Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Marvel Rivals Review (So Far) / POE2 Mini-Review - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

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What's up and welcome back to the kind of funny games cast for Friday, December 6, 2024. Of course, I am Tim Getty's. I'm joined today by the Master of Hype Snow Bike. Good morning, Tim. Happy Friday. Nice to see you. To you as well. You're going to have a great little Path of Exile weekend?

Yes, Path of Exile weekend. Marco Freak Out weekend with Andy Cortez, a lot of Call of Duty ranked. Also, looking into like, what's next on my backlog game, Tim? Do I go way back, Andy and play Demon Souls on that sweet place? Station 5 Pro here in the office or do I play something from this year that I haven't played? You know what I mean? There's a lot of games out there.

We talk about our top tens. Yeah. You know what I mean? But I got a solid top 10. I got some that people have forgotten about that then when they hear it, they're going to go, oh shit. That was a really good time. Mike was right. Yeah. Yeah. I got a couple of those. Yeah, I mean, you introduce them as just snowback, Mike. You're looking at a top 25, possibly top 10.

Jeff the Landshark in North America. Watch out. You don't understand the sort of skill this guy's got a job. I mean, I felt a level of power emanating from him. I didn't know what was the difference, though. You saw the clip, though. I know you saw the clip. Of you and Jeff, I did see the clip.

Do you want, should we show the clip? Should we show the clip while we talk about the podcast topic? We'll get that. We'll get that in there later. That's a little tease for later, everybody. Because, of course, I have to introduce the nitro rifle, Andy Cortez. Looking in amazing, amazing in his brand new, want to explain this for me, a sweater. It's a little ugly Christmas sweater I designed Tim.

I like that. It's called, from the help of chat, Winter Wonderlands Between. I like that. That's very good. You get that. There's a lot of other ones. Another one I was going to do a jingle Belden Ring. That one not so much.

But yeah, it's all your favorite characters from the world of Eldon Ring. Designed it. Drew all the characters. What I love most about it, two things. It's all knitted. One, fantastic color math there. You know what you mean? Nice distribution of good colors that look good together.

But on top of that, unmistakably Andy Cortez art. Yeah. Oh, thank you. You look down at the bottom guys in particular. Like, uh, the witch. Yeah, right there. We got Blythe. And on the other side of you?

Yeah. Those two, the middle and those two, I'm like, Andy Cortez did that. 10 out of 10, I'd be able to call that. Melina and the back, the back's probably my, well, we got, we got, uh, I like the turtle. We got Melania right there. Turtle Pope is a great one.

Yeah, Turtle Pope right here. I'm doing the weird, like, weather forecasting thing. I don't know what sides of what. So wait, is this, is it only Eldon Ring characters, or is it? This is only Eldon Ring, and then the other one is Blood Born. Gotcha. Yeah. Do you have one, are you going to make one for Sekiro?

The bathing ape? The bathing ape. That's all I know. That's his name. He throws shit at you, you know. And then he bays afterwards. What happens? Oh, that's around that shit.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Remember everybody, this is the kind of funny games cast each and every weekday. We get together to talk about the biggest revest. reviews, previews, previews, and topics and video games live on YouTube, Twitch and and podcast services around the globe. If you love what we do, please support us with the kind of funny membership. You get the shows ad-free.

You can watch live as we record them and you get a daily exclusive Gregway. For a chance to be part of this show, please get your super chats in as we go. We're talking all about Marvel rivals. So if you have any questions about the game or Marvel in general, anything you want to do, super chat them in and we'll get to them as we go. A little housekeeping for you. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Games cast is live. Now you can check out all of Greg and Paris's thoughts.

And we just did a great games daily. There was me and Jerica breaking down the reviews at large of Indiana Jones, which is doing very, very well right now, which gets me excited because I'm currently in the lead in fantasy critic, a place I didn't expect to be, Mike, but it feels pretty damn good. The only thing standing in my way of victory is Greg Miller and Marvel rivals. So I can't wait to hear how bad this game is from you guys. I really need that, okay? Cross your fingers.

If you're kind of funny member, of course, you get today's Greg Way. That's going to be Snowbike Mike. Yeah, today will be a Snowbike Mike takeover. Not quite sure where it will go, what it will be. Yesterday, you could tell it went places. Me and Nick sat on the couch. We just turned it on the camera and we let it go. And then we found out that Mike broke something in this office.

What did I break? Tune in to find out. Can you just tell me? Yeah, can you have Barrett? I will say this. I broke it and I was going to run away. I was going to leave it. Oh, yeah.

I was going to leave it and see what happens. That's the play. That's what you got to do. But like to the point that I don't want to spoil the content. Yeah. It did end with you literally kind of running away. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. You were 5 o'clock on the dot.

I had to get out of it. I've never seen Snowbike Mike leave the office with haste a single time. And it was weird. And I didn't ask questions. But then when I heard the story, I'm like, I knew something was up. Yeah. I knew something was up with this man. You don't want to tune into that one.

Like I said, it kind of goes places at the beginning, where are we going. And then it's just Mike and Nick talk. And then we went to where we needed to be. Yeah. Man. Today we're brought to you by Shady Ray's and R frames and shout out to our Patreon producers to Lately Twining and Carl Jacobs.

We're also brought to you by Aternum. That's not right. New World. Imperial. Imperial. Thank you so much. Imperial. Last minute, so I didn't get any in the run of show here.

