Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Outriders Review - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 68

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

We assemble an all-star team to talk about #Outriders. Join -- deep breath -- Greg, Blessing, Andy, SnowBikeMike, Joey, and their very special guests Spawn On Me's Kahlief Adams and the Blind Gamer Steve Saylor to talk about the highs and lows of People Can Fly's looter shooter. Keep up with Steve at https://twitter.com/stevesaylor and keep up with Kah at https://twitter.com/Kahjahkins 8YO9UAJKzvWaKbuKOQBW Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller. Tim Getty stepped on a rock and got bit on both eyes by a snake. Joining me today, he's the future class of video games. Blessing at Eyo, Jr. Rest and peace, Tim Getty is for the second time. Still alive. He's on me. Oh, he's still alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, because last time he died after he tripped over. I forgot that he died. I forgot that he died. Yeah, Cool, Greg was holding a bunch of knives. And so the fact that he's able to come back and come back stronger to not die this time. I'm very. impressed. He's slowed down his heart rate. He's been practicing that lately. So everybody thought he was dead, but it was just, oh, he's been practicing that. I forgot. He mentioned it. Wow. See, that makes more sense, because back when I had it communicated to me that, yeah, he missed a show because he stepped on a rock,

I didn't realize there was knives involved. I just thought his foot hurt, and he missed it because of a sore foot. Cool, Greg was holding a lot of knives. Yeah, cool Greg was holding a lot of knives. Oh, my God. There's so much narrative here. Who needs books? We're right here. I think you began the narrative. You know, it doesn't matter. We're all together. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. who started, they were all collaborating. All right, it's all happening over here.

That other voice, of course, was the Hispanic heartthrob, Texas treat. Latino, heat, clicking heads and ripping them to shreds, the globe trotten, headshotting, Nitro Rifle from Twitch. Dot TV, Andy Cortez. Greg, you can remember a song that you heard in 1994, but you can't get this down yet. What's going on, Greg? Well, first off, you've seen me do it off book before. But the problem is I only introduce you once a week on the kind of funny podcast, or I guess twice a week now on the kind of funny podcast. And sometimes I have it in front of me.

and sometimes I don't. So when I take, like right now, I'm using a different doc so I don't have it in front of me. So I'm relying on Hispanic heartthrob, Texas treat Latino heat.

And then it was the wait, because it clicking or ripping. I couldn't remember what came first, you know, now that I remember, C before R. You know what I mean? Alphabetical.

I'll have it for you or not. Yeah, exactly. Except after C. Like how he would click his, his mouse to be able to shoot. Yeah. Think about that, Greg. Head shot.

No, I understand, I understand what he's doing. I don't, I don't think he's doing. twos. I don't think you got it, man. He's the master of hype, Snowbike, Mike. Hey, what up, everybody? Happy to be here. What are you drinking there? What are you drinking on?

A little tea. I dominated Andy Cortez, Nick Scarpino, Joey, and Tim, and mini golf. And I'm rewarding myself with a little bit of hot. If you went by one stroke over me and Andy, calm down. Fucking space level is stupid. I've noticed that there's, yeah, there's this energy. Andy and Mike have come in here and they're both down. Andy no longer standing. He's sitting. Mike drinking tea. Like, they've gone.

They went the yard, as they say. Spawn on me's Kalee, Adams. How are you? I'm good, good. Satata and Tibbetai, Contaginal Jackson coming to a stream very, very soon near you. Ooh, look at that. Yeah. It is happening. And then, of course, she's...

Look up, looking at space. I don't know what this happened. Oh, you don't know that. Well, we just get rid of your mouth. Oh, we have a show today, folks. We have some energy for you. And rounding out our six-tete. What's six?

Is it six-text-tet. Sex-tet? Is that true? Yeah. The sex set. She, of course, is Christmas in April. It's Joey Noel on the ones and two. She's up in the voice. She's in the cloud.

I am. It's real nice up here. A little wet, but real nice. I guess, yeah. There's moisture in clouds. Yeah, that's part of it. If you didn't know, ladies gentlemen, this is the kind of funny games cast, and it's our review, I guess so far probably of Outriders.

I think everybody's in a different place with the game. But basically, it'll be titled The Outriders Review. We've all been playing, and we all want to talk about it. But first, I need to tell you that, of course, this is the kind of funny games cast. each and every week we get together to talk about all the things we love and sometimes

don't love in video games if you love us talking about video games you can go to patreon.com slash kind of funny games where of course you can write in to be part of the show you can watch live just like Matt Grover is

I got a friend named Grover too don't worry about it Corey Scott and the Lou are that's the blue guy that's the blue guy from the Elmo I recognize him of course on patreon.com slash kind of funny games

yes you can be part of the show yes you can be a Patreon on producer. You can also get the show ad-free, and you can get it with the exclusive post show we do each and every week when we record, usually on Tuesdays. However, if you have no bucks to toss our way, it's no big deal. You can get a brand spank a new episode of the games cast, usually Wednesdays, YouTube.com slash kind of funny games, roosterteeth.com and podcast services around the globe each and every Wednesday, unless there's some weird embargo we have to worry about. Of course, when you get them later on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games,

you have to listen to the ad and you don't get a post show, but you still get one hell of a show. like, subscribe, share, click the bell, and all that jazz. Some housekeeping before we get into the business of the day. There has been a huge week of video game content up on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. The Xcast tackled PlayStation's the show coming to Xbox GamePass. Try to wrap your head around that sentence. PSI Love You, Exo, Exo has a Ratchet and Clank review up and us debating if it has a place

in the best PlayStation 4 games of all time and what it means for the next Ratchet and Clink PS5 game. And then there is a brand, new Blessing Show all about Eldon Ring. Of course, all this content is up on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games. Two of them up on podcast services. Blessing show, not only available on YouTube. com slash Kind of Funny Games.

So it would mean a lot if you went there in support to one of the few video-only products we do. For now, though, thank you to our Patreon producers. James Hastings, Sancho West Gaming, Julie and the group, gluten-free gamer, Delaney Twinning, Jeffrey Pee-Long. I'm sorry, Jeffrey Pee-Pee-P-P-Long. Hesus Barrio, aka Bent Fork, PR, Skin-Tite, salmon game jumper X, Mohamed Mohammed Mohammed. Today we are sponsored by Upstart, but I will tell you

about, nah, damn it. This is, Caliph, how good am I at my job? Do you think? You're pretty good. I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. But as I was reading those producers, I was like, that sounds like an old list of Patreon producers. And it turns out everybody, sorry, that one's on me. That was on me. Yeah, I heard the door open. I'm sorry, those were July 2020 producers. The April 21 21 Patreon producers go like this Mick aka adenetobiologist Tom Bach Elliott James Hastings, Sanchez-Scho West Gaming, Julian the gluten-free gamer Tretberry and Tyler Ross

Today we are still. What's that? I was going to say you heard the surprise of my voice when I said, Momo! That was like a genuine, holy crap. We've chased a lot of people off, but you know. And that's what gave it away because I was like, man, I haven't done the Jeffrey P, Pee, P, P, P long in a long time. And I was like, oh, right, because when I did that for a month,

he's like, fuck these guys. I am not, I don't want to hear my name. It's called Pee, Pee, Pee, P long. But there you go, Pee, Pong stockings. You're back in the show, Jeffrey, what about it? While we're here, Bert Meg's a cool name too, but I digress. We're brought to you by Upstart. I'll tell you about it later.

For now, let's talk about a little game called Outriders. As we record this this morning, it was at a 77 on Metacritic, of course, Outriders. Out right now on PlayStation Xbox. PC came out April 1st from People Can Fly. the developer, Square, NX, the publisher. Khalif Adams, where are you in your outwriters' journey right now?

I need to know your class, I need to know your level, your world's here, your hours played. I am PPP, Packing it all into all the time that I have in my life at this point. It is unreasonable how much time I've been spending in there. I'm running on three different consoles, three different platforms are running on PC, PS5, and Xbox.

Why? I have a, because I, what do you mean why? Why not? Why not, baby? You got to get it all in when you can. You can't just have it. Commit to one. As Mike would say,

commit to greatness, right, Mike? Commit to greatness, Kaleef, but also, hey, game developers out there, commit to cross progression. Oh, my God. Think about it. Thank you. About it.

Can we get me progression going across the game? If you're going to make me sign into my Square Annex account, then how about that account means something and carry this information for me like destiny? I agree. I mean, that's the reason why I'm on all the different platforms right now, so I can play with everybody who wants to get some games in. But I'm running on the main account, which is my highest count on PC.

I'm around 21. I got to 21 last night. I'm running my trickster class over there. And then I'm rocking a pyro as well. That's like a level, a level eight or so. It is so good. It's so good right now.

I'm having a blast with it. And I'm excited to hear where everybody else is running and why you're running what you're running. Okay. Well, then let's start getting into going around the horn here. We'll start with you, Andy Cortez. Give me your class level world tier. How many hours played?

I am a technomancer. I am level 18, world tier 7. I just unlocked that. Nice. And hours played, it says 13 and a half, but I always,

you know, the game will sit idle every once in a house. Let's take 12. Okay. Snowback mic, same questions. I'm rocking a Devastator because Khalif I like to get up in the action

and get rewarded for that. I like how you looked at me when you said that. You asked, hey, why are you playing? I made me want to wink at you from across the internet. I was like, get up on it. Hey, wang! Oh, this kid likes action.

All right. He likes to get up in there. Come here. Steal my heart with the thieves shirts on. I see you. Currently, level 27. World Tier 7 complete, working on 8th right now. And ours played about 12, I would say, about 12.

Okay. Blessing Eddie O. Ye Jr. I am rocking the Technomancer at level 22. World Tier 7. And I've been playing for, it says 19 hours in my PS5. But that, that is. is also some of it that's me including the demo time first of all that is also me including the time i spent playing both the technomancer class and the trickster class because i started off as trickster

and so i probably did a few hours as that too and then also standing idle and so really it's probably more like 17 hours in total uh voice in the class joie noel where are you at with all this uh i am a pyromancer i'm level 19 world tier 7 and i'm about 20 hours in very nice i love the diversity as you're saying caliph in terms of what everybody's playing right i'm playing a trickster I am level 30. Beat the campaign last night with Mikey. Went off on an expedition. Today played a little bit before this to get,

just have an excuse to play. World Tier 9. And I'm at 39 hours played when you combined in the demo and what I've put in on the thing. And yeah, I can't get enough of this game, Andy Cortez. Mike, how are you such a high level

with, you've played way more than me. There's no way that we've played the same amount of hours. So we're going to talk about it here, Andy. So what can happen here is I've kicked it down world tiers a couple of times where it's like been breeze mode, we'll call it, and you're still getting XP but I'm like breezing through missions here.

So you'll notice your guys' playtime's a little bit higher because you've probably been working on those world tiers. I've had moments where I've played solo, kicked it down to world tier three and just mindlessly gunned down. Got it. Okay, okay. Really elevate my gameplay there. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, because I had the same question because it seems like our times are all over the place

and I was expecting certain numbers from Greg and Joey that are way different from what they would have been, like depending on what their level were. Yeah. Well, I played with a lot of early level people this weekend that didn't play a lot last week. Two people that were like kind of starting out. So I feel like I put a lot of, it was just kind of helping them power through and get them leveled. Yeah. And I feel like that's where the hours start stacking up pretty quickly and world tiers don't move as much is that's what I ran into too. So I'd been playing, I've done the demo, falling in love with there. And I want to talk about specifically

Andy and where he's at with that. But for this part of the conversation had been doing so, when I started up, I was already committed and knew what I was doing, and it was that idea of I was, like, blasting out the code Friday and Saturday. And so many kind of funny best friends were jumping in there playing, and I'm so glad you did. I love playing with you guys. But it was like, I have it cranked up to the highest world tier. And all of a sudden, like, a level nine comes in and is just getting hit once a dead. I'm like, all right, well, this sucks.

