Castle Super Beast - Out Now! CSB297: The Ubidome

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

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["Sailor Moon Theme"] Hey, bro. What's up? How much caffeine can you get into your system in three hours? So that's so there's a fun fun story about that Is that I can get it a lot like a lot like a lot But then my wife will be like how much caffeine did you drink you look like you're vibrating? and I'll be like One caffeine and she'll be like no you didn't and then she'll be like, one caffeine?

And she'll be like, mm-mm, no you didn't. And then she'll be able to check the tape. Yeah. So one caffeine. I have one caffeine. There is video evidence of it. I suppose as long as you have your other cans pre-cracked and sitting just out of frame, you can just... So you want to hear the fucking pro tip? Mm-hmm is you make sure you get all the same color of monster, and then you're like bro. I got a pee

Oh, it's time to pee Okay, we're gonna go to break Yes Then you crack that shit And then you drink you have to drink a little bit before you get in because if you don't then it's really obvious that you're Tipper's drink I see yeah You have to drink a little bit before you get in because if you don't then it's really obvious that you're til first drink I see. Yeah, that's Wow, this is the tech that has to be invented got it, bro

This is just one of those days where it all just it's all just sinks up and both of us Join this discord call just going Yeah, it's good. It's good shit. No, I just I had a like really rough sleep night I don't know I'm super burnt and you know what you're super you I feel you very strongly I'm tremendously cooked It's one of those days that my poor little man. He had gas or something He did not have a good sleep night Therefore so I didn't have a good sleep night therefore so I didn't have a good sleep night yeah and that's like I feel bad cuz like oh poor little guy

just just fart dude mm-hmm just gotta massage it out you get it so I've never had much much much use for that he did once Went in there. It's in there. Okay, just gotta come out Well, I have it doesn't work for me either Well, like I can't I can't like massage my belly and get it out either so I just cry in the bathroom Okay, but I pretend I'm watching videos, but I'm actually crying. I know that I have exactly two and a half cans of Guru in my system before it's like, that's your limit. Oh, okay.

I mean, that is the limit, but it's- Well, what are you going to pour a half a can of Guru around? No, but I can tell because right around that halfway mark is where it starts to be like, oh, there's that little You know you start to be like yeah So for me it's like when I slam into 490 milligrams of caffeine When I slam into 480 490 That's when that's when you're fucking going. So to break it down, one of these regular ass sugar-free white monster cans is 170 milligrams

of caffeine. So when you are at the two and a half mark on this monster can and you're crushing 450. It feels like the way that I had someone describe what it must be like to be Spider-Man with Spider-Sense but no Spider-Agility. So everything's really, really fast, but I'm not faster to accommodate my increased perception. You just see it coming. I'm just really I just so fast Yeah, I've realized as well that like if I still need if I'm at my two and a half limit if I'm at the limit too early in the day if I'm at the limit too early in the day, if I have

to push it even further beyond a normal cup of coffee with nothing in it, just straight black coffee, can do one of those. I feel as if the taurine, gorine, extra stuff is not helping with the- You got to get that Toreen, bro. The jitter. But yeah, just a straight coffee after that is like, okay, I can do one more bump up and then that's my energy limit. But it's not actually energy, by the way.

It's tired masking. Yeah, no. You've decided to turn off every chemical that your body is sending that says dude lie down. Yeah. Yeah No emergency, but that's an emergency bean water This reminds me of a tick tock. I remember seeing like three years ago Maybe two years ago where it was this this regular looking white lady Who was putting up a tick tock that was I'm gonna prove to my family That they're full of shit and that I know what I'm doing

So this is how many monsters I drink in a day and she drinks exclusively white sugar-free monster and You're watching it and she's had three by the time she gets to work. And I counted them up and by the end of the day she has like nine and I'm just sitting there aghast. And I remember the top comment being like, why don't you just switch to cocaine? It might be healthier like what like yeah micro dosing mushrooms what like you might be

better off just switching to like caffeine pills or cocaine that is three times over the daily limit if not four between and four. And that's like the average test day that she recorded. Oh my God. So like, you know, there's those bad days. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so like, I just assume that the, what's it called? The engineering law of how a thing needs to be literally twice as strong as it's given like load, right?

So in other words, the margin of error has to have a safety rating of zero or a safety rating of one. There's a calculation that says this thing, this table or this bridge has to support twice as much as someone would actually use it Right, right. Yeah, it needs to be so weight limit of a thousand pounds on an elevator has to go to 2000 It will not fail until it hits 2000 exactly right? Yeah, so that's the kind of bit where I'm looking and I go if they say you can have two cans in a day You can probably have four ten for

Ten the damage, right? And you're saying nine and it's like, well, I guess you don't drop dead then, but you are taking, you're shaving off time from the future, you know? It's like the cigarette that subtracts from your final life count number. I feel like that's kind of what you're looking at,

if not instant damage. Delayed Cool good good, so that's good do and yeah Yeah, you see the the the good part the positive is that we've had a long healthy experience of taking this type of energy and and redirecting it into the content for the better. So yeah, you know what? Listen, it may not be the healthiest thing to jam myself with anti-sleep drugs and stimulants

in over-the-counter gigantic cans. But at least I did something healthy and useful with it. Like sit on my ass for eight hours and beat metaphor. Yeah, there you go. This is the only job. This is real. This is truly the only job where you show up and then it's like, Oh man, I'm so tired. I'm fucking out of it. Yeah, how are you? I'm really out of it. Oh, perfect. Good.

That's good. Use it. Use it. That's good though. It's also the most like dog shit job in the world or even like hobby if you stream as a hobby because like, thank God, Paige also streams. So like the empathy is there because like,

oh man, oh that metaphor stream was rough. Oh, I'm so tired. Hold on while I move 40 feet so that I can sit down and play metaphor to relax. No, it's different though. No, no, it's, it's different. No. Yeah. How do you explain it? No, it's different. I swear there's going to be, there's going to be some great studies in a couple of decades on this shit. Isn't it fun to be like pioneering into the unknown?

Yeah, dude. It's so fun. To create all the mistakes that everyone's going to. I'm guinea pigging myself. Exactly. All the data is going to be pulled from us. It's going to be awesome. OK, so let's go.

No spoilers. But how did that? OK, so metaphor ends really strong nice good My total my takeaway is that I really really appreciate that metaphor tried a bunch of different shit And I think from a gameplay standpoint It's definitely a more fun game to play like the archetype system is better than the persona system But overall I did not come away from it as strongly and as in love with it as I did for three, four, or five persona.

Okay. You started talking about feeling your way towards the end about two weeks ago. Was the ending here a classic Atlas style, we're going to linger as long as possible. It's rock solid. The pacing doesn't... Pacing's aces. This is where we say farewell? The pacing is aces.

It doesn't overstay its welcome. Excellent. It gives you tons of time at the end like I did in fact finish the game with Like ten days of like just going to bed, okay? Just just go I'm just gonna go to bed cuz I got to run out this calendar Which is wild because I've never experienced that in an atlas game before yeah when you press the touchpad And you see it says some people went straight to bed. I'm like what the fuck is wrong with you Yeah, no you you got time you're good. Yeah and you see it says some people went straight to bed. I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Yeah, no, you got time. You're good. Yeah, OK. There's a couple things that start to happen that are objective improvements in a vacuum, but I don't think they make the thing better overall. I think that the Persona style game has gotten weaker and weaker

with their use of teleporting around conveniently. Huh, okay, so you don't have to travel and deal with the journey from like I patient But also this is a game that's taking place in a large fantasy country So versus like running around a lot of different places running around school, you know but I'm actually specifically referring to like teleporting to shops. Oh Quick teleporting in town. Yeah, quick teleporting in town.

Yeah, so like I think back to P3, P4, P5, and how like you could, you know, you could, you'd hop around to different areas, but you always had this thing where like, oh, you gotta run down to Shibuya. And like you spent like a proportion of your character's daily life section moving from place to place through in the areas. You're at Brawlhaven, so I'll use Brawlhaven as an example. I never,

ever spent any time in Brawlhaven after that first couple of days because it would be like, I'm going to the shop, I'm going to the Coliseum, I'm going to the shop I'm going to the Coliseum I'm going to the beetle guy and just instantly run there and so I actually like spent I didn't get the the like the the vibe of these places nearly as strongly there's a couple of towns at the end of the game that I barely spent any time in at all interesting okay I feel. I feel like I'm currently... So for me, I just completed the Braille Haven calendar event. Which is cool. It's cool. Also, this whole third section is an anti-Dungeon. It's quite interesting.

It's very weird. I really like that it's super, super weird. Even combat expectations are super minimalized and it's actually just plot heavy as opposed to everything. Very, very strange and interesting. This is the chill part of the game. In terms of how it feels about quick teleporting, I just had some thoughts on that because I have been, yeah, as once you get to town, you're like, okay, let me go to the armor

shop, let me go to the sword shop, update, da, da, da, and you quickly get in and out and do your business without really stepping foot into some of the actual sections of the town. I noticed that once or twice, like I would run outside and see somebody that had like just a text prompt that wasn't there before, and talking to them was like a little activity for like,

oh hey, help me do this thing or that thing, and raise your ranking with the people. And I was like, oh, so there's some good reasons to like hit the streets every now and then. Oh absolutely, like when you wanna debate the gang, like the other candidates, you have to go check manually. Exactly. And there were a lot of days where I was looking to debate and I noticed I was like, I couldn't find anyone, you know? So, and like, yeah, going to check manually then

involved like literally teleporting to each town and trying to figure out what was going on, whether anyone was there or not. I kind of had this thing of like, okay, as the ability to quick travel got better and better, I was like, this is awesome. And then it streamlines things. And then there's times where I'm like, going back to the Gauntlet runner and teleporting to Grand Trad is taking too long. I'm just going to go through the S-Link menu and it says that Maria wants

to talk. So you do it that way and then you get there faster, right? You know, they're instantaneous. Yeah. You need to speed up the already instantaneous method of getting to another location, but no, that transition is taking too long. And it's kind of like, okay, but when you see these people out on the streets that are worth talking to that have some good stuff for you, you kind kind of be like, okay, hold on back up a bit actually live in this town a little bit and explore it, you know, and I liked that I had like a reminder to go do that every once in a hurry to do that for prepping stuff, but then if you kind of want to just have a day seeing what's around or stuff like that. And maybe I'm early enough that it's not at a full on like, okay, you're in there.

Okay, but I did feel like I was moving around too quickly and ignoring too much. And then the game gave me a good reason to kind of slow that down. So that leads to, cause that's like definitely to taste, right? Like do you want to just go really fast or do you want to vibe it out? And that leads to like part two of that for me is like, I don't think that the game's soundtrack is as good as P3, P4, or P5s overall.

I think a lot of it. I think the really incredible tracks are incredible. I think the best piece of music in the entire game is the normal ambush battle theme. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. To the point where all of the boss themes, I was like, I wish this was a normal battle,

because the normal battle theme is so exciting. I see, okay. I feel that the normal town themes are usually just like, you know, melodic fantasy themes that are not standing out like the battle themes are and like a lot of the Esperanto stuff. But if your comparison point is the, you know, the funny like persona joy of like hanging out in the different cities and getting that bop going. You're not getting the bop running around the cities.

Yeah, so that's kind of like the core big point of these two micro points is like I did not have the humming along bop of navigating the game world at any point that I did from any of the persona games. See, I only, I got, but I was super, like the fucking Gauntlet Runner theme when you're on the road is an absolute banger. I love that shit every time and I can't spend enough time on the road just because of how awesome it is to hear the

brr brr brr brr brr brr. The Gauntlet Runner stuff is great. Incredible. Running through dungeons, I think those dungeon themes have been excellent as well. I would just say, yeah, I'm yeah, if I'm thinking about it, I guess the day-to-day town stuff is fine, but you're not tapping along with it as you are with P3, 4, and 5 day-to-day. My last thing to say about the music is that the good stuff is good good and the great stuff is great, but like I remember beating P5 and

then going to YouTubeRepeat.com and throwing the 10 hours rivers in the desert. So fucking Lincoln there. Yeah. And just having that be the soundtrack of my day to day life for multiple weeks. And I don't feel that way about literally any song in this game. OK, see, I there I disagree because I feel like the because I you know, it's funny, I just did this because I was creating my my stream music playlist and I was going over persona music and some metaphor

soundtracks as well. And I absolutely feel that the academia themes and like I mentioned the gauntlet runner, the ambush battle, a lot of those themes are like, I want those playing, I want to hear that shit. Those are the ones that stand out for me. And going over persona as well, the river's the rivers in the desert and the life will change and a lot of, and basically a lot of the vocal tracks, are the ones you're kind of looking for. There's some stuff in between there that like is filler that we don't really think about as much

on that really long playlist. So I think in each of these cases, there's a lot of filler on the persona tracks as well that you kind of are skipping past to get to the really good ones that you remember, you know, the casino infiltration and, you know, arc and all these things, right? So obviously this is like the most subjective according to taste kind of thing. Like to some degree, I'm pretty sure I actually just prefer the style of like the more modern persona soundtracks.

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

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

can add metaphor to a list of games that I have gotten to the end to and optimized the final boss out of existence and had to be told later what it does. You skipped phases from doing too much damage. I skipped every mechanic the final boss had. I did not see it do even one thing No all phases The whole way through oh boy, okay, and the final boss does cool stuff and has cool mechanics

Well, and I had to be informed of them later. Is this what you wanted? Is this is this the conclusion that you have fought for? So we had a really, me and the chat had a very interesting situation where I grinded a little bit around dungeon 4 and they said you should be fine to beat most of the rest of the game, but there's a bunch of fights that are really hard. And then I went into, there's a bunch of optional bosses you can do before the final. And I didn't grind again and just completely fucking steamrolled them because I understood how to use the archetype system and what to equip and what to not equip. And

then I'm like, you know what, since the final boss is going to be the final boss, it'll probably be a multi-phase affair. You know what, I'll grind out the archetypes on the main character, right, for the stat boosts and just set up my party in such a way that I found something that worked. And it worked real well because for like 11 bosses in a row, I was doing the exact same thing on every character on every turn. And it just worked. Just the winning stack. Like I found, like this person cast Stabilitate, this person does the Strike Attack, this character does the Buff Attack, you know, like the cycle. And it's like, oh, I have solved, metaphor.

I feel like what happened in the last couple of side quests off the main was I got there and then I started swinging at the enemies and they would die before a fight would happen. And I went, oh, shit, I'm a bit too strong, actually, because the grunts are not engaging. And then the the regular tough things are coming in yellow. And I was like, huh, I didn't try grinding, you know? Yeah. So if you ever get to the point where... So I initially, a couple of weeks ago, was

like, this is one of the best systems ever because you never have to fight trash ever again, right? Cutting your experience in half on auto kills is not enough because you're still gaining a bunch of experience by just mowing through them because there's no threat. There's no reason you would ever avoid them. And I found that if you ever get out in front of the game on a level basis, the game will never catch back up to you. Yeah. It will never catch back up to you. And even in terms of just getting a lot of heroes' incense and dropping it on the archetypes

I want for the better skills that I'm like, okay, this one gets that credit grape skill at level six, fuck it, spend it, get that one, you know? And I'm like, the pace that I'm getting those at is, yeah, it's definitely at pacing the challenges in question. But I mean, it, but it's like, this is without me particularly trying to get that. Yeah, I know. That's my point. It's like I thought I was doing that because I like to grind out and get a bunch of levels,

and I did do that. But I grinded a couple, I grinded like 10 levels above the recommended like on Dungeon 4, and then never did it again and the game was on with 40% of its remaining runtime it was never able to catch up okay so here something I've I've said about three p3 p4 and p5 is to me p3 has the best final boss p4 has the best culprit and p5 has the best crew boss, P4 has the best culprit, and P5 has the best crew. Those are the strengths of those individual games for a company. Okay, well this has the best culprit and it has the best crew.

Okay. Easy. Okay. Easy, no question. Cool. Interesting. Absolutely the best cast they've ever had no absolutely no doubt It's all winners awesome Okay

Even the only member of the crew that I'm like not like madly in love with is still like a really good character that I like so far so far. We're on track so far like all the pieces that I'm looking at seem to be really high contenders But when I compare those games together, those are the takeaways I'm kind of left with, you know? Yeah, it would take a lot to have anyone, like, surpass what Heisme is up to at this point. Heisme is the best character. It's kind of like...