But I appreciate you. We brought you by Imperial. But we'll talk all about that later. Let's start with the topic of the show. Marvel Rivals. Our review, so far. We're not actually going to give a final number on this or anything

because servers just went live. What, Andy? 4 p.m. yesterday. 4 p.m. Pacific time yesterday. Now, Bless and I had codes for the whole week. They sent us a separate little build. One of those weird ones then where it's like you got to

unzip it, the file, right? You got to unzip it. And then it requires a password to unzip it. And it's just like an executable. Very odd. I'm I used to just like a steam experimental branch or something like that. A very weird kind of way of doing things, but it worked out. It worked out.

Okay. And the game was also getting updated, even though you weren't clicking update on this game. So I don't know how the hell they were doing that. Are they my colonels, Mike? I have no idea. They're in your kernels. But like throughout the week, it was them not only just revealing the new character of Cloak and Dagger or Wolverine, but then later that night, the builds that we had would have access to these new heroes.

Cloak and dagger. Sick as hell. Cooler's hell in name. Like, come on. Are you kidding me? Pretty wild character in the game too, Tim. Yeah? I still don't know what they do, Mike. Transforming into two different characters all around the map. It's pretty wild, Tim. So let's start here. How long have each of you played? Mike? I put in seven hours last night. I started at 4 o'clock and we went till 11 o'clock.

I probably would have gone longer with Andy and Jady, but I did get tired and how to turn it off. So I am seven hours deep into this day one build. Andy? Um, shocking. I had a lot of, uh, like, my computer just started like exploding yesterday. It was very scary. Um, so I thought I was going to have a lot less hours. I have 6.5 because I did, I did continue on after my, I played for about three hours on stream and then suddenly I lost audio. I was like, what the fuck happened? And then I restarted. And then I, I try to unplug the wavelength. That's always a disaster trying to do that midstream, blew everything up. Went back in, ended up playing a deal. decent amount more got to the level 10, which is what's required of you to play competitive. I have 6.5 hours. And that's not even including the beta sort of a week that influencers and streamers and press had. Which you all put in a significant amount of time in. I put about, yeah, I put about four or five hours into that as well. Yeah. Yeah. In addition to the beta from whenever

that was a couple months ago, which I think I put like 25 hours in or 20, something like that. So, anyway, let's start with you then, with all that prior experience and now playing the actual game being out. What are your thoughts on Marvel Rivals so far? Marvel Rivals is a supremely impressive product, I think. Is it going to have balancing issues? Of course. People have balancing issues with games that have been out for six years at this point, like Overwatch or whatever. Like, that's just something that's always going to happen.

I think that's an easy thing to point out to go, yeah, they got to work on bad. balancing. That's like a really easy take to say because every game always needs to work on balancing at every moment. Especially with 33 characters. It's going to be balancing all the time. Surprising amount of characters. As an outsider to this, I saw the like launch lineup and I was like, no way is this like actually what's in the game. Good for them. A wild amount of characters I have at the start and to not even think to drip free to drip feed those. You know what I mean? I would have assumed what the process would have been was, hey, whatever the characters you all played during the beta. We'll let you have like two more. And every month, here's a, here's Wolverine.

Here is whoever the hell, right? And super, super impressive that they were able to launch with that much shows you that Nettys, they got that money. And that budget is going really far because this game is on another level production wise. The amount of times that a player got a player of the game last night and me and Mike would react to the highlight intro of that character. And we'd be like, holy shit. That's like every, there's so much love put into every kind of character's move set and every character's animations. Super impressive shit along with the team up abilities. I just think it's a really insanely impressive product for being a free to play game where you don't have to buy characters. And that's something they already committed to whenever the beta was out and them saying, hey, you're not going to be buying characters here.

Whenever we release them, they're out. You get them. you'll be paying for battle pass stuff or skins and we got a decent amount of those we got a little pop-up notification during our gameplay yesterday that I we had a good chuckle at that was like hey if you can't buy anything make sure you reset

it's like oh they want please make sure the money's coming in yeah let's help you please let's get this money let's get this monetization going I'm super impressed with it I'm having a lot of fun playing a lot of different heroes uh oh

a lot of the powers going oh what the hell's happening. We're going to ride this lightning. We're riding it, baby. Donny 2.0, Mox Cyclone. We'll see what goes on. Dude, honestly, where my brain goes is like

Greg Miller's going to pull a bit right now. Oh, my God. Like these lights are flashing over here. I'm like, Greg Miller's going to come from the ceiling. Marvel rivals of all things. But, yeah, I'm very impressed with it. I'm having a great time. I think it's a lot of fun.

I think that they are at such an advantage with new players who look at a game like Overwatch and say, That game's been out forever. How in the hell would I have a, you know, a snow globes chance in hell to be able to survive in this game where everybody playing has been playing for their whole lives at this point. And they have so much experience, I'm going to feel stupid as hell. I don't want to hop in.

That's how I feel League of Legends, Mike, you know. So to have that advantage of a very sort of friendly style game that anybody can kind of hop into right now because it is brand new and we are all. starting off on the same foot, that's awesome as hell. They're also at the advantage where Overwatch is in kind of like this, it feels like a panic mode trying to get 6 v6 back in some sort of way to bring back

a lot of lost player base. I'm ranting, sorry. Marvel Rivals is 5V5, 6.6. 6.6. It is 6.6. Okay. But it's not, I mean, I don't think that that's why players would say,

I'm going to pick this over, Overwatch. I just think it's a brand new, fresh thing. And I don't think I think no matter how impressive Marvel rivals is, I still don't think Overwatch will die. I think that has its fan base. This reminds you a lot of a

Valorant CS2 sort of thing, like, where Valent comes around and it's also this really, really precision shooter and both games are still succeeding and doing very well. I think both games will continue to do their thing, but Valerant, very, very good. Awesome.