Let's turn the world tier down. And we can keep moving the story and doing stuff that, you know, is mattering for my progression, but not actually that, you know, pushing me or, you know, doing the world tier stuff. Because, of course, we should point out, too, if you're here for, if you're here the Outriders review and you haven't actually played Outriders, you might be, oh, is this going to be, I saw somebody say, oh, is this spoiler free? We'll get into like, is there a story-d-hour writer? I couldn't spell this game if I wanted to.

I have no idea what's going on. So I know you've been playing Greg, like, what's going on in the story? I was like, who? I think this person, like, I don't think you have to worry too much about that, but it is that idea that, you know, you have your level, which caps at 30, and then you have your world tiers, which is dick. dictating how hard the level your enemies are going to be, what kind of legendary drops you're getting, the percentage is there. And so it's another XP bar pretty much that's filling in as you play. But when you go down to somebody else's and they're playing on World Tier 2, you're at their mercy. And so you're playing on their World Tier 2. Or if you want to go in and pick one, you can pick to be on level 5, but then you won't be filling in your bar that is level 6 to get to level 7 kind of thing. So that's this system that I think is really cool and works really well and we'll talk about it. But that's where that's at and why I think you're seeing hours. up, but like I, it was one of those things if I told you, talk about hours played as we go

around, I would expect me to be way further in world tier than nine. I feel like we're all right in that meat, meaty area at the same time. But to kick the conversation off, Andy Cortez, I need your updated take here for our Outwriters review. Of course, you went and saw the demo the first time, you loved it, you came back, when another demo came around, you brought blessing, you guys enjoyed it, and then when the actual demo dropped and you got to play it, you didn't seem hot on it anymore. And you and I kind of inversed, where I had no expectations for it and I got excited where you had expectations and then came down. Talk to me where you are right now, you know, days after release. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's weird because I've

totally done, I was mentioning last night on stream, I've done a 360 with this game. Did the 180 when the demo came out, not feeling too great. I don't think, I think a lot of it may have been due to technical issues. The demo wasn't running super great on PC. There was no DLSS. There was no, um, the game brand really janky even without being in a party. And that's never a good sign. When you're a single player and the game isn't running great. So I knew

what I was going to expect when it came to story and voice acting. And going into it, I warned everybody. I was like, look, I'm super looking for it to Outwriters. I think the acting is not good. And I think the story is just going to be whatever. Who cares? I love the gameplay so much.

I'm just really, really excited for it. And all of the negatives just kind of piled on in addition to not only the negatives of the voice acting in the gameplay, but the negatives in how the game felt. I just wasn't feeling it. And I now I just can't get enough of this game. I really can't. It's so much fun. Go ahead, bless. Yeah, Andy, how much of this do you think is because when we played the demo, or not the demo, when we went in for the preview back in August, was it that,

they threw us in at a higher level. Because the thing I noticed when the demo came out recently and we were playing and I think we both might have been in the same spot in terms of playing the demo and that kind of tempering our expectations a bit. The thing that had me a bit excited was seeing Greg

go play the game with IGN and them giving him a build that seemed to be way higher level and then Greg coming back and being like, hey, I'm kind of into Outwriters. Like, I'm kind of digging this. That kind of started getting the gears in my head going of like, okay, so it might be that the game just shines way more at a higher level. Do you think that's what it is?

No, I think it was just a performance, honestly. I think just the way it felt, again, I have like a really good PC and I expect it to work really, really well. And there was a lot of broken things in the settings. There was just, there was things that just weren't working when I would change the resolution. Sometimes it wouldn't change unless I did some weird thing, then suddenly it looked good again. There was just a lot of jank all over the place with the demo. But they've seemed to have just fixed a lot of issues when it comes to how it performs on PC.

The one negative I'm still seeing, apart from the other negatives, obviously, like, server issues, not good. We're not going to excuse that here. We know the game has a shitload of problems when it comes to creating parties and all that stuff, but just the moment to moment gameplay,

the gunfire, the merging of abilities, the different sort of enemy variants, obviously, like, it's these soldiers with white face kind of helmet things that come at you in waves and I honestly expected that to

feel old by now and it hasn't yet, which is a good feeling. And I'm having an actual blast with it. I can't believe that I'm really, I did another 180 again. The full 360 has happened. So you're back to where you started, where you were excited for it.

Yeah, I can't, I can't get enough of it. I want to keep playing. I am a, again, I pick Technomancer because I love long range. I love sniping. And a couple of negatives I'll throw out there. I still think that as soon as I group up with other players, I start to notice pretty big performance drops.

When I'm in a single player game, it's flawless. Like, I have no issues. And it's just when people join my party, I regret picking the long range class and sniping because it's so much harder to snipe when you are dealing with, you know, I'll be at like 90-ish frames and then like, boom, 32 frames, a little drop there. and it's just like there's a lot of hitching and stuff.

So I hope all that stuff gets ironed out. Sure. I am not happy about the PC console crossplay not working. Because so much of this was me wanting to play with Greg. Like that was like kind of the whole reason. We're still going to too, baby. Don't worry. That was kind of the whole reason why I was so stoked about this.

But yeah, that being turned off and then then realizing all the other issues, I think that the PC console stuff is still kind of. Well, they tweeted about that today as we record three hours ago. Outwriters tweeted, we know everyone has been keen to know more about the fix for PC console crossplay. The fix for this is tied to the overall patches that we are currently cooking up and running through testing. We hope to soon share more news about their release schedule and content. And it's interesting, you know, Mike and I were playing last night and we were talking about the pros, cons warming up for this conversation. And, you know, we were so gung-ho to beat the story

last night. And Mike, there was a moment where I thought we weren't going to be able to. Because every time we would advance into the boss's room, we would die. And then when we would come back out, it would just be black screen. And so it had to be a restart. And like, I have not seen a developer yet talk about power cycling your Xbox or your PlayStation 5 or Series X. And they have been so upfront of like, if this keeps happening and you hang on your sign-in screen, turn off the unit, unplug it, leave it unplug for minutes, put it back in. Like that detail to it. And when we eventually got through it and beat the thing, it seems like it was that other guy who was joining us.

He was causing us, Mike. There was this conversation where Mike and I were talking. Mike's what don't you like about the game? And I started talking stuff and he's like, but you know, aside from all the, crashes. And it was like, I can't believe, and this is very much a me personal thing, but I'd like to hear the groups take on it too. Like, the way Outriders has handled it has made it not be a problem for me. Where I feel like when you do, when games launch like this and have broken servers and you can't play and everything's crashing, it's when they're, hey, we're going to update you soon. And you see that tweets four hours old and nothing's being updated that you're like, what the fuck? And then you get mad. All week and long, all I felt was sympathy for them. Because they were, the social media manager was on there. I felt like every 20 minutes being like, here's the update. this is happening. We're doing the mother of all, turn it off, turn it on again, right? Khalif, am I on the money about that? No, you're right. I mean, I think that's one of the things that you wind up finding most often

is that the biggest complaints from folks in the community is that the teams aren't being transparent enough. Yeah. And I would even say they're probably a little bit too transparent the best couple of days because there's a lot of stuff coming in and out from various parts of the conversation. But I do think that the thing that I was most impressed with was the fact that even through all the kind of, you know, people getting in their behinds about things not working

and the cross progression and all that kind of stuff not being up there with all the service thing because the thing that was like really frustrating me was like you had streamers who were like,

dude, I just signed this contract to do this content. What do you mean? I can't play the game. I was like, hey, my fault. I got nothing to do with me.

It was the person who's making that game. Like, you got to just wait, home me and get your stuff together. But I think that the thing that you see that they did really well that a lot of, you know,

companies don't do well is they didn't seem panicked, which is really nice to be able to see a company come out and be, you know, transparent. And they knew that they were like, we have this under control. They may have been freaking out behind the scenes, but nobody in public knew. And that was kind of awesome to see from that standpoint, because you don't see that often. Like, you see people turtle. You'll see people just like freak out and just not say a thing for like days.

But they were talking for a while. Andy, go ahead. I had mentioned that when we were doing the demo was, All the time leading up to it, they put out that 23 tweet thread on Twitter about, here's everything to expect, right? And I was like, wow, you know, this level of transparency is getting me really excited because I feel like they're so confident with all of this. And how can anything be bad, right?

Like, this company is totally like going out there and saying like, hey, this game's going to come out and here's how we are operating on the internet. Here's how we are behaving on Twitter. and we are so upfront with everything. And so it kind of gave me a false sense of confidence that the game was going to launch perfect. And then the demo came out, and it was less than perfect, obviously. And then the game launched, and it seems to just kind of, you know,

it's intermittent, right? The game's either working or it's not. And it's going to kick you out of a game or it's not, or it's going to hang on the 80% loading thing or it's not. And it just kind of seems like it's luck of the draw at this point. Cleave Adams. I think the interesting part about all of this was when we had those conversations, because I remembered that also, right?

Andy was that whole bucket list of things. I was just like, here are all the things that we're going to do. Here's the way we're going to talk about that stuff. And then it was just like once Game Pass came into the conversation, which I'm sure we're probably going to talk about at some point. I just wonder how that threw all expectations off the window. Like I know that that thing got signed a while ago. It has to have gotten signed a long time ago.

But even then, you have to just like think that, the number of people who signed in and logged in at that point just threw everything off in terms of expectations and numbers. Mike is high and Mike's like, yeah, boy, I keep asking. I mean, I think that, you know, Mike asked me last night while we're getting ready for this of just like, you know, I'm like, I love it, obviously. He's like, you know, asking these really insightful questions about like, well, why do you love it?

And where does that come from? And why does this hit when we something like Godfall didn't and so on and so forth? And I think so much of it is expectations and seating. and expectations are usually we use them and they didn't meet expectations, right? I feel so many people were flat on this game. Like, I would say, what was it, a month ago where Andy was talking to me on a thing? And it was talking about Outwriters. I was like, oh, yeah, would I like that?

And you're like, oh, my God, you'd love it. Like, I had totally missed exactly what this game was and where it was going to go. And I feel like I'm far from the only person who missed that, where I have text on my phone from last week asking friends, hey, are you going to be playing Outriders? I haven't even heard about it. What is it? And then it was this idea that on Game Pass, you have nothing to lose, you jump in, and then it actually goes and clicks and works.

Snowbike, why do you think this is clicking and working? I mean, I think game pass is a big deal. For me, it's just a good game, right? This isn't a great groundbreaking game. This isn't a bad game. This is just a middle of the road good game for me. And the best part is you can play with your friends and it's got familiarity that so many people love, right? It has Diablo and Borderlands.

You like looters shooters. You like endless action. This game is bringing it to you, right? And to know that you can play cross platform with your friends, elevates that so much in the day and age that we live in with this online world. And then you put Game Pass on top of that. And now, like you said, right, this is a, you know, a AA team, not much expectations on this.

Honestly, it could have just breached through the radar of most people and not even been on the radar. But then you put it on Game Pass where now I don't have to convince my friends to spend $60 on a fun weekend together, right? We can all download it. We can enjoy this, right? don't expect us to be playing this months later like a destiny type game. And we talked about this games at the service and where we fall. But like this is that perfect two-week experience with you and your friends, borderlands, grab as much gear as you can, try to max out your characters, get weird with

with different guns and different builds, and then move on to the next game. And I think that's exactly where my expectations were and that's where they landed. And it's been perfect ever since. I've had so much fun with it. It's junk food, man. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm feasting right now.

