, I am going to guess this. This is, I don't know. The vampire lord

you deal with is evil, but he's the most lawful, evil character I think I've ever seen. He's horrible and cruel and murderous, but he's also weirdly fair. Okay. So I bet there's a let's make a deal ending in that game that just cuts the game short once you unlock it. Yeah.

Right. And that makes sense, actually. That would make sense. Like, this is an interesting topic because I'm just like going off my gut. I'm, I just, I feel like getting ambushed by an ending I didn't see coming is, it's not a problem if I feel like it's almost like a, uh, uh, uh, uh, It's like a creative choice in a moment of dialogue, but you know that you're not auto-saving fuck you start again afterwards. Yeah, I think Disco Elysium has one of the best alternate endings where if you get a gun, you just go, I'm going to fucking do it. Do it, you whore, right?

Or release me, you know, set me free. So I want to, there's one detail about Don Walker that I need to tell you because the villain is so fascinating. It bears mentioning that this is one of the most interesting vampire villains I've ever seen. So, vampires take over your valley and all the local government and then they rule it and they seal the valley off. So you're trapped, right? And they go, we're, we are the ruling class now. You're all cattle, right? Bad.

And here's the deal. They offer up their vampire blood to you freely. which cures all diseases. Everyone in the valley was dying of the bubonic plague and they offer up their blood freely and cure all disease. They eliminate all taxes. There is no tax. Vampire politics.

Ooh. Right? They've eliminated all work for the state. Sure, sure, sure. food the provided no you everyone's still farming their own but they're farming their own for themselves because the vampires

don't need food themselves right okay so no taxes free miraculous health care like they save your sister's life in the intro from the plague incredible and there's no working for the state right so it that's a really good deal but you're trapped in the valley but it's the whole valley the only thing they ask

is every full moon, they take one pint of blood per person as a tithe. Okay. If you communize the blood situation, we don't have to kill a person because we can take a little bit from everybody. Okay. Okay. So it is, it is a tax, but it is a one pint of blood a month. Right. Right. Okay. Which is like, oh, like, they're explaining this and I'm like, wait a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait a second. Now, this actually has like, now, like a lot of value, like a lot. Now, hold on. What is the cost of putting the vampire blood into yourself?

Nothing. It just heals you and rejuvenates. You don't become a subservient. No. You don't have any. The way they turn you is they have to put a piece of their body inside you. So the blood is just miracle super healing. And they, so they, what they do is they slash, they slash you,

to get the pint from you, right? And then they offer you some of their blood so that you heal up and your blood regenerates. So you're fine. You're not a ghoul. You don't, you don't. No, no, no. There's no like long-term problem at all. Okay?

Jet packs? What's that? Yeah. Yeah. The downside is that when people become too weak or too old, or rebel in any way murder everybody. That's the only solution they have available. But there's something that happens in the game's intro that really, like, shocked me genuinely.

Cohen's mom is having trouble. Cohen's mom is like a fragile lady and she's suffering from like a nervous breakdown over the blood stuff. So she freaks the fuck out when they get the pint of blood for her. And Cohen and his dad are trying to calm her. and Brancis like pushes her down like two steps and calls her weak and says maybe next time we'll have to kill her, right? Cohen freaks out and calls him some names and calls him a monster and goes, how dare you? And vampire lord Brancis says, hey, you call me that again and I'll show you. And then lets you leave.

Like he lets it go. And I'm like, this is actually. you like this is you should have started with this part by the way this is the most interesting thing about this game you've said that like the villains are lawful lawful

lawful lawful evil like huh and okay and you guys are and they offer you like very legitimate benefits to be on 1349 Romania yeah yeah and like they're they've already taken over

there is no fighting back you're in the system. It's just do you die fighting against it or do you accept it for a better life? Yeah. And it's like, so as a result of the little rebellion, they kill every single person in your village and they take your family to eat them. But the

problem is, and this is like the real like Cohen even brings it up. If we hadn't have done anything, we'd all be fine though, actually. Like it's scary and these are guys or monsters, but like Cohen, like, freaks out at the guy who organized the rebellion because he's

like, you cause this to happen. And it's like, yes, but also no, Brents just did. This is fucking fascinating because it gets at a core concept, which is really interesting to discuss, which is the cost of freedom. What is it actually worth? And is someone wrong for desiring that freedom above all else, including the cleanest, safest, most cushy ride, right? So the cushiest possible jail cell in the world or freedom. In the introduction of the game, the very first thing that Brancis does is kill the local noble that runs the area, the valley that you live in, because he is trying to exterminate your sister for having the plague and then kill you for talking back.