Mike, I want to jump to you. Not Valor, very, very, very. Valor, it's very good, but this game Marvel Rivals very good is what I'm doing. Yeah, there's a fun conversation to be had about longevity and where this game and Overwatch and the state of the first person shooter, shooter industry goes later, because I love having that talk. But right now, for me, Marvel Rivals is a great game. It is up there.

It has the presentation value of those wowing Marvel IP characters in a really well-done style. The maps are beautiful. The gunplay feels really, really good. being in third person, seeing your character goes a long way for having, hey, this is your Marvel character, deck it out with the cool costumes, have a good time. So all in all, I mean, if you like Overwatch, if you've ever thought about Overwatch, if you just want to try an Overwatch-type game, Marvel Rivals is for you.

It's got the Marvel IP on it. It's got the Overwatch gameplay. It is a great game. It's a lot of fun. Where I get hung up as a casual audience member of this style of gameplay and of this game mode. is there's not enough game modes. There's currently three game modes promoted.

You would think that two of them look the exact same. You would never know the difference, truly and honestly. And so for me, I have still, since Overwatch to now, after 10 years, it feels like, it's like I haven't seen anything break the mold game mode-wise in this style of game. It feels like if you play Overwatch, you've seen there, you've been it, you've done it, all the same game modes and push the payload to tug a war, that they've added and created in the past couple of years to just hold the point.

Right now, the problem for me as a casual fan with Marvel rivals is anything that passed about two hours or three hours of gameplay, it just feels too repetitive because it is just either capture the point or push the payload. And I'm hoping that in the future, we will see Marvel rivals or even Overwatch

somehow break that. Because I think for the casual audience member, it gets just too repetitive, only having those options. but for right now, if you jump in and have fun, this is a great game, a lot of fun. Very ignorant question here. Go ahead. So with that, with Mike saying this,

I feel like this is something I hear you say often, is wanting more maps, wanting more modes. You do play a lot of these competitive shooters. But Andy, I guess I feel like you might be answering this already, but do you think that this game should just double down on it is this, these modes? Like, this is what this style of game is between Overwatch and Marvel rivals? or do you think that other modes are something that they should be looking into with the cast of characters and the abilities those characters have? I've always differed from Mike on this discussion because when I play Overwatch, I know what I'm getting and that is the game mode.

When you play CS2 or Valerant, you are playing a search and destroy mode. It's two rounds of offense or defense and you're planning a bomb or you're trying to diffuse the bomb. And that's what those games are about. That's why you play those games. And of course, they have little silly modes of death match or whatever to warm up or play team, whatever the fuck, you know. But for me, Overwatch is push the payload or control the zone, king of the hill, whatever the hell you want to call it. So I guess when I play a Call of Duty or Halo, I expect different game modes in addition to different little fun things of, you know, you know, the skull, you know, what's that mode?

Oddball. Oddball. Yeah, oddball and stuff like that. Or capture the flag. Those are the games where I expect the kind of more wacky modes. But for me, I've always differed from this on Mike where if I'm playing a game that's an Overwatch clone, I expect to just have the Overwatch clone modes. And I think you can still iterate.

Like, you know, Mike was mentioning earlier, Overwatch 2, try to replace one of their least popular modes, which was called Two Point Capture, where a team is on. offense and a team is on defense and you swap rounds, but you essentially rush one point and you try to take that point. And once you do, then you go to the second point. And that mode is just really unpopular because it felt like it just wasn't as fun as two teams clashing over one singular point or two teams defending and pushing the payload, right? They tried to introduce this push mode where it is a, it's a tug-of-war thing where there's a robot in the middle. And if you push the road, If you're running with the robot, the robot will walk,

and then the other team kills you, they can push it back the other way. Cool. And I like that mode better than two-point capture, but it isn't like setting the world on fire. I don't particularly love whenever that game mode pops up. If they can iterate and make a third sort of version of that, I'm all forward,

but like I'm still extremely satisfied with just getting more maps and more payload and more King of the Hill or capture the zone. I need to take you guys on a tangent real quick. Yeah, take me. Because Mike, you said there's the two modes that are similar out of three. And it reminded me if something weird that's been happening to me, this has nothing to do with Marvel rivals. Okay, great.

You know when you're on Gmail and like you're on a thread and you go to reply and then there's a couple like auto fill options that pop up in the bottom of just like, you know, quick reply type thing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For some reason in the last couple days, every time I go to reply, the word brilliant is in the replies. They know you. It's like, brilliant, thank you. And I'm just like, I've never said brilliant in my life.

They're working it. And yesterday, two out of three of the responses had the word brilliant in it, and I just feel like I'm getting taken over by the Brits. Like, what's happening here? It's brilliant. It's so weird. They got to know you by now. Yeah, I thought they would just know he is. You think with the amount of times you're replying, they see. Dude, yo.

But brilliant? Sounds good. Yeah. What are we talking about? I don't know, man. Anyways, back to Marvel rivals. That reminds me of another really, really good tweet I saw recently of like, you know, it said like British guy unhooking my bra before we're about to have sex. And the quote is, what's all this said? So good. So Marvel rivals, obviously a lot of conversations to be had about these type of games coming out,

how competitive the landscape is it being a clone of a very successful game, Overwatch. but in Overwatch's not biggest years, do you think that this game is doing enough to stand apart? and let's just, let me just call this what this is. Six months from now, what's this game look like? Mike? Six months from now, what does this game look like? Well, Steam charts day one were 450,000, so almost half a million.