I want to keep feasting and eating more of it, right? Joey, talk to me because, you know, when I think of a Joey Noel game, I'm usually thinking of something you and Lauren can play together. And that's, that can be Minecraft Dungeons, that can be Borderlands, that can be Diablo, but right now it is Outriders. Like, what sold you on giving this a shot and why are you sticking around? So I think the fact that I had a demo that I could try at the beginning was really accessible. So it's like, okay, like this is something I might be into, but I don't want to ask for a code or pay for the whole thing or figure out of play it on game pass.

So it was nice to like get a handle on like what the mechanics were and what the gameplay was like ahead of time, even though that weekend I felt like was real buggy on, at least for me. Like I couldn't, it took forever to get in. But I've been looking for something like this to play. We had played Diablo season, Diablo three seasonal. That hadn't really scratched the itch too much. I had tried to jump into the division. vision two, but because I just went straight into the expansion, never played the original game. I had like no idea what I was doing. So that was hard. And then I tried to go back and

finish Border Lanes three, but it was because it was an older game as with like the rest of these two, everybody like either because Border Lanes isn't cross play so I couldn't get the right people to were willing to play with me on the right platform or people had already finished it and kind of. Sure, you're so far gone. Right. Yeah. So this is the perfect mix of it's pretty like easy systems to figure out. It's not like overly complicated, which I appreciate. And then because it's on game pass and because crossplay was working at least for me for most of the weekend really well, it was really easy to hop in with Rie and Danny for a little

bit or with Lauren and Jacob or Bless and Lauren and I were playing. Like there were so many different configurations of people that we're playing that you could pretty much always find at least one other person. Now Blessing, hold on you one second. Or are you going to jump off this, Mike? What do you got? Yeah, just another one is like, when Joey says that, right, she's talking about like, are we going to go play other older games? And I think now is the perfect time for this game of like, what else are you playing?

Right? Like, blessing will say disco Elysium, but like that's such a small market, right? This is the new hotness, right? It's not the big AAA game, but it is hot right now. And the crossplay saves it. But you look around the landscape, what are you going to play Ball and Wonderworld? Like, there's nothing else to play right now. And so this game has hit at that moment.

we've talked about a lot before with other games of like you strike when nobody else is around in this spring area it's been quiet since launch of the new gen consoles it's been quiet since holiday and we're just looking at the horizon and this game came out the perfect time with the perfect features and game pass it's like that's the perfect storm that's the mixture in the pot to make something special especially out of game like this and before blessing starts i just want to say it's good enough like yeah yeah the game is as good as it needs to be that's It's a perfect way to bring Blessing in because, yeah, Bless, you and I had been talking, right, when we were getting ready to pick a book club game for PSI love you last week before we had Outwriters. And it was that question of, well, what is going to be April for us and what are we actually going to be playing? And you were very much like, well, I want to try Outriders, but I don't think I'm going to hang that long with it or something to that effect. Where are you at right now after having played more of it, or any of it, I guess? Yeah, I'm having a lot of fun with it. I think saying that it's good enough is probably the perfect way to describe it. Also, junk food is also another perfect way to describe it. because for me, Outwriters isn't a game that I describe as a great game.

It is a very fun game. It's a game that, you know, I'm in it right now because it gives me that satisfaction of going in, playing with friends, getting that dopamine hit of taking out enemies and getting through a tough room and then getting all the gear because this game just has a deluge of gear that it gives you after every single fight. That noise, man, that you want to start when it drops chung. Yeah, and being able to pick up each one and the half of them usually are going to be higher level than the stuff I got.

and so I go in and dismantle what I don't want and then equip what I want. There's something about just that inherent loop that is just so, gives so much satisfaction that, like, I think for me that's the thing that keeps pulling me in is it nails that so well. But like, everything else in the game for me has been very much like, I do not care. Like, I don't care about the story. I've been why I've been trying to keep up with the cutscenes and watch them, but I don't really care about any of the characters.

Like, there are cool things that happen here or there. but by the time I get to any of the cool stuff, I'm like, I don't care about the context that this is in. When you introduce this new character that looks different from all the other characters I met, I'm like, all right, I don't understand why this is cool, but this seems like a cool thing. This seems like a cool reveal, but I don't care about it.

When you talk about the art design in the world, I think graphically the game looks really cool, but the art direction is very much PS3 era. Here's a third-person action shooter. Like, it is very brown. The characters pretty much look nondescript for the most part. I don't really, there's nothing that is pulling me in from anything that isn't gameplay. But the gameplay is so fun that it is good enough for me that I keep coming back to it.

And so, yeah, it's just a really fun game. Bless you mean your truck modifications aren't the thing that's pulling you back in? No. I don't, and that's the thing. Where do you get the truck modifications? Because, like, I barely have anything that I can, like, apply to my truck right now. I have, like, two paints. Dude, you got to go through those accolades.

You got to knock out those accolades. You got all sorts of causes. But, like, you want to, to that your idea. of like, you know, it's good enough, and it is like a PS3 feeling game at times or whatever. Like when they're like, oh, you have my truck. Yeah. Like they start playing this guitar riff. You're like, what the fuck is this game?

Does they like show you your fucking cool boxy truck? It has an attitude that I, it has an attitude that I don't really like. Like, as soon as you get into the game from the start, they start dropping F bombs. They start dropping attitude and all this shit. But it also doesn't get in the way. Like when Borderlands 3 came out like a year and a half ago or two, years ago. People, I remember all over the place we were like, oh yeah, I don't really like

the writing, or I don't really like the jokes. The discourse was the fart jokes. Yeah, like people weren't really vibed with a sense of humor and that's of course, like, to each their own, right? Like, there's some people that will love that and some people that'll hate that. For Outwriters, I think for the most part, people seem to have ignored like all those aspects of the game

because it's pretty easy to ignore. It doesn't get in the way. But even with that, I'm sure there are people that will dig it because there is lore there. There is a world there that is there that is there. if you want to get into that. But to the borderlands comparison, I feel like this game is also interesting because it feels like it is pulled

between trying to be multiple different types of games. On Monday's games daily, we went through the review and review and progress roundup. And there was one of those in there that kind of compared it to being both like a borderlansy type of game or a Gearsie type of game,

but then also it being a destiny kind of game. And it feels like it doesn't want to pick a space which kind of leaves it in this place where leading up to Outwriters, I was talking about it like a games and a service because so many of the mechanics here and so many of the systems and the loot and the gear and all that stuff feel very destiny-like.

It feels like it wants to be destiny so bad. It's Destiny's inventory screen, which, granted, Avengers is Destiny's inventory screen. But I mean, this is like the exact same thing. It's the exact same thing, but then also it tries to push off of that so much where the devs are very much like this. This isn't games of the service.

This is a loot game. And it seems like they wanted to be more borderlands, but it feels like at the same time it doesn't know what it wants to be, which leaves the game in this kind of weird place for me where I would like this game to have ongoing content, not necessarily because I'm interested in the story, just because

I think it could be fun if this game just got raids over time, right? Like, what if you dropped three raids a year for like the next three years? Like, for where I'm at with the game right now, I'd like to do that. Like, I'd like to keep playing it in that way because it's been fun in that aspect. Clef, you're trying

to jump in on this game's a service conversation? because I had a question eventually. Yeah, real quick, because it pings on both the things that Bless and Mike said, which is I'm happy it's in that weird nebulous space right now. I like the fact that it's not trying, it's doing a little bit of each one of those things well enough to kind of get me into the space, like inventory-wise, smartest dismantling system I've seen in the game in a long time. Yep.

Like really smart way that it deals with that in a way way better than Destiny does. So wait, real quick, while we're here, because there are people who haven't played yet and are going to be. Explain to me how to dismantling it works in here. So basically, in most games, you'll have to kind of go through each part. Each thing you want to dismantle, click on it, mark it, and then hit a button to dismantle it. The way they do it in Outwriters is everything has a type or a kind of level. So it's like kind of general green, yellow, purple, blue system you see in kind of most games,

basing it on, you know, rarity of stuff. You basically have a couple of bars on the bottom right-hand side of this. screen that delineate between those, you can click on that and it'll mark everything that's that rarity. And you can just hit another button and remove all that from your inventory. Super, super smart in a way that deals with stuff like that. And going back to the conversation around the games of service part, this is a game that relieves me of having to worry about the games of service parts that I hate, which are the things in Destiny where I feel like I'm always behind the curve. Yep. Where I always feel like I have to go back and say, what did I

miss. Is there a thing that I didn't do because I didn't have time to do it? This, I'll be able to jump back in when they throw a new content out and just jump back into that stuff, run through it and it'll be done. And I love that part of it. I love that that's going to be a part of the way we look at this. Mike? Yeah, I want to give some shout out to that is right, Khalif, right? The games and service aspect we've always talked about with Destiny of like, oh, it's raid time. A new strike is out. Oh, what gear level is that? I can't do that, right? And I hate that feeling. And a cool part about Outriders is that instantaneously switching between world tiers, right?

So now when that new content comes out, I never feel like I'm holding back, Greg, or anybody back, because we can just kick it down the world tier. Go back there right away. Oh, Mike, you're doing a little bit better? Let's kick it up a little bit. And I feel like that really hits a sweet spot there

that they should get a lot of kudos and credit for because you're right. When I think of Destiny in these other games, all of a sudden it's like, oh, you're not that maxed out gear level. Sorry, bro. Like, you can't play with us tonight. Oh, that sucks.

And when I can't get down to go playing a lower world here with somebody, like I'm wasting my time. Like I'm still enjoying it. I'm still getting stuff for granted, like levels and yada, yada, but at least resources.

Because again, like to really, like, we talk about it being junk food. We talk about it being approachable though, right? In a way, and I'll get to you in one second. Sorry, Andy. That isn't like, you know,

sucking you in in a way that like, even the, I love the division two, but like, it took me a while to wrap my head around division two and the recalibration table and storing things in the library and yada yada yada, right?

Like the way Outwriters is doing its system is very brilliant in terms of, of like you can't you can level you can change the rarity of the gear you have you can't change it to the legendary you have to find those out of drops right but you so you can get them to really high tiers and then you can improve the level the you can level them up to get better stats you can level up the attributes on them which is all just as simple as you can do this but then on top of that are the mods and the mods are able to be swapped in whenever you want to them there's three different classes of them they cost resources obviously to bring in but you

have a library you're building and even today where I was like wait like I'm looking everything and like I can sell everything to get titanium to upgrade the equipment I want to upgrade but I also don't I should be dismantling these to save mods right well how do I look through the gear I'm like how can I tell if I've saved the mod and real quick just at a glance if it has the little square then broken up into four different squares that means it's in your mod library if it doesn't it doesn't so break that down and that'll go into your library and it's like oh like this stuff is entry level enough that I don't have to overthink it and I don't have to read or watch a YouTube video to explain it.