I don't think you'll find anyone that will disagree with you. It's kind of broken, you know? Heisme, like, the cast is really strong like stroll is absolutely the best First bro guy that joins the party they've ever done because he's not an idiot He's actually the smart guy in the gang. He's he's forward-thinking and intelligent and compassionate But high as may is like a full leap beyond the rest of the cast in Gravitas. And the fact that he's a cute little Batman. And I think, look, if we're, because you have to compare fucking Jinpei to Yosuke to Ryuji.

And Ryuji is easily like the winner of those three. Okay, misogynist, homophobe, possibly closeted homophobe. Loud guy. Guy who talks too loud. Like, oh, what should he... you know? And yeah, Stroll is not those archetypes at all. And that's the thing, is like he kinda like- Struggles the main character of a fire emblem.

Okay. Tagging along with you. Okay, sure, sure. Yeah, but he's kind of, he's like, you know, the naive, like, you know, but, and kinda silly at times, but ultimately, simple and good person, you know? He's almost like a protagonist. Like, yeah, like even in the way he looks and stuff. Like he doesn't have the,

he doesn't have the like, oh, your best friend's the horny one thing going on. You know? And he's not played for goofs. In fact, Hulkenberg is usually the one played for goofs And she's even the whole she's holding her head even higher up Yeah, and as she's played for goose because she's the most serious member. So I was like, okay. Yeah in Fact so far so far like no one is the horny one I mean, well, maybe the fourth member or our fifth, you know

I don't know. Like, it feels as if there's a, like, just increase in honor and nobility. Although, yeah, my latest party member is a little bit like, ooh, you know. Masked dancer. There is very There is very little Romantic or sexual content in this game mm-hmm not none, but little Yeah And you and it's like the whole s-link system in our brains is like synonymous with like who you're gonna date right who you're gonna Pick what's your who's gonna? It's totally divorced. We're gonna get to ten with yeah, and here's just like

Like like ooh are those two an item nah no not interested Absolutely, not no they're not Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, no metaphor is really strong. it's an incredibly easy recommend I loved it I think the gameplay is Fantastic, I think it's brain dead that you can't fight the super boss until you're on new game plus I hate that I think I think that the game gives you so many tools to break it that the game can't keep up with you if you decide to break it at all. The system they built is just asking you to synergize and optimize and all sorts of shit. Yeah, and I guess, again, I was feeling this strength

while not attempting to grind. So even at normal pace. And the interesting thing, too, is while you can spend time going out into areas and picking fights and stuff, it feels like the least useful way to spend your time by comparison to everything else you could be doing. So like, you know, Colosseum is cool. And like, there's some some great stuff. Oh, there's Okay, hey, I'm

gonna tell you right now Colosseum has some fucking. Oh, yeah, I realized I absolutely realized that and I've been doing that. I'm like, great. I want to wait to like get some fights in and build some XP and use my my builds while getting fights that are worth it. And that feels like the way. But otherwise, just going out and then running in circles just feels like a complete waste of a day.

Something I noticed as well that I feel is a, this is more of a, I guess, an overall thing that Atlas has been doing since, I guess P5? No. Yeah, P5 is probably where they began doing this, and they've solved an incredible problem. Around P5 is when,

because they've always had a thing in these games where you talk to somebody, their portrait pops up, and then you see their 3D model also doing the thing. But the 3D models have not always been the most expressive, right? It's only as of the more recent games where the 3D models are simultaneously voicing and are animating the discussion,

their voice mouth flaps and their face expressions and things like that are going. I feel like thinking back to maybe like golden or so, you kind of just got the like vague RPG gesture. You had a PlayStation one Resident Evil voice acting gesturing where they're miming. Yeah. Like don't open that door. Exactly.

With the arm going out and shit like that. Exactly. And a lot of the weight was carried by the emotions, like the sweat drops coming off of them and stuff like that. Yeah. But yeah, when you think of like Five and Three Reload, and now Metaphor especially, the 3D models are... You can watch them the same as the art can, and they're both just doing their jobs. The thing with 3D models as we know,

a problem has always been that they, like with Castlevania sometimes, fail to convey the artwork and the right expression and the right facial subtleties and details. 3D models will work sometimes from some angles and fail spectacularly from other angles. I always like it's a hit or miss even when they do an incredible job. And I feel like so, for example, in this game, Luis, his 3D model is amazing. And you can often see great expression and detail coming off of that in game while his his artwork on the side is just crushing it.

Showing you both at the same time covers for any situations where the 3D is kind of failing, because the artwork is gonna make up for that in a way. Do you understand what I mean? So there are times- I absolutely know exactly what you mean. Yeah, so there are times where the 3D model's like, just at the, it's not the exact perfect angle, it looks like it's okay, but it's not conveying the emotion enough. Talking to Brigida, for example,

Brigida is a really good one where she has her makeup and the extra lines and things that they have detail on her face. There are some expressions she makes where she's sad in her story, and the 3D model just looks a little dead-eyed and the angle doesn't convey it, but you see the little shift in the artwork on the side, and that carries the feeling over where the 3D model failed to do so. It's a really great option select that they run the entire game. So here's where I get to be really unfair because the standards and expectations between these two games are different, but they're so directly comparable that I must.

So Persona 3 Reload came out earlier this year. Persona 3 Reload's lip flaps and general 3D model animation during the discussions that you are talking about right now are way better than metaphors. Metaphor has basic lip flap talking and like you'll see and it's first of all, it's synced to the Japanese voiceover because like sometimes you'll see they over Will's mouth go up and down when it's not correct. Totally. And it's not lip synced either. Whereas Persona 3 Reloads was like absolutely lip synced and tied to whatever language you had and it looked much better. And like Reload was like doing old cutscenes. Right. Yeah. Old, really old dialogue

and had, you know, they're remaking it so it's not exactly fair. But there is something about Reload that really stood out to me extremely strongly and this put me down a like a mental path to find out that had me checking out the like Josh Sawyer's post-mortem on Pillars of Eternity 2 and it's about voice acting and so in Persona 3 Reload every single S-Link is voice acted in its totality and so is every single story event. In metaphor, there's a shit ton of voice acting. And then you hit the 80% mark. And then more and more and more scenes that are really important, just start to not

have voice acting at all. Okay, they just they just do the one bark at the top of the line. voice acting at all. Okay, they just do the one bark at the top of the line. Yeah. But therefore... Including like a bunch of dialogue with your party in the final dungeon of the game that seems really vital, that it seems very important. and the The fire the first and last bond link are fully voice acted in metaphor But the victory lap bond links aren't

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

Yeah, a line here or there. Like when you start out the date or whatever, there will be a scene that has the full lines. And then if they go to a change of location, then it'll go into... The lines are gone. The lines are gone, exactly, yeah. It started to get like strange in the last month of the game. And obviously I'll ask chat to back me up with some yeas or nays if they noticed it.

But like just lots and lots of inner party conversations of various levels of gravitas that I'm just sitting here going like, I really, really wish this was fucking voice acted. Okay, so some of that was- Because the actors are all great. Front loaded then.

They kind of, yeah, I guess it staggered off towards the end. And this led to me going back and finding out there's the Western game equivalent of when this happened. So in your traditional like CRPGs like Pillars or Baldur's Gate you'd either have like really important story moments that were voice acted and like character introductions but beyond that it would be like barks or like line here or there right so Pillars of Eternity 1 is like the best example and that gives them a lot of writing freedom because they can

change the writing like super late You have to lock in super early and I watched Josh Sawyer's post-mortem on Deadfire 2 and he basically describes that when Larian's Divinity Original Sin 2 came out that had full voice acting for literally every single spoken word in the entire game. And it kind of ruined it for everybody because that is now the standard going forward. Unrealistic, though that might be. Yeah. And so Pillars of Eternity 2, despite the fact that they were like more than halfway done through the game, the order from on high from their publisher came down that said,

games got to have full voice acting now and they went oh Wish we had planned for that beforehand And now with Baldur's Gate 3 that expectation is even more Okay, like cemented Baldur's for sure I yeah, like every single random character in the world's like fuck-off town dialogue is voice acted Here's the thing though, with those shortcomings, as far as Atlas is concerned though, if they front load and then have some stuff that's crucial that's missing later,

I feel like the approach they've taken, and the same thing with the dual art style, I feel like the approach they've taken has been to overwhelm you with things to look at to confirm the emotion that you're supposed to be feeling. So when someone's saying something, you have the art, you're reading what they're saying, you have the 3D acting it out or the 3D animation playing it out, and then you have the bark at the top of the line going, you know, like, no, or whatever, as it says, like, this can't

be happening, you know, like, no, or whatever, as it says, like, this can't be happening, you know? And like, the approach is to kind of give you an overwhelming amount of information with each line to look at or check or hear, that you never stop to think like for a second. Oh, absolutely. It's absolutely adequate to understand the emotional tone of the scene.

But I don't want the final time I talk to these characters to be a text box. I want to hear Heismei's actor tell me about how Heismei feels. And it's one of those things where like every Atlas game had this to some degree, like you know most of the time S-Links weren't even voiced, right? And it's just like, like, only the really important story stuff is the stuff that gets full voice acting. But after they did P3 reload where it's like every single thing, now I'm spoiled. Now I'm like, Oh, like I could every line of dialogue

spoken by gourmet King is voiced in persona threead. Are you telling me that Gourmet King is more important than hearing the end of Heismay's story about his child? I think they are saying Gourmet King are more important. But no, it's about budget. They had more budget for voice acting on Reload. Yeah, and you know that there's a you know you know that like there's a version of The game that they have going we're like all the lines are being inserted over the fact and you know They just have like the generic barks there at first and I can imagine them replacing it Yeah, there's times where you see the flaps desync as well and stuff. So

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

and that'll be that, you know? But yeah, okay, I can see that being a bummer. It only started to really like pop up like for real during like the last dungeon because like shit is popping off and I'm like this would have been voice acted in earlier dungeons. Okay, okay. But yeah, for the Western games like yeah, Divinity, Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate

3 have like totally ruined it and like there's no going back. Of interest when Josh was talking about it during his post-mortem, he said that Pillars 1 did not have full voice acting and one of the biggest pieces of criticism they got was that it was really hard to get people to stream Pillars of Eternity 1 because streamers don't like huge big blocks of text. Disco fucking Elysium. And as a person who despite everyone wanting me stop, streamed the entirety of Pillars of Eternity 1, let me tell you, I did not want to read gigantic big blocks of text.

So formatting makes a difference because Disco Elysium's paragraphs rolled through on that ticker and you feel them like pages of a book and visual novel style line by line blocks appearing in this in metaphor and in Phoenix Wright, which I'm currently playing, give you a little bit more chance to digest piece by piece even though you know you're doing you're in for a while. It just doesn't feel as daunting as when that full fucking dialogue list goes up on Disco's case, you know? It really is, yeah, for streaming purposes it's, you know, that's not the average gamer's like situation, but like it fucking feels horrible and tiring and exhausting when you see it like that. That made or break,

the voice acting added to the final cut. Oh, absolutely. Like saved the game there, and it's wild because I'm like, this is one of the best games ever made. You know, to implement it. Yeah, and you and I looked at that game, and Paige looked at that game, and I'm sure a dozen

or hundreds of other streamers looked at that game, and they're like, well, I'd be insane not to play this on stream, but I don't feel up to being able to read all this dialogue on stream. So I guess I'll just wait and hope. And like that turned out well for us on disco. Also, it turns out that not only was it voice acted, it was like unbelievably phenomenally voice acted at that. So yeah, cool. Okay. What, okay, what do you think your hour count was at? It was 90 something, 91, 92, something like that. Got it.

I feel no desire for an upgraded version. Well, yeah. Okay, but. Like, no, no like Pete, like once they started doing those, you looked at them and like when Persona 5 came out, you could be like, Oh, I wonder what they could change and upgrade it or whatever. And like, yeah, you could kind of see it. Yeah, no, the archetype system is extremely complete. And the bonds that you have are extremely succinct and well formed and and like very succinctly. I can see the updates that come with these versions though. I can see a part of it almost being like

we can't help it, we just see little things that we're like, oh we can make that a little bit, you know? Oh there is like a hole in the game. There is a part of the game that you get to and you're like, this used to be a full scale dungeon with a whole month associated with it. And we're not going to get to do it. You can see where they just went, nah, and took it out. If the promise that was made is the promise that's kept and this is all going to be DLC and not new versions for sale, then whatever.

That's fine. I'm down with whatever extra stuff gets thrown in, as long as it can be thrown into the existing progress I have. Cool. But yeah, Math 4 is a good game. Thumbs up. It's on sale right now on Steam, actually.

Is it? Yeah, it's 25% off, which at least one person in my chat was massively fucking pissed off about because they're like, I beat the game yesterday and it's already 25% off? It came out like eight weeks ago. Well, isn't this just like a holiday, like Black Friday sale thing? Yeah, but it's pretty uncommon for Atlus games to go on sale within their first year of release Oh even so it's like great for everybody that that didn't buy it Not as great for people who bought it on the first day

I almost I feel like holiday sale things almost don't count because it's not like a It's not a permanent discount on the game. Right? It's like these Yeah, but holiday sales also exist in like a weird alternate reality like Ubisoft can't make up its mind as to what Far Cry 5 should cost because Far Cry 5 is either $79.99 every single day of the year unless there's a sale at which point they always cut it 90% down to $7.99 it's like so which is the real price because it's on sale for 799 literally every time it goes on sale Because yeah, I feel like a permanent slash is one where you feel more like ah god damn it You know as opposed to like like a window of time where I can it doesn't feel as bad to me. I

Don't know Okay, cool You know what I'm just thinking cuz you're you're you did the calendar event in Metaphor around Brawlhaven, right? Yep. That is the moment where I prepared for like a big sortie and then you didn't get one. And after that point, the game couldn't catch up to me because I prepped for like a big deal they really make it sound like you've got a fucking juice no man yeah holy shit they really make it sound like and you do expect it you know emotionally for it to be a big deal and you're like it's a joke yeah okay okay I was gonna talk Yeah. Um, okay, okay. I was gonna talk about metaphor as well, so like yeah, that just all rolls in together there.

Yeah, what else, man, what's up with you? I just wanted to talk about metaphor right away. I played a little bit of Tactical Breach Wizards. Well, Tactical Breach Wizards? Tactical, Tactical. Tactical, I'm gonna bleat that. Bleat with us I Played some tactical breach wizards and that is a fun concept

for with great execution Really in love. It's it really dedicates itself to the natural results of its stupid setting Absolutely. So the concept of what if a plus B, in this case, what if wizards plus, you know, like SWAT team style, tactical gear come together and you see a wand with a silencer on it. And you see a body art, you see a bullet Kevlar, and then like a knife where like the shoulder knives like holster would go. But it's a magic dagger, you know? Yeah.

And you're like, yeah, okay, I get it. You hit the door, you put a rune on it and the rune is like C4 exploding. Breach! Very fun concept. So you can't just defenestrate everyone. But you're gonna try. And then the game's like, fucking throw everyone in this level out of a window. Yes So in terms of literally like not just look feel animation like even the model quality

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

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

one of the first big missions before you have a boss fight in it, there is one where you have to knock three enemies out of a window in the same turn and then do something else. And it takes a lot of thinking ahead. I spent a lot of time on that specific one. Good. That was a really fun one to piece together that showed, like, okay, they understand the assignment on these types of games. So, very, very fun and charming with that. The dialogue is opt-in for Marvel dialogue. So, you can choose to say, he's right behind me, isn't he or you can skip that?

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

affect in what way and then which way are you pushing or pulling the enemies, you know? I want to see a lot of that with spells. You should play Midnight Suns if you like that. in what way and then which way are you pushing or pulling the enemies, you know? I wanna see a lot of that with spells. You should play Midnight Suns if you like that. Oh yeah, right. Because there's like an entire, like 40% of all cards in that game are knock someone in a direction that is harmful to them. And something that I did not expect

about Tactical Breach Wizards either is, perfect information in this case is a game mechanic that you have to activate. Yeah. Every other game shows you a little ghost trail. It's just the interface. Of like, the enemy is about to step forward and swing at you.