I'm sure when you include Xbox and PlayStation, this was massive on this launch. I do expect this to have the juice. I think it has the leverage. That's where I get into game modes and what is this game with Andy Cortez because when I look at this, right, does this pull the Fortnite audience?

Does this pull the Roblox audience? When me and Paris used to talk, does this pull something like his son to come in and play with these just normal established games that are really dominating the market? And so I'm very interested to see if we get that 2017

Overwatch hype all over again where it was, oh snap, this is the game that we all want to play. This is everyone's talking about it. And it has the Marvel IP. It is a great game. I think it's got the juice. I just don't know where we will be six months from now with this. I will be really impressed if it's still pulling in massive numbers like it is, of course,

today and throughout this week and month, but where this will go. I think that's an Andy question of, is the e-sports going to be something because they already promote tournaments that will keep people engaged? is Overwatch now going to reignite with people wanting to jump back to classic Overwatch that they know and love with their favorite characters, new characters being added in that fights for this? I don't know. Yeah, I think now more than ever,

I've never been more unsure of what a game will look like. And it's easy to, it's easy to feel discouraged nowadays by any multiplayer of the game, game that comes out. This is the one I've had the most confidence in, not only because of it being a supremely well-made product, but it is the Marvel IP that people know already. And it's one thing to make a Marvel multiplayer game and have it just be complete shit, but it's not. Like, this game is really good and really well thought out and

designed. And me jumping in from the Marvel side of this, like, you know, putting the Marvel IP on something these days doesn't necessarily just immediately equal success. Of course, yeah. And And I think even looking at video games, what I've been so impressed from the outside looking in on this is how much love it seems is put into making sure that this feels like a Marvel product in the good ways, but also having a unique identity to it. Like it reminds me watching this of how I felt in the 90s and early 2000s with Marvel versus Capcom one and two of they're doing justice to these characters. They're going to have all of the mainstays that you would expect given the time frame of

these coming out. So for us now, all the MCU characters, but also getting in there a little bit deeper and getting a little weird with some of the, the picks that they have. Like, this kind of just seems like an unbelievable success from the Marvel side, seeing all the skins they have, it being third person and giving you all the options you want. Like we played the Insomniac Spider-Man games and like, it's, we love suiting Spidey up. We love unlocking different classic suits and seeing new ones they make. but it seems like this game is doing that for all 33 characters. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of wild to think about the move sets that these characters have. And as I was looking through a lot of the different characters, you know,

because obviously it takes a lot to just build a character and sculpt a 3D art of somebody. But Hulk has three different versions. Hulk is diva in this video game. So in the video game Overwatch, when diva gets knocked out of the mech, they call it baby diva, where it's just the actual pilot, the girl running around with the pistol,

and she can shoot enough enemies to then get her mech back to her. And that's the equivalent here is Incredible Hulk, where whenever he gets knocked out of Hulk form, he becomes Bruce Banner. And he's just a small, little scrawny dude running around, shooting a gun. and he could eventually get his Hulk back.

But then the ultimate is a completely different 3D model for Hulk. And what is crazy about that is that when you're selling cosmetics, you have to make a themed version. If it's a Christmas thing, you have to make a Christmas version of banner, normal Hulk, and the ultimate form of Hulk, which is just kind of wild. Like the amount of work that's going to have to be put into this, in addition to a character like magic,

the sword-wielding lady from new mutants, if you're like me and don't know a whole lot. Of course, yeah, Anna Taylor Joy, that's her name. When she goes into her ultimate form, she becomes like that demon with the sword and just kind of goes crazy. That's another model that they have to make. There's so much love put into every one of these characters

and so much thought put into the movesets. The idea that on this payload map, these goats in fucking... Love and Thunder. Yeah, or the Love and Thunder ones that yell. Whenever they get to the payload, they go, and they yell like they do in the movie. There's all these little small touches

that casual audiences like me would go, oh, that makes sense. You know, that's pretty neat. And I've said this a million times. I always talk about the Marvel versus Capcom games because I feel like they did such a good job of ingratiating people into these characters so that when you watch the movies or watch the shows,

it's just your familiarity with the dumb little things of the goats yelling or the way that Scarlet, which kind of moved in multiverse copacist, it deepens your understanding of the characters. so it just makes, I think, the entire experience feel more premium. And like you both are speaking so highly on the production value of the game. Jumping from that to the gameplay itself. Obviously, it seems like they're cloning Overwatch successfully.

That's a good thing. That's a quality game. Andy, you being one of the biggest Overwatch fans, I know, do you think that you're going to be playing this not six months from now? Because I know that that is crazy. But like, do you see yourself playing this? at the end of next month. Absolutely, yeah, especially because of the competitive mode.

I want to get ranked. I want to see what these skins are. I want to play enough to where we have a squad. I think they did a great job of launching with a lot of features that a lot of games don't have at launch. They not only launched with a full instant replay, so where any match you've played, you could just go back and play that match

and play it from different perspectives or free cam mode during that. Insane sort of tools that are already there for the broadcaster that wants to, like Snowmike Mike, maybe shot cast over something. Now you can't do it in real time, but it's still crazy that you could do it of a replay.