To the point of what we're talking about so far, and I granted, you know, I'm level capped, but I still have plenty to get and go and, you know, all the expeditions and World Tears, I don't feel like I'm like in division, I sat on resources for so long. In Avengers, I am still sitting on resources that when they drop Black Panther and I want to immediately upgrade Black Panther, you know, I'm going to be able to do it kind of thing. Whereas in this one, I am like, oh, well, spend the titanium because I'm getting so much loot that I'm not getting anything out of. I can just sell that, get my shards, and then use that to set. Like, there's just a really great ecosystem in there. I'm sorry. Andy, you wanted to jump in

on something about this. I was just going to mention that I wonder if the decision to not be a game's service and not have monetization built in, not have, you know, a sort of ever-verse thing. I wonder if that decision was made to kind of lower the expectations of sales and stuff, because I think when publishers make a game a games as a service and know that you have built in monetization and know that not everybody's going to put their credit card up but there will

be the kind of golden goose is that say I want to drop 500 bucks on this in the next couple weeks or so. And I wonder if the decision to go away from that was to kind of like well we don't want to be put in the expectation tier of a games as a service type game. We don't know how much this is going to sell

you know. Let me bring in Mr. Leroy Williams, who wrote into patreon.com slash kind of funny games, just like you can and says, like many others, I decided to check out Outwriters over the weekend, despite mixed reviews from a few people at Kind of Funny. I started with the demo, and I'm quite enjoying it. I was trying to figure out how long the demo lasts when I stumbled across the FAQ section of Outriders website. One question caught my attention. Is Outriders at a games as a service? I thought the question was strange. It seemed to have an obvious answer, but the developer's response was surprising. Quote, no, Outraders will be a complete experience out of the box, end quote.

This game has so many things in common with other games as a service that this doesn't make much sense to me. Outrider seems to essentially be Destiny slash the Division slash Borderlands, and despite saying it's a complete experience out of the box, I'm sure if it is successful, there will be expansions. What's your take on what's going on here? Are they trying to avoid the stigma of half-baked games like Anthem, Fallout, 76, Avengers, and what defines games as service in 2021?

A battle pass? I remember when this went up And I remember all of us talking about it And I think correct me if I'm wrong Like over on Xcats You guys had a long conversation about this And I think it was Paris It was like if it walks like a duck

And looks like a duck, it's probably a duck kind of thing But now that we're here We're playing it I feel like I understand what they were going for That it's not a games as a service In the same way we're talking about Mike you said it yourself In two weeks

We're going to be done We're going to have I think moved on I will probably I'm trying to platinum it So once I go through and do that I don't know how much I'll be turning it on. Does that sound right for what you're thinking, Mike? Do you think this is a games as a service?

No, Greg, I think this weekend with it has really changed my thought process on games of service. But of course, we've had these conversations on the kind of funny X-cast. Games as a service as it's evolved, right? There's a lot of gray in between, right? You can go either way on certain games. And I think Andy put it quite well with the monetization, the expectations, right? And there is a lot of like, if that game came out,

and it was seen as a games of service, and it didn't hit the good battle pass, great monetization techniques with customization and so forth, we would be slamming this game, right? But now after a weekend with it, I've actually changed my tone where it's like, okay, I understand what they mean by, no, this isn't a games of service.

This is borderland to Diablo. Here it is. This is the campaign. You're going to play it. You're going to beat it. We've got a little bit of extra stuff at the end, and you're done, right? I'm not expecting, hey, there's going to be a raid.

There's going to be seven dungeons throughout the next three months, I have no expectations now for this game besides what I have played right here in front of me, and that's it, which is really good for them because as Andy's going to finish out here, it's like, I was going to give them the moon, right? I was going to look at them and be like, hey, if you can't reach destiny levels, you're gone, right? We're going to see it just like we've seen other games. You're out of the league now. And so they did a good job here.

Andy? I also think that this is one of those games that, you know, I'm not trying to do the, watch the first six seasons, and it gets really, really good in season. 7 TV thing. Yeah. But I definitely think this is a game that gets better around our 5 or 6. And once it opens up and those systems open up, and I knew that when Bless and I did the second demo, I remember talking to the dude who lets you modify.

And I was like, oh, I haven't gotten to modification yet. And I remember loving that and being really interested in it and seeing how those systems kind of work and trying to learn that. And not that it's this over-complicated thing, but it's exciting because it's a brand new kind of doorway being opened. And once that opened up, not only are you not fighting kind of the same humanoid things,

but then creatures start being involved. And then they have their own kind of move sets. And the game just gets infinitely more interesting gameplay-wise, I think, around hour five or six. Once you... Now, you will still encounter the humanoid type characters or whatever, but I just think the game has really, really nicely designed arenas

for cover. and I know some people are like, oh, you don't even have the standing cover. Like, I do. I love sniping. I love, kind of. Yeah, if you're the technomancer, you do. Yeah. I love popping out and like, you know, I see the sniper scope from the people when there.

And then it's like, oh, he's not looking to me. Bam, pop that head and like, it feels so good gameplay-wise. I'm sorry, one second. I'm checking my notes. Is it safe to say you like clicking heads? I do. I do. Yeah.

I sure love doing that. What's up, bless. Blessing. Yeah, I think a thing that's nice about them not committing to the games of service thing is is pretty much what Annie just said is that the game pretty much gets to be a video game as video game. They don't have to think about things beyond the future. They can kind of just do

whatever they want in this iteration. It's a co-op shooter. Yeah, it's a co-op shooter and to the mod thing, right? I remember us both like talking to the person during our demo and us both being like, oh yeah, they're mods. Oh shit. Like, this seems like it goes deep. Yeah. Yeah. And like, they can kind of go crazy with it. And that's

the thing that I appreciate because I keep bringing this up that when I say the game is a video game as video game, right? Like there are, you can pick up shoes as gear and the shoes will let your your turret last six seconds longer and it's like what the fuck does that mean like how does that make any sense but in the context of the video game you throw context out and it's like cool we get what this is we don't we don't care we're just going to let it do what it wants to do and once you do that it becomes it becomes really fun because it does turn into this thing of oh yeah I'm sure by the time we get to the end of the game

or whatever the end game is or if there's a rate at the end of the game I have no idea I have no idea what awaits but when we get to the hard stuff that is expedited they call it expeditions. But once we get there, I'm so excited because I know for a fact that when we get there, I'm going to want to clear my skill tree probably. Respect everything, figure out how I want to play. This is where I think the game is succeeding at something. I didn't expect in why the game is something special, because we're talking about all these mechanics and stuff. And obviously, I hope

at this point you've seen Outwriters' gameplay, you know. Third-person shooter, superpowers kind of thing. And for me, it was, Andy being like, you're going to love this game, Greg. We jumped in when the demo came, we played it on stream, and it was all of us having a good time talking to each other, running around shooting, but I walked away being like, this didn't seem special. I don't get what it is. And then to Blessings early, early point, for me, the change was I went and did stuff with IGN, where I went over and filmed the Let's Play with Brian Altano, Alfredo from Achievement Hunter and me, kind of is like this little IGN reunion of us doing a squad. And on it was one of the developers

from people can fly. And so we were thrown into highest difficulty world tier, legendary items, you're out there. And I mean, I was getting my fucking teeth kicked in. And the guy was like, oh, well, you know, like, you're a pie. I was playing piramance. And then he's like, you know, you only heal by burning. And then it was like, I switch, you know, here as I'm playing as trickster, you're only healing by getting up close and doing damage there.

And like, wrapping my head around the fact that, like, I played the beginning of the game and the demo like I was playing the division, where it was run, slamming to cover gears even, they pop over, shoot. And to learn like, oh, that's not how these classes play and understand that. I was like, oh, okay, and it changed the way I did and made me start playing the game that way. So when I got it here, rolled Chikster to have the slowdown powers and do all that. It was this drip feed of, cool, I'm getting in there. I understand up close.

I have, you know, the bubble to expand to slowdown time. And then it was you start unlocking your abilities all the way up through level 22 and finding those and falling into, you know, blessing I talked and Joey about ratchet and clank and how I like to stick with one set of moves and one set of weapons. I was sticking with those same three skills for a lot of my. time in Outwriters. And then it was, and the way I keep describing these arenas that Andy brought up is their arenas and in some ways they scratch the itch for me that puzzle games do. I run in there and I die over and over and over again.

And I'm like, all right, but if I just would have had this skill when I got to this captain, I could have changed it up. And so it suddenly becomes, oh, I want this different. I'm going to bring in a different scale. I need to be doing. I need to be doing more damage. I look at the skills for ones that. Keeping the interrupts for the rechargers and stuff.

Exactly. And so, like, this is a game that doesn't penalize. It costs nothing to respect. You can go in and change your moves. And it's awesome that way of now I'm so deep into that system that I'm like, all right, cool. What I want to do tonight is pour a bourbon, sit there and go through all my mods and find the mods that go to my temporal blades that make me go faster. Caliph, your hand's been up. Then we're coming to blessing. I want you all to know. I love this episode of The Outriders. I'm so, so sad that Tim had to die so we could have this episode of Game. No, I know. The thing that I love about this game so much, and it wind up, and it didn't turn for me until I got a very specific mod, which was called Bone Shrater, or Bone Shrapnel. And basically, you kill a thing, and it turns that enemy's bones into shrapnel

that then explodes into everybody else that you wind up hitting. And I was like, oh, wait a minute, this game has no meta. And that's awesome, because I never have to think about it. And that's the thing that is so very cool, where, again, the idea around going back and when you, lose a fight of saying, I could do this now because I understand that, oh, this doesn't fit this situation in the way that it needs to feels extremely good because that ties directly to

world level too. We're like, oh, okay, if I do this at this world level, I may be able to get away with this. If I do this at this other one, I'm going to get wrecked. And then being able to go through all the other weapons that I have and say, well, okay, this weapon fires at this rate, but I needed to do this kind of damage because I like the way those two synergies work together. Like I dismantled a legendary weapon last night because I was like, I got it and it was great,

but it doesn't do anything in the way that I play. Sure. And it feels like an outrageous thing, right? In another game, that would be like such a mistake. But I feel like, period. I'm not worried about it. Yeah, people would crap on you. You say that out loud.

They were like, well, why would you do that? You got that legendary. Why would you ever do that? I was like, it literally doesn't do what I needed to do for the situations and the play style that I have. So I can do that and then insert a different mod that actually makes that gun better. The no meta thing is such a beautiful thing.

thing. And that also goes back to what Mike was talking about in terms of kind of the destiny role that this game kind of plays. And the fact that you don't have to worry about balance is also a thing in there too. There's no multiplayer. You don't have to think about that. So that balance that would usually have to go across weapons and go across mods. You never have to think about, which is dope. Bless you wanted to jump in. Hold on. Did you have, do we already, Blessing you still got something to say on this? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, to piggyback off of the no meta thing, I think I, I, I do. I, I do. you think that is very accurate when you're talking about this game. Like the other day I unlocked

dual wheel pistols that both freeze my enemies, but then also does like anomaly damage or some bullshit. And so like I'll use that to shred through like multiple levels and that was my go to gun. But then like eventually I found something else and I was like cool, I guess I'll just move on

with that. It seems like there is no, how destiny would always have those guns that is like all right, here's the one, here's the one gun that you need to get so that it'll if you want to be, if you want to play at the highest level, this is the one you go to. When everybody was running Galahorn, when there was that one weekend where there was the laser in Destiny

2 that was broken. I was going to say Bjorn Borg. Yeah. There's like another one, nothing called Midas and something that used to rock in Destiny. Outwriters are so messy that it doesn't seem to have that. I think I wanted to bring up also about gameplay in the game, and this piggybacks off of what Greg was talking about in terms of

how arenas start to feel like puzzles. It feels like the game very much is inspired by Doom in that instance. because the game wants you to be aggressive and being aggressive is how you attain health. Doom does the exact same thing, both Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal,

where you would have to get glory kills in order to get health. You would have to do your fire attack in order to get ammo and shit like that. Outwriters seems to function the exact same way. And I saw something on Twitter tweet that the cover in Outwriters isn't for you. Like it's for your enemies.