And you're like, OK, cool. Don't be there. Here, you've got to click through the plan and then simulate to see what would happen as the main character's ability is to like pre-cog. And then if you like the result, you can commit to it or you can go back and change it. And it's a little more work than I would want that mechanic to be because I prefer when I can just see where things are already going trajectory-wise. But because it's in lore reasoning is like a part of what's his ability and stuff, I get it and it feels fine. I think that it gives it a really different taste so like into the breeches like perfect information is like you're gonna sit there and you're

You're playing the game in your mind in a lot of cases before committing to it on paper Yeah, whereas It's it's the equivalent of like doing an algebra program problem in your head and then writing down the answer, right? Whereas in tactical breach wizards, you're like, oh, I have a really good idea. Oh, that would not work. Oh, that would work really badly. All right, let's roll that back. It's more like show your work, kind of solving it. Yeah. And so that pacing of like trying this, it failed, redo, try this, it failed is actually unlike the, you know, so into the Breach, Shogun Showdown,

these are the comparisons, fights in tight spaces, but when you're doing that particular element, that's actually a lot like what it is to play Phantom Brigade. When you set up your mechs and like how they're gonna move and attack on the timeline and what's gonna come in what direction, like you try out a couple different runs

before you commit to playing it out. So a Phantom Brigade does a lot of that and Transistor also does a lot of that. You move around in Transistor on that timeline a few times before you're like, this is the one I'm going with. I feel like this is the best way to deal with the threat. So yeah, it becomes even more genres being pulled in here just from the pacing set up and change there. And I still do prefer the one where I see the world coming at me and you have to like

find a way to, you know, squeeze around the bullet lines and limbo them. But it's fun here. You know, this is definitely not too bad. So that was a big part of it that I thought was great. And then it has the single best cosmetic currency I have ever seen in any game ever. Fucking phenomenal. You have to earn confidence

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

I can't believe it hasn't been done before. Amazing, I love that. That's great, that sells that, that whole concept in one shot. So yeah, that's a fun one for sure. It does feel too, that when taking all these kind of these types of games, amongst which I'll put Slay the Spire as well to some degree with like, you know, setting up

your moves and progressing roguelike into the not into the breach. Tactical Breach Wizards is on the more time intense missions, a part of that. So you can do a stage in Shogun Showdown in like less than five minutes. You can do honestly like a minute 30 seconds to get through a level. Here, it's just bigger, it's more involved.

It feels like- You're doing sets of stages. Yeah, it feels like each one is gonna be much, much heavier. And I imagine, as it's a triple A game, that's what Midnight Suns is as well, right? No! Really? It's not. It's Midnight Suns.

So, okay, well, Midnight Suns is not, it's in the middle there. So first of all, Midnight Suns is not a triple A game. That is a firm double A. Okay. And when you go on a mission in Midnight Suns, it is not, it is not, so you'll go on one stage and then come back, right? So you're not doing like five little rooms in a row like you do in tactical

breach wizards, but your given stage is going to take a little longer than an into the breach map. Well, okay. Okay. Yeah. I w I would say that it is half as long as an X comm mission. And that is where I was ultimately going, is I realize in this discussion too, that I'm like, huh. XCOM is a big frame of reference for all these things, but not quite the same because in XCOM,

you don't know for certain what's going to happen on the next turn. You see percentages. You really don't. You see percentages that you cannot trust. So the unknown variable means that that game is just like, it's a completely different thing. But then second, and this is probably part of like, it changes the feeling for me. Like I never really got into XCOM outside of like when we did that run back in the day and played it, LPing it.

The failed all the way through. Yeah. I feel like my desire for shorter, quicker runs is that same scratch I have when I go like, let me get on Ballot Show for a minute and get out. An XCOM mission that takes upwards of maybe 30 minutes, depending on how- The XCOM mission's like 20, 30 minutes, I'd say. It's a huge commitment that I feel like I'm kinda like, ah, I wish, it's not a, no,

I'm framing this in the wrong way. What that game is trying to do is perfect for what it's going for. What I usually want- Yeah, but you can't just sit down, bang out a mission, and then walk away. XCOM's a fuckin' sit down and play some fucking Video games and video game and I'm not finding myself in that mood as often these days as I am to like scratch a little

Itch and then you know come back and sit down for a few do another thing. Yes my task, you know sons lives in a weird space where it's definitely longer than a breach map and But like in a weird space where it's definitely longer than a breach map, but like, you can, it is like, you sit down, you bang out like an easier, like non-narrative mission in 10 minutes. But the narrative missions that have like cutscenes attached to them and are way, way harder will take like 20. Okay. Yeah, into the Breach could,

the bigger missions with like tons of enemies and reinforcement waves could take, you know, 15. They could go heavy, but the fast ones are like, you know, like, yeah, five or so. Especially once you like get used to your team and you're going quickly through it. So yeah, so I feel like right now Breach Wizards is landing in that higher time investment

space for my buck and that means that I'll probably pick at it a little bit less for now, a little bit more in the future once I'm done with Shogun Showdown and stuff like that. But very fun. We also had Get Into Fighting games for Rivals of Aether 2. Reggie brought his homie Ned who came over and was a guest to kind of teach us a bit more about Rivals of Aether and Hey Rivals of Aether one was my favorite of the platform fighters the the smash clones and

Then how come it didn't be game of the year fighting game of the year multiverses damn The Pope was too strong. The aura was under it was was could not be cracked There was not enough tithes paid. I feel like Aether 2 is easily just running away with it as far as I'm concerned. It's my favorite not-Smash-style. By the way, all jokes aside, even though I'm not crazy about Aether, All jokes aside, even though I'm not crazy about Aether, I totally agree with you that Rivals of Aether 1 was absolutely the best not-Smash game.

Cup Cup, part of it was like it was doing more of its own thing, and it had its own feel that was more distinct. So here's the interesting part, coming into it, like in two, there's a lot of unique things that are really, doing its own thing applies really well Coming into it, like in two, there's a lot of unique things that are really, doing its own thing applies really well to like the character kits, but the game in a lot of ways

is actually just, is actually doing a lot of things that are very Smash-like, but it's just doing them exceptionally well, right? And I think we've had a- Get real labor of love energy off of it. Yes, it feels like, you know, each of these these games has now come out and had its different thing where it's like how are they gonna stand out

and multiverses had the 2v2 part of it. And being shit. And then also had that. And then it had its other problems. But they pushed that kind of aspect as their identity. Hey, Wooly. Hey, hey, hey, Wooly. You might not be a fan of our pizza now, but what if we took the pizza you're eating into the back and then pissed all over it and brought it back out for you? How about you like it now?

I'm not going to pretend. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I didn't have fun with multiverses when it came out and when I was going through that. Oh, I totally did. I totally had fun with multiverses when it came out. I feel like the progression of events has made that game much of a bummer over time.

But we can't go and make it sound like PlayStation All-Stars had held a candle to it. You know what I mean? Hey, you know what PlayStation All-Stars didn't do? Go away and come back. And then come back worse. Right. It came out and it was bad, but Isaac from Dead Space, his rival was Zeus.

And that was stupid as shit. But yeah, I do, when we line them up, you kind of get those, and then you get your, everything from TMNT Smash Up to Nickelodeon and so on. Slap City stood out because it had a clutch button, and the clutch button is really fun. What a great concept. That's like the name button is really fun. What a great concept. That's like the name. But I feel Rivals just always felt

like it had the most love put into it. And my go-to example of this is the way it treated Shovel Knight. When you look at Shovel Knight as a guest in that game, sure, Shovel Knight has been a guest in every game, and, Gush of a knight has been a guest in every game and there's often a very predictable but solid move kit that he gets. You know, you got the down shovel, you've got the fishing, you've got the spinner, you know, you got all the things you expect to see. But the rivals of Aether one had so much extra love put in his is just the amount of the lengths they went to

to make him as accurate as possible and have way more in there than your average like platform fighter would expect. It showed love, you know? And so I feel like that goes into a lot of all these other, all the other characters as well, and you feel it. You feel it in the amount of things they can do with the possibilities and a lot of what the other all the other characters as well. And you feel it. You feel it in the amount of things they can do with the possibilities and a lot of what

the system has going for it. And and it's it's just fun, man. The parry system in particular, I was talking about it from trying out the demo earlier, but I think that's a really fun addition to the game that you you know, you can use to like call out big predictable moments and get a nice big reward for it. But you could also do regular dodging and spot dodging.

And the things that you, like if you're used to Smash movement, you could always do. It finds these places where these other games, and Smash included, didn't give you options. And it says, hey, when you're hanging off the ledge, what if you pressed your B button? You could do a ledge special. Yeah, well, what happened, man?

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

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

to go. You don't even have to think about it. Yeah, we're living in a golden age in which you are now a stupid pariah for your online being weird or non-useful in a lot of situations. And as a side note, the Aetherverse is a thing because there's the card game, there's the dungeon crawler, there's all these they're kind of getting into as well. So, um, shout outs, you know, Dan Fornis and rivals of Aether too, man. It's real, real good. It's a lot of fun. And I, yeah, I think it stands out. I think it's it's absolutely worth your attention. And it was fun. Yeah, shout outs to Ned as well who came over and kind of showed us some of the some of the tech and some of the cool things you could do. I Shout-outs to Ned as well who came over and kind of showed us some of the some of the tech and some of the cool things you could do.

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

And they're just, yeah, they're fun. There's just a lot of fun and great stuff going on with it. So, uh, everyone go check that out. I hope Aether continues to do well, or at least well enough to continue to exist. It's one of those things I look at and I'm like, yeah, this isn't for me. But I'm also appreciative of its continued quality and existence. Yes, yes. And something I pointed out as well is that, you know, as we do, like as you are well aware,

there are different proportions and styles of furries out there, right? Yeah. You have... It's a wide variety of that. Yeah, art style changes, the number of heads high, whether they're more like Jim Henson-esque or going into... Yeah, like however you cartoon them. Or do you want to be like a tiny little furry rabbit in this game called Atlas that has good reviews? And I'm like, this looks cool. And then I scroll past the fact that it has an absolutely

degenerate ass slider in it that has the fucking shorts right up the bunny rabbit's ass. There you go. And then you click on it on steam, and it's like overwhelmingly positive Yeah, and I'm like I don't know if those I don't know what the positive I don't know what proportion of what positive of what part is these reviews are coming from but apparently it's pretty good Well there you go right so look Zootopia be stars and my little pony different styles of you know anthropomorphic character design here. The Furries character designs in the Aetherverse, it feels are like Disney's Robin Hood style.

And those are pretty good. So pre... No. I think those are pretty good ones closeted era furries Uh, I mean Robin Hood was before they knew what they were doing I Wouldn't that's not the case here. I think a third knows what it's doing, but it just proportionally reminds me of that, you know, I Feel like that's uh, that's what I'm seeing here.

Anyways, anyways, yeah, no, by the time Minerva Mink came around, it was too late. Time Minerva Mink came around, somebody walked by the guy drawing that. I was like, get the fuck out of here. They're never going to let you put this fucking bitch in the kids cartoons. Like, yeah, you fucking bet. I mean, you know, they knew that they were making sexy animals, but they did not know that they were sculpting a generation of young impressionable minds that were watching these things. Yeah, and it'll never go back. You can't go back now. The Contagion has existed. It's in the water.

Alright, so yeah, that is going to be pretty much my week. We did some Phoenix Wright yesterday, schedule wise, that's continuing. And tomorrow, ba-da-ba-ba-bum, we are starting Cyberpunk. Hey! So come swing over to Woolly Versus, that's on Twitch and on YouTube.

We're gonna be getting into the into first session seeing how that feels. And then on Thursday, I think I'm going to take a look at and probably at and probably continue through 1000 times resist. I want to check that out. So I was thinking about that after Phoenix, right? But I think I'm just going to start it now. You know what? That 1000 times resist is such a great game to talk about after the conversation we had about the voice acting because I was finishing up metaphor and people were like,

you should try 1000 times resist. And I'm like, answer me the one question and this one question will determine if the chance of me playing it is 0% or anything higher than 0% and is does 1000 times resist have full voice acting? And the answer was yes. Ah, awesome. Very cool. So like that made it from a well, I will probably never play this to maybe I will play it stuff okay yeah I know as well that things when we run three things it gets a little spotty on the schedule but I think Phoenix Wright should be wrapping up shortly but yeah we had a slot here so I'm just gonna get

that look that Phoenix Wright it's a fun, but man, it's sometimes impossible to figure out when the fucking game is going to end. We got them. There's no... Here's a video tape of them committing the murder and a signed confession. How they get out of this. Hey, look, it's some bullshit I pulled out of my ass. I mean, I think as well, the only thing I can trust

is the turnabout theme, because when you get cornered and then you get, I don't know them perfectly, but there's three levels of escalation, right? And when you get from the first one is when like, oh, should I caught you? And the second one is like, now you're cracking. But if you never get to the final one, you know the case is not done yet.

You know we might go for another day, you know? So I'm relying on listening to it. When I hear all three, that's when I feel like their back is against the wall, you know? They also kind of get caught in like their own, like, and you notice it more as the games go on, you get caught in this cycle where you're like, well, this is the third case case so the likelihood of wrapping this

up on day one is zero like it's not no matter how this goes because each case is 20% or 30% longer than the case before it so even though it looks like I got him dead to rights I know something's coming down something's gonna happen gotta be dramatic. Unknown people just showing up in the fucking courtroom or you hit them with the foot with your big shot and then they just kind of tank it and go, yeah. And they're like, yeah, so fuck, we're going to be here another day. Just because I own the gun that shot them doesn't mean and I wanted them dead. It doesn't mean that I shot them because I have an unreliable alibi

That you'll need to interview tomorrow. I was saying it I was saying you were playing but I'm like I'm just getting hit with the fucking Joey, but a fuku Situation over and over of just like I could not stand my wife. She was the worst. I hated her I Didn't kill her No Okay was the worst. I hated her. I didn't kill her. No. Okay. Like, the Yeah, it was that that that type of vibe. Anyways, we will be checking that out this week. Saturday, no stream. But perhaps Friday instead. So check my Twitter and my blue sky for the schedule

Yeah, that's pretty much for me all right I gotta use the restroom and then I have a bunch more week to talk about actually be right back. Oh What you eating man Protein bar Fuck yeah All right. Let's see. Hey, it's Pat pats That's what Pat play this week. All right, so I beat metaphor That's done. What else? Oh, yeah, so every new stage of development for your baby is the fucking coolest thing ever Until they become like kids and talk back and shit or whatever, but you know what you just enjoy it while it's good, right?

No, I joke obviously it's all always gonna be good but The newest trick is the baby will put his hand on his mouth and go When you when you when you say hello to him, blowing kisses. Wow. Ready for, ready for the stage. And, and like, so there's like, I love my baby. I'm so proud of my baby. And then there's like, you're at a restaurant with your quiet, well behaved baby. And he looks at an old lady, one table over and smiles and goes, mwah! And you see that person just fucking dies! She dies. Just,

Yes, implodes into a black hole, 100%. And you're like, yeah! Got him. And then, Paige talked about it on her stream and I talked about it on my stream, and I talked about it on my stream, but I should mention it here, that Paige and I can confirm that we made the first genuine fucking mistake parenting this child.

Like, did it and were immediate, like, shouldn't have done that. That's gonna come back on us real bad. So, you know, babies need to try new foods. So, this means you make dinner or you go out somewhere and you hear you a little baby, here's a little piece of food. Do you like it? No, you don't like it?

Oh, you do like it. So, hey, guess what? Kids like chicken fingers and chicken nuggies. Just fucking shocker, right? This kid likes pickles and lemons and shit like that. Oh, that's crazy right, but then we saw like that that Like chocolate syrup that like hardens into like a shell on like ice cream So yes, the coating dip.