And they also launched with these squads. I'm blanking up. Maybe they call them factions in this game. Faction. Yeah, factions. You can create your own faction, and they have in-game tournaments already. You can click on the little tournament tab,

and it'll tell you when teams are going to be trying to play for tournament spots and then those tournament spots will likely lead to cool rewards and things like that. That is so awesome to build a community from the get-go where it's already telling fans

hey, find your squad, find your friends or whatever and hop in here and be online at this time to play against other squads online and it isn't just competitive mode where you are just trying to get your rank up. It is we are our team, here's our team name,

going against, you know, the Gibronies over there. Hopefully we beat them and move on to the next stage. That shit is so awesome. And I love when games can kind of bring in that. It's why I've been in love with Valerant for the last couple of years after I fell off for a bit, because Valerant Premier has that rec league, you know, after work softball, soccer matches that Mike does with Bless. It's just really, really cool. So having all those modes pushes it even further for me of this is something that I want to play

for a long time. Because I haven't really had the itch for Overwatch in a while. This is scratching that itch that anytime I look at Overwatch or I see a friend play, I'm like, maybe I should go play Overwatch I'm good.

I have other stuff to play. This is making me want to play this arena shooter, this sort of payload hero thing. I'm having a lot of fun with it. And custom lobbies day one. I mean, the game ran really well day one. I think we only got kicked

like truly once during the seven hour experience. It ran flawlessly. Custom lobbies day one. Finding matches immediately. Finding games, yeah, when you have half a million people on Steam alone, yeah, it's going to be easy to find this, right? And yeah, I mean, Tim, 33 characters, and they have the unique team-up abilities,

which makes it a little bit different than Overwatch, of course, adding that flare of, oh, my God, Rocket Raccoon can jump on the back of Groot, right? And then it gets damage reduction while on the back of Groot, when then it can move around the field with Groot, healing people. you see Andy and when he plays Punisher or Bucky and then J.D. plays Rocket.

You get that team-up ability of faster shooting and unlimited ammo. So it is really cool to see up these team-up abilities and how that will grow with 33 plus more characters. They'll continue to add that. And it's cool of like when I play a character, I can ping the whole lobby and say, hey, somebody else play one of these three characters so we can use those team-up abilities together.

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Try for yourself the shades rated five stars by over 300,000 people. Shadirrase.com, use code kind of funny for 50% off two or more pairs of shades. Andy, my question for you. And Mike, I want to hear your thoughts on this as well. Y'all are multiplayer boys. You got your superiors.

squads. You have friends. You have things. Andy just went on a whole tirade talking about how excited he is that they're actually coming up with like worthwhile events and like timed things to get a squad together and do. What if you're on the complete other side? You're hearing you guys talk about this stuff. You're not really into multiplayer things, but this game looks cool. You're not going to be mouse and keyboarding it. You're just going to be a simple controller boy. Can you just jump into this game and have some fun? Or are you just going to be completely overwhelmed? Without having a squad, it's just you playing with Randos. I think you can absolutely hop in and have fun. Obviously everything is always elevated whenever you are with friends or whatever. But again, I think you're at such of a benefit of being here within the first week, right? And that's the learning period. That's where people are getting the hang of controls and moves and what characters should I be playing right here in this moment. I think it's like you could hop in and just play against bots as well

that's all that's awesome you could play against like three different levels of difficulty bots cool you could set a custom match up and play against any sort of set of difficulties of bots that you might want to play again so absolutely you can hop in and have some fun and be a hero that you want to play does this game work on Steam deck do you know

oh that's I don't know only because of how anti-cheats can sometimes not love steam deck. Because they don't want people doing, you know, aim bots and stuff. Gotcha. Mike, what do you think? I still don't know where my steam deck is.

I'm going to look for it one day. It's not high on my list of like life things. But one day I'll look for it again. You know, it might be under the bed, Andy. Who knows? Who knows? Yeah, I don't know. You know, playing solo is a lot of fun.

This isn't a game where you will take over as a solo player. It's not like you're getting seven kills alone. It's a team-based game. so you'll be running around with their squads. But I think, yeah, it's just fine. I think it's a fun time. Now would probably be the time to jump in when there's a lot of a large player base.

But I think Overwatch has benefited from years of it where you just jump in, you zone out, you play and have some fun with this one. You can take it super competitive. You can take it super casual. Follow to you. Yeah. I think this is a good game that can be team or solo.

This is one of those games for sure. Yeah, it's really easy to feel your impact when you're in a game, I think. Like it's, it would be rare to hop into a game and not, you know, because you get the little sound effect whenever an elimination happens. Even if the kill wasn't necessarily yours, you're going to get that little thing pop up and you'll have the narrator of the match who is Galactica. The Galactus's daughter or some shit, I forget one. But she'll be like, great kill, you know, and she gets all stoked whenever you pop off. That's a 5K or whatever.

you feel that instant satisfaction. You get that coming back to you. You see your little ultimate meter going up. Mike's done some big pop-off plays. I always talk about the satisfaction I get whenever I would play support a whole lot back in the day where I love knowing that this little... As Rocket Raccoon, Raccoon's a lot of fun to play as

as a support character because he just shoots out a lot of little yellow orbs that heal your team. And when it gets next to the character that you're trying to heal, if Mike's out there as a tank, as venom, I can shoot that little orb of heel juice,

and it'll slow down when it's next to him to kind of, like, pour into him. And you see his health bark go up and you know, oh, he's going to, I'm supplementing him for this, like, fight that he's taken on right now. There's a lot of different ways to get satisfaction from this video game.

And there's a lot of baddies in this game as well. That's the chat's popping off right now in a very, very sick way. A lot of great character. The arts fantastic. Yeah, the arts style. And each character has three different outfits, if not four, on a couple other ones. I mean, I've already given them $20 and got the cool.

Jeff, the shark, want to be dolphin. But I call it the Camron skin because he's got the pink hoodie on. I love that. It's the cutest in the world. It's super cool. So I'm calling it to Kill a Cam right now. Yeah, it's adorable. Twirl girl, there she is.

