Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Rage 2 Impressions - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 222

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

Robinhood is giving listeners a free stock at http://greggy.robinhood.com The crew go over their impressions on Rage 2, the Divison 2 raid, and Greg and Andrea five their first E3 Judges week game impressions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome to the kind of funny games cast. I and one of your host, Greg Miller, alongside the best hair in the business, FM3 underscore on Twitch.tv, Fremerebell of the 3rd. What's up? Welcome back from Judges Week. Thank you, thank you. Joining me back from Judges Week is none other than the busiest lady in the business, Andrea Renee, representing what's good games? A new episode each and every Friday on YouTube and podcast services around the globe. What's up, gents? Nothing we're back. I know. Greg thinks it's Monday. What day of the week does it feel like for you? Yeah, Monday's a good one because we were gone for so many days in a row,

but there's been so much work over the last 24 hours because publishing the show and everything. Catching up. And like the E3 blitz has begun. Yeah, and boxes are just nuked right now. I just can't find anything. I just want to tell everyone I'm busy. I mean, honestly, we're to the point now where it's fair. That's a fair response.

You are busy, by the way. Hey, we have 14 games coming to E3. Can we book your time? Like, no. No. I know what I'm going to go out into diming out big publishers. But one of the big ones just yesterday was finally like, all right,

we're ready to book. Can we get three hours of your time? Like, fuck you. That's what you can get. Fuck you. They're definitely watching the show. No exactly. Oh,

they know who they are, right? Let's call them Ruby Soft. They know who they are. I don't know what they're doing. Meanwhile, Renendo hasn't even fucking answered an email what they're doing.

What the fuck do you guys want me to do? You know what I mean? To be email and PlayStation for demo times, they won't answer either. To be fair, right, this is every E3 every year. Of course. Of course.

You always hear, when are we going to plan it? You know, the teams ask it, when is we going to have the first meeting? And you're like, just wait because nobody knows what's going on until about three weeks before. Yeah, that's just the way that it goes every year. Yeah. Yeah. But if you didn't understand that, Andrea and I were at E3 Judges Week all week long. So it's my first day in the office, your first day in the office.

So it's totally screwed everything up. We have a lot of secrets. This whole book here, my little black book, jacked full of impossible information that I can't share because it's all embargoed, except for many games. today that we're going to talk about that are in embargoed, so that's it. Because of course, this is the kind of funny games cast. Each and every week, three, sometimes four, best friends gather on this table, each coming to talk about the video games they love and what's going on in the industry, what they've been playing, and what Kevin's eating?

What are you eating, Big Katie? It's a salad. All right, good. Good for you, buddy. Exactly, exactly. If you like that, you can watch the show live as we recorded or early without any ads, plus a pre-imposed show over on patreon.com slash kind of funny. If you have no...

Kind of Funny Games, Tim. Trying to add lib the intros as I go. It's good. I actually like it. By the way, Tim, a house fell on him. Not here. Sorry. Yeah, Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny Games. You can get it early, ad free, all that jazz.

If you have no bucks to toss our way, no big deal, of course, you can go to YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games on Monday. We put it up as a big video on MPD. What are you cracking up at Nick? I actually had a deeper layer joke than I thought at first. The house fell on him. Is he that make him the wicked witch?

Yeah. Yeah. Good point. We got him. We got them good, Andrea. A high five. A little stripe socks sticking out. Housekeeping for you.

Of course, the Kind of Funny Games E3 showcase is Monday, June 10th at 430 p.m. Pacific Time. You can watch it live on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games. We are doing a YouTube premiere. So that's your one place to go get it. Enjoy it.

One of the many E3 conferences that we'll be talking about. Obviously, we'll be reacting live to the rest of them. Not PC, obviously. Come on, no. One of these days, that's going to be your initiative

or you're going to push for the other to pay attention to the PC one I'm not saying the PC conferences ever work out that well but you should pay more attention to PCD3 that's home The PC gamer show though is not something that I think it's ever has ever let the world on fire I think the biggest news that came out of that show last year

was the Age of Empires remake right I think that was it for the record it usually just falls into that devolver category even upload VR category and the showcase category if we weren't doing the showcase or stuff, right? Of like, oh, cool, they're announcing games. I don't know if it's worth us reacting and trying to like, you know,

keep up new stuff. I watch it, I keep up with it of what they do, but it's like, does it have the hype behind it? No. I, yeah, I think we've all dreamt of having a PC show to rally around, but honestly, they're very hard to do because PC is not, still not like Xbox or PlayStation and you try to like turn it into that. You guys have no souls?