But Paige has been familiar. So Paige was like, oh, you've never had that? We've got to try that. So we'll pick up ice cream. We don't usually have ice cream in the house, so we'll pick up ice cream. And so we've given the kid a little piece of cake and we've given him a little piece of this or that. So we gave him what was the equivalent of like a single gram, like, you know, the tip of a spoon of vanilla ice cream. And the kid, you saw like every neuron fire up simultaneously and he grabbed the spoon and, and then for like four days afterwards, he would, he would pinch his fingers like this and go, ah, ah, and hit his chin. And you're like, do you want chicken nuggets? Do you want toast? Do you

want a banana? Do you want berries? No. He would fucking like flap his arms going, ah. And it's like, oh, fuck. He's been asking for ice cream for days and he's getting mad that there's no ice cream. Now that was last week. He seems to have forgotten what the ice cream feels like right now because he's back to eating like normal. Okay. But like there was that there was that fucking day there. We're like shit! Yeah. Is this kid only gonna fucking eat ice cream now You know that my god damn it the monkey loves those those cucumber slices until it sees the grape go by and goes get So like yeah, okay ice cream is off the table no more trying out ice cream

That is a mommy and daddy food only No more trying out ice cream. That is a mommy and daddy food only. But like, you know, bullet dodged, but grazed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. There are some, there are some food pleasures that like you're going to need to wait a little bit. But it's crazy. Cause like we gave him like a little tiny piece of cake on his, on his first birthday and he was like, ah, it's fine. He didn't, you know, the sugar craziness hadn't

locked in genetically or something. No, you need to save it till you can use it as an incentive to control. That's, that's, that is how you end up with a pat situation. You don't want that. That's how you give yourself a disordered eating yeah in regards to sweets you don't do that that's bad to do no the good rewards that come from following and doing as you're told so yeah you know so the only thing that sweets will be for is Every time he does a good job or gets a good grade on a test or any time he said Just give him as many sweets as he can eat during those two crucial time periods. Let's associate

Feelings of success and reward With unhealthy eating bro, dude dude, I was so doomed. I was so fucking doomed. Let's lick those two and marry the concepts together. OK, I was a shy child, very shy. So when I went out and did social things or did really well at a social gathering that I was nervous

about. Here's candy. And you open that tub may have given me bad habits. You open up that tub and you peel the foil back and inside is just the word happiness and you just grab your spoon. I once described page asked me once like why do I like sweet sugary treats so much? And I said like you ever like act like you say it and you didn't realize that it was your true feeling Until it's out of your mouth and now it's out of the world. Yeah, I was like, oh cuz it feels like happiness Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there you go. That's it. It's you go from being stressed to just happy Like no matter what's happening. You can be the stressed and freaked out and you just eat a candy and then you're just happy and you're relaxed Like oh let's start early

So No more trying out ice creams for the baby that he had the one gram and that was like crack cocaine, so no more of that. Let's see. As for, and he's the most perfect angel ever and I love him. Someone in the chat brought up the getting cheated out of the quarter piece of pie in my childhood. Yeah, no, I'm still mad about it. Anyway, that pie should have been shared. Yeah, no, I'm still mad about it. Anyway, that pie should have been shared. You know, pie kitchen sweets are most effective when you learn that,

or as long as there are still good things in the world, then you don't need those treats as much now. You know? As reality starts to happen, they shine even brighter. Now I wanna eat a bunch of candy. Just talking about this, damn it. Yeah, you fucking do.

Yeah, I do. Hey, don't enable. Shame. Shame on you. Nigga, I got diabetes. What the fuck you think this is? I thought you were pre-diabetes. I hit the real thing. You hit it?

That's why I had to do this now. Yeah, but I'm back now. But I'm back now. I am back. It's true. Yeah. So like, you know, you tasted it for a little while. It's permanent. You came back off it. It's permanent. Once you have it, it for a little while. It's probably came back off. It's permanent once you have it. It's Not not permanent nah Yeah, I knew a guy and he was he was diabetes

And then he got way less fat and then his doctor was like you're cured right yeah, I prestige well Yeah, hold on. Yeah, let me describe that slightly more accurately. That is what that guy told me. Hmm Got it. Okay that like that. He told me that he lost a bunch of weight and his doctor said you are cured of your diabetes I Was not in the doctor's office that with him at the time The phrase I'm sure that's the exact phrasing the doctor's office that with him at the time mm-hmm the phrase I'm sure that's the exact phrasing the doctor used Probably verbatim got it probably alright, so

Did you know that the people who made dead cells split off into multiple developers? There's motion twin, and then there's an offshoot of motion twin. I did not know that There's motion twin and then there's an offshoot of motion twin. I did not know that So I did know that motion twin did recently develop something I played Was it Astral Ascent? No Was it windblown? No, okay. Well they made one of those. Okay, and I can't tell you which one it is okay so I played Astral Ascent and Windblown the the split offs of Dead Cells huh you remember how Dead Cells

was 2d but had like a weird 3d aspect to it did it what was 3d or like there were what's that? Like they were... I don't know how to describe it. I don't remember anything about it. Like it was sprite based but it looked kind of like crunchy and fat like it was 3D. I don't know how to describe it. The sprites had dynamic lighting on them in the way that like the KOF 12 and 13 sprites did, but that was the main deal? So Astral Ascent is a lot more like Dead Cells.

It is a 2D scroller that you go level to level as a roguelite. It's very pastel based. And you get upgrades and you will get your gadget on your L&R and you like it's it's very much like a like a successor to Dead Cells. And I don't like it at all. Oh, damn. I don't like it even a little. And I I I wait Astral Scent. Yeah, that's the right game. Yeah, it's 2D art is really good. I just don't like Literally anything about every single thing the game does. Holy shit. Let me pull this up and take a look. Now that is not to say it's bad. In fact, it's kind of like it's got a lot of quality going on with it

What the fuck is the English language man? What do you mean? What are you saying right now? I say hey listen, I'm using my non Definitive language to describe my feelings. I said I Didn't like it not that it was bad. For you that's very important. Most people use these types of words, not me though. In fact, you know what that is? That is years of learning and then correct usage of language

after lessons have been learned. I am attempting to use my words more effectively gotcha Okay, somebody in the chest is pizza tower feelings. You know what that might have been the fucking turning point pizza because pizza tower I was like I bet people really like this though. Yeah, well yeah I feel like it must have happened years before that but that was a very strong case of like this is not bad But it is not for me. Yeah so I don't like it's really floaty and it's very pastel and I hate it. I clicked play and the

first thing I saw was someone floating in the air and a parts pastel art style as they landed on the ground. And it's like all the parts of Dead Cells that I did not enjoy got split off to create their own game. Huh. Huh. This looks cool. It's a much more colorful game, certainly. Yeah. So, I hate it. On the other hand, when blown- Art style is pretty much the beginning and end of that thought? No, it's art style. It's the feel. It's the tone.

I played it for like an hour and I was like, I don't feel. I am not appealed by literally anything that is going on here vibes. I'm bored. My vibes are dead. I Had no feelings other than like I don't like how this controls right Someone in the chat asked the important question which characters did I try the two starting characters Which characters did I try the two starting characters? Okay, I also played windblown which is some of the dead cells people deciding that they would like to make furry Hades And

That's really good That And that's really good That The banner for windblown has almost the exact position and coloring as dead cells Protagonist like in the foreground. Yeah interesting The music in windblown is fucking incredible. I really like its color use. I really like its aesthetic It it is a Hades-like that is the clear inspiration, but it takes a bunch of weird little changes to the formula that make it really interesting. This was shown at a game show recently. I remember it, I remember watching a trailer for this at,

yeah, with something, yeah, okay. So one of the things is that, I've been testing this a lot lately, which is does this game have dodge offset for his combos? Because I'm noticing that more and more games have dodge offset, which is cool. And to those of you who are not familiar with dodge offset, that means if you have a five hit combo,

but you dodge in between hits three and four and you hit combo again Hits four and five will come out so you don't interrupt your combo even if you don't actually complete the the previous strings Yeah, so the reason why dodge offset is so interesting in windblown is because You have your dead cell style weapons where they all have like three or four hit combos and they'll act like Hades weapons but you're picking them up during your run. You're not picking up like staff and running staff the whole time and then getting upgrades for staff. Like no, you're getting either staff or you're getting butcher's knife or greatsword and it has the Dead Cells unlock progression where you're getting more and more different weapons

with more and more move sets. The most interesting thing about it is that once you unlock it very early on is that the game's core mechanic is dodge offset because the final hit of every combo is switching to your other weapon with a unique attack that switches to your other weapon. Stylish. That's cool. So the butcher's knife is the starter weapon, which is like left slash, right slash, and then big overhead slash. Super basic, right? But if it's your secondary weapon and you switch to it on the final hit of like a stave combo, it will create like a gigantic whirlwind of slashes

in front of you for like 10 seconds. Okay, yeah. That will interact with all of your other stuff. I mean, I'm seeing some upgrades in the footage here that looks just like Hades upgrades, really. Yeah. Like spinning blade. It feels really good. It plays really well. Okay, so what you were just describing about our style and sort of a color and

things like that, it's funny you met like what I'm looking at here with Windblown going, the color of this game is World of Warcraft. Yes. No Like, the color of this game is Warcraft 3. Okay. That's a really very tiny distinction. The purples and blues and rainbow lighting of everything happening at all times right now is very much what I feel like watching wow when I see it. What's also really strange, both Astral Asset and Windblown are going for more pastel, lighter colors. They're actually really similar. In Astral they're very flat and in Windblown they're very flat. And in Windblown, they're very shaded because they have lots of lighting and lots of shadows on them.

Everything is glowing. Everything is glowing. Oh, yeah, every single thing is glowing. Yeah, and flashing. And to be fair, in some cases, I feel like there's that kind of Xbox 360 glow. It's kind of like a, you know. You know exactly what you mean. Yeah. What you mean is of Xbox 360 glow. It's kind of like a, you know. You know exactly what you mean.

Yeah. What you mean is Unreal Engine 3 glow. Sure. Fury, you know. Yeah. Yeah, right. But what they have is awesome hand drawn slash and hit sparks on top of the glows.

And that makes them look better. That makes them look good. So that's a nice touch I'm seeing here. So Windblown gets to live in the part of my Steam library where I play it for three hours and go, wow, that's great. On the shelf with you, early access game. I'll see you in six to 18 months when you're done and hit

1.0. I mean, it really does. I mean, coming from the dead cells bones, like this is, yeah, way more Hades and as well as Astral Ascent is much more of a Dead Cells successor in what they're going for. Yeah, and they both focused on different parts of what Dead Cells was about and it turns out I liked one side of that equation way more than I like the other one interesting Okay. Oh Yeah, I mean I'd have to play this and get the feel for it, but I do feel a bit of death's gambit in how this is playing out with the way things are moving. There's another thing that comes to mind, but either way, both games are just filling

the screen with your abilities stacking on top of each other and you're kind of like, well, you know, a bullet heaven, like final form feels like it's what you're running around doing that on the screen in a 2D content sense. Okay, interesting. So, so the steam sales, the autumn sales been happening, which is why I've been trying out so many of these. So have, Willie, have you ever, I don't know if you've encountered this, has there ever been a game that you love but then someone ruined it?

Or like, you know, bad patch, or like the company was really horrible. And then they said to you, what if you could play that game, but instead it wasn't like that game at all, other than the parts about that game that you liked. So hey, you know how you hate playing Overwatch because Overwatch sucks now? What if you could play a new game that was not overwatch but was in fact overwatch and called it marvel rivals right like you see what I'm saying with that yeah like you know all that fucking anger and shit the gross the direct

replacement what if what if I just gave you a new overwatch game that just didn't have the same name on it mm-hmm right that is Well, that's as close as I could possibly get to something that most people here would understand so destiny 2 is a game I put a lot of time in and Destiny 2 is my most hated game that I have ever put time in

And Destiny 2 is my most hated game that I have ever put time in because all the time that I put into Destiny 2, I feel like it got thrown into my face because that game was like, like ruined under me, like just just made bad. So I looked at a game and I said, what is this game? It was called Witchfire. I looked at a game and I said, what is this game? It was called Witchfire. And someone personally edited the old XKCD comic to be like, what game is this? Witchfire. What's it like? Destiny.

What is it though? It's not Destiny. Amazing. That's exactly what I wanted. And I thought that can't possibly be that on the nose because the store page says it's a first person shooter, dark action, edgy, grim dark extraction rogue like many words on there. And then I load up which fire, which is in early access. It's not done. It's been, but it's one of those games that's been in early

access for so long that you could just lie and say it's done. You know, those kinds of things. Sure. Sure. Sure. And when people said that it plays like Destiny, I expected a game that was very similar to Destiny in look and feel. I was not expecting a game that felt identical in feel to Destiny, down to the buttons. I was not expecting a game that is so similar to the way Destiny feels that I can see which

guns got ripped off to become which guns in which fire. Where I look at the gun hunger and I go, that's a cross between Hawkmoon and the Ace of Spades. And it acts like Hawkmoon, but it plays like the Ace of Spades kind of thing. So sometimes there are games that are like, you know, in a similar style or like clones of or so. And then sometimes there are games that are, I guess, like an Exodus game. Like as you leave that, come here. This is where- We're here. This is a basket for you to fall it is it is an exodus game that you're supposed to you Are you we're waiting for you all and everything is exactly the way you you remembered it?

So I'm gonna have to go into a little bit of destiny terminology here to Get it across for the the lapsed players But the long and short of it is what Witchfire is. Witchfire says, go into a little open map that in Destiny would be called a patrol area, and there are a multitude of enemy groups and chests and randomly generated type of roguelike things that you can go around, interact with, shoot, discover little hidden vaults and tombs and micro-dungeons and shit like that. As you kill these enemies, you'll get resources and you get a little rogue-like power-up system

that only works in for the parts that only does one trip at a time, right? And you're playing with Destiny guns. Guns that are just stolen directly from Destiny down to the part where they have what in Destiny would be called an exotic catalyst But here they're just like hey shoot 20 kill 25 enemies with this handgun. Okay now the handgun Will stockpile power if you do headshots one after the other Okay, now kill 150 enemies with this handgun and

Upgrade it in the shop now It will stockpile power for every headshot you get before reloading and that power will exponentially go up per bullet that you do it in a row. And then kill 200 with this and then upgrade it a third time and now it will let you keep that streak going even if you hit a body shot and just roll it There's a gun that you have to get the heat on and it will burn enemies to put status on you know that kind of

Destiny gunplay weapon upgrade thing and also in destiny like the rare gun with the Customization and such is the peak of what you're trying to do. It's called an exotic in destiny It's a gun that has weird properties that does cool things and feels great. But the point of the entire video game is to get the cool rare gun. And so here what they have done is like every gun that you get is the cool rare gun.

And instead they put it into a kind of rogue-like kind of thing. And if you level up your character like in Dark Souls, then the map rerolls itself so that enemies are in different locations and special events are in different places. It's really cool and it feels really good and I put a bunch of time into it despite the fact it's early access and it has a bunch of cool challenges to it, but it also has only half the areas that it will have in the full game. So I'm putting it on the shelf. But if you're the kind of person who really fucking likes

Destiny but doesn't want to play Destiny, Witchfire is over there and it's a little bit different, but I had a blast playing it over the weekend. From the developers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Yeah, weird, huh? What the huh? What is that fucking strange? That is not weird as far not what I expected to see there Baffling but yeah, no plays plays it plays excellently there's you know, there's no story right now and you know There's bits and pieces missing and it doesn't have half the levels, but it plays incredibly

And So if you're interested I would suggest checking it out. It's not really on sale It's like 10% off on the autumn sale. Hmm. Oh, it's always funny to imagine I feel like I can't pull the exact examples, but gates Devs that make a really narrative heavy game just go man fuck it We want some gameplay, and you just you just make a gameplay loop-ass gameplay thing as yours as your second thing When your identity can just go in either direction

Hell man, we've done walking simulators for a while. What do you guys want to do basketball game? Fuck it. So, Witchfires were the cool. And the last game that I played this week of note is somebody sent me a code for what's called the Soul Frame Preludes, which is a fancy way of saying the alpha version of Soul Frame. So Soul Frame is Digital Extremes' not Warframe incoming action game, not quite MMO thing

that is medieval and fantasy instead of sci-fi. Okay. I was in fact going to... I mean, so on the docket is the the the Warframe Devstream and some of that stuff. Was this included in those announcements? I don't know. Okay. I didn't even know that that happened. So any of that stuff that's in there,

I would be new to me. I just happened to get sent a code. The game's been available to stream for about 30 days, but I didn't have access. It's like invite only kind of thing. But eventually you get your own invite to send out to somebody. Did you play what they showed at Ted O'Conn? No, I don't know. I've been off. I have been off the Digital Extremes wagon for years now since 21. I've been out. But I did play a million hours of Warframe back in the day, so it's a good starting point for comparison for Soulframe. And what they're doing with Soulframe is really smart. So Warframe is a third-person shooter

where you have a button for melee, and you have a bunch of you know magic abilities your one two three four like it's a MOBA and you're going out there and you're grinding and you're running missions and you're doing shooter missions. Soul Frame is exactly the same game in reverse so in Warframe where most of your buttons are for shooting and you have a melee button, in Soulframe most of your buttons are for melee and you have a shooting button. So in Warframe you have slide, aim, shoot, etc. and your powers, right?