And we saw Mike. We saw Mike as Jeff the Landshark also riding on. on the back of Groot. Yes. Jump on the back of Groot. That was some adorable shit. That's very cool. Is that the link that you sent?

No, the clip that I have, of course, is Jeff the Landsharks' ultimate ability, which is a very cool, like, a shark kind of circling the water and then comes up and grabs anybody that's inside of this area of effect. It's really cool. Imagine Nick doing the sucking blow, Tim. Yes, Tim. That's exactly what it is. And so you can see, I've sucked up all of six enemies.

And I'm going to go off. the map with them and gets a six little kill ace. Yeah, my first ace ever Marvel rivals. Let's go, baby. And that opened up the suck and blow in a freaking shooter.

This is horrible. And that opened up the match for us. Yeah. Because like we were at a standstill right there. Mike doing that really, really helped the squad like push for awesome. Yeah, I can even get my own teammates. So I could technically save you or

if you're like endless dark, you get up tight because I'm probably going to kill you too. So I apologize to my teammates ahead of time. But yeah, you can also suck up your team. Yeah, a couple times we'd get sucked up by Mike. As like a solo player, just in general, there's a lot of heroes in this, right? Like, you have a lot of heroes to choose from. And someone in the chat was asking, what's 33 too many?

And I would say no. I think it's the right amount because it always feels like I have something new to click on, someone new to try. I know it's going to be a nightmare for balancing, and we're going to see that for weeks on end here. One character's not correctly balanced, right? But it is fun as the casual audience to this style of gameplay. I love having as many years as possible

so I can always try something new and fresh. Yeah, I would have loved if they launched with maybe 25 or something. I only because I don't want them to just blow their load immediately. Like I think about the future of continuing the hype and hopefully they have enough. There's been a lot of characters that have kind of been leaking and stuff here in different forums everywhere. but I would have loved for them to have had a constant kind of tempo

with releasing a new dude every two weeks or month or whatever. I think I could have continued the hype quite a bit. But there's still a lot of characters you look at it. You're like, ooh, we're cyclops. Where's Gambit? What are the possibilities there that, you know, how is that kit going to look? We need more superheroes of guns.

I'll say that right now. Punisher in this? Huh? Punisher in this? Punisher's in it. He's the default character that everybody says if you don't know who to play as, play his Punisher, because he's your soldier 76. He has an AR, and then he, if you scroll down on the mouse, wheel, it becomes a shoddy. And so you can use the shoddy.

And he's just very, very basic. But when, whenever they sort of revealed Winter Soldier, I'm like, oh, shit, he has a hand cannon. Hell yeah, more characters than guns, please, because I'm, I like to be the shooty shoot guy, as opposed to the, I'm going to get up in your face and be a melee type character. Yeah, the big thing is the melee characters. really spoke about like, yeah, melee heroes are a big thing in this game. And there's a lot of them from Spider-Man to Iron Fist. Spider-Man is really interesting with the web slinging as well alongside Venom.

But like, the idea- Spider-Man's a fucking freak. Spider-Man in this game is swinging all over the map. And it is very cool to see it, add something to the movement of crashing the back lines and being that pester over for your healers and kind of any sort of DPS character in the back. It's fun to watch. It's difficult to master, and it's a nightmare to have to go up against

A good Spider-Man. Yeah, good Spider-Man. And then similar to, like, Iron Fist has been a lot of fun to see and watch. It is cool that they've blended this shooter with melee that clearly still feels like a shooter, right? It's not like anything changes, but it is really cool of seeing characters like that.

So the melee is very interesting to me, because I feel like more and more we've been seeing melee in this type of game and like competitive traditional shooter games that are a little bit more arranged where I'd say melee is more of a option but not like a... Loewan, look at this real quick, Tim.

Rewinded it like five, 10 seconds, Barrett? Just because this is something to just kind of marvel at. No pun intended. The Doctor Strange portals are cool as shit. That's insane. Like, obviously, portals have been in games for a long time.

Yeah, but in a real-time multiplayer game is so cool. From Dr. Strange, again, we know the language of this. That's so sick. But this melee stuff, earlier I was looking at the footage, they were showing a Wolverine getting in there and just kind of slicing people up. Does that feel good? Because I feel like that's such a difficult thing for me

to wrap my head around. Melee, such melee-focused combat feeling good in this type of game pace. It doesn't feel good for me because I just don't vibe with those characters. I understand why anybody could get satisfaction from being a melee character if they're dominating because you're getting kills. there winter soldier has a really fun kit that has some melee involved winter soldier is a kind of hybrid ranged got some melee stuff as well to kind of fend off anybody trying to push on him or whatever but he has a gun that has three bullets right and his that's his left click his right click he can

grapple dudes with his like soldier arm and bring them back towards you and then you can combo that with the move that he has where he essentially punches forward at you, knocks you up in the sky. And I've done, I've had a lot of satisfaction of like, shoot a dude, grapple him, bring him back to you, punch him, knock him up to the sky, shoot him in the air and they're dead. It's like, oh, man, that feels so fucking good. But it's when you're melee only, that's where you kind of lose me because I'm just not that type of player.