And Brancis saves you, takes out the nobility, heals your sister from death, and lets you go. And you're like, they actively helped you. Like, like, like they,

like they, they 100% saved your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now what? Now what? And then they go,

well, now that I've done all this, all I want is my blood, is my blood tax and for you not to try and kill me. What is freedom worth? What is it actually worth? And like, and like,

he turns you, he turns you into a vampire for kicks because you called him a monster and he is an asshole. But like, like they do, like it's, it's the lawfulest evil I've ever seen in anything. Because it,

because it's so interesting. Because the struggle of the power of, like, you know, the classic thing of like, you're a vampire. you get all these benefits, but here's the downside, right? Loss of your humanity, loss of your ability to, all these things.

And there's, there's a lot, there's a lot of literature out there that addresses that and talks about those things. This proposition, though, this is fucking interesting. And this is the first time I've heard of anything like that and makes me immensely curious. Wow. So one of the things that's, that's really interesting to me is, is that what you, you're yelling at a guy, once you've turned into a vampire, you're yelling at a guy to get out of his house because it's burning down

and he brings up that you can't go in there and get him because he hasn't invited you in and if we're if we're going with vampires that are on like the logic of you need to invite them in or else they just can't the lawful vampire thing makes more sense

like they are physically bound by like social rules like they they may not. They can burn your fucking house down with you inside it, but they can't enter. And so as a result, they still maintain the guard and they even have a special like subdivision of like little monster guys that look like Sators. Sorry, big monster guys that look like Sators to run things during the day. And you get a hold of them and go, why do you work with the vampires? They're so evil. And he goes, Have you ever seen any of my people before? And Cohen goes, no. He's like, yeah, because we're scared

of humans because we live in the mountains and every time we come down you kill us but not anymore now that we work for the vampires we have positions of authority and we can just live and we're not afraid of you people anymore we're genociding us and it's like

that guy has a really good reason to work with the vampires oh man wow libertarians are getting devoured you're getting fucking spit roasted on that shit that's interesting that's really interesting

I that you should have I want to know more about that playing out you know yeah it's so the the the the the first four five hours is like a microcosm of what appears to be the

whole game so like the prolog is super super super slick very cool game I am going to wait to play it either myself or on stream for a while it's it's it's got some fucking jank to to smooth out okay okay

Poland Poland is it Hold on is it falling apart or is it just No no it's not it is not falling apart But it could it could That's why it could use some smoothing out It'll probably be a little bit more smoothed out In a couple of months Not like usually sometimes I'd say a couple of years

No like a couple of months like it's if you could totally play it right now and have like a great time I just like I have a lot on my fucking plate right now Vampire Socialism Who's signing up? It's so cool

So like you hear me describe that I am absolutely certain There is a deal you can make to save your family But I'll work with you And I'll just keep the status quo going Like I am absolutely certain Cool Okay

It's a character, it's a villain that I would actually believe if they offered me a deal. Yeah. Right? Like if they offered me a deal, I would be like, you probably mean that deal. Again, we talked about fucking just straight, pure, absolute evil and then convincing evil. And now we're going back to the realm of convincing evil.

Yeah. Fun, fun to think about it. We have not a lot of time to get through a lot of things. That's right. What do you have? Okay. Nintendo Direct. Oh my God.

The fucking Nintendo Direct was this week. That's what I'm talking about. We got to move. Okay. Okarina time looks weird. Wet. Looks wet. Sure. Jump button.

Moving on. Sure. We'll see. Samis is hungry. Hold on. And also I saw someone, I don't know if this is confirmed or not, but the models were a choice to make it look like puppets, like Japanese puppets. Yeah, makes sense, but that's not confirmed. And also, if they wanted them to look like. like puppets, I need them to look like puppets

from like an old Santa Claus movie. Not like... Your Pinocchio type... Yeah, I want Pinocchio or like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer or shit. It's a big swing for a classic that you know, everybody wants to look perfectly. But we talked about Zella last week. We did that like...