In Soulframe you have light attack, heavy attack, block slash parry, and then the left trigger is for all of your abilities which does include firing a little bit of lightning out of your hands kind of like a gun. But like the the the the the focus is completely inverted from guns to melee. Also, I mean, the, that, yeah, what we saw of it, and yeah, what I'm kind of looking at, it's like not much grunts that you're dealing with either. It seems like it's very like one on one. No, you're dealing with way less enemies,

but they're much stronger. A lot of duels. Yeah, a lot of like, you know, oh, there's three guys. They're much more like souls. And like melee bosses and whatnot. And in its general structure, however, it's actually incredibly similar to Warframe. So like in Warframe, between missions, you go to the Orbiter, which is your little spaceship that would fly in orbit. In Soulframe, you hit the select button and your character teleports into, I don't know what the fuck to call it,

I forget the name of it, but like a mind palace that has your upgrade stall and your character that builds your gear and shit like that. And when you earn a new blueprint and get the items to build gear, it can take 8 to 12 hours in real human time to build it because you're going to build it and then you're going to go back out there and you're going to grind and etc. And I remember, so like the starting area is like a fairly large open area, like a field, like a medieval type of village area. And I was like, I wonder how they're going to do Warframe style content, like a defense mission or a assassination mission, you know, the types of missions that you would fly the orbiter on. And then my little bird waypoint brought me to the door to an underground labyrinth. And then when I went into the underground labyrinth, I discovered

that the underground labyrinth was completely disconnected from the overworld's internalized geography and was in fact a very complex tile set that was randomized and that is how that you'll be physically traveling to little dungeon areas that will have your randomized tile sets for your warframe stone missions. Are you online while you're playing this? Okay, are there online features that are occurring? I don't know. It's the version that I'm playing is very early. Very early. I do know that in the bottom left corner, it says recruiting on a little window. So... That means it will be multiplayer.

And that there will be a chat. But the version that I'm playing is very early and very early access. Okay, because real world our timers like for online, I guess that's that's how those things go for single-player offline what the fuck are we doing you know I was actually thinking about the timers and I remembered that I was thinking a lot about them and how people hate them so much in Warframe it's a it's a retention mechanic obviously it's

I'll build this that means I'll log back in a couple days, right? Yeah, it's mobile games with their daily usage batteries. Yeah, and it's not about dailies It's just about come back later come back and play again later And I realized that like when I was playing warframe a lot I really you only interact with the timers once ever in the entire time you play warframe and That's the first time you turn them on. Because the second time you go to turn on your timers, you're picking up the shit that you set up last time.

Here's an important question. Will this game be free? Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Okay. If I see a timer in a game- Oh, this is a companion that I've bought. To Warframe. I'm gonna lose my shit

Yeah, okay I I would say that this is much more appealing to people like you who are more way more into melee combat than super fast running gun combat But it is a frame game Like it's not called soul fighter or whatever the fuck, it's called Soul Frame. And it's very interesting because I was really impressed and it feels really good. And it has that really, so you've seen Warframe enough to be like, it has a really weird technology It's very strange and like Siberian like indigenous like technological Just art style inspiration

Yeah, like like warframes technology just looks like kind of nonsensical and mckin by a lot biological It looks super weird. Okay and Okay. And SoulFrame's fantasy setting is the same exact aesthetic, but inverted, where it's not fantasy. Sorry, it's not technological with weird biological fantasy elements. It's fantasy biological stuff with weird technological elements. And the proportions are-

Right? The accent is different. It's the slight tech accent as opposed to the slight organic accent. So instead of a robot that has a weird stag head on it, it's a weird deformed stag that has one weird robot part on it. Yeah, exactly. And it's really interesting because it's really, really, really obviously Warframe's sister game or cousin.

And it looks very similar despite being in the opposite setting it's super interesting and super weird what's that someone said Warhammer versus 40k yeah it's inverted in the way that yeah Warhammer and Warhammer 40k are inverted but you're hitting similar notes. Yeah, cool. Okay. And this this will had me into the strange situation where have you ever been in the situation where someone says every single right answer to your question that gets you to rethink something where like you're like,

I don't know. And then you ask the five questions that all need to be answered correctly and all five are answered correctly. Does it have? So I go, well, Steve's on this. That'd be Steve Sinclair over at Digital Extremes. Soul Frame is his new baby, right? Steve's on this. That'd be Steve Sinclair over at Digital Extremes. Soul Frame is his new baby, right? He's off Warframe because Rebecca Ford, Space Mom, and wonderful lady and fantastic Dio Cosplayer is now head of Warframe being promoted up from community manager.

And I'm like, so this is Steve's baby. So how's Rebecca been doing with Warframe? Because the people watching my Soul Frame chat are gonna tend to be people that know what the fuck. And I'm like, so this is Steve's baby. So how's Rebecca been doing with Warframe? Because the people watching my Soulframe chat are going to tend to be people that know what the fuck they're talking about with Warframe. To which they respond, oh, it's great. It's better than it's ever been. Which is always fun because when you ask people about Destiny, you get one guy going, Destiny's

going great. And then you have like 20 guys going, no's not it's actually shit but I asked like how's Warframe doing under Rebecca and oh it's doing great what's changed oh they toned down this thing that you hate and they improved the thing that you like like okay well that is a good answer and I I go, well, Inaros was my favorite frame that ever happened. Did they ever make Inaros Prime? Well, Pat, not only did they make Inaros Prime, but they gave him a full scale rework and he's better than he's ever been and he's more fun too.

I go, oh, okay, that's pretty good. And then someone said, yeah, Rebecca and Pablo have been doing really well. I go, why are you talking about Pablo? Because if you're not familiar, Pablo is a guy who would do reworks on some of the Warframes every now and then. And he would be of note because you wanted Pablo to be the guy who reworked your frame. Oh, the reworks had specific names attached. I had authors you really Yes, oh my god. I didn't know it went in like that like can you imagine if it was like that was a Mr.. Takumi-san was the person who balanced bison. Oh this time around oh right yeah

I saw you know so we're getting into the this Gundam redesign was done by Hajime Katoki. So we got the version car Yes, the specific of yeah, okay, right, right, right. So You're like they're like well Pablo's doing well, I'm like well And the level Pablo did in our says rework like oh really? It's like well Pablo's like the head gameplay man now Cuz Steve's gone. So Pablo's running all that shit under Rebecca, Pablo's like the head gameplay man now. Because Steve's gone. So Pablo's running all of that shit under Rebecca. And I'm like, but Pablo was the best one. He always did the best reworks.

And then at the end of all that, I'm like. Maybe I should go check on my Warframe account. And so I logged in on the warframe and The very first thing that happened Like clockwork everyone that has ever gone away from that game for any length of time how much you log in how much? 75 percent off flat coupon shows up off-plat coupon shows up. He's back!

Every time. Initiate all the discounts. Initiate everything. Give it. Give him all the feelings. I saw people talking about the way that that seems to happen is that your daily login bonuses will rotate when you're not logging in and it will save the highest value

one. Oh my God. So if you were gone like I was for three years, I was actually kind of guaranteed to come back to that. And it's a great incentive to be like, look, look at all this free money. Well jokes on digital extremes because I actually still had so much free money left over from the last time I played Warframe that it would be totally pointless to buy it now. So Inaros Prime is currently gestating in my orbiter's womb and they will be done in

68 hours. It's not that it's free money, it's that the money you don't spend is being wasted for the bonus that you should be getting That's right So in RS prime is cooking they got a bun in the oven and so we'll see how that goes and I'm interested in seeing The three years of features from a live service game and what it's like to catch up on that

And what strange is like I'm not playing ff14 at all anymore like I've completely quit Entirely well until they you know drop new shit No, I the 7.1 came and. Didn't even bother to log in. That happened quietly. Yeah, I talked about it on my stream, but I was not super happy with the way the Dawn Trail stuff was going, but the future of Dawn Trail.

But the number one thing, and this cannot be overstated, that there's one thing that Warframe has and Soulframe by that measure have over Final Fantasy 14 that cannot be beat and that is the ability to pause the game when the baby gets a hold of the remote or tries to run away and get into some shit. The ability to pause your video game becomes the single most defining characteristic of playing a game when there is a baby. Because the baby's playing with his toys and you play your baby toy for your grownup toy and then the baby starts to crawl away and you're like, well, I need to go chase that now.

So I thought it was a more online game that was like persistently online enough that you wouldn't be able to. So Warframe, if you start a mission in a private lobby by yourself, pause just pauses the game. Your instance to alone, so why not? Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And that alone is the difference between, oh yeah, I'll blow a bunch of time on this

and not. Because if, you know, if baby, I have a climber. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was curious. I can't not, I can't be like, hold on baby, there's six minutes left of this EX roulette. Well, so I was wondering if like the FF14 thing was like,

how much one, baby affects that, right? And second, I also know that like they just started a new story after a real long closing arc of that last one. And I was wondering if you kind of felt like that was a good exit point. I was, but it was the it was this thing where what I would describe as my so there's, you know, I'm a dad now and I love hanging out with my little guy and if he looks at the TV too closely I turn whatever I'm playing off because I don't want to fry his brain with screen time and all that shit. Like no iPad for this child, no, don't do it. So my only quote-unquote unmolested screen time for dad is

From 1030 p.m. To midnight Right because that's when baby is asleep and It's not up too late before I go to bed because I need to get up at 8 because the baby gets up at 8 right? and before I go to bed because I need to get up at eight because the baby gets up at eight. Right. Um, and, uh, for FF 14, I was like running roulette at fucking 11 o'clock at night. And for a class, I don't plan on playing just so I could level up all my characters. And I was like, what the fuck am I fucking, I could look an hour a day of,

of, of, of, you know, not having to worry about, you know, baby eating a piece of wood he found on the ground to do this. And I'm blowing it, fucking leveling up fucking tanks. I'm not gonna play, what the fuck am I doing? It's fucking stupid as shit okay well um there's that and then as you just established there's also well you got to get let that account cool down for a little bit so that when you eventually you do come back you get these fucking bonuses all stacked up for it doesn't do that 14 does all they

don't do incentives they don't do a welcome back incentives what they do is catch up the first hit is free no 14 what 14 does is catch up is that like If you want to grind your character out to max power in the current patch it'll take you the whole patch But reaching that exact same level of character power two patches later will take one one hundredth of the time Same level of character power two patches later will take one one hundredth of the time So you can catch up to the current patch and when the next expansion comes out getting ready for the next expansion will take you know and amount of time etc

Susie says having kids cures you of ff14 it yeah It's it's it's you see now you have to dodge the danger patterns in real life by moving the kid out of the way of the The burning spells that are flying. Here's a really good example in lines across the ground When baby man started to move around more, you know when he went from being potato to to slow moving potato Then in there I stopped playing nearly as much f FF14 and started playing Street Fighter way more often because I can just get the fuck up and walk away from Street Fighter and be like, what's going to happen? I'm going to lose a match? Who gives a shit?

Less committal in and out for sure. Which led to really strange matchmaking situations where I got all the way down to fucking 800 MR and then I'm being matched up with people in 900 MR. I'm like, bro, when I'm not walking away from matches for full rounds, I'm going to stomp your ass. But, you know. Well, bad news for that with the new patch that just happened because the disconnect messages are now saying

that if you disconnect too many times, you're going to be placed in basically rage quit jail it sounds like. Oh, I don't disconnect, man. Oh, you idle out. I just put the controller down and fucking walk away. Okay. Excuse me. And the guy on the other end gets a free win.

Right, right, right. Like we're in the middle of a pitched round, too And I'm like, well gotta go. I don't know what he's got. What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? Put that down. What is that? What is that? Oh, it's it's a granola bar. Okay, you you're supposed to have that. Okay I've lost the round. Okay Hold start to press the baby currently needs attention. Yeah like taunt But yeah warframe on the flip side I can just pause That's good, and it has the same dopamine release of grind that I so desire the salt frame looks really good and

to a lot of people it's gonna be very Warframe looks really good and to a lot of people, it's going to be very appealing to start a frame game at the goddamn beginning of it. Because Warframe lived in this weird place where it was fucking terrible for like a year and a half, two years. And then all of a sudden it got really good But by the time it got really good it had already built up just like a shit ton of stuff So like it was this massive super complicated game that seemed to come out of nowhere Whereas soul frame it's like it's already in a way way way better State than launch warframe was Launch Warframe was like shit.

I played Warframe with launch. It sucked. Warframe also, can you play it in like, I mean, I know there's kind of those daily interactions and little bits, but can you do it in small chunks as well? Oh yeah, you can play Warframe in fucking four minute chunks. Okay. If you want. I mean, this is literally what I was just saying about breach wizards and XCOM and stuff.

My life is already in a place where I always have a preference towards the low commitment activity. Anything that is a, yeah, that's an hour and a half long dungeon commitment of an action nature that it's not something I can just at least pause or take time or turns with or so it just yeah I have to clear out a moment to sit down and lock in for that and I depending on your Progression in Warframe you can run the diffs that you can run a mission that will last you 45 seconds if it's an assassination mission.

So it's literally bullet jump to the target, shoot them until they're dead, and then sprint as hard as you can to the exit all the way up until I bet you I could do an hour of survival waves on this map and got to get a bunch of good rewards if I feel up to it. And it's your prerogative. Yeah. Okay. Cool.

And I can do either of those with people I actually partied with, auto party, solo, any particular combination of those? Well, I mean if you you know Forgive me for being somewhat shocked, but I guess it's like Yeah, 14 never really had a reason to have an explosive. It's all over kind of moment It was always a well made addictive thing that ever since I guess the reborn You know patch Was just going to be a you fade off whenever you want to. So they've built the game like that and they have been incredibly clear in every interview.

They're like, hey, you don't enjoy it, just leave and then if you feel like it, come back and there'll be more stuff later. Which I think is really endearing and I think important to that kind of thing because like well If you don't keep up every single fucking day, you're gonna fall way behind like fuck off. I hate that. Everybody hates that No one likes that. But um, but you've been playing for I've been playing since 2015. Yeah, for a 14. Yeah, and Final Fantasy 14 So different people are affected by this at different levels and some

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

it's going to have this raid, the item levels for the raid are going to be this, it's going to have this many floors, it's going to have this, this, this, this, this, and you could theory craft that shit out for like two years in advance and you would be right on almost all of it. And that's comforting to some people. Yeah, you're going to grind out 450 tomes of the expensive tome a week. You're gonna grind out 2,000 tomes of the least expensive tomes a week.

You're gonna have this, this, this. You're gonna run this many roulettes. They're gonna be cost this, this, this. It has been literally unchanged for the entirety of a Roam Reborn. Because it worked, yeah. And it works, and they have like a pipeline that is rock solid.

But it means that when you start to like fade off, I'm like, well, I know exactly what is coming over the next year, almost down to the day. And then I can look back at the years that I played the game and go, well, I know exactly the time and shit that I'm going to do in the future if I continue to do so. And right now it's just not super appealing. 14 has a problem that almost all MMOs or live service or ongoing games have, which is it is more fun to catch up than it is to be on the edge. It is more fun to have the whole game out in front of you than it is to have done everything and be sitting around waiting for the new thing to come out. Okay.

Yeah, interesting. Like, way more. Okay. Way more fun. Well, because I guess that that resembles playing on regular offline RPG more, right, in a way. Yeah. As opposed to opposed to like being stuck with the real calendar and whatever's going on. Yeah, so that makes sense.

Like you know, hey man, are you more fun? Are you having more fun with One Piece at volume five and you look at the 400 volumes to go? Or are you more having more fun with one piece hoping to get to the scans before someone spoils you this week. Right? Like it's just, God, fuck those times. Yeah. Those times are every day. But if you go with this scantlation group, they do really good color pages for the Naruto chapter covers.

Oh, They do really good color pages for the Naruto chapter covers Like I guess that the easiest way for me to Like put a bow on it is like I have more fun reading volumes of manga than I do chapters I mean, it's funny cuz soon there's gonna be a decision where if you're into one piece you can say do I watch? Oh, which fucking or do I start the new one? That's simultaneously gonna be played It's so crazy cuz I'm like, you know full metal alchemist brotherhood had the had the decency to at least wait one Was it year before? After the other one finished before starting up or so like this shit's like nah No time nah simultaneous two pieces though

Okay, gotcha, huh, and so this cycles back to warframe. It's like hey guess what I have in warframe I have three years of content that I didn't do cuz warframes when you hit the wall on warframe and you have run out of new Content islands frame and you have run out of new content islands. God, that game becomes boring as shit when you're all caught up. Oh, man, just boring as fuck. I mean, I know that like, whatever, if I had a more relevant connection, it would have come up. But I, I think the same part of me that like, you know, feels like the need

to go after more, newer experiences and play new games and all that, especially now given everything that comes in versus replaying things, would not want that. That sort of stability you're describing is not an appeal. No. Well, so here's the funniest thing. Back when FFXIV started its new MMO journey, that stability was like, what? I can count on content for my MMO actually coming out on time?