But I understand why people love it. A lot of people are like, Andy, you're crazy. Iron fist is awesome. It's like, I'm not saying he's not a good character. It's just not my style of play, you know? The melee combat worked so well in this scenario, because the game modes are centered around, you have to go to one point,

and that gathers everybody there. So the melee always feels like it can be viable and part of it because we're not standing 100 yards away from each other, just shooting from window to window. It's a brawl. It's right. That's truly the feel. So when you have the game modes like push the payload

where the team either has to be right next to payload, to push it forward or the defending team has to be stopping you at that point or capture the point. It's always we are going to one spot. We're going to bang into each other and that's where the melee characters feel good, right? It never feels like, oh, that person's sniping me

from a thousand yards away the whole entire time. You're in the mix the whole time. So your main and Jeff? Yeah, I'm playing Jeff, Storm, slylock. I've clicked on every single character, but if I throw down 20 on Jeff, I'm going to be Jeff forever now.

That's my thing. What about you, Andy? Man, I love, I'm having trouble picking anybody to try to Maine. I'm the, I'm best at Hela. That's where I like, if I want to lock in,

I will play as Hela. What's her play style? Hela is a, I mean, better, if you could just bring up some footage, top 10 NAA, uh, Hela gameplay.

Like, I'm, I'm fucking sick nasty to him. Like, I am disgusting as Hela. Um, and she is, she throws her daggers, her sword things, you know, long range.

She kind of feels like a super broken character. She's the type of character that if you are just, if you're hitting shots, she reminds you of just like a Zenata and Overwatch where she's just shooting a sharp projectile. And then her right click, she kind of charges up all the projectiles and shoots them all. And then when they hit, if they hit a character, they'll then explode inside. of the character. This is the ultimate. That's her ultimate ability. It goes into the first person.

She floats up into the sky first person and you look down at wherever you're at and you start like shooting projectiles there at him. She's insanely fun of play. She has a quick getaway as well. Well, she turns into like a green raven sort of like spirit raven. And you could kind of fly away and get the hell out of dodge if somebody starts pushing you. And then she has a move that will suck a bunch of enemies towards it. It's like a little orbit toss and enemies will kind of get. hurt, but also get pulled towards the center

point of it. A lot of characters can feel kind of samey and they'll have one move that really differentiates them. But the like essentially a lot of characters are just, I'm going to shoot one projectile or two. You know, um, moon night,

very fun as well. Had a lot, having a lot of fun with moon night. Winter Soldier. I love playing Winter Soldier. Widow maker is just Black Widow or reverse that. Black Widow is just Widow maker. She's a sniper. She can sprint as well, which is really, really nice to kind of get out of crazy if somebody's pushing you. I'm having a lot of fun with the projectile style players.

I am really bummed out that I'm not loving any of the tanks so far. I was hoping we'd get some more tank love. And maybe that just comes down to me maybe feeling a lot more viable on a DPS player. So I'm like, I shouldn't be playing tank. my team needs me to be DPS. Let me go click a couple heads. But when I play Overwatch, I love playing as, as Sigma or Roadhog. And there's like that skill involved of, I need a couple of characters to feel a lot more

different because so far just a lot of the different characters can feel like just skin swaps. Class this, class that. Yeah. How's my girl Scarlet Witch play? Scarlet Witch is very Opie. Scarlet Witch. Well, I think we're in a, I think we're in a really good spot with the game right now, Mike, because I feel like five times a game, we'll say that about four different characters.

Yeah, every character. Like, this character's so fucking Ope. And that's, that means you're in a great spot because a lot of people are finding ways to be good with a lot of different characters. Scarlet Witch, she'll auto aim, like, suck your life force out of you if you're, which is like, man, I would love for that having, right? But she sucks a life force out of you, Tim, and then she can float up in the sky. and throw orbs at you

that kind of explode. Blessing really loves playing as Scarlet Witch. She's an absolute batty as well. And you can get the skin from Multiverse of Man. Is it really cool? Is there any way

I can see Scarlet Witch's just skins? A lot of MCU skins to this. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's definitely got to be a little collection out there. Okay, good. I will say, well, we bring up the skins. You know what does grind my gears?

Yeah, let me hear you. Some characters on the movement side of things, Tim. Some characters have a double jump. Some characters can run up walls. Some characters don't have anything at all. It's just a basic just kind of jump. The jump

isn't good enough. It needs a mantle. We need a mantle. Or every character needs a double jump. Because there's areas there where you can't even jump up to where you want to go and you're hit with this frustration of like, God damn it. Like, what am I? Now I just got to go back to the basic path. Every character needs some sort of mantle or just give them all double jumps. There's a weird, there's a movement tweak here that needs to be elevated. Well, I think another reason why I feel even more strongly about that is because

you and I just played Fortnite for three hours the night before. Yes. And I kept on just feeling the muscle memory of I can mantle here. And you can't mantle. And it just really, really stinks. Man, what a just a bad. Storm, I think, is just like number one baddie of the game, though. Okay.

Not thrilled about these. Love how accurate they are to multiple versus of madness. Like, come on, are you kidding me with this? Yeah. So freaking sick. Now, they did make the Star Lord version look like Chris Pratt, though. He looks very much like Chris Pratt. Like, you know, in the game, Star Lord doesn't,

Well, I guess maybe, I don't know if we've seen a skin of him without the helmet. But, oh, we have? They have the blue and red from the latest movie. You're right, you're right. But the Guardians of the Galaxy 3 version of Star Lord skin is like, oh, you made just a Chris Pratt equivalent of the face, which is pretty neat. And it seems like they're going to be doing that for quite a bunch of different heroes. Yeah, I agree with Mike. We need a mantle.

Yeah. It feels really, really awkward when there's a lot of different heights of stuff that, oh, my character. character can't just jump up there, even though my ankles are kind of clipping right at the edge. You got to either just lower that surface or kind of make it easier for maneuvering, you know. Destructible environments are big positive. It is fun to see the environments change with gunshots, blowing holes and walls, bridges falling down, the environment actually evolving as you play from bridges to different slots moving and creating barriers that you can hide behind.