No, I'm saying that it's not like it's a publisher, a single publisher or, you know, distributor with a bunch of games. Now it's not even one storefront. and I hear that's a huge problem. Yeah, exactly. Maybe that's what we need is the Epic store conference. That would go real well.

Anything Epic would do this. And then there's a steam conference. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's how it would go. That's how it all have to happen. I'm excited about this year's E3. Overall, though, because you can't say, how excited should we be for E3 based on what you know.

Oh, based on what we know? I mean, the games we played or stuff, you should be excited. We talk about some kind of funny games daily today. Like, why? Yeah, and there's no PlayStation. Okay, whatever. Still, it's E3.

Are you kidding me? This was the best. showing across the board for a judge's week that I've had almost definitively. There was something at every appointment that I went to that I was interested in and really enjoyed my time with. And that almost never happens. So I was very impressed by everything that we saw and I'm really excited to play more and to see more and to see how the community reacts to some of the stuff we got to see today. Yep. Yeah, Ubisoft. This week, that news was just coming out how they have a total of four AAA games before

March 2020 in the fiscal year and you do forget in the late gen that things are so well-tuned that there are there's always some of these end-of-the-generation surprises we don't know when the next consoles are coming out but probably end of 2020 or early 2021 so I'm excited to see what's out there but yeah when you look ahead you're like we've been doing anticipated games you're like I don't know like Nintendo's got some stuff but you're like what else is something so Pokemon sword and shield that's all we're going to be talking about animal cross hey but E3 hopefully we'll answer some questions we talked about that last week we're going to talk about Judges Week in a second. Right now, I need to thank Patreon

producers James Hastings and Mohammed and Mohammed. We couldn't do this without you, right? Nick? Heck yeah. That's my man. Today we're brought to you by Robin Hood, but I'll tell you about that later for now. Let's begin the kind of funny games cast with what is and forever will be. What's your plan?

Fran? Do do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, What have you been playing? A lot of games on the list today. Fran, you're the one who didn't go to Judges Week. You said, I'm too good for that. I won't leave my streaming. I won't leave my streaming community behind. I need to be there for them. I need to remind people that I have an epic game store code. Like, I need to be all right.

What did you, what did you? So what, you played rage two while we were on? Yeah, rage two was the thing that I finally got to jump into. We had actually, were we at the preview event way back when together. We were. Yeah, with Tim Willits. Yeah. It was quite some time ago. And what a journey it's been. But it's been quiet. And then boom, it hit. I'm playing on PC. Okay. First of all, runs amazing on PC. Yeah. Obviously, it's id. I was going to say that id. But, you know, some games, depending on how they are, they chop, or they take more resource. Well, and that's fair because it's actually Avalanche's engine for Rage 2. It's not Id's. Oh, that's right.

It is on their engine, but of course working with Id and, you know, once they get a hold of anything. But it runs incredibly well for starters. But long story short, I went into it with pretty much lowered expectations regardless to what the reviews were. Why were the expectations lowered? Just because the narrative, and it's been fair, is like, it's because it's kind of quiet. Totally, right? bit about rage and then kind of quiet and sometimes when that happens sometimes it's by intent

is that they don't want to like do preview stuff because they don't want any mixed reviews. That's not really why but I just haven't had a reason to be excited. Here's my optics on it were this that obviously I remember when you guys went to see it at the preview event. Rage 1 wasn't my cup of tea so I just didn't pay attention. I'm not the shooter guy. I saw you guys go to the preview event. Well come on, division's not a shooter buddy.

That's a way of life. All right. You know what I'm saying? Wolfpack. That's what I'm talking about. Thank you very much, Kiff. No, that, and then it was, you know, on Games Daily that week where it was like, or the week before where somebody's like, you know, Rage's out next week, nobody's talking about it. I was like, that can't be right.

I look at the date. I'm like, fuck, Rage 2 is out next week. Everybody felt that way. I've literally had, and I, I don't know if she, Andrew's better at a job than me. I've had my head down all week at Judges' Week. How did the reviews net out? Did people just not like it? It's like 70, I think right now.