You want to be mobile. You want to be going around. Unless you're like me and Andy and you're a Technomancer, then you might want to use cover every now and then. But for the most part, you want to be mobile. You want to get in their face. I think that is a thing that I'm very happy it took that inspiration because enough shooters don't take that inspiration from Doom. And it makes for a game that is more about those combat puzzles and figuring out who you want to take out first and what order in order to get past it, which I think is a very beautiful thing.

Getting to play last night, I played with Paris and Caliph. Last night was the most fun I've had playing the game where it was the first time that I was introduced to bounties. I didn't know that was a thing in the game It's such a simple thing It's not like I'm not You know, trying to praise people can fly for having Just like hunt down this person or What an unheard of move?

What an unheard of kind of side mission Or go go find this animal right Go hunt this thing you know And that was so much fun Because I got incredible loot And then Paris and Khalif had to bounce So then I played solo and tried going through some more story stuff And I

It was such a fun challenging time. I lost like twice and I was like, do I want to drop the world tier? I know. I know. I can fucking do it and I ended up like I'd go into the fight and then I would fall back when I needed to to get more to get more sort of

space to work with and it was so much fucking fun doing it solo and I had plenty of people in chat hey can I play this solo? And I know they recommend to play it with friends. However, I think if you can find a good balance with world tier and you don't want to be too overwhelmed and also just based

on my experience playing solo performs a lot better like flawlessly when it comes to frame drops and not having any issues because it looks gorgeous and it feels fantastic to play um i have a suggestion for people can fly if they're listening right now you know they are i hope they are um a suggestion when it comes to you because we talk about the borderlands sort of leveling issues right you know how borderlands just hop in and you just all level out and it doesn't really matter what level you are. Greg could be 91 and I could be two and it doesn't matter. Go ahead, Greg.

Let me, I want to bring in a question because I know where you're driving. We talked a little bit about this on stream. Squeezel 23 wrote into patreon.com slash kind of funny games and says, For Outriders, how has the world tier system worked for you? I've hit a couple of roadblocks on missions where I was given a tip to try lowering the world tier for difficulty purposes, but always saw that as a cop-out.

Has anyone addressed their difficulty tier? And if so, how has that worked for you? But back into your line, because I know where you're going. Because Borderlands 3, of course, one of the big things was I can be level 30, Joey can be level 2, blessing can be 17, we can all come together and we're fighting the same battles that are the right difficulty for us. And we talked about this on stream and I love the accessibility of that. However, it feels fake to me.

It feels like there are no consequences. It feels like it, I love that anybody could just hop in and Greg who, works 90 hours a week and he's got seven kids at home and he says, dang, I only have these 30 minutes I can play with my friends, but I can hop in and have a fun time. That's fucking great for Greg working 80 hours a week. But it feels fake.

It doesn't feel like it's like there's any, I don't know. You're not really facing consequence if you're just playing at your level. Go ahead, Ka. The thing that goes back to both what you said and what Greg was talking about, and it's the reason why I was talking, I was playing with a friend of mine top tier over on Twitch. and we were running through it and we were both talking about not

lowering the levels. And we said, why would you not lower the levels? And I was like, because I get to go into every fight after I've lost and make the mental recalibration of how I then need to take on this fight. Whether that means I need to back up in turtle, whether that means I need to swap out mods,

whether that means I need to swap out skills, it gives me the ability to actually change the way I'm taking on a fight that is not something that I have to worry about from a difficult Fulti standpoint. It's all about me adjusting to what's happening as opposed to me making the game adjust

to me, which I think is a lot of fun. But it's in the same conversation, I swear I'm not going anywhere else because I love this and I love what's happening. I do appreciate that it's there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there were I had the, you know, when I was trying to meet, again, I don't know if I've said this in this podcast yet,

I apologize if I had me and Mike beat the campaign last night. No big deal. So you know, we beat it. We beat it. And the night before, I was making this push with two kind of funny best friends who had answered my call on Twitter, and we got to a part that was run your head into the wall over and over, and I gave it five or six tries, and I was like, it is 1145, and I am already exhausted, and I'd like to beat this. And so I knocked it down, right?

And it was that I have been in that run, I want to that challenge, and I want to feel it. And in a different world, I would sit there on a Saturday all day in front of me and figure it out and grind it out and, you know, go level and come back to it. But in that moment, I wanted to change it up and I did, and I didn't feel bad. Sorry, back to an 80. Yeah, I think lowering the level totally fine. Like, I'm totally fine with that. I think a way that people can fly can maybe find an in-between when it comes to wanting to play with your friends is here's a suggestion.

It's me and Greg. We're playing. We're both level 20. Bless wants to hop in. He's a level 12. I think what it should do is instead of scaling to the enemies to then fit for, for three people. I think you keep it for two people scaling why,

enemy wise, right? But unless you're within like five levels of each other. So maybe when Bless hits like level 15 or level 16 and we're both level 22s or whatever, then you raise the enemy level to then scale for three players as opposed to the two that were just there. I think that could be a neat in between. If Ka's a level 20 and I'm a level five, I hop into Kaas world, but only have enemies there scaling for one player in the world, right?

And so you're, I think it's a, it could be a neat in between. And then once I kind of catch up, then say, all right, Andy, you've caught up to the appropriate level now. Now here's enough enemies for the both of you. I think that could be kind of a neat workaround. As opposed to Borderlands just hop in whenever you want, you know. Sure, yeah, of course. Joey, I'm able to see everybody else when they're nodding along or disapproving.

How are you feeling? Is everything we're saying resonating with you in terms of the world tier system? Have you experimented with it? Are you enjoying it? I move it up and down constantly, depending on who I'm playing with, if I'm playing by myself, and kind of like what encounters I'm in. I feel like I usually go through and try it on whatever the default one that I'm on the first time. And then if I think, if I get like halfway and I think I can figure it out than I do,

what I appreciate about what this does is that it doesn't, you don't have to go so far into the settings to adjust it that it makes you feel like you're cheap. like you're cheating. It's just right there. And it's like, okay, this feels like a purposeful placement that you're supposed to kind of waver back. And it was mentioned where it's like cheating. And to call it out, right? Like I know Mike mentioned it, but I think you've seen in other games like, this is not,

all right, if you change the difficulty, you have to reload the checkpoint. Like you can be midfight and be like, all right, there's just too many captains. And like that. And that's the other thing, too, is it dynamically spawning those amounts based on what world tier you're at and stuff like that. You can dial it down. So they'll, if they're already spawn, get weaker or whatever. And you can get out of that fight even with them rather than have to, you know, die and do it.

But it's instantaneous, no loading, no weird stuff to go for it. And it doesn't call you out for it, which is great, too. Like a lot of games do, whether you make you wear the chicken hat or they make you do all the other kind of stuff where it's like you, you're penalized for dropping it down a little bit. And that's the thing is they do such a great job with it, right? It's like the world tier shows when you go to the menu to choose which one you want. It's showing you how many levels the enemies will gain, right? So it's not that you're taking away enemies level. to make them easier.

You're starting from what is equal, and then you're already adding stuff to it from it. Yeah. Yeah, cool one that we've brought up is the gameplay, and I really like it of like Andy is talked about playing by himself, and Khalif has talked about different strategies going in. I think it is one of those games where you and your friends are going to just start mindlessly killing, right? You're going to find that sweet spot where you're just gunning things down.

Nobody speaks for like 15 minutes because you're in the zone. And then eventually you're going to hit a wall. and the coolest part about this game and the different abilities and how you can switch them on the fly is like you can be like hold up a second guys like we need to figure this out we're doing it wrong right and me and Greg had a perfect one we were playing a little bit higher than we should have been

because I was a little bit lower than him and said Greg use your slow mobility in this death tunnel and let's bottleneck them through here right and then you made the death tunnel I was doing I was still like this is what I'm talking about in the game where it was like I was running down there and we were with somebody else who wasn't on Discord with us.

And I was slamming, we're getting too spread out, there are snipers across the way, and then it was spawning two or three captains that ran out. And you were the one of like, hold up, like this next time fall back was draw them to the tunnel, and we draw them up the tunnel, and we had this kill zone that we could just work on. And then you were like, go down.

It's like that kind of, again, puzzle mechanic. And it isn't a puzzle mechanic. It's just tactical. And it's just a way that I usually don't play these. When I fucking play Borderlands, and I love Borderlands, don't get me wrong. It is very much of running in there, blowing everything up.

my shield explodes and blows people back and I'm trying to figure out whereas this can be that but it can also be so much more Andy I can already tell last night I unlocked several more skills that I kind of forgot I had unlocked because I was I love my skills so much because they are so toxic that toxic turret

they are so no I haven't gotten that one yet but I did unlock the heal your squad mates thing and I'm like oh this will be great when we get into expedition mode and you all you know I got a carry all my back, you know, because I'm the support guy, but I'm clicking on. It seems like we were doing that to you yesterday.

I don't know about that. I mean, that's the thing. Go ahead, bless, sorry. Well, to piggyback a little bit off of mic, right? Like, that's the thing that I think is so awesome is I've had the healing ability as the technomancer for a while now. And just yesterday I was playing with Danny Pena and Rhee. And not once were they like, hey, bless, I needed to heal me.

Hey, like come through, like drop your heels. I never had any of that because the game, like we've mentioned before, the game is so kind of messy that. that you don't really get us, I don't really have a sense of what Reeds or Danny's abilities are. I know they don't really have a sense of what my abilities are

aside from the fact that I dropped turrets. But I do identify the times where I'm like, okay, cool, I should heal them here because it seems like their health is getting low. And you have that freedom of working together but then also not feeling so pressured that you feel bad when you miss a heel

or you feel like somebody else is stepping to them. It's that overwatch support class. Yeah, exactly. Feels good. I think it's great. I think it's great. In the, yeah,

malcontent wrote and wrote into Patreon.com slash kind of funny games. it says, imagine a shooter releasing in 2021 without regenerating health. Outrider not only pulls it, Outwriters, not only pulls it off, it creates a fabulously unique situation in which you are always the aggressor. Not only do you have to kill to stay alive, you can stay alive as long as you can kill. I'm a teleporting shotgun assassin, and no shooter has felt this good since, well, Destiny first launch.

I almost wish it was a live service. I can't get enough. Yeah, and it goes to that point, too, where I was talking about that with the folks I was playing with last night before we jumped on with Andy. And I was like, oh, yeah, there really isn't a healer class and there really isn't an agro class because you're not supposed to have things come to you. You're supposed to go to it. Yeah, which is actually really interesting in that respect, too.

Like, you would think Devastator class would be the agro tanky one, but there isn't a tanky one because they want you to die. And they want you to move forward to kind of get the health. Oh, I let things come to me, man. I like, again, playing offline or, you know, everything, it's always on. online but playing single player because it works so smoothly it is just it is sniping heaven and it feels so good where i unlocked a sniper last night that it's not the bolt action but it is the one-shot rifle i believe and it isn't a zoom in scope but it does like zoom in pretty good when you do

a ds and bullets will if i hit headshots it crits and bullets will ricochet to enemies within five meters. I mean, it's just like, the game gives you so many cool little reasons to want to keep playing. And it reminds me of honestly, playing like Hades or Loop Hero and getting all of these little modifications like, oh, let me try this level and see what I could do with this new thing that I've just unlocked, you know? I'm telling you, man, I'm pouring that glass of bourbon tonight. I'm going to go in there and start tinkering. Yeah, close me out here, Mike on this thought, and then I want to get an ad read in here. It is cool more towards Khalif right there.