This hungry, hungry girl needs to eat. No, wait, we talked about that last week too. No, we talked about that in FF14. Oh my God, it's so confusing. But yes, the ravenous... ravenous girl got to eat girl dinner Metroid Sam is hungry so I don't know if you guys know this but girls

when they get hungry they get mean they get mean when they're hungry you have to feed them you have to feed women Metroid is fed it's important um that trailer is the it is it is the dream of everything I could ever possibly want for a set for a Metroid game it is yeah absolutely 100% it is uh great suits amazing upgrades super interesting villains that look like We keep the Metroid suit Man, the suit, take it to the

I never thought for a second Not only keep it, actually get to use it As opposed to just end off the last game with it, right? Make it a real thing Fucking rider kicks Just in case you weren't in enough We're gonna close the show out on a goddamn rider kick Exploding into high contrast

I mean fuck me And then just yeah the 2D gameplay, the actual mechanic of these, the enemies you're fighting, the absorption, the fact that she pulls the arm out and it's like you see the, the creature get scared of how hungry Sam this is. I just, I'm like, this is absolute perfection. I fucking love everything about that. Cannot wait. Most excited I've been for a Nintendo game, fucking forever. It looks super sick, dude. It looks super sick. I also, I'm kind of blown away. I I would not, if you asked me, I would not have thought that Metroid Dread was five years ago, but it was.

Yeah, that's, so, hey, perceived time. Yep. Things, I was like, I was talking about Silent Hill, uh, townfall because it's coming out soon. And like, I, I find it unbelievable that Silent Hill F was like one year ago. Like, I feel like that, that, that was either 10 years ago or it just happened. Um, I also like that, like, the new suit we, see right away. I'm like, no notes looks great. Right? I also because there are, I will say that I, like, every once in a while we'll hit a Samis suit or I'm like,

eh, um, that shit's clean. It's, um, it's starting to make sense when I was a kid and I'd be like, dad, the fucking game's coming out in two years that's so far away. And he'd be like, whatever. Yeah, man. Just wait. Like, it makes a lot more sense to me now.

I saw, I went to Dread. I saw 2021 and just fucking went, oh, how is that possible? You know? But yes, this is perfect. And as someone who I like Prime, but it has its flaws and things that I don't love about it. I think Dread's way better than any of the Prime. It's the return to form. It's to me, it's the purest form.

It's just, it's the exactly side view version. And I say that as a guy who doesn't like Supervictory. That much, exactly, right? Like Dread's just that good. Um, yeah, we are no longer afraid of Sammas talking. We're no longer afraid of her, of her dialogue. She can have a personality. She can be a person.

She can narrate her own story. Lean into it. Let's go. Right. No, no more holding back on that. And, um, other M kind of fucked that up for a really long time. And sure. And we're back.

We're past it. Great. Uh, I'm, I'm super excited for that. The other thing they shot, they showed off obviously is, Kirby destroying the Truman show. Super cool concept. Super cool concept. Because Kirby is like uniquely unprepared to deal with this level of tomfoolery. But all, right?

Like, but he's always ready for an Eldridge beyond the veil, you know? Sure, but he's a cute guy. Why is anybody trying to trick my cute guy here? More to it, even when Kirby went 3D, they always limited how far they wanted to go with the full 3D scope. Yeah. right? And, you know, world, like, forgotten, like, basically, like, you got little peaks, like, little peaks of it in controlled smaller areas that are full 3D, and this is, like, the full-on third-person adventure. So it looks cool. Can't wait to see what we do with that. I hope they absolutely lean into as much of that reality-shattering Eldridge nonsense as they

usually do. They, they're aware of the fact that Kirby needs to cover two, grounds here and there is a fandom that wants it to always be a bit unnerving and creepy. Hunger. Nintendo is entering the age of hunger. The Hongry age. Got to get that hungry. Dogs are hungry. Yeah, time to blow the dust off that switch too and get it going.

I'm excited for that. This week also, BlizzCon announced a bunch of shit. Seems like Blizzard kind of came out to be like, hey, please invest. It's a bit of a like, we're doing everything that you know us for. So, please invest. So, Blizzard did, I think I have a gut, I have my gut feeling is that you're right, is that this is a please invest. I think I know why that is. So a couple weeks ago, I don't know if you notice, but Blizzard fully unionized.