Metacritic. Yeah, Metacritic. It's funny, I turn my nose about it, not because I don't appreciate Metacritic. It's that there's so many reviews in there. You get this like, I'm going to come off. No, we can absolutely turn our nose up at Metacritic. I've had my repeat with them for a long time. Yeah, I appreciate the effort.

But there's so many reviews. So in other words, I like to talk about reviews you trust or know. What's my IGN in GameSpock? Surprisingly, this is the biggest thing that stood out to me, Dan Stapleton, if you know him. Sure. Robot. It's like the most cynical review robot that you know. He does love PC.

It's his one, you know. Ah, there it is. This is how you got them. Probably. but he gave it an eight, I think. And I was like surprised. Dan's a hard, he's a hard sell. He's one of the highest reviews out there.

Okay. Of the short list that I saw. But it's getting between six to eights. And interestingly, it's a narrative a little like days gone, but without all the bugs and stuff where it's this, some people are like, I don't know, I got kind of bored after a while, like some of the mechanics. But there's another side of which you're like, I really like it. And the thing to really like about it is just the core gunplay and combo mechanics.

It makes you earn like a lot of stuff. And it just feels really good to get into battle. Driving and stuff, I still don't like that much. Okay. But my quick review is I'm only, you know, maybe five hours in. I'm playing on hard mode just because I like when it's skill. But not because I'm really good at this stuff, but in skill-based games, I like to be sort of informed when I hit that wall and be like, you need to upgrade your skills.

What's it going to be? And that's how I play. That's how I played God of War as well. Gotcha. I'm liking it so far, but it's definitely. are you to stick with it to the end? Absolutely. Probably, but there's no like PVP and multiplayer and no,

they're doing some post-release content, but I think that's going to be for the hardcore, but I'm liking it. It gave us the indication that multiplayer was not part of their plans at all. I'm also really looking forward to diving in. I loved the first rage, and it was also a very divisive game. You either loved it or you were like, this game is trash.

And so I know that people who liked the first one have kind of a mixed reviews about this one, particularly with the narrative. But if they improve the gunplay, which sounds like they did, sounds like they still have the best shotgun in video games. So we'll see how it is.

Yeah, people love the range shotgun. But if you like shooters, it's definitely in that 6 to 8 range. I can already say that. And Nikki Scarpino, we brought you off the KF, AF bench to come talk about this. Yeah, I was warming that real hard.

Yeah, I've been playing it for a while now and I really like it. Yeah? It's interesting because for me, this is one of those games that you would not think this is a Nick Scarpino jam, but I just beat New Dawn,

and I'm like, I really want another game like that where it's this big open world where you just kind of grind a little bit. And this is scratching that edge. I will give, yeah, I will give it a shout-out. The shooting mechanic is a little bit more arcadey than you'd find in a Far Cry game, which I actually like.

Yeah, that's, yeah, that's it's shooting though, right? Yeah, it's very much, I mean, it feels very doom. It feels very, very, actually, it feels tighter than Doom, honestly. It feels because there's a lot, there's a lot more intricacies to it, and the way they have their powers, structured in it, I think is really, really cool

and they're fairly unique. And it does reward exploration, but it's very weird coming from a Far Cry game where the world feels so alive going to this where it's just empty. And there's a lot of driving in it. There is, and you can discover stuff, but Far Cry design or? Yeah.

It wants you to get out there, but you know, I play through, I'm the kind of guy that, like, I get in and I start exploring immediately and whatever I find, I just try to like, I try to take over. The first thing I did, I took over a bandits den that was like, I didn't realize how hard. It was like a level five or six. And I had like one gun. And it took me three hours to be.

Oh, my God. And I didn't occur to me just walk away and level up and come back. I'm like, I'm not letting this go. I'm not letting this go. Because that's how you learn. That's how you train. And then every other, I mean, I literally have not come across a bandit's den that's that bad since. I've been playing for almost 10 hours probably.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm loving it in the show. And I can confirm the shotgun is freaking amazing. Give me an example. Like, in Far Cry, New Dawn, like, there's, like, Buffalo.

So, yeah, I mean, like, that's, like, what's different? To be honest, that's one of the, that's a, that's a blessing and a curse for Far Cry, I feel. Because it really, like, it takes you out of the narrative when you get attacked by a bear and you have to worry about a fucking Wolverine coming at your, coming at your, your nads. And you're like, what, it just, the world feels so alive and there's so much else going on it that you're like, why should I care about the overarching story about what's happening? I'm going to get the email. Hey, can we use it as a box quote. When you said rage is empty, I was like, wait, but there's like caravans that roll by.