Because the usual way of putting out releases was the whole game is in the expansion There will be nothing until the next expansion Which is like a fucking Dog shit way to do it because you would burn out in like four months and be like well time to quit Yeah, and I can and the analogy of like keeping up with you know seasons of like say strivers Sf6 DLC or so it's like but in those games You don't really like catch up and be like well, I've played all the new content. So now I'm done You know, you know because it's just like I want to play bison. Yeah, you're gonna bison got nerfed. I don't care. Yeah

But if you do your taunt now, you can get a big buff going. Who is ever gonna let you do that fucking taunt? People having fun offline. No one. Anyone who lets Akuma eat those buns that wants to have a good time is gonna let Bison taunt on you now. No, I don't wanna fucking have a good time. I wanna grind ranked! By the way, so for anyone who doesn't know, now if you put a bomb with Bison on your opponent and then you do his forward taunt, he counts down 3, 2, 1, and then the explosion happens

at the end of the taunt, and now Bison can actually do his super Bison moves, like his crazy teleport. He can do his teleport, he's got his alpha shadow luis shadow luis and psycho crusher yeah yeah so it's great but that's it for Pat played a lot of shit this week finished metaphor and my baby's the best so that's what's going on with me this week it's gonna be very few streams me and Paige are gonna miss the Marvel rivals and Path of Exile 2 launch on Friday because we are going on a little road trip,

little vacay, nothing too crazy, just taking some time off, but we'll be back on either the seventh or the eighth and get back to that shit. But, uh, fucking go do something good with your life. Oh! Someone asked in the chat, any D&D updates. You know what, man? I think I'm getting the absolute best Dungeons and Dragons experience playing with this group. I talked about, like, three, four weeks ago about, like, all the different kind of stereotypes. I'm kind of running into all the classic D and D things. And that was the last time we sat down to play because we've been completely unable to schedule another session for like a month because someone's always busy or the babysitter gets sick or whatever. And this is, this is like the true is the classic experience maybe

Maybe we'll be able to play next week maybe Yeah, that's I did that is in fact it the three sessions in eight weeks All right Campaign on a roll. Cool. All right. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors. I love our sponsors.

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Yeah But then into the new I have a banana I'm a little peckish. So I decided to get a banana You know who else is a little peckish Stretch isn't it? Yeah Squirrels hey check out this big acorn. Yeah, that's not all she's got this big. That tail. Why they make squirrel girls so fucking thick.

That tail is bushy as fuck. It's awesome. Hey, Marvel Rivals is coming out this week and they showed off the launch trailer intro, the basically a music video, anime opening. It's a very well produced. It's pretty good. Launch trailer. It's pretty good. Man, that Chinese armored anime aesthetic is the fucking peak.

I love that shit so much. I love it. So it works on a number of the designs. I mean, Iron Fist is looking, he looks okay. He's got the hair out. I do prefer the covering, but regardless, I kind of get what they're going for with everything. My thing though is anytime I see Logan looking a little too cool and young with the bangs for the hair. I don't like that kind of Logan. I want Logan to be a scruffy short Canadian that's just, ah, with the hairline almost not receding, but I want it going up and being good.

Okay. Well, pay them $12. Yeah. I suppose so, right? Get your cosmetic going. There's been a couple times where we've seen that kind of cool, younger looking Logan. I'm reminded a bit too of like, as much as I liked it, the Snicket comic from the Creator of Blame as well. It's just like a different kind of younger, cooler look. And I'm like, I want him to be a little munchkin. I want that widow's peak into the Wolverine hair going. So yes, unlock your cosmetics and then you'll be fine.

Otherwise you're getting anime Wolverine. Not a big... You know what's awesome about that fucking trailer? That's the launch trailer, right? So first of all, there's characters that are like brand new as of the launch trailer, like Cloak and Dagger and Squirrel Girl, right? Mm-hmm. And you're like, wow, that's cool. And then there's like a shit ton of characters that we played in the alpha that are not going to be there at launch like a ton like four. It's not fucking there That's really weird. That's really weird. Yeah Yeah, the the X-Men evolution Wolverine is to basically the look that I'm describing here not not my favorite but whatever it's fine

So when did we saw yeah, we saw a couple things so they shut off three character trailers squirrel girl the Unbeatable, Unstoppable, Slayer of Gods, all, you know, great. Simple line delivery, check out this big acorn, throws a big acorn at ya, what more do you want? Squirrel Stampede. No, no notes. Perfect.

Exactly what it needed to be. Um, thick with two C's. No problems with that. Like a bushy tail. Um, iron fist who is the, yeah, martial arts duelist, you knowist who jumps in there. It's a parry god being put in a fucking third person shooter. So he looks like he has a healing ability to meditate and heal or put up a,

kind of like a you attack me and I heal while I'm glowing. So he has a parry and a full meditate, heal. And he also has a quadruple jump in a wall run. The jump in wall run mobility stuff looks really good with him. The melee stuff, it looks cool but it's not as impactful as I was kind of hoping. I like when there's a nice big hit with that stuff, especially as you're moving through a game.

When things kind of feel a little like just kind of tap, tap, tap, tap, tap light, it's not as satisfying. For example, when you play as Iron Fist in Marvel, you know, and he goes into the level three with the one inch punch, you get a nice big boom, you know, you get these massive like quick combos into a big stomp step Big hits, you know, so feels like that's not really what what's gonna be the cases here but you need to make a character that obviously works in a In a team shooter and make his kit work make sense there So he looks like the like yeah kind of fast multi hitting

version of you know, what is multi-hitting version of, you know, what is Black Panther's medium sized, and then Magic's heavy sized melee stuff. And then they showed off Black Widow, who's, hey, she's got a sniper, she's shooting heads, it's Black Widow. Hey, gentlemen, it is up to you to be good enough to cause this character to get horribly nerfed. Yes, we will see, we will see.

This is an archetype that requires a fine touch because it can be just ruinous or worthless and it's real thin. Squirrel Girl might be the Hanzo, maybe? Or slightly Hanzo-ish, so we'll see how that works out. But yeah, you can't nerf skill. And if a headshot is one shot, one kill, then that will always continue.

I think her ult, just making it so that anyone she hits with it can barely move So it's also really easier. It's super filthy. It's super dirty Have we seen the Hawkeye trailer yet, yeah, oh, okay, I missed that one then he has Hansa that's more Hansa, okay Somebody I think it's a bouncycy907 in the chat, made a very important distinction where they pointed out that Marvel Rivals is launching with more characters on day one than Overwatch One did the day it died. The day it died being the day of Overwatchwatch that's right. Yeah, okay of overwatch ones shut down. Yeah, okay

That is an unflattering comparison Well as I we as we were talking about with your Exodus games Hey, check this one out. It's in third person. You can see your characters doing cool stuff You know what I bet I would love to see like some kind of like statistical breakdown of Can I see my character versus can I not see my character on the purchases of cosmetics? Because I fucking bet being able to see your fucking character people buy skins.

Wow. I wonder. I wonder. I feel like that would be interesting to see. I mean, for me, it's literally the will I buy the game or not, you know, or will I start playing the game or not. It is a much more dire metric for me. But yeah, if it's just, you know, if you can see it at all times, certainly, I'm sure

that's a high incentive. And did we, was there a Wolverine trailer too? No. No. Okay, so. That's probably going to come out the day before the game launches. Any word about the... I didn't see anything about the micro, about the mini-buys yet.

So we're all going to find that out together. We'll find out. The gameplay is good. That being said, the game's free, so... No matter how bad it is, it doesn't matter? No. There's no upper limit on terrible? No, what I'm saying is if the characters are free, it becomes a completely different discussion

than if you're buying characters and there's also cosmetics. Yeah. Then it just becomes a matter of discipline, I suppose. It becomes whining instead of complaining. Justified whining. Justified whining. But it goes from like, oh, damn it, to like, Each costume is fucking $20. Like, you know, like, yeah, absolutely justified.

But still the base game and its components are all there, I suppose. Yeah, because they're going to come out and the fucking things are going to be $12 or $15 or some fucking nonsense, right? Then you're like, fucking Overwatch charged you full price and then also charged you the same cost for the costume. It's like, yes, this is frog boiling nonsense, but it's like take a win as small as it is no matter where. I feel like I have an internal, like if I'm playing a free game and I'm enjoying it and

I'm enjoying it certainly past the point of like a full purchase. I feel like I have a, oh, I'm willing to spend when I care about this thing threshold I hit. Absolutely. So I'm like, yeah, if this game would cost whatever and I'm like just opting in on what I care about, then yeah, I don't mind. It's a tip jar. Yeah. And the thing is too, is if you able to kind of be like I'm just going to focus on the a few

Things I care about as opposed to trying to you know wail for the whole set or whatever then Well from the way that it the store was built out on the last alpha It looks like it's do you want this costume then fucking buy it? Which is as far as mini by Formats the least evil I hope that it there's you know It there isn't a case of like grind this battle pass into the dirt and then

Quadruple grind it and you get this icon and then after that icon you get this one time. Okay well, I would like you to do me a favor. I would like you to hold out your left hand up and keep that hope in there. And I need you to shit in your other hand and I would like you to see which one fills up first. Okay. I have an inkling. which one fills up first. Okay, I Have as I have a counterpoint

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

Yeah, that could have been a beta only thing. I it. I got it. I did. I did get it by the way. Yeah. Yeah. So you got it. But I bet you that thing will never be back ever again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm so and I already got it. So I was, I mean, I'm not actually literally talking about that one. Yeah. But I'm like, let's say it's like, okay, how badly do I want classic Magneto? Pretty bad. It's not the end of the world for me, you know? But I would like it. It would be cool. I would probably dig a, like, maybe classic Magneto helmet off would be like a bigger cell, but I'm not going to play Magneto that much really. So, you know, eh. Not, you know, same like it's like if I don't play them,

if they're not part of my main rotation or so, then I just, I don't think I'm going to end up carrying that much too. So I think it'll be okay. Um, but. I mean, we'll see. Yeah. Um, but then I was gonna say, but what if they got the fucking Nix colors on or they get the, you know, straight up again, they're like, they just keep doing Marvel versus Capcom references with some of these costumes. I'm like, ah, fuck. All right. It'll be really interesting to see, because we don't know a lot about how they're gonna do the microtransaction of the cosmetics,

because there's always the possibility that they do the two-stage cosmetic, which is colors and costumes are separate distinctions. And then there's the worst version, which is costumes with different colors are also different distinctions, but I don't expect that either. Iron Man has the potential to fuck me up. Different levels of awesome Iron Man outfit do have the potential to ruin me, depending on how cool they are. You know, if you're going to make a mini-buy game with characters that have costumes, these

Marvel characters have a multitude of different looks already. One might say literally hundreds per character in some cases. This is the strength of the brand that was chosen. Anyway that's that's looking cool so. Oh if you you know what mini by watch I guess I don't know sure but on the same day that Marvel Rivals comes out, Path of Exile 2 is coming out, which is a proper sequel to Path of Exile, and they are doing something really interesting.

Anything you have ever bought for Path of Exile 1 will carry over into Path of Exile 2, including all the cosmetics they've ever released. Wow. That is very consumer friendly. That's awesome. And any account upgrades or bank space or whatever the fuck, it's all carrying over.

And if you fucking spent more than like $480, you just get all of the fucking Fancy pants Becker early access rewards from the highest money amount nice fucking nice That's great It is great because it means that like the absolute crazies will get rewarded for being the absolute crazies And like good for them. It's nice when the things you've bought continue to be available to you into the future. That must have been a lot of work because the game looks different. Like it is an upgraded game.

So like to carry all that shit forward must have been fucking ridiculous. Now every once in a while, companies might think to themselves, nah though, how about the thing you bought you don't get to keep? What? Who would say that? What kind of dumb stupid bitch would say that. Warcraft 1 and 2 are being delisted from GOG as the remasters are being dropped. However, Good Old Game says that they're going to preserve them anyway, handing out a discount and announcing a new policy for preservation of all delisted games on the platform.

So carrying this analogy forward, the anthropomorphized version of good old games that exists for the purpose of this story said, I'm not a bitch. You can keep your shit forever if I sold it to you. I promise as long as you buy it before They're Obligated to deal it to delist it exactly so literally can't do anything fucking right like they showed off those Warcraft remasters and they said that they were gonna go back and Re-master Warcraft 3 and it was like yeah, you know what?

master Warcraft three. And it was like, yeah, you know what? That's, that's good. And now it's like, by the way, if you bought it somewhere else, you know, fuck yourself because you got to get it on the battle that launcher. Yeah. So you know, obviously, getting people over to the battle that launcher or to spend, you know, 40 bucks on there on the remaster, or whatever the case is, your incentive to go to good old games has been the ability to buy the original version of the game without DRM and pretty straightforward with its installation and the way it more or less was back when

you first got it. So Blizzard has basically announced that, yeah, delisting that shit, making it so that you can't get access to it unless you go over to, again, to the remaster or to Battle.net. And this is one month after those remasters dropped. And so Good Old Games, which preservation and shit has been their MO for a while, basically went, okay, well, as of December 13th, you're not going to be able to buy the games anymore

from GOG Galaxy. Use the discount code MAKEWARECRAFTLIVEFOREVER and you'll knock $2 off of the already $15 for the Warcraft 1 and 2 bundle. And that'll be specifically for getting it before the delisting day. And then you will be able to play whatever you get from them, even if it gets delisted forever. even if it gets delisted forever. And then they also with that have announced a policy for the preservation program. That's basically trying to make sure that anyone who buys something from the store,

the process of getting it delisted does not affect what you own and your ability to play it no matter what. They will always be supporting stuff that was once listed if it's owned by anybody even long after the company in question no longer gives you access to those things. So that's awesome as fuck. And in particular, it's like, you know, I prefer Steam in general. But every now and then I'd go and buy a game on GOG specifically because I want a locked down Offline version that will never ever ever be fucked with ever again Like I bought Dragon Age origins on good old games because that's the best place to buy it and you don't have to worry about EA coming in and Shitting all over the fucking thing with some bullshit

shitting all over the fucking thing with some bullshit. And there will always stay that version forever. And there will always be incentive for said publishers to come along and snatch away the shit you've bought as we go forward in time. Like that'll that's not going away anytime soon. So putting something like this in place to just make sure that like, yep, once you have it, you fucking have it, is good and important. And also, unfortunately fucking mandatory in a world where it's not treated like physical, where if you have the disk, you have the disk, isn't that stand of that, right? Digital is being abused now and we're

seeing things where, you know, there's agreements changing terms where you no longer are like, you don't own what you bought digitally. In fact, you own the license to access that thing as long as we say you can and whatever the fuck. So all of this coming from one of the the storefronts for PC games and for digital ownership is pretty good. As far as just like a push back against the fact that fuck you, you know? Good shit to GOG. GOG is the best. I love them. Like, I've re-bought some of their games on Steam just for convenience, but like, I'm

very happy that that is a storefront that I can buy games from. And I tend to use it for its stated purpose, which is is I can't get this old bullshit to fucking work. Oh The GOG version works fine. Oh great fantastic And Then there's the part of it where it's just like The shittier you get about this stuff and the less options people get the more they're gonna be like, okay fine fuck you then I'll figure it out

You know also we're also in a place. It's like, okay Let's say your game has de novo and it's super locked down and it's super pirate friendly It's not 1994 anymore where there's like five good games that are coming out on the Super Nintendo that year Right there. There are there are So so many fucking games that are coming out help me help you I help me help you I want to buy the thing let them give me a way to do it. Don't don't make this harder It's like we were past the point of

like I'll just pirate it we're now at the point of like fuck it then I guess I'll just ignore it Assassin's Creed there's other shit coming that could you but my time is could be spent on yep no, only remember. Fucking Nintendo. Nintendo. Yeah, so good stuff to that. I am a fan of a term that has popped up for the first time and across my desk, a new scrub quote.