Like he said right there is no like tank and healer. But it is cool of like being on that devastating side, Khalif, I am up in people's faces. But there's also move settings where like I can fall back and like you've noticed there's no crawl mechanic when you're down. Right. But I have a wall that will catch bullets and I can shoot back. I also have the gollum. And I also have this one reverberation where like if I'm in the middle of people, I life suck from all of them and I can pop the gallum. And like there is moments and different like cool play styles.

you can do what it's like oh everybody get behind me hold up a second right and like i really love that and that's one thing we'll talk about probably in just a little bit it's like i think there is a little bit on the single player side that i don't like punishment wise where there is no free revives when you play with your friends it's interesting because like everybody is spread out and you are in the action that's why i feel like they give you that free revive and there's no crawl right where it's like hey you fell down and you can't crawl to your friends or hide behind cover just pick yourself back up and then there i am and single player And it's like, I just went down and I'm so used to multiplayer because that's what they want you to play.

And it's over. And you restart and you're like, what's that? Right? Like, that's a weird transition there. I'd love to ask them like, why did we not put that in the single player or why do we have it in the multiplayer? Because it is so night and day difference between the two of those moments. Traveling also feels a little convoluted. Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God. Oh, sure. I can fast travel around the flags in the map I'm in. But if I want to leave this map and go to a different area. I fast travel to the flag at camp and then talk to the person with the car and then the car can take me to the bigger map and then I once I'm into the news It's like yeah, why can't you see you? It's 30 cutteens later. The question also like I accidentally did a really old quest

Yesterday because I didn't realize that if I pops up it looks new. Yeah, it looks new and I was like okay, well So list of quest I guess it's my first one that I have to do that's my main one But actually I added to add a tab to the second page which had my main quest which I feel like it's such a weird decision and let alone the map system in general for the local area The amount of times I'm like, all right, I fast traveled here. I wanted to do this. Oh, crap. All right. Well, it looks like my back.

There's no like real representation. I'm like, I think this and I go and I look. I'm like, no, what the opposite way? So now I come out and stick to my left. Yeah, Mike. I gave it a lot of credit during the beta of like I love the little GTA map tracker when you press up on the D pad and it will show you where to go, right? But there is a number of missions that it will not spawn and show the correct way.

And I want to give some, I'm going to give a nice little shout out to my boy Washburn, who's trying to get me at in the live chat with patrons. It's like there was three moments there where like it didn't track right. And he's like, what the hell is going on here? And like, thankfully I'd played the mission. I'm like, it doesn't track right. We have to go over here and like take a side. And it's like you have such a perfect system.

But then it breaks down a couple of times where it's like what the heck is happening here. Why is it doing that? Yeah, there was definitely some. There was some missions last night that were broken for me, Khalif and Paris, where we had gone to this thing. I think we all died. So it spawned us back. And then we couldn't go back. up the rope that got us to that mission.

Yep. It said, here's the rope, but you can't go back up. So that's like obviously bugs. But last night, as I continued playing solo, I ended up going to that area where you fight like the mother or something. It's like this big monster. The brood mother, yeah. The brood mother, yeah.

End up fighting that enemy. I mean, that's something that we, I think we did during the first demo we ever did during the first event. And that was a lot of fun. Finding those enemies was a blast and having their different movesets. they all sort of do different things. And then you realize, oh, Malik killed our boy, Seth.

This is wild. Spoilers, by the way. Who gives a shit? Trust me, you're going to be like, I don't know who fucking Seth is. I don't know what's happened. And then when you round the corner, you see the Outrider's logo,

oh, that's the thing that I use for fast travel. Let me hit the tab button, and it tells me to go backwards. Why? What's backward? Where is it leading me? No, it's just leading me to the start of the level. No, fuck that.

Let me just go back to the Outriders logo. So, yeah, The tracker thing, genius in theory, when implemented well. And when it doesn't work, it's just kind of useless. For now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to remind you, of course, you go to patreon.com slash kind of funny games to be part of our shows over there. You can watch live as we record them. You can get them with the exclusive post show.

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Go to upstart.com slash Kind of Funny. We've been talking here critically. You know, we've talked about some of the things that this game gets wrong. We are now welcoming to the show, ladies and gentlemen. one the only Steve Sailor the Blind Gamer. Hello Steve. Wow. Hey, how's it going? It's good, sir. How are you?

I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on. Thank you, Steve, for coming on. Of course, on short notice. Earlier this year, you hit us up. You're like, hey, you guys talking about accessibility all the time on shows, but you never have any of the accessibility experts on. And I was like, well, it's always short term. We don't think about it and that it happens or there's some story that breaks, but we're about to go live. And literally, as we were getting ready to sit down,

today and do the Outriders review, the one, the only James Davis at James Davis makes, hit up the kind of funny games cast thread and was like, hey, Steve Saylor just posted a video about accessibility and how it's breaking his heart for Outriders. What do you guys think about it? And I was like, I don't need to think at all about it. I can bring you Steve on here. This is what we were talking about. Steve wants to help out more in 2021. I'm all about it. Steve, where are you at with Outriders? So here's the thing. I want to love this game. really, really badly.

The story, the gameplay, the combat is just extremely fun. And it's everything that I would kind of want in this type of game. Sure. It's unfortunate that the accessibility kind of doesn't meet that fun level. There are a lot of things that are missing and they try to do a few things. There is an accessibility menu, but there are a lot of things that are missing and kind of weird that they don't really work that well that unfortunately kind of makes it extremely frustrating for someone like myself and like to be able to play it kind of adds extra barriers to the

gameplay that I'm having to get past and sort of my disability kind of gets in the way stuff like the autoane there is it there is one an option there to turn it on but I've yet to actually see if it works or not because it doesn't um there's stuff like uh subtitles are too small the text is just atrociously small across the board um even with the enlarged text size that that's there, it's very negligible as far as what it actually increases. There's a lot of difficulty even trying to be able to aim even with the out on because I feel like the, because I play it on console, so I play in controller. I feel that the sensitivity on the thumbsticks is really sticky in that I want to be able

to make slight movements and I want to be able to try to be able to aim down sites. but for some reason it just kind of moves me a mile away from where the enemy is. And I know people are going to say play a mouse and keyboard, but I'm not built that way. And it's easier for me to play on a controller. Also, Steve, you don't make it know. You have taste. You have taste. It's fine.

Steve. One day you'll see the light. One day you'll see the light. No. I'm with you, Steve. I'm rocking the control. Well, here's the big idea. I can see the light.

So there's that problem. That's literally the problem. That's the problem, yes. So James Davis's question was this. Steve, when you wrote into patreon.com slash kind of funny games, do you think Outriders will ever make the game more accessible? With games like The Last of Us 2 having so many options, it's disappointed to see a game have none.

I thought T.Lew 2 would have been the catalyst, but here we are. Obviously, Steve, Last of Us 2 got so much deserved praise for its bevy of options for accessibility. Do you think that this is just a game that was already in production at the same time and then didn't get to see that? Do you think as much as we've applauded, people can fly in the Outriders account for being so vocal and reacted this weekend?

Do you think this is something you'd see change? Well, yeah, and full disclosure, I was one of the consultants on The Last of Us 2. So I do know. Money hat. Yeah. PlayStation chill. So I did get to see kind of how they implemented their accessibility settings. And what it looks like, the difference between Tilo 2 and Outrider,

is that it kind of seems that Outwriters started with accessibility a little bit later on in production. Whenever we're consulting with studios, we generally try to be able to encourage to be able to start with accessibility from the beginning because a lot of times when you're having to lock down features before accessibility, a lot of those features are not able to be changed or edited later on to accommodate. It is possible that Outwriters could become more accessible. We are seeing more updates and patches from games and studios that are adding more accessibility in. Gosa Sashima had that. Outer Worlds actually was notorious for having extremely small text,

but it took a developer to basically be like, you know what, let's see if we can be able to add the ability to increase text size in that game. And two months later, Obsidian released a patch that would allow you to do that. And it allowed me to go in and actually enjoy that game. So I think there is that possibility, but it would really depend on how much was.

locked down before they try to be able to implement accessibility. Square Enix is kind of starting on their accessibility journey. They did a little bit with Avengers and in Tomb Raider, but they haven't really sort of, it seems that they don't really have a lot of evangelists for accessibility in Square Enix as a whole to try to be able to kind of encourage that from the beginning. And that's the thing too is that with a lot of people thinking, oh, the last of us two kind of solved accessibility.

It did to a certain degree. But we're not going to be able to see the true impact of that until about five, possibly even 10 years from now just because of how long it takes for games to be in development. And more unlikely, Lassoas 2 was early in the development before Outriders was. Sure. From the ground up kind of thing, right? Exactly.

Yeah. Well, Steve, that sucks. I want you to enjoy this game. We all like this game quite a bit. Yeah. And there's some really cool stuff that's in there that I think is should be applauded, even for accessibility, like the beacon system that's in there for navigation. is superb.

It's one of those features that I would love to be able to see in other games and makes it a lot easier for me to be able to know exactly where I need to go. The high contrast mode that is in there for the menus

is really good. The ability to decrease the difficulty in the world tier is a neat novel concept. I think probably the only negative I have of that is that if you do go down to a lower tier,

so it's a little bit easier for you be able to play, you're not unlocking those high-end items that you can be able to get if you're in those higher tiers, which is unfortunate. And that kind of is something you don't really want to be able to have these higher-end items in a higher difficulty. And that kind of locks out a certain group of players.

So there's stuff there that there's like nuggets of like really good accessibility. But with Outwriters case, unfortunately, it just didn't make launch. Well, yeah. And that'll be the interesting thing to see what happens after launch and see if they're, you know, they say they're going to be responsive. Obviously, they've been responsive with the server stuff and all that. But what happens with the patches? They're already talking about this, you know, PC console one, of course.

We'll have to wait and see. Steve, real quick. Let's say people can flag hit you up and they say, hey, we have enough, you know, bandwidth to work on one thing immediately right now. We can get it done in a week. What's the first thing you ask for? Ooh, that would be essentially a combination. Oh, man. Oh, it's a harder to be between the two.

Let's say like a perfect world. They'll say, we'll try to get to the other stuff too, obviously. but we have time for one thing right now. Yeah. I would say, I would say large text. That's been something that has been plaguing a lot of games as of late. And it is,

like there's a lot of lore that I want to get into this game, but I can't read it because I can't see it. And that needs to change, not just outwriters, but just across the board. Yeah, but yeah, that would say like that would probably be my number one priority.

And then I've got another list. If, hey, if outwriters, you want to contact me, let me know. That's got to be something that these game engines kind of built in. They have to sort of build these things in just from the start without having like the need to do crazy customization to the game. Like these, I feel like if the engines kind of had these more simple solutions at the start,

I feel like it would be easier to implement those changes, just kind of more on the fly. Oh, exactly. Like the example I gave of Outer Worlds, a little bit of the behind the scenes stories of that was that there was one developer that saw the feedback of people saying it had really small text. He went into the engine and was able to within an afternoon actually implement a feature that would increase the font size across the board, but it took three months to be able to fix all the UI bugs that it caused. And so, like, yes, like Episity was able to give them resources and it actually made into the first patch that came out. But not a lot of studios will want to be able to

sort of dedicate to that because they're either already working on future DLC or just their next project. So it really depends on kind of how much they're willing to dedicate to stuff like that. But yeah, it can be done in certain engines and some can't. It's there's a whole legacy and engines and stuff like that. Yeah, there's a whole behind the scenes of that too. Well, Steve, if people want to keep up with you and help out in the cause, where can they find you? You can be able to find me on Twitter at Steve Saylor or Twitch.tv slash blindgamer Steve. on YouTube.