Like 100% ratified the whole company union, which means Microsoft can no. longer threaten them with layoffs. Yeah. Because then they would have a strike. Yes, there was a full exactly. There was a, that went through after years of fighting for it, they finally got it. And it's Which means that if

they announced. I believe that negotiating a deal was the last step in like making it de facto a recognized union and they and they did negotiate the deal. So, now that layoffs are no longer a threat, they

an offer to Blizzard. Blizzard does what? They make a bunch of new fucking announcements that are long term so that either if Microsoft wants to do something to them they have to cancel them or if they get sold off then Blizzard has well by the way

in a couple of years we got the StarCraft game coming. 20. 30. StarCraft Open World Shooter, Mick Gordon on the music. Yeah, that's pretty hot. That's powerful shit. That trailer is pretty good. That's a great trailer.

Opening up a Terran Space Marines helmet and just goo coming out. And it's the it's about time kind of angle. You know? That level of like yeah, we're getting in there. And rinse. Yeah. With Mick Gordon on the ones and twos. Yes, if you didn't see it, Mick Gordon tweeted out the trailer.

You know, and just basically that was the sign you needed. Go back and listen to the music. music that's playing in the Starcraft trailer. To announce too early, too far away, but I think it's for economic and company reasons. A million percent. I think that's what they're doing. And it's very clear that like they know the buttons to press that everybody wants to be pressed, right? Well, I have a button to press. They said, hey, by the way, we are putting out a new Warcraft 3 expansion in the year of our Lord 2026 and we're putting it out 10 minutes ago.

How about? Do you guys like Warcraft 3? To which people said, yeah, I really like Warcraft 3. That was the peak of your company. Your company was, I was never more in love with the Blizzard logo than when I was playing Warcraft 3. The polar opposite of 2XCO, they went to dead game Heroes of the Storm and added a new character to it. Yes, which has now, by the way, I don't know if you, you saw this, the 2XCO subreddit has been poisoned. Oh yeah. Poisoned by this news.

It's the, like, it's the most, it's the whole most horrendous, like, fucking. It's the worst thing that can ever happen to 2XCO. Yeah. The dead game came back and added more content. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you either give some hopium to people that, that didn't know they had any left, or you just make it, you pour salt in the wound.

Uh, they also, they also, with the new expansion, there's a, so, remember they did Warcraft 3 reforged and everybody Warcraft 3 reforged and everybody hated how it looked the new expansion has the new definitive graphics which is the one it should have always had and I think they're going to backport it to the other versions of the game so they're doing the thing that everybody wanted them to do and then giving you a wow expansion

or a Worldcraft 3 expansion on top of it like that's a win that the Warcraft 3 thing is just like a solid way apparently the expansion is great I've spoke to some people who were playing yesterday. Apparently it's fantastic. So that got announced and then World of Warcraft Forever got announced.

World of Warcraft Forever is like the most interesting thing Plissard has done in like 10 years. So I'm, this is something where I'm like, again, completely don't know the deal, but like what I got from this is it is a recreation of your zero to 60 experience. I'm going to have to. run you through a history lesson very quick for you to have any shot at understanding what this fucking thing actually is. Wow Forever is weird. It is a weird fucking thing.

Okay. Because I think I know, but oh shit, you're, hold on. You're delaying a little bit. Can you just do a quick disconnect and reconnect? Okay. Just drop out and drop back in. All right. Hello? Am I good now? Hello? Ah, you're still delaying shit. Discord is. Hold on. Discord's doing this. Should I leave a call and come back in? Here, yeah, leave the call itself and then and then just rejoin. Okay. Hello. Yep, that fixed it. Is that better?

All right. So here's your, here's your breakdown. Down in 2004 World of Warcraft releases, you go zero to 60 and most of that game was the leveling journey, right? Then in 2008, Burning Crusade comes out and everybody moves to Burning Crusade. And this starts a very long-term thing with World of Warcraft where leveling gets faster to, to approximate the same. thing. It's kind of, it's similar to what 14 does, but 14 just makes it easier. Instead, leveling gets faster. And because of the way that gear

and item level works, all the raids and World War of Warcraft Classic become devalue. You don't have to do them anymore. You just get to the new level cap and use the new gear and then you do that stuff, right? And then Rathalich King comes out and then Cataclysm redos the earlier zones and right away people go, but I like the earlier zones the way they were. I don't want you to change them.