A new, like a new genre of scrub quote? A new genre of scrub quote has occurred to me. I don't know how long this has been a thing in the respective community that it comes from all right? What community is this this is call of duty? Oh? I know what this is Have you? Been have you heard of skill based damage before wooly I have heard of oh my God I have not

Skill based damage is new to me. What the fuck? Um, so yeah, we got we got scrub quotes, a little little Twitter exchange going back and forth from COD warfare forum and some poster. And know seems like the posters being salty about being bad and the COD Warfare forum account is basically being like nah it's on you stop playing bad play good and then poster says you do realize there's a thing called skill based damage, right? I'm not the only person that goes through that, which is like, wait, what? Do you want to know what skill based damage is?

Well, fortunately, there is a an article that's breaking down Call of Duty Black Ops skill-based damage theory and it gets into what players are fighting, like they're theory crafting the idea. Players are reporting that their damage is being adjusted to accommodate for their high skill. So I thought here that copium was a gas and it turns out if you concentrate it hard enough, it can become a solid. It can become a thick block solid of copium that you can fucking that's undiluted solid of copium that you can fucking, that's undiluted, where you believe that.

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

All weapons damage across the skill level apparently. So when the fuck so There is something that goes on with first-person shooters specifically that leads to this type of mental mistake is there is a I matches that you on board with No, there's a there's a technical reason for this perception error. OK, because that and fucking the Gears of War super account when you're new are setting you down the pathway.

It is a technical situation. So there's a lot of different variabilities, but one of them became very popularly known due to the way that Rainbow Six Siege works. It is a concept known as Peeker's Advantage. Are you familiar with Peeker's Advantage? No. Fighting games are new to rollback, but first person shooters have been using rollback and hit detection and all this shit for ages. And what Peaker's advantage is,

is that if I am staring at a corner and you, Wooly, are coming around the corner and you peek around the corner, on your screen you have the time in between the server sending your movement to me to see me and shoot before I can see you and shoot, therefore giving you an extremely tiny perceptual advantage. Okay, so first of all, are you talking about using like a peak lean button or you mean just moving? Literally anything. Literally just walking around the corner. When I am unmoving and you are moving,

you are moving through, because I'm stationary, the server is gonna display me as stationary, but your movement has to be sent to accommodate. So you will get that tiny time period where you can see me and I can't see you even though you are actually visible beyond the corner. And if we fire at the same time, if we both fire within one millisecond of seeing each other, because you actually saw me slightly earlier, you get peekers advantage.

So this is really popular. This is really prevalent in Rainbow Six Siege because people die instantly in that game. Like if you and you're peeking around corners all the time. And so it becomes this thing where, staring at a wall defending, you are at an active disadvantage to the guy whoop, whoop, poking his head out to try and see if you're there. So that is the peeker's version. Which, so that, sorry, no, like,

anything rollback related, it continues to guess what it thinks you were doing based on what you're Yeah, and so if you're stationary doesn't have to guess you're locked in that that's right Yeah, and so in Call of Duty where everyone's flying around all over the place If the server tick is a little off or whatever you can get situations where you're like, you know what you did Totally shoot that guy, but the game said he killed you because your like client side experience did not quite line up. And if you're a baby, you'll go, they're out to get me that that that wasn't a bug or just like a mishap. That's on purpose.

And why is it on purpose? Because I'm just so good. SID Okay. Okay. See, I also heard about skill based fall damage where people were effectively self reporting because an anti-cheat system was if you fall from fall distance Small distances you die. That's awesome as fuck and people who called that out were just clearly cheating but but so I um, you know Ways there's all shit. There's all sorts of versions of this in ff14 There's a version of this exact problem, but it's not called peak advantage because you're not doing PvP or shit. It's called the latency shuffle.

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

Fuck. Yeah, that classic eating a flash kick and then flashing back to, nope, it was blocked. You know? Yeah. Yeah, that's the latency shuffle. I see, I see. And people, there are people in the chat right now that are like, is that why I see people do that?

Yes, that is why you see people do that. And the worse your latency is is the more pronounced the problem. Well, fuck those clowns with these particular issues. Fuck those actual real confusing issues. These clowns are bad and are actively... Oh yeah. They're living in a fantasy world in which the only way they could lose is if there's a concerted effort to undermine them. Again, copium in solid form now being sliced and served on a plate with a knife and fork is... I can't believe it.

This is wild shit. Good stuff. Incredible. Love to see it. Yeah. We touched on it a little bit earlier, but yeah, Street Fighter 6, the change list came down and they- It's a minor patch. No, it's not.

The wild part is they chose to do this in the middle of Street Fighter League. So there are events that just passed an upcoming events that are watched a goddamn I co streamed the pagoda snack champions college fucking tour last night, which was hours after the fucking patch went live. Yeah, that's it's kind of nuts to have official events like that soon because you I would expect that they try to clear a space around anything official at the very least. Nah, fuck him! From one day to the next, the game has changed. Adapt or die.

Changes now. Um... So, it's... Absolutely ridiculous. It is interesting to see as like, okay, so Akuma got touched, Bison got touched... Bison got toned down a little bit. Yes, yes. You don't get free meter drain off of that knee anymore.

That's fine, that's fair. Every time you do a stomp and you're getting out of there, if you fuck it up, you should be able to be punished for it. You don't get free escape for going for a trying the stomp. And then we get shit like, uh, Ed, go fuck yourself, Ed. I mean, you're fucking backdash. Ed at highest levels was again considered was being considered top one by like by, you know, the best players because of a lot of shit. What's wild is inconsistency though, because things were Ed's level two, they'll take away its ability to like generate meter, you know, while it's active. So he puts the fireball out and then you know, they'll take away its ability to generate meter while it's active.

So he puts the fireball out and then they've nerfed that. Across the board, that makes a lot of sense. But for some reason, Rashid can put out his level two tornado. You know why? You know why? Because Pablo was fucking nerfing Ed and Jimmy was not nerfing Rashid. The Rashid meme continues of just like, he will never get touched. Rashid gets to do whatever the fuck he wants from day one,

from Shoe Fighter 5 forward. They made a change, like a system-wide change that specifically nerfs GEEF. And, well, GEEF and I think Jury, where... But GEEF. And well GEEF and I think Jury where... But GEEF. You could do, you could start a jump and then cancel your pre-jump frames. So like as you're starting to jump you become throw-in vulnerable and then he could cancel that into like, you know, his SPD and Jury I think can do something else as well where they made it so that no now you don't become throw-in vulnerable there you get thrown. So that's consistency. Cons, consistency is good, right?

And then you get weird shit like, you know what? Jamie can just fuckin' heal his drive gauge whenever he fuckin' hits it. So that's wild, because Jamie, they've been trying to fix for a long time, and it's like, let's give him some more, let's give him some more, and each time they've done something- Just give him more and more and more until he has enough

but the thing is that the Jamie players are like but the sober Jamie is the problem and they're like Drunk Jamie is even better now No, it's it's more like now that you can when you're drinking what you're gonna be drinking you have more drive gauge to defend Yourself and to drive rush and before you used going to be drinking, you have more drive gauge to defend yourself and to drive rush. And before you used to only get that after you were fully drunk and now you get it right away. So he just gets more drive.

Yeah, so sober Jamie is stronger now. Incredible. Because you don't give up your oaky as bad. That's really good. Drive is so important. And the fact that he gets it back every time he gets a sip is nuts. And Kimberly just getting a full just right across the board upgrade of just about everything.

She was struggling for a bit too. So you know, I can see how they went and they went, all right, we want her to be competitive as well. Her and Ryu are seemed like the winners of the patch that are eating the best. Yeah, Ryu in particular, they just made Donkey Kick like a whole lot better. Marisa! Didn't wait to see what they're gonna do. I'm like, surely they know the problem. Surely they know there are issues here. Surely they know that her damage doesn't mean anything when others can do that same output

and now she's just got the downsides. No reversal, etc. And yeah, they gave her better charge buttons. So if you do the bigger, slower hits, you get better results, whether it's retracted throwability on one... Wow, that doesn't address that problem at all. Or juggle or plus frames, especially on Superman Punch, they've made it a better move overall.

But no, her anti-air is what she needs, and she still doesn't have it. So nope, doesn't really fix the problem. Eh, you know, it is what it is. This is what's happening. If Kimberly can go some four or so patches without finally getting this around, then maybe Christmas comes next year, who knows. I think, yeah, Blanka just got a little touch to his double knee, so they kind of left him alone overall. But it feels like they're really going like, okay, it'll take a couple rounds of patches before they're like, let's give it a little bit,

let's give it a little bit, and then after three or four, they're still not doing shit, Captain. Like, all right, fuck it, juice it, Kimberly's give it a little bit. Let's give it a little bit. And then after three or four, they're like, they're still not doing shit, Cap'n. Like, all right, fuck it, juice it. Kimberly's got a million things now. She can go nuts. I feel like that's kind of the Jamie situation where they're just gonna buff Jamie every six months until complaining stops.

Until morale improves. Yeah, like. Yeah, so Terry, for example, Terry Bogard is kind of going through that. Like, he, yeah. So the Terry, for example, Terry Bogard is kind of going through that. Like he's currently, he's just not good enough to compete with, you know, the, uh, even the middle of the game right now. So they're like, that sucks because I love playing as Terry, but he's, he's bad. So they're like, all right, let's start here. He's got, um, he's got his fierce punch, which now goes from being minus one

to plus one. Right. So, and it acts the same on block or hit which is the really weird part to me But if you're in burnout, he can he can terrorize you, you know giving someone more like Terry rise ah giving someone like a little like a I Mean, this is getting granular or so but like Kimberly as well got like some changes of stuff that went from being like plus two to plus four. And that means you can do new combos essentially that you could. Yeah, that's a big difference. Anytime you give somebody the ability to just do

brand new combos that they couldn't do before, like that's a huge change. So we'll see how things shake out. But I appreciate the willingness to, you know, have these DLC characters come out and be all like ah party time. All right parties over Yeah, now we have to we have to roll them. Okay, everyone bought them you bought them. Okay, let's tone about let's tone them And hey, you bought Terry we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna work on we're gonna say we're gonna take month Important to note to that for all the winning for all the winners and losers Of these these these patches

It's still fucking best launch version balance of absolutely never made you know like absolutely fantastic So in conclusion balance is important and designing your game around The way it's played optimally is a good thing to consider. Especially when you're going to have official tournaments for it. Mm-hmm. Well, wait, hold on. Why would you have... I mean, after everyone saw what happened with For Honor, why would you have official money having tournaments for a game that you at the development level know to be a completely broken piece of fucking shit? Because I think if you acknowledge deep inside in your heart that it's a broken piece of

shit, there's something inside that's like, but then how do we market and get the excitement going, you know? Dragon Ball fucking sparking zero is like letting people bet money on a fucking Harlem Globetrotters fucking game. I mean, God bless. I will repeat the praise I gave for its awesome menus, the fact that every Goku you could ever want is there, and all the love and all the detail and every single version of every character in your Goku toy box simulator. It's incredible. Absolutely.

That's what it is. You can pick every Goku and you can put them in the sandbox and watch them go. And then you decide. You don't have to use your imagination because the voice actors are there and it looks great. And if for some godforsaken reason you decide to hold an official tournament for this thing, you can't act surprised when people

play the optimal way, when the optimal way turns out to be to fucking not play at all. So in Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, a couple of characters characters I think it's 18 and 19 the androids the end can get a life lead and just Literally run away for what is it like 10 fucking minutes? Just fly straight up straight down about about 10 minutes about a little yeah, and There's no timer when the match starts mind you you only know when it's down to like the last two or three Yeah, you got to go nine minutes before you see anything. So God bless, you know, Tyrant and the other commentators are just, there's a point where the matches are playing and the way that you're optimally seeing the grand finals go down

is just shoot a little pew pew and then fly up and fly down and if the other player approaches you to attempt to fucking fight Nah, run away at Dragon Ball speeds and get the fuck out of there and then occasionally pew pew for 13 14 minutes or so. I see someone in the chat saying that the France match was fucking 16 minutes long Yeah, I remember I so I there was a I checked on the timeline and I watched the match that started at like, it was like, whatever, like 233 and then went up to like 44 or 45 or something like just, it just for one, for that one game, cause you also have multiple team, teammates that you can tag through as well.

And the commentary, they just stop. Yeah, well what are you supposed to fucking say? They just straight up stop, but they're clearly being professional and God bless, cause when it cuts back when the time is over and the match is done, it's like, and there you have it. There's your winner and stay tuned for more action. You know, like, what are you supposed to say, man?

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

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

to each other. Flying anywhere and teleporting and doing the shit you're doing to feel like a Dragonball episode is the goal, and they've accomplished that goal. And please don't put a bracket or money on the line when you know that that was your only goal. This was a mistake. Yeah, the players are then, there's like things of chat log of discord logs where players are like, the producers came in and the TOs were like, you're going to have to, you can't

play like you have to play for real. And like the rule changes were coming in, like, like off stream and stuff. And it's like, you can't just fucking arbitrarily like what, you know, like you have to play for real. I am playing for real I won this is the it turns out. This is the way to play to win What are you supposed to do? You know no make it fun though you change the game now Make the game so that this is not a thing then how about that right know what you're fucking putting out there It's it's wild. Um I love my favorite part though

Is that the tournament is called Tournament is called Dragon Ball sparking zero dramatic showdown I missed that I didn't know that. Oh, that's good. Oh That's good shit right there dramatic showdown, baby. Yeah Yeah It's it's fine. It's fine. Know what you are. Know what you're meant to be. And don't try to be the thing that you're not. You know what I love about stories like this? Like, absolutely. it gives me like a warmth in my heart and like a flutter in my stomach is

this is, this is someone's fault. Like this embarrassment can at some point in the process be boiled down to someone who either said, it's fine, don't worry about it, or should have said, hey man, that sucks actually and didn't. Well, because a bunch of this is also again, sticking shit on the wall, you know, and seeing what happens, Gadjirobi could heal himself forever with the Senzu beans. They nerf that because they saw that happening when the game launched, but they didn't see this happening, you know, where the androids don't use key and therefore they can just stall it out forever. Stupid shit forever.

You know, and it's like, yeah, the whole game is not, it's like they, when you have that many characters and that much shit going on, like it's never going to be balanced. It's not that, you know, why try to do this or, or make a commitment to actually fucking, you know, consider that part of the game. I mean, for fuck's sake, we had a real fighting game developer making a real fighting game and actually balancing it, and that game ended up insanely fucking unbalanced. But at least you could fucking watch people play it. You can play it.

That's it. You know, it's just, whatever the lesson here is, it's just know what you are. If you want to be like, not at all, if gameplay is an afterthought, then cool, be that thing, but then don't put on a fucking bracket here, see this outcome and then go, hey, no, stop it. You can't do that. You made it this way. They're doing what the game allows them to do. You made a system that incentivized this way. They're doing what the game allows them to do. You made a system that incentivized this behavior. Why

are you mad at people for doing that behavior? Yeah, you know, and you give these these, you give these types of games like long enough and eventually the players have to come up with their own Mash Brothers rule set for what's viable and not viable. You can only run for 30 seconds. So that means every single person is staring at their fucking watch while running to stop at 29 seconds, throw a single hit and start running for 29 more seconds.

And for what it's worth, like whenever, when there are like bugs in games that allow somebody to like stall out forever and such, there are rules that are considered where they go like yeah That's actually not allowed you can't hey fucking stuff. You know Anyway, like cross-tec and comes back. It's back, baby Fucking lame it out like cross-tec and fucking get that Mega Man like it's even the same fucking thing with fucking box art Mega Man floating into the sky Looks like Android 19 yeah shoot your opponent and float away to win that's it unstoppable oh man yeah that's that's great that's great so if you have put that into your game you have massively

fucked up on a huge level and you need to take it back to the drawing board. But it's accurate to the source material. It is not accurate to the source material. Is he not called Jump and Shoot Man? It didn't jump like that. Okay well that's all fine and dandy. The only other thing was that there was a dev stream for Warframe where they talked about new game mode, big updates, and Warframe 1999. So I don't know what the fuck 1999 is. Apparently I thought it was gonna be like a separate thing but it's not a separate thing. It's like an expansion and it's gonna have shit from that version come into the goddamn future or some shit. I don't know. That shit's weird. Ben Starr is there. Okay. And so is Neil Newbon. There's a new mode

called face off. That's like PVP V E. So what? Not PvP, but I'm so I'm so shocked because Warframe PvP is the worst thing that's ever existed. And I remember you saying that, which is why it's like, okay, so another crack at it. 4v4, fighting waves of enemies Someone in chat says it's PvE, but it's a race so that's Okay, okay, so that's okay smart actually That dino game that came out the other day yeah, right, okay What the fuck was that called? Dino crisis duck What the fuck was that called? Dino Crisis? Dino Crisis Evolution?