YouTube.com slash snowball. Steve, thank you so much for coming in today. No problem. On the short notice, it works. See, I knew if we started texting each other about this, we can make it happen. We did it. Yeah, exactly. And I'll see.

You never, you never, you never, you never, you never call me back. You know, I'm disappointed. I can call you, man. I'll call you tonight. I mean, Tinned, Greg did. Three in the morning bus going to ring. I'm what you're going to get it. What time is I mean?

Steve. Well, three in the morning to be 6 a.m. So I'll be just with time I'm looking out. Yeah. Toronto. I mean, hey, man, at 10 p.m. tonight, for me, expect to call. We'll see you later, Steve. All right, take care, guys.

Take it easy to do you. Bye. Talking about expansion's future, what it could be patches and all that jazz, I want to do this. I want to know how much longer, and I'm going to go to Joey with this one, but there's a little bit of a lead in. How much longer are you expecting to play this game? What's your future plan for Outriders, right?

Lucy Dream wrote in and said this. What keeps you going in a game like this, when the story isn't working for you. I tried the demo when it was really interested in the world and the story they were setting up until the flash forward and it turned into just everything

that's a poor man's mad max. Gameplay seems cool, if not a bit clunky, probably better with teammates, but I was so turned off by the change in tone, I put it down near to return. I think this is interesting

because we're all talking about like we've glossed over it as somebody who's seen the story through, right? Like, I like the setup of it, right? We need to, it's basically mass effect and Dromeda,

we earth's dead, we've come here we need to establish a colony we get down there it's not what we thought and then guess what you're put on ice for 30 some years you wake up and like the people you just see that are younger or 30 years old they're all hell's broken loose like that's all i needed and like when mike was like what are we doing here i'm like well this thing's doing that and i don't even remember this character's name abigail i think i don't know she like there's all these different movie pieces that i don't i always you know talk about being the story horror i play video games because i want to be part of that that's all i want hit me with these stories

tell me all sorts of things. And that's not what this game is about. Even like me and Mike talking over a cutscene or whatever, and I'm like, I don't know what's happening. And doing a thing today. Like I was like, I'm doing a side mission where at the end, you know, this guy just wanted to blow everything up. And I'm like, all right, I forget what his deal was.

But, you know, blah, blah. For me, it's the gameplay loop, but it does bring the question of what every future plans are for it. Joey, how long, what's your goal with Outriders? So I do want to unlock the like final world level tier, which is 15, right? Wow. Okay. That would be my goal.

Love it. That's predicated based on what other games are coming out that are going to inevitably distract me from this and how long are other people playing? Because I do have fun when I play by myself, but I feel like I always have to knock it down at least one or two world levels when I do play by myself. So that is not going to be great for unlocking more world tears. So it kind of depends on those two things. I feel like I'm the only other thing that I have on my radar right now that I can think of off the top of my head is like the new Pokemon Snap that comes out at the end of the month.

But like I don't think that's going to really tear me away. Dominate your hours. And there's such different types of games that I feel like I won't be in the mood to play that. Blessing, what does it look like for you in terms of how much you're going to play this? I think it depends on what some of the end game looks like because right now I'm having fun, but the story isn't enough for me to carry me through. And so it's a combination of, does this game continue to stay fun? And then do I feel motivated to play with friends so we can play the end game and play the expeditions? And how fun do those end up being?

Is that combined with a little bit of what Joey's saying of, all right, what's on the horizon? And for me, it is, right now we are playing Disco Elysium for PSL of you. And so I'm enjoying that at the same time. But then also in a few weeks, we're going to get Neer Repliquant. And I'm going to definitely want to play that. The week after that, we're going to get Returnal, and I'm going to want to try that out. And then soon after that, we're going to get Mass Effect trilogy, which I want to jump into. and I know that's going to take a while to chew on.

And then right after that, we're going to get a death loop. And so there are games that are coming up. Yeah, we're warming up right now in terms of game releases. And I feel like by the time we hit near Replicant, which is coming out April 23rd, and so that's a couple weeks away, that might be it for me in this game. Thankfully, there's nothing between now and then that's really pulling my attention to the Frikesco,

and I think I can juggle these two games at the same time for now. Yeah, Josh EG actually wrote in during the show live and said, is there end game content this, or do you beat it and it's done? Mike and I finished the story last night, and that opened up Expeditions, which is a brand new map with a whole bunch of different objectives

and a new different tiered system in terms of difficulty that you unlock as you play. And then what it is, is it's all time-based of you have to go through this, and if you beat it by this time or less, you're in the gold tier, you get this chest,

which will bring you up multiple levels on the expeditions page so you can take on harder challenges to get better awards, and it's that kind of system that's feeding that loot grind to it. And there's story stuff that I think is cool tied to it, but I won't bring up, obviously.

And for me, the goal is the platinum. And so, like, I feel like it's going to be hanging in there to do that and then just to hang out with my friends. But I'm right there with you, blessed that. When something else comes along and takes me away, I'll be taken away, and that'll be the thing. Khalif, what's your plan for hanging out with it? Yeah, level 15 is the, you know, world tier 15 is the next goal

to try to see if we can get there because, you know, I'll get to the end game at something. point and get to expeditions and stuff. For me, I think the thing that's going to actually like continuously kind of pull me back in because most of the games that Bless talked about, I'm not excited for it yet until Returnal and then Deathloop. So I have some more time to kind of dig around and stuff.

But once I start to see either, you know, people can fly, start to talk about either new mods that are going to be coming up in the space or new potential skills, which I think would be a fantastic thing to add to the expeditions layer, which is going to keep people kind of kind of going. that's the stuff that's going to wind up pulling me in, because you wind up getting to a min-max point, too,

where you're like, oh, if I can get this mod up to this point with this weapons and I understand the synergies between those kinds of things, I'm going to wreck stuff and then continue to kind of move up levels, which is going to be that thing that winds up working. And I think also kind of playing with other people, you'll then start to change up the way you kind of maneuver with skills and other stuff so that you can be a part of a team as opposed to playing it in kind of the solo way that I've been playing it already.

So you'll be swapping things in and out to have builds that will kind of work towards that as a better conversation too. And you're talking about things that I'm surprised aren't in the game, loadouts for a game that is giving me so many, so much loot, then, you know, I'd love to have a loot set that is like, here's my solo build. Here is when I need to be doing damage. Here's when I want more time stuff. To have those, you know, on a quick select be able to go, I'm surprised they don't exist. Instead, I have to keep all that armor and keep it in my head straight. And then to your point of, you know, more mods, more other stuff, you know, This isn't a games of services we talked about,

so what does that mean for DLC? I want to point over to Forbes. Forbes had an interview after the demo, but before the launch that Paul from Forbes shared again today. This question stood out to me when I reread it. Forbes, you've repeatedly said that Outwriters is not meant to be a live service game and is quote unquote complete at launch. But what would the threshold be for you to consider future content,

missions, guns, classes, and such? Does not live service rule out meaningful expansion? or can things like DLC still be in the cards? People can fly responded. We never said that we would abandon the game. This isn't a games as a service. But if people like it, we will definitely be doing more things in the Outwriters universe.

We have many more stories to tell and a lot of ideas we want to explore that we couldn't fit in the original game. So we're happy to create more content in the future. Anything we would make would be in the form of significant expansions with self-contained stories. So I would think that, like, you know, know, different mods and changes like that, you wouldn't see until they were like, hey, boom,

here's an actual substantial piece of content. Yeah. Mike, you are, of course, Mr. Multiplayer guy. You have the Squid Squad you're playing with all the time. Do you see Outwriters having a long life for you? Long life? No. This is at the tip of our tongues for about a week to two weeks.

We'll all get up to max level. We'll play a couple expeditions. But I do not see us grinding this out or trying to continue to do that loop for certain gear like we would in a destiny or a division, right? The guns just aren't there, right? I don't really need any of these guns. They aren't speaking to me like the destiny guns, right? They're just a bunch of flesh.

But I will give it this, right? This game is just good enough where it will always be a perfect off night for us. Me and my squad are more competitive multiplayer squads. So we like really having that competitive edge. But when we need those nights off, this is going to be one to put in the roller decks of like, hey, y'all want to play this? and I think it is proven to us that it is a good game. If you bring out more DLC later on,

we will jump back on for the weekend. If we want to go do an expedition or two, we will do it. I wasn't truly impressed by the expeditions. I don't think they're game changing, right? They add a fun level once you get to the end. But it isn't anything where it's like, yo, I want to do four hours of expeditions.

I want to do two of these and then be done with the expeditions. The expeditions are cool. And in terms of, oh, it's a new thing of like, let's go fast. Let's go and challenge ourselves and try out these new crazy weapons, like the guy who did 4 million damage. The stats pop up. I had barely, or I'd almost scraped the 2 million damage. Mike was way under leveled and should have you been doing it yet,

did like, what, a couple hundred thousand? And then this kid we were with did 4 million damage. Like, all right, well, cool, thanks for carrying. What's the idea behind the expeditions? In terms of? Like, is it a type of raid or is it just? It's, you know, multi-tiered rooms of lots of. enemies, like with the goal of getting to something specific to open it up kind of thing.

And then when you do that, you get a special currency that you can then only spend with one of the vendors now that has new higher tiered gear, stuff like that. So it's like, you story attached? Yeah, there's story attached to it. Not, well, I shouldn't say that. There's a story beat that gets you there and then you're doing something for the story. And I don't think it's going to pay off. Like, I do all the expeditions and then, you know, these special gates open or something

like that. But I, you know, I've done one now with Mike. So it's not like I'm well. versed in it and he's stretched the imagination. Yeah, back to Mike. It does have the tease of if you do all the expeditions, you unlock the final expedition, right? There was one called like the World Wind or something for me. And Greg Wood said like, hey, if you do these, right, then you're going to work your way

up to the final one, which is really cool and be like, okay, I would like to see that. It's right. But it is just room after room, Andy, essentially what you've seen in the mission structure already of. You're in room one, kill seven bosses, go to room two, defend this obelisk, go to room three do the same thing and you have 12 minutes to get the best rewards 15 minutes to get the second tier

and then 17 and on you get the third tier. Get your happy meal toy and get out of there. Yeah and we beat ours just so everybody knows we beat ours with like 12 seconds left so shout out to Greg for being incredible. No shout to that guy who did 4 million damage. What are you talking about? Is it like 4 million was badass? A man just posted on Twitter he put

192 million out into an explanation. This is what I'm talking about. You think that I like. Just know there's a lot more to do. So is time counting down or is it like... Yeah, there's a timer on the screen that's going and telling you how much. If it hits zero, it does the... No, no, there's one like super sub like, hey, you got a participation box that has like a rusty knife in it.

And they're like, congratulations. But it is dope loot. Like, Andy, I want to, yeah, close... Yeah, exactly. And, you know, like, there are those like ultimate class armors that I think look hideous. You all look, you know, you look like, what's his name, Lord Zeta? or whatever from Power Rangers when you get it. Like, I don't want it, but I want the stats attached to it.

Yeah, we haven't talked about armor yet. We need to transmog. This game needs to. Wait, what? Desperately. I don't like how my character looks at all. I've never, I've not looked dope once so far. I mean, Destiny doesn't have that either in the biggest ways either.