It does have, you know, bandits that are littered around. How is it different than Far Cry in terms of emptiness? Because Far Cry is like that on steroids. Like if you stop for five seconds, you get attacked by something. That's the UBysoft Open World Way, right? It's like the perpetual distraction. Yeah. Right?

So you're going from point A to point B, but then you stop 10 times along the way because there's a guy on the side of the road that needs help. Or you see a flocked deer. And then there's some crafting materials you can get. That's just Ubisoft. open worlds overall. And rage and rage two aren't like that. I had hoped that they would improve because they teamed up with Avalanche who, you know, specializes in making open world games. And it sounds like from what I've heard that it's better, but it's not great. And so that there

still is an emphasis on getting in your vehicles and driving from point A to point B, not really getting out to explore. It is more than, I was going to say, the caravans seem to be, or when just crews of cars roll by and you can upgrade your vehicles, that seems to be the one thing that they we're counting on. Have you rolled into any crazy fights? But the problem is like there's no, I mean, maybe I haven't come across the stories yet, but there's not a lot of incentive to do that. You can just dodge the caravans.

You don't really need to. And honestly, a lot of the main story missions that I've done so far, again, I'm only maybe midway through the game, but does not revolve around you having to do anything with those caravans. So other than leveling up and getting specific like, like, you can get materials and stuff to out level yourself up. So are you enjoying this because of it or because of you just, this is filling in the gap between the next other thing you're actually going to be.

get super into? No, I actually, I actually like this because it feels a little bit more paired down than a Ubisoft, the moral game. So it's not like overwhelming with the things to do. Yeah, because after a certain point, you just go, what the, what am I doing? Why am I fishing right now? Like, I don't need to fish. There is a psychotic, like,

religious cult leader out there that I'm supposed to take down, but I'm also kind of intrigued with the bass that's happening. So, like, I do like that it sparse, and it does kind of buy into that post-apocalyptic sort of world. My only real criticism of the game so far is that you just don't care about the story at all.

Yeah. The story is so generic, bad guy. The acting doesn't really, and tonally, a lot of the acting is a little weird because everything's kind of peppy. And you're like, this is a weird vibe to have. Yeah, it's very 80s cheese where a lot of the lines just said, like, for instance, when you leave your car, your car's like super happy and like, hey, see you later. Have fun out there.

Be careful. And you're like, okay. I give it the vibe you're going for. It's a lot more fun that I would think if people are like eating each other on the side of the rope. Well, that's why they put the neon colors in it this time around. Yeah. I do think it's worth pointing out a little bit of the detail

if you're not familiar with what they did with Rage 2 and even over Rage 1. There's just like so many skill trees and power. It's a lot. There's like four to six different column vendors or people that account for different skill trees. Some are focused on skill and combat. Others are survival.

And like you do get points and have to go all over the map collecting those points to do it. But just as an example, yeah. When you start, you have like what, a pistol and an assault rifle. And that's it. Pretty much, yeah. Like almost nothing. and you can jump.

Yeah, you can literally level up the guns and then also modify the guns. So it's like there's, and that's also kind of, it's a confusion factor for me. You can upgrade each gun and modify them with mods. Yeah, they have core mods. They have core mods that you come in. So you have to pick, you can make the guns stronger,

but you can also modify them. And there's just a lot of those in there to a point where it's a little confusing at times because I just got to the part where you have to, you can upgrade yourself. Oh, okay. But you've already been doing it. that but you go to a doctor like a vendor that's like a medical doctor and you'll upgrade the

court but you get you take the parts like the gland and yeah yes but that's it's a little confusing because I'm like I thought I did it with the nanotrite stuff or like what's the feldriss it is confusing like all of these games like I'd argue that destiny and division any of these that do that but but just to finish the example it is cool that so when you start out right you just have the basics and you melee someone and you slide and if you think that's all that's there absolutely not no you get you know ground pound slams you get what else you dashes, you get like a shog, you can put up barriers. There's one that's a double jump, which I think every shooting game should have a double

jump because it is a fucking game changer and it's great. And that's the point. If you level that up, by the way, spoilers, you can float in the air while you shoot people. Yes, cool. Like you can actually, if you jump up and shoot someone, it gives you another second. So if you keep shooting people, you can keep floating in the air. It's useless, but it's awesome. You can kick back grenades.