No, XO Primal But I only knew that because someone in the chat said it There you go I did not remember that Ubisoft just announced that Xdefiant is shutting down and two studios are closing Wow, it's all coming up roses for Ubisoft Put a pin in that

Yeah, I feel like, um, I feel like that, that docket point is going to continue across, uh, a couple, a couple of weeks. I love how long the conversation between you and me has been going about Ubisoft both on and off this podcast. It is funnier and funnier every week. It's just, it's not often that you see stories happening from different angles entirely that all kind of just position, you know, like you see like, Oh, look, here's a story about the wolves are now outside the door.

Yeah, here's here's like it's always this fun. Oh, there's a leak in the basement, huh? It's the situation where it's like, here's the version that's in the newspaper. Here's the version from Jimmy's next door neighbor. Here's the version overheard at the grocery store 10 days later, and you know, and then they all converge into like, oh, this is cool. Not good. Not good. Sell your stock if you own any. That's my advice. I mean, I anxiously await the final story. that is, they have found a new bunker to move all the sexual predators to as the final bastion.

We're out of places and offices and studios to move people around to, so we've created the final protective bunker. We've sealed off the basement of the Rainbow Six Siege developers and we're just going to have the sex predators fight each other down there. It's bringing a new meaning to peak advantage. Let's take some letters. Meaning to peak advantage Let's take some letters. Oh before we do that actually there is a piece of news that we missed

So you know how I've made jokes in the past about when's the good time to start a Computer role-playing game such as path of the righteous or Baldur's Gate. Did you see the Baldur's Gate news? Oh, no. I'm sorry. I just a thunderdome. It just becomes an Ubisoft thunderdome. The Ubi-Dome. Oh, whoa. No, tell me more. No, tell me more. So Baldur's Gate, the Larian said that Patch 7 was going to be the last patch and then they said, fuck you, we lied. The next patch is going to have cross-play, photo mode, and 12 more subclasses.

One for every single class in the game. That's a lot. That sure is. It sure is a lot. That's 30% more classes in the game. Jesus Christ, man. Is that an expansion? No, that's patch eight. At what point do people, Patch eight.

At what point? At what point do people start going, OK, guys, guys, hold on, right? Just the just your plate is just more food coming from whatever that picture is of like the person with the all the food and just more Yeah, it's just like What? How many runs do they expect one to do

Well as new millennium in the chat cuz he could tell you I think he's up to 14 He's got a sickness though. Well, okay, but like, you're also- 20? You're on 20 you fucking freak? Stop it. Okay, but like this is at like very clear decision to not play anything else, right? All other things are just not happening, right? Why not just play Baldur's Gate. It's got a season Oh Jesus sorry what the fuck? What are you doing? Sorry, I'm sorry

Just done with this podcast today My finger hit the hit the button sorry Excuse me Excuse me. Excuse me. Um, anyway, that's what Larian should be doing. That's what they should be doing. Wrap it up guys. It's too much. Oh, fuck. Anyway, yeah, no, that's, that's crazy. That's a crazy. Yeah, that's crazy. That's a crazy... Yeah, it's ridiculous.

And a bunch of those subclasses are ones that people were asking for and like disappointed that they'd never made it into the original release. Like Hexblade Warlock and Giant's Path Barbarian and shit like that. I mean, it is a design philosophy to take your product and basically go, we are making this as if no other game exists. So I think what's happening is that the narrative people are all on pre-production on their next game because this patch isn't going to have narrative stuff.

It's all technical or gameplay stuff. So those people want to do something. So they're like, fuck it. Why don't we just throw a dozen more classes into the game? Mad Fientist Okay. Well, okay. I mean, in this type of industry environment, if you can find new work and your thing is making money and everything is going well, then by all means, find ways to keep busy and quality of life the shit out of whatever you're doing.

I will say though that they... Larian earlier today, I talked about how Josh Sawyer talked about Larian with Divinity made it so that full voice acting became the overnight standard for all of these types of games. And there was an article right when Baldur's Gate three came out. It was like, you can't use this game to set a new standard for RPGs. And everyone mocked it. Um, and that article has now been retroactively proven super accurate cause nobody is going to be able to put out a game like Baldur's Gate three. We I don't think ever in like will be able to put out a fucking game and support it like they did with Baldur's Gate 3.

We just got finished saying this with Elden Ring, right? Like and coming off of like a studio that's being really successful with their previous releases and people are used to like more bite sized morsels by comparison, which were also really big. If you're going to go forward like this, I guess it's almost like, all right, these games are going to release as platforms that exist for MMO lengths of time and just get treated as such, even though it's a single player game. I don't know if you remember,

but there used to be like this thing with Baldur's gate one and two and planescape where there'd be people that replayed them every single year because I, you'd roll a new type of class and you'd go through it and it's a classic and blah, blah, blah. And like they've recreated that situation in like one year where people are replaying a fucking 150 hour long RPG back to back and then by the time they're done dude I know people that beat that game twice before the epilogue came out yeah well you're talking I mean shit during the early access even right yeah like yeah I Just would but yeah when you describe, you know

The person who's on their 20th. It's just like okay. So like well that person's sick Well, it's just like you know what we're doing here trying to keep up with hundreds of games coming out every year. Yeah There's no way you're doing that and you can't argue with that value though, holy fuck. Yeah. I remember I was describing to Reggie some time ago about the feeling of the person that you're talking to on the internet that knows everything about the game that they know, and you not knowing about that thing means that that's a blind spot for you, but you can't see all the other things

They don't know because they're just locked into that one dude. Okay. I had a perfect example of this Where I was talking about how I really like the changes that i'm not going to go into the specifics But I I really like the change that the path of exile 2 is making compared to the first one Uh because and I said as a new player to Path of Asylum, never spent more than 20 hours in it, re-specking in that game was really hard, right? It was very punishing. The skill tree was very extreme. To which person in chat said, actually, it's totally easy. You don't know, talking to me, what you're talking about. I have 35, 40 hours. To which I go, I don't know if that's true. To which people who put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it go, no, you, that guy, don't

know what you're talking about. Respecting did used to be really hard. It's just not hard now. And you don't know that because you only just started playing and just this circling fucking level of varying expertises just all bouncing off of each other. Oh my god. And so and you can get in on our chat who's beaten Baldur's Gate three 20 times says, oh, you could get a play through down to 40 hours easy. Yeah, bro. You don't

even look at the dialogue anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and you only you can experience that from the seat where you're seeing it from every direction, you know, in each different genre and each different thing. It's a wild one. But yeah, no, we had a big talk about that. Uh, alright, let's take some letters. If you want to send a letter in, send it to CastleSuperBeastMail with gmail.com. That's CastleSuperBeastMail at gmail.com. Alright, we got one coming in over here.

No name. Uh, okay. Yeah, don't mention, don't mention my name because I'm not Over here, no name. Okay, yeah, don't mention my name because I'm not sure this information's public. Last episode about Gold Masters reminded me of a story that was mentioned. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bop. Okay, so, so Coffee Stain Publishing was talking about Satisfactory before it was announced, and this must have been around 2019 or so.

The reason they got into publishing to begin with at all was because they released a previous game perhaps sanctum to The it had a publisher for the console versions They had multiple issues But it all culminated in the publisher sending the gold masters for ps3 to the wrong address delaying the release of the game Delaying the release of the game It was mailed into the wrong fucking building they were so incompetent that they just decided fuck it We're gonna be our own publishers after this point. You know, that's Crazy, this is a little out of date But I remember a long time ago

back in the early 90s I remember a long time ago, back in the early 90s, gold masters were often not sent in the mail at all. Someone would get it and put it in their car and drive it over. Yes, yes, if that was possible, that was a thing. Because it would also just be faster if you were within driving distance versus going with the mail, you know?

But it also gave you the certainty of like safety. Did you put it in the guy's fucking hand? Yes, yes courier can do the job, but sometimes you just you do they would do it themselves a hundred percent. That was that's a thing That's a really good reason to create your own publishing arm That's a bunch of bullshit. Oh man. All right. Alculator says, dear Watt and Pooley, I've met multiple people that say that they don't rewatch

movies or TV shows or reread books because they already know what's gonna happen. My first thought as always, do they not re-listen to songs? My theory is that they're too proud to admit that they're getting a worse attention span. You two are normal consumers of media. What's your opinion? No, we're not. Yes. The most normal media consumers. We are highly, highly atypical media consumers.

I've talked about the fact that I don't re-experience a lot of media, especially these days. If I did in the past, it was more minimal, but now it's like very, very rare. And that just comes from the fact that this atypical career has led to me like every week keeping up with what's going on releases so on and so forth and all and with every with the overall keeping up with the industry means trying to keep your finger on the pulse of so many things. So when I replay something, if I'm replaying something or choosing to go back over a particularly

long game that I know I enjoy, I feel like I could be better spending that time learning more about a new thing or re-experiencing something, or experiencing something that I haven't, or uncovering something else that I'm curious about, or that people have recommended. I love 13 Sentinels. I really think that's a highly recommended game that I would, you know, tell a lot of

friends to play. I can't think of a time when I'm ever going to do it again. I think I highly prioritize some new shit and seeing how that goes, you know? So Wooly, you and I both have elements, particularly strongly in one or the other, that would lead to this type of scenario. I'm obsessed. I am like a proud member of the cult of the new. I want the newest.

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

The number one thing that I see, and it feeds into spoiler culture and it feeds into the insanity that is like hyper specific anti-spoiler. And I have to talk to everybody about this within minutes of it coming out is that shock and surprise for many are the primary desire they're trying to get out of their media. And media has reflected that to become way worse with stuff like Game of Thrones and shit like that. Or it's like, we have to surprise the audience. How about you have the audience enjoy themselves? Shouldn't that be the primary thing?

Surprise and shock are disposable. So like a lot of the same people who are like, well, why would I rewatch this? I already know what it has are the same people that are fucking going on to social media within minutes of a TV show ending so that they can argue about who they're shipping in the finale of Arcane and spoiling it for everybody that happens to follow them. The real goal is actually just talking about it and talking about how surprised you were rather than actually engaging with the media at all. And look, sometimes my approach is not perfect and obviously there's gonna be flaws in it,

one of which that people will, I will be glazed forever over is like something like Transistor or I forget too much of that for something that I really enjoyed when I played it. Well, if you forget all of it, then fucking just go back. And then that would be a great thing to go and replay. So it's not a perfect strategy or solution, nor is it great for everybody. But regardless, I think that the job and the way we go about this is going to kind of leave

me often seeking out new experiences as a priority just on instate in a lot of cases. And every once in a while, I'll, you know, maybe pop something in or so. But I even find times where I'm like, well, okay, games where I'm trying to rest and I have like a period of downtime that I want to relax in is where comforts come into play. But yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, I'm like, I'm hearing enough good things about 1000 times resist. And I'm like, Okay, here, let's go. Let's let's let's see what's going on. And then there's your Yeah, there's your your mouth washing style game where it's like,

this I'm never gonna play, but I will certainly recommend it to somebody and sit through them playing it. You know, that yes, I'm probably gonna see that game again watching a friend play it or two. All the stuff that I said before, I think it all combines into there's a certain genre of person, and I believe that is like half or more of all people, who feel no desire to engage with any of the media that they're ever watching or interacting with in any way whatsoever. People are watching serialized television dramas with the same level of emotional investment that my mom watches house flipping shows on HGTV, where it is something to watch and pleasantly tickle the neurons and relax and have no actual meaningful

involvement in your front of your brain at all. Just all lizard brain, all back here. Just all lizard brain, all back here. Because if you have no desire to ever even think or talk about something after it's done, well, because I know what had happened, that means you're not actually interested in the thing you just experienced at all and you don't really have any follow-up thoughts because you didn't actually care about it when you were going through it at all. I have friends that kind of consume media like that and it's okay, you know what I mean? It's a personal choice. It's not worse or better. It's just less involved. Yeah, that's it.

I mean, your personality will determine whether or not you give a shit about these things, or you're like, I'm spending my time doing other things and stuff. And they're like, that's OK. For me, I'm going to watch a fucking Dave Lynch shit. And I don't want to walk away from Dave Lynch shit going, huh, weird, and then go about my day.

I want to go back and look at some of the weird shit and be like, what the fuck is going on in this? What was he thinking? And I'll go and read fucking interviews or watch interviews with Lynch and be like, what the hell, what is he getting at? And I'll look at the scenes around it and be like, because I want to take all the little pieces

and appreciate them. Instead of just going, haha, the baby was deformed. I would also argue as well, not even argue, I had a thought that is our parents who are the people who kind of consume things this way, because we grew up in a generation where media consumption had already been a normalized thing and the newer generations are also more and more experienced in that. So like how to watch something quote unquote and what to think about while you're doing so was something that you know if you were around when the TV came into existence you know you don't know how to think about these other things you're like the medium the medium and

everything associated is kind of being figured out as it goes. So I feel like you know when I think of my parents watching like, you know, the sitcoms they grew up with and then like movies and stuff like that like there was a framework of analysis that was just like okay. Well you look at books with that level of like Specificity that's not true. But that, well, for them, for them, there was a feeling that, oh no, books deserve this, and you know, maybe even old plays or so,

but not TV and movies, and certainly not video games. You know, it was just the norm to not look at it as a medium worthy of that type of dissection. to not look at it as a medium worthy of that type of dissection. I think my parents fulfill a really good example criteria for the various steps on this. My dad would watch a lot of movies, but most of the movies that he would watch

were old movies because they reminded him of watching the old movies. They were nostalgic, and they were relaxing to him, and he was tired because he worked a lot. And one of the things he told me was like one of the most insane, he has the weirdest, most insane subtitle take I've ever encountered in my life. My father hates subtitles so much that despite the fact that he does not speak Italian or German, he would rather watch a movie in Italian or German because he knows like four phrases entirely without reading the subtitles, because that's preferable to him. And as a result, he would never ever watch any Asian cinema that had to have subtitles or anything like that.

I mean, like in fucking Game of Thrones, there's scenes where they're speaking high Valyrian, a fictional language. Oh yeah. It's just like, yeah, I just want to hear the noises. And then I think about my mom, and my mom is like a stereotypical suburban mom when watching movies. And it's like, fucking get that pause ready. Cause every scene will be accompanied by the questions and the questions are the things that just occurred in the scene.

And what's happening is my mom isn't actually just paying, she's just not paying attention. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Other things like, like there's, there's a bunch, there's a couple of things that she would watch that she'd pay like wrapped attention because there were things that she was interested in But like most of the movies that my mom watched like she was just watching it just to watch it But then she would get lost because she wasn't paying attention

Other prior so you would have to have the fucking mental cheat sheet of who that guy is I've watched I've watched a friend of mine in particular struggle with like I've watched a friend of mine in particular struggle with trying to resist the phone during any movie or anything that's over an hour or at least an hour. And it's like every tan got it, that's like, and she's gotten better at it. And it's a bit more, it's also ADHD kind of related as well and stuff. But there's an element of like, like the, the that even when you're thinking, Oh, I wonder what's going on. It's like you've already disconnected with whatever is happening on the screen, you know?

You know, it's funny, there is one thing when I'm watching a movie that will overwhelm me like intensely and I will have to pause it and pull out my phone and it is who the fuck is that guy? Oh the face I recognize. I know that guy but what's his fucking name? What did I see him in? Who is that guy? Do you know who that It's Ray Fines. I was Ray Fines. I was. All right. Actually, you know what? Actually, like that has happened like two or three times and it has been Ray Fines. Yes, that's why I say I like it specifically that far.

I don't know why. It's specifically him. Yeah. He's got one of those faces. Mm-hmm All right, and we got one last one here coming in from Julian Hey Batman and Robin Ed was trained by Balrog hard our soft day. Does he say it? Does Ed say it?

No it does Ed say it no I'll do you one better no Balrog would just beat the no bricks off no no here's what I'm saying Balrog absolutely let him say it. He did not curtail that one bit. And then one day Ed came home with blood on his knuckles after a fight that he won as a kid beating up an adult and went, yo, what the fuck? Why didn't you tell me? And Balrog just went, eh. That's pretty good. And now he doesn't say it. Ehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe Thanks for watching!