Yeah, but you can like apply. We knew that. We knew that when they were making this game. Like, why would you address that? In Destiny, I can make my character like all white and pink. And I, even though I look ugly, I still look dope at the same time. This game, I don't, I don't even have the opportunity to, like color coordinate in any way that even looks

remotely cool. A hundred percent. I just looked like its mocks needed or at least dives or need it. I look like I'm both in the past and in the future in the same time. I don't like how my character looks. Yeah, I uh, I felt like I was looking dope playing with uh, Kaleef and Parathside. And then I unlocked armor that put bone

fucking all around me. I was like, I don't want bone on my armor. I don't, I, what are we doing right here? What are this monster hunter shit? These styles are clashing. I don't want to keep on getting higher level and start to look more and more like some organic freak monster.

Like, no, man, I want to look like, but that's all just, you know, personal preference. It's like my character thinks they're in Monster Hunter and Mass Effect at the same time. Yeah, I prefer the Destiny Mass Effect sort of thing. I don't think I will really stick with this game at all, and that's, I've said this a million times, it's never an indictment on the game. Destiny could be firing on all cylinders, putting out the best sort of shit, and when I'm done with the game, I'm usually just done with the game. I don't really stick around and try to find out the new thing. I'm always, you know, playing Call Duty with Mike or, you know, playing whatever multiplayer game I'm hooked on or whatever.

So I do think one potential way to continue the life of this, as opposed to just putting out free DLC, similar to how, like, a game like Ghostrunners, putting out sort of, you know, what their DLC looks like where they can't really just put out new campaign missions. but hey, we'll do variations of past things that you've already seen. I think they could put out sort of epic versions of bounties or like modified versions of monsters that you go hunt that, you know, maybe it's the same monster with a lot of the same movesets, but maybe it has one added move and now it shoots green fire now. And it's like it's like a golden emblem on the map that you're like, oh, that's the one that I unlocked because I hit this level or whatever. Sure. I think that could be a quick way to kind of add more and more life to this. Because you can't really replace story missions. But I think if you modify these bounties and say, oh, that dude that you killed, well, it turns out he didn't die.

That bull didn't kill him. He's free. He's back again. They could take a cue from another hit games service from Squaredex, Marvel's Avengers, and then everybody's just a clone. And so you're not really fighting abomination for the 19th time. You're fighting the 19th abomination clone. It makes them wrong. This is element, element resisted.

Element resisted. Just for half an hour. My immersion is totally perfect right now. I feel so immersed in this world. Understandable. Yeah. Joe, are you going to stick with it? Yeah, I think I answered the beginning.

She was the first. We've just been going around. There's so many of us. By the time the carousel ends, you want to get back on it. Tim, how about you, Tim? My eyes! These snakes. Oh, God, the snakes are still on, Tim.

I guess final thoughts, right? I feel like we're all super high in this. You know, final thoughts, but then the other question would be this. Mike, you asked me this last night. And, you know, obviously Xbox Game Pass, you can go get this game for just your low, low price of either the one buck a month deal or the $15 or whatever it is, right? Because Xbox Game Pass, amazing deal. But you asked me, would you pay full price for this game?

Obviously, I had a review code. But, like, I would. I have had such a blast without riders. Would, yeah, Caliph your shit nodding, you'd be into? Yeah, I mean, I haven't had a game like this. where I've thought about it as soon as I wake up in a long time. Yep, exactly. That's such a great way putting it.

If it's always on my mind, I want to go play. I'm like, right after we get off of this, I'm going to go play. It's like one of those things. We're just like, I need to figure out all the little intricate parts that go together so that I can have the most badass, badass character that I can. And then be able to wreck things and shoot bullets that drop lightning out of the sky. It's amazing in that way. Blessing, would you pay?

Yeah. So many of my Twitch chat asked me the same question. actually last night when I was playing the game. And the way I answer it is when it comes to co-op games like this, the way that I kind of look at it is similar to how I look at like, you know, how much would I pay to go to Six Flags with Friends? Like I'm not playing this game specifically for just the story or just the gunplay or whatever. I'm playing this game to hang out with Friends for the most part and have fun while I'm doing it.

And this is a very fun thing to do with Friends. And so if I, like, I would pay $60 to go to Six Flags for five hours. I think I'd pay $60 to $70 to get a fun 30-hour cost. co-op experience of friends. I think that's worth that. And so, yeah, I'd pay full price for it. Could not agree more with less there. You know, if I had no idea what this game was and my homies back home hit me up and like, oh, dude, we're all going to get

this out-dryder's game. You're going to get it? What is it? Let me look at it. Oh, fuck yeah, I'm down. Let's do this, you know? So I would do that just because I wanted to play games with my friends. But then once you're in there, I think the gunplay and the moment-to-moment gameplay is

more than satisfying enough. I think it's really legitimately fun to get in there into these big arenas and figure out how to take out enemies and just see all these crazy cool abilities mesh with each other. And I, yeah, I think it's definitely worth it, thousand percent worth it. Is it flawless? No. Of course not.

No, I mean, and that's what we're talking about. The story is a bombastic action movie, pay as much attention as you want to. There's all sorts of crashes right now that are going on. There's the accessibility stuff Steve talked about. But then, yeah, there's this game that I think does a great job of shaking up the biomes like you know introducing new enemies that are the same class

of enemy but are they different enough they look different there's something new to shoot but then something you're talking about that we've mentioned but we haven't specifically brought up is like yeah there's always that moment of where the power is combined where you do the I do a slow-mo thing right Mike's shooting from the side a devastator jumps up in the air flies in like Superman and ground pound somebody did nothingness Andy snipe in a head from like there's all these things where like you know

It's funny that this is another square next game, and I, you know, jokingly brought up Avengers. But one of the big things people are like with the Avengers, like, why the fuck aren't their team up moves? Like you're the, you're the Avengers, right? And this game delivers that where it is a synergy of powers happening at once. Or you're about to get knocked down,

but somebody does throw, or I'm about to get knocked down. And somebody tosses that turret there that's in front of me that, you know, takes out the enemy or helps me take them out to get my health going. Like, there's so much of that. Best sound design in a game too for a while. Sorry, what was that?

Best sound design I've seen in a game in a while, too. Like I didn't even notice it until Blessing brought it up with the chichunk of the When you beat a boss and they drop their loot and it's like chunk chichch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch'ch. It's two real things that I think of every Every time I jump into a thing is when you have a pyro and they shoot off their bomb and then the bomb starts to explode And then the sound of when you shoot bullets that have weakness on it yep it is a very very cool sound that just goes along with you know like oh I know what's happening in the background without me even having to see it Yeah kind of stuff which is super cool and that was the other one from you. when I switch to this damage build I'm running, right? Like using my anomaly bullets.

So I forget they're called on for Trickster, the time ones. But they do extra damage and like they sound different. And so it's that thing of I don't even have to look at the HUD. If I don't hear that sound, I know that I should get on it. Joey, would you pay for this game? Yeah, 100%. And I feel like I'm with Andy and Bless where so much of it is based on my friend group being really into it and having a bunch of people to play with.

I think if I, if I didn't have that crew of people, I probably would be a little bit less into it, but I still even when nobody's around or it's like a weird hour, it's like, oh, maybe I'll just try this one time by myself. So it does have that like hook in me. But I think it's definitely a game that's more fun if you have people to play with. And then Snow Bicycle Michael,

the man who gets it for free off Xbox GamePass. Game Pass rules. If you're listening, get Game Pass. Put it on game pass on PC. God. Yeah, because it's on cloud and on console, which is really cool. but Blessing and Andy hit it so well, right?

This game is worth the 60 with the time that you're going to spend with your friends. And no, this isn't perfect. This is a 77, this is middle of the road video game that has a lot of fun gameplay loops that you're going to enjoy with your friends, but it's not going to blow your skirt up, right? And what I would say is, is if you are not attacking your backlog, if you and your friends are looking for a multiplayer game to play right now, it is worth the $60. If you want to wait, this is a perfect on-sale game. And when this game drops to $40 or below, and it's not a games of service and you're not going to be left behind and not be able to partake and everything, this is a game where you and your friends could buy it for $40 or cheaper and have a blast for a weekend or two.

So if you'd like to wait, stay out of the conversation, let things fix itself. If you can catch this on sale, this is going to be one of those. Put this in your roll of decks of multiplayer games because it's going to be a good one. Dude, so true. Like, I'm trying to hop into Destiny right now. being like what is happening in this video game? There are a million systems that,

obviously it's because the game's been out for a while and they've developed these so many different solutions and different currencies and all these different things. But this game is not overwhelming when it comes to the way that the, the way the systems work. It doesn't throw a lot at you in terms of having to figure out how to level up.

And it's like any other video game. It's white, green, blue, purple, and legendary, whatever. So I think it's more than simple enough that if it does go on sale in three months for, you know, $39.99 or $2,999, you're not going to be, you're not going to hop in and feel like, whoa, I have, oh, this is crazy. Like, like, no, it's pretty, it's simple for what it is. And I think it's in a lot of ways, like what Mike talked about for his friend group of like, I do feel like this is a game that if Poe found it three months from now, I was like, I'm playing Outriders. and play it. I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll jump in and I'll come either clean house with my guy or maybe I'll make a new, roll new one and roll

with here or whatever. Like, there's a bunch of different options in there of just like a game to catch up with to actually shoot the shit with. You know, Mike almost went live last night when we were beating it, but he stopped because it was just like, we're just hanging out. It's nice to have something to talk about that's not work and play through it. And now we talk about this game for a long time. It's nice to have

something to jump into like a destiny that's not a destiny. I feel Andy 1,000% that like last time I jumped in a destiny was during Forsaken. And I been out since launch and trying to jump back in and then also play with people who've been playing destiny this whole time. You feel like you feel like you, you feel like you, you, you, you, don't understand anything that's going on in this world and you, you, like, for me, it was, it was a very difficult time trying to get in and I bounced out about a few days later. And for Outriders

to come out and be something that's from the ground up, I can hop in and have a fun time with it, not have to worry about all the, all the stuff that came before it. I think, I think there's so much value in that. And so if you're looking for that, then I think it's perfect. I think Outriders is the best example since dying light of what you were talking about, Mike, a game that drops with like low expectations in spring when everybody, you know, like January to spring.

Everybody wants that new hotness. They want a new game and they're just, they're desperate in quotes to play something on their new systems that they don't want from their backlog. They don't want to worry about something from December. This is that one of like, it's a moment right now that they just captured and crushed. So congratulations to them for sure.

And the game's great. Well then, it seems like we are all in agreement that this game is pretty good, huh? That's my impersonation of the voice acting. If that's an outwriters' reference, I don't get it. Because I don't get any sort of references the same. Tell me, Andy, give me the backstory on Jacob, or Jacob. Jacob.

Jacob, Polish. Jacob was from back home. He was one of my friends from back home, and little did I know. He'd be alive still 30 years later. Fucking hell. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been your review. of Outwriters here on the Kind of Funny Gamescast. We all love it and are playing it and you should too.

Of course, if you like our show, the Gamescast, you should love and appreciate that over on patreon.com slash kind of funny games, where you can get each into every episode ad free. You can get it with the post show we're about to do on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny Games. And of course, you can be watching live just like Gary H. is, Joshi G. is, and Raoul Ponce Jr. is.

Ladies and gentlemen, this show will be back with Tim hosting after he recovers from the snake bites and the knives and the thing. We thank you for your support. Kaleef, where can people keep up with you? All podcast platforms, the Spawnamy podcast with Khalif Adams. And you can check us out on Twitch.tv. TV slash Sponami every Wednesday night, 6 p.m. PSD to watch the live show.

Latest episode is rocking with ID at Xbox senior manager Chris Charla rocking with us talking about all the wonderful stuff that they're doing in the indie space. So go check that out. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Kleefe. Oh, it's lovely. Until next time. It's been our pleasure to serve. you.