And then expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion, happened over 22 fucking years. The game gets faster. The focus changes. Raid Finder gets added. Now, leveling is so fast, and there's so many zones, you actually pick the expansion you want to level through when you make a new character.

You go, I want to level from one to 100 in Pandaria or whatever. People are having nostalgia for those days of your... Basically, the long and short of it is that Wow is a very different game 22 years later, which no shit it was. That was a different time in the world, right? And then you saw people a couple of years ago, we want classic back. I want to play fucking World of Warcraft Classic. We are playing private servers of World of Warcraft, Vanilla.

That is the game that we want. And so Blizzard, like, kowt and said, here's your classic servers. And now they have your classic vanilla server. then you have your classic vanilla server which goes up to Burning Crusade and then your anniversary server that goes up to this and now you have a I think a third one

that goes up to Pandara and so they're just every option wherever your nostalgia stops you can go to that place yes yes and and so like as somebody who has taken a look at retail wow

and played wow back in the good old days they're fundamentally different games like the speed the focus like the things that you do in the game they're different games like they're street fighter for arcade edition specifically. Right.

Yeah, no, but it's the difference between Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 5. Like they are very fundamentally different, right? Decades of development. And so what the interesting thing is that the people who screamed the loudest for classic and they wanted everything back the way it was, that was because those are the crazies that were playing on private servers. And they were like, I want this locked in time. But it became very obvious over time that what a very large amount of people actually

wanted is they wanted World of Warcraft in 2004 to have been a different game as it grew. They wanted it to keep the same like gameplay pillars that it did in 2004. So Blizzard has

decided to come out with World of Warcraft Forever in which in World of Warcraft Forever it takes place in a split timeline so ignore all the events that ever happened It actually takes place before vanilla in 2004, and the new Warcraft 3 expansion leads directly into it.

And they say, most of the game will be the leveling journey. It'll be zero to 60 forever. And you will not be leaving the planet. You will just be focusing on those two first things. And people go, well, how are you going to update it? How are you going to, right? If you're never leveling up past 60 and whatever,

they said they are changing it to a whole, horizontal game and not a vertical game. A vertical game is one in which every expansion gives you tennis three levels. It gives you gear this better. What they want is to have it be more like old school runescape where the new raid comes out. Is the stuff in there better? Sometimes. Maybe it's better in this situation. Maybe it's better in this situation. They want it to be like Guild Wars 2 or FF11. Where you still want to do the new stuff and there's cool new stuff in there, but it's not necessarily the best stuff just because it's new. And it'll always be challenging if you're maxed, if you're capped out.

Yeah. And then the other thing that they're doing is on top of that, they're remixing stuff. They're adding classes that were never available for certain jobs. And they're adding something they stole from Guild Wars 2, which is, hey, did you level a character to cap and max out their professions? You get, I think it's called legacy point. And a legacy point is something you cash in on your account that gives your account buffs. So two of the ones that they showed was if you hit max value on a profession, you get a point that you can spend on not needing reagents for your skills ever again.

Okay. Like you never have to buy an item to use any of your skills. And there was another one that had five ranks where it's like increase the rate and value of rested XP. So if you want to level up a bunch of alts, you can put points into this. So I saw a breakdown. that basically shows that like, yeah, this is actually, I think, is it like eight different versions of wow that exist now, like parallel to each other? Potentially.

Like, it's an insanely, it's way bigger than I thought. I'm gonna, I'll look. I have the, I have the Battlenet launcher on this PC. I can tell you. Because it seemed like, it seemed like a whole bunch when you added classic, current, classic. Okay, right now there are five. Okay, classic up to a certain expansion, classic up to another expansion. There's classic one, classic two, classic three.