That's all positive. I like all that. I think it's awkward when they reformed, though. I had this same criticism during the beta period. Whenever the destructible environments reform and go back to what they were where maybe this column was broken, but now that column is sort of being built back up. But all you see is sort of a green placeholder version of the column kind of forming back.

And you can still shoot enemies through it, even though you can't really see them. It's kind of awkward. But I don't really know what the solution is around there. that aside from the fact that maybe just leaving it destructed the whole time. The storm looks fucking cool as hell. Are you kidding me with this?

She's got the white and black risk it off her storm. And then she's got the Mohawk storm too. Yo, the punk rock storm. This skin is sick. Yeah, the ivory breeze is what they call that. Ivory breeze. I mean, wow, all of them are freaking cool.

Oh my God, that's awesome. Yeah, this ivory breeze is what I was looking at. That's sick. That's my favorite one. And that when you actually earn, too, you don't even have to pay for it. So I'm going to earn that eventually. Love that.

It's a great game. It's a really good time. It's really, really good. Free to play. Being everywhere, cross play. This has the makings here for the holiday season to take over the end of the year. Like Tim asked before, I am interested to see where we go. But as of right now, you can't go wrong.

This is a great game. It was the game of the summer and maybe the game of the winter. This is it. Maybe it is everyone. Stay tuned. I could not. I wanted to stop playing a lot. earlier last night, but I just, I was having a lot of fun playing a lot of different characters,

want to get competitive ranked. We're both ranked in now. Start Saturday, December 7th. You can start playing ranked games. They have a tournament right away for the top 250 teams or something crazy like that. So go out there, have fun with your friends. Just like y'all are about to do right now. These boys and Nick are about to hop in the lab and play some Marvel rivals.

So go check that out. If you're on Twitch, you can stay right where you are. on YouTube, you're going to need to make the jump. But guess what? We actually aren't done with this episode. Our boy, Zanth, our ARPG man here, here kind of funny, has an update on his time with Path of Exile 2. So we're going to leave you with a short little, I think it's about six-minute video of him talking about his updated thoughts. And right after that, this episode will end. But we appreciate you all for hanging out. Stay tuned for some more, Zant. Until next time, love you all. Goodbye.

Ladies, gentlemen, and NBs. Welcome to the podcast. within a podcast covering all the latest and greatest in all things ARPGs, condense into a tight five that we're calling Arbidge Time or ARPT, ARPG time. I am your host, Zanth, and let's get on with it. Path of Exile 2, Early Access Releases today, and I had the opportunity to get hands-on for about the past week to review, and unlike some people, I did manage to keep my mouth shut. it. On the kind of funny scale, and it is early access, and there's a lot left to be discovered, this is still a 10 out of 10 masterpiece with only six classes, two ascendancies for each class,

giving us essentially 12 classes. Some of the items have yet to be introduced into the game. Some of the skills have yet to be introduced into the game, this is still the greatest ARPG I have never played. And if it were to release in this form, barring all those other things they never make it in, I would be content to play this version for years. Full stop. Well, let's talk about why. First and foremost, the story. In an airpg, it is not a big deal if you have a great story, but it helps.

And I found myself at the end of the story portion wanting to know where we were going next and why. And that is a nice example of good storytelling within the genre. Often, you just kind of want to rush through. I kind of expected that with the pace at which I was trying to push through all the content. But the story itself was still engaging and I wanted to keep going with it. visually, the game looks amazing. Even if you're running on a very grummy PC because you only got access to a PC version. If I go back to when we were in LA, running on a top line PC, it was even better and I look forward to dropping it into my PlayStation the second I can until I'm able to upgrade this beast.

Where an ARPG truly shines, though, is not as much on the polish side, on just the razzle-dazzle graphics, if you have it. It's in the skills, it's in the systems. It's in the fun. I didn't find myself chasing fun in this game. It was all around me. I could sit there for 20, 30 minutes messing with skills, messing with my skill tree trying to make it worked and never feel disappointed. I did find points of inflection during this game, points of resistance where I was struggling with a boss. Several bosses, you'll see. But at no point

did I ever feel like it was unfair. I would go back to my tree. I could go back to older areas. Every time I'd go back to an old area, it was generating a brand new map for me to explore to find new things. So even if I was retreading something I had done before, I was still experiencing it in a different way, which made that process of making and creating this character more exciting. Speaking of which, I spent 48 hours in the past eight days playing this game. Don't do the math, please. And I only played one character and one ascendancy. I spent all of that time playing a sorceress, and I spec into becoming a chronomancer, because the thought of stopping time sounded so cool.

But as I was doing it, I also had major foemone becoming a mercenary, or becoming a monk, or perhaps maybe even a witch. Every time I was getting involved in my character, it was also in the back of my head planning another character for me to go in and play. that's exciting. And to cap it off, there's more to come. There are going to be six more classes. Each one of the classes will have three actual ascendancies,

which brings the grand total to 24 missing classes in the game that will be introduced in the next six months. That's on top of more skills, that's on top of more items, and three additional acts that you won't experience in early access. With the moment, as I said earlier, this is the greatest ARPGI of play. And it's only going to get my recommendation. The servers might be a bit of a mess today.

But go out, get in, and tell me what you think. and I'll be back, maybe in a longer form, once we've all had a chance to play, to really dig into this. In the meantime, this is Zanth, and this has been Arbidge done.