Retail and forever. Okay, okay. So you have the, and when you pick one of these routes, how is it not dividing the player base so much? It is. But there's about 10 million people who play World Warcraft. How many play 14? So, uh, once to. Wow is always going to be

the king in the fucking mountain Like when Wow is having a down period It's still five times bigger than it's contemporary Willie there are people that have been playing World of Warcraft Every single year of their life since they were five years old Yeah but it's not it's not closer than that No Really

I wow we live in a goddamn fucking echo chamber Oh my God Listen the bubble it's not the No it's not the echo chamber number, millions of those people who play wow are people that don't engage in this. They're just like, I like World of Warcraft, so I play World of Warcraft. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, they're just, it's just, yeah, no, they're, it's, it's, it's, it's the, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, definitely. of, it's, it's very, it's always been very popular and very, very casualty, for sure.

I just thought that 14 was closer to it than that. I didn't, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the definite, definitive number two. Yeah. That's, that's shocking. Okay. Fair enough. You can divide those numbers. Yeah, yeah, sure. Also for Wow forever, which is why I'm going back on Friday. Also, sorry, controller support. Yeah, okay. Controlers, full native controller support. That's good. Everyone I know that casually played Wow has stopped, right? So that also added to the feeling of like, oh yeah, that was a time and it's done now, you know? Everybody that I know that casually played Wow is back. on Friday. Hmm. That's a... Speaking of this week, check it out on Friday at 3 p.m. Pacific.

It's going to be me, Hina, Ecto, Mint, and Girl DM are going to be dropping into the Wow Forever beta. Come tag along over at twitch.tv slash Pat Stairsat and or their respective channels. That's, that's, it's so interesting.

I know that I live in the weeaboo space of everyone that's into 14. That's true. Yes, you are. And then I also, and I know that like, yeah, I know I knew people that are absolutely not in that space that are still like wow heads that have been for a long time. But it sounded like everyone was frustrated with the game at some point. Oh, yeah. And so now they're saying, hey, guys, we're going to be making a divergent world of Warcraft from all the stuff you really liked.

Remember when all of you really love the game without any qualification? we're going to make more of that game. 10 million is a number that you can divide many times and still have a healthy number of people playing. So sure, I get it. I get it. That's a big one. And then they also have Diablo 5, right?

Yeah, which is actually really strange to, like, I feel like it sucks for the people who really like Diablo 4 to be like, by the way, off camera after Diablo 4, Diablo 1. In between Diablo 4 and 5. Diablo just conclusively won and you didn't do shit in four. Nothing mattered. Fuck you. Four might as well have not even happened.

Did they throw a date on that? Damn it. Is that? Later. Like way later. So Diablo 169 in the chat says, by the way, Diablo 5 is being written by Amy Henning. Is that true? Fuck. You can't do me like that. Amy Hennig is the goat, man.

What? Soul Reaver. Soul Reaver. And Uncharted and the Uncharted games. Yeah. Okay. She's the goat, man. Definitely know the name from years of conversation, but I don't remember the association.

Speaking of things like The Last of Us and uncharted and such, look there's not much to say here but wolverine has come along and has been getting its reviews and um jean park weighed in on it as well and it's really just kind of sounding like uh there's a lot of negative mainly a lot of fart gas yep there's a lot of fart gas jean has brought back the fart gas fart gas is in there surreal um surreal dude and it's and like you expect there to be a whole lot of like, you know, Eagle Vision type shit going on with this type of thing. It seems like it's totally gone completely out of fucking control on this one. A lot, but you have, what was, yeah, there's the video that was, I forgot, which channel

was it? Skillup. Skill up. Did the main negative video on it, breaking down how the Wolverine game has, like, there's so much handholding all over the game that it. It's flooding the screen with shit at all times. It's the ultimate in focus, focus L. Focus M, that is just like, yeah, you can't get away from the scent path that you have to follow towards the objective.

And then while you're on that path, another one shows up to pull you off to the one collectible over here. And then a giant vibrating pulsing thing over a sound effect. And here's the thing, all the bits that I've seen of that game were all of this handholding and pointing is they're all fucking hallways. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not like complicated environments. They're just hallways. You know, in a Spider-Man game, it's a giant open map, so you have lots of places to go and get lost in. So it makes sense to kind of in this open world environment, have things that ping your attention.

But in a very linear story-based game where the objective is always in front of you, it's just insanely distracting. And yeah, and it goes too far with the amount of UI, modern UI stuff taking over. you have QTEs that obviously they don't fail there's no point to them and it's funny because Logan is because he's got healing factor that's a decent opportunity they could have had to make a

a QTE fail but still succeed you know but like instead yeah where he gets horribly injured but he still managed to yeah you could have done that in a way but instead they just didn't put a fail state in at all overall the combat is being you know a lot is pretty basic and, yeah, the over-designed hand-holding elements are kind of just becoming a major negative. Gene was saying that, like, he, the overall, he did enjoy it and it felt like a more elaborate modern version of the old X-Men beat-em-ups kind of thing.

But I think that they clearly wanted to design. I didn't see how Spider-Man 2 went because I didn't play it, but I heard people didn't like it as much as, Spider-Man, Wonder Miles Morales. Apparently, the Insomniac formula was not up to snuff there or whatever. Whatever the case is, in this one, it seems like they just want to make sure that you can pop the game in and completely make sure that you are not missing anything in it and not have any discovery whatsoever. Just go follow line, mash a clause Wolverine and move on. And it sucks when you kind of make the game look nice or have a pretty environment that you'd want to, you know, I guess like feel immersed in because this scent line is just completely ripping it apart. I once I saw someone describe like track Gene Gray by her farts.

I was just like it's burnt the fuck in my brain. And the constant reminder of where are you, Gene? Come on, Gene. You know, also this coming out right after Onamoo. has you fucking fighting your shit off, like, is a really, like, unfortunate. And it's a, very unfortunate. And it's like, I say put all the navigational everything in the game that you want or need, but just have a way to opt in or turn it on or use it for a moment or, you know, pull the map up, whatever you want to do, but just don't have it be unavoidably in there

so that you have, uh, what is it? What did you write? You wrote, uh, the gene fart gas is a, um, uh, a core mechanic. Right. So that's a bummer. Insomniax says they're going to further refine the player experience based on feedback. Yeah, I bet. So we'll see how that goes. Other big story this week. Sony is dropping Fizint, so Kojima is moving into Xbox. And this is a huge, huge one because Fizint was the game that was announced to be basically the Metal Gear Solid successor, while O.D was the experimental horror thing that was coming up. the PT successor, if you would.

And each of those went to a different respective company. So Xbox was going to be doing all the OD stuff. And Fizint was expected to be the next big franchise over on PlayStation. It was a very odd thing to see Sony come out and basically have to, you know, make the announcement themselves directly and go, yep, we're dropping this. And it sounds like the reasons why are the game. was over budget, laid on deadlines, and it sounds like, according to Jason Schreier and a couple other reports on it, that ever since Concord failed, Sony has gotten more and more aggressive about their milestones. It basically changed everything about how loose they were with their

vanity projects and things that are... Very typical overcorrection where, hey, guys, let's spend a billion dollars on a bunch of shit will cancel for no reason. And then, hey, we got this actual thing that's maybe running a little late because it's fucking the cojumbo. Yeah. So throw him out. Throw him out on the street. There is a there is a thing to it where it's like games are all games are always late and over budget tends to be the way that Kojima would proceeds. And that has probably been the case for pretty much everything he's worked on. You also get a name like that involved and you announce it because you're you're investing in the prestige of that name, right? To be on your on to say, hey, we've got a big Kojima game coming down the pipe.

it's something where like if a company says hey we don't we don't want to have things going over budget and being laid on their delivery and we have these strict things or whatever it like I get that from a production point of view if you want to be strict enough about it in this way but um the move where they basically were like yeah

we're just going to cancel this and and it's it's done with uh that would have been let's let's just burn the whole thing now That's dog shit. That sucks. And at the very least, it seems like, okay, what's cool is because Kojima was like, I want to save this project. It matters a lot. We're going to move it to someone that will fund it.

And instead of having to destroy everything and have the game be canceled, they moved it over to Xbox. So this is super weird in a world where we're talking every week about all the dumb decisions Sony's making and all the dumb decisions Xbox is making. We're going to let the last of us guys spend $400 shit zillion on that space game that everyone thinks looks like shit. And Xbox is making tons of nonsense, dumb decisions, too, with the entire thing. And it's just weird to have to look it in this place and be like, yeah, it's one or the other. No, it's Steam or Nintendo is what it fucking is now. And that's the other bit is that Sony is treating PC as more hostile now. than it was initially was right like it was it was not a competitor before but now it absolutely is um anyway

this is this is one of those ones where yeah it's uh i'm happy the project continues to exist and it's not just bucket shelved and the successor so to so to speak to metal gear continues to be a thing that we will get um but uh and i i reached out deal worked too was that they took it on for Xbox took it on board as long as they also got the PC and film rights because that's a that's a that including the film and PC rights to OD as well, which they initially did not have. I reached out to somebody and asked them, hey,

what's going on in the Sony Slack channels as a result of this? And the answer is every single person over the physical stuff and over this is just going, what the fuck are they fucking do it? Like, no one has a clue. Like, it appears to be that even people who work at Sony companies

are like, have they lost their fucking minds? What is going on? Yeah. I do wonder what the tolerable amount of being latent over budget is, if you decide to tighten up on that to a degree, but you expect, but you allow for some leeway on it, and then that metric changes. So, like, you're allowed to change that metric. The answer is and has always been. as long as it is the thing that I, the CEO, like. Right.

You can do whatever forever. And the other thing. So, Kojima has always been very popular with the people over there. But then the people that brought Kojima over to Sony to do all this stuff, they just wasted billions of dollars. A key point that was all that I didn't also mention here that influenced the decision as well is that Death Stranding 1 and 2 did not sell the, the way that they were hoping it would. Of course not. There was never going to be Metal Gear.

So that part of it as well is where I think the one is perhaps setting things up and then it does what it does. And then two comes and they kind of go, okay, with the second one, we can see that it's not, it's not metal gear and it's not becoming Metal Gear. It's not becoming the console seller. That informs the decision as well, right? So they sold, I think, well for what you would expect it to be, but I think not for what Sony expected of it or wanted it to become and not enough for the cost analysis on it. So yeah, it's like you're allowed, you're allowed to tighten it up and go like, nope, we didn't see what we wanted from these numbers.

And also you're late and behind schedule and not delivering and all these things. You can do that. Yadda, yada. whatever. I'm will this pay off in the end? I'm hard to see how it will

it would. But hey guys, listen, we're canceling games and you can't buy games physically anymore and also fuck you eat my shit. It's it's kind of I saw

today that the build price for PS6 is being estimated at a thousand dollars. Jesus Christ. and it's like, well, you're not putting that fucking out. What I think... What it kind of says to me more than anything is that like in the industry,

there have been like untouchable names that it doesn't matter, you know, whatever they're working on. It's a Kojima is one of those names. It doesn't matter. You're going to get the ability to alter your, your product out and people care. They're going to be showing up,

uh, not in, you know, GTA numbers, mind you, but there is enough behind it and the idea and the people are

enough people are interested in the idea of like a big Kojima project that they'll always be tuning in for what's coming next there and anything that you invest in like that is like the fact that the industry is in a place now where you can't even tank that type of cost right you can't do that anymore

and you've got to tighten up the belt to the point where yep you've got to cut all. Yeah, they're still making fair games, by the way. I don't know if you saw that they're still bankrolling fair games. Do you even know what fucking fair games is? Yeah, with the dollar sign at the end. Yeah, yeah, that's, well, you know, that's going to, that's going to get canceled.

It's going to come out and for four days and they're going to cancel it. And they're going to go, this is Kojima's fault. Yeah, I would, I'd be curious to know what the, what the bar was for Death Stranding one and two, and then what the, what the deal they would have wanted was. But in any case, I'm like the idea that like, hey, cool, go, like, go buy an Xbox to play these games now? Like, fucking, eh. I, I, we'll see what happens with this PC version.

But it's, uh, that's a, that's a crazy. Wait, what? That's a crazy, uh, uh, uh, detail. And, you know, at least code, again, glad code you got to keep the. Oh, also. I don't know if we talked about it here, but Bungee is subletting their office. No, that's nuts. That's where Bungee's at.

Okay. Okay. For Marathon and Destiny. Cool. That's great. Let's, I got to go. So that's about all the time we have. All right.

Have a good one, everybody. Yeah, sorry for the letters. We just, we got to wrap it up, but I got to get the time. Letters are shit anyway. Don't worry. We had one or two decent ones, but we'll get them next time. Put them next week. Take care.

Bye-bye.