And then if you level that up, you can kick them back to the people that threw them. It's awesome. And that doesn't sound useless to me. That was the point I wanted to land on is that I think if you're going to like Rage 2, it's not for the story and it's not for the own world and some of that. It's like it's all right. It's for the chaos. When you eject yourself out of your car, which is the power you can get,

and then start shooting in people and combine it with these powers and then you get a gun where you tag someone that you can point at them with the missile that tracks it, you start playing in this really just-causy way, I think. That's what's going to make it special if you're going to be into it. But if you can't stand collecting all your points and driving around, it may not be for you. Interesting. Yeah. Jump on there, Andy.

Andy. Andy. Like, I just... Fuck, he... I encountered an... Nowadays, you get one of them, you have to get the other. I encountered an NPC the other day

that I just could not give a lesser shit about, where during the dialogue, I just wanted it to end. The best NPC, easily Rahul Koli, right? Easily Raul Koli. He's in the game multiple times. Is he really?

He's the vendor. He's the vendor. He's the doctor. But he's also a guy named Wafer Thin Jim. He's just kind of like a random guy. but I don't give a shit at all about anything that I couldn't tell you what's happening in the story I really can't and they really want to have playful NPCs like borderlands does yeah where you in borderlands I met so many characters that I wanted to talk to them and like learn more

I've I felt complete opposite with all this I'm only sticking with this game because taking over camps is really fun and the combat's great I feel like I've been spoiled by the movement in apex to where like I want it to feel like that here, but the slide doesn't feel quite right. Decent slide, though. It's okay. It's almost there. But, like, it's still, the combat again is like, they nailed everything. The ids shooting that you've, you know, grown accustomed to is fantastic.

It's like, uh, cool. It's funny. I had something else to say about it, and I forgot. Oh, no, I just made me one more point about this story stuff. I feel like too many games, days gone included. They're suffering from, it's my speculation, but now they have access to make cutscenes a lot easier. in-game, they start producing like all these story moments that make

you sit there and watch. I have a theory. And you guys tell me because it's a big one and I'm going to drop it. Kevin, throw up the Fran theory. Yeah. And I'm tired of it if it's true and your developers and publishers that are causing this. But this is completely hypothesizing. You're given a number of how long your critical path has to be.

Guess what? Once you have all of it filled out, you start thinking, how can I stretch this out? Because I'm like 10 hours behind or 3 hours behind. And you start placing cutscenes in between everything. Because I I skip all of them. Both in this game. No way, do you know how expensive it is

to do cutscenes? In-game cutscenes? No, recording audio, that's like the extent of it. In-game cutscenes, I'm talking about You're talking about not, okay, so you're not talking about a fully slaged moot-capped. I'm talking about in days gone when you stand there and you walk with someone off the path forever and in the same and many other games and it happens in this game too.

God, it's terrible. That you get a brief cutscene and then they sit at their desk and they talk to you and follow you while you talk to them for a really long time. long time. I skipped them all, honestly. After the first intro. I see what you're saying. The point of rescinded. I was with Andrea for a second. I thought you're talking about like mocaps.

No, he's talking about. No, not performing biastics. He's talking about when you have to get the backstory of a side character that you don't give a shit about. Like when you're standing at a vendor, right? A monologue about how we haven't seen that Ranger in years. And I get it. It's world building, but at a certain point that little skip button comes up, press

square to skip and I'm fucking hammering that thing. I'm like, just give me the goal. And I'm watching the show is crying and a small tier. By the way, I do. That's where I believe it's two things. One, it's temptation that now that the tools are a bit easier to make in-game cutscenes. It's tempting to put more of that stuff in and try to world build. But on the other side, I actually do worry sometimes that your critical path that you want to make it longer.

Like, how often do we say, like, why didn't you just make that? Like, Days Gone, think about it. Why don't make it a 30-hour game instead of a 60-air game? That's what I mean, I've said it before. I've beaten the drama for a long time. I think inside of Days Gone's, 50 hours, there's a great 10-hour, there's an amazing 10-hour game. Yes. But I don't even know if it's true because I think, honestly,

what it is in a lot of the days gone forced walks, forced rides where you talk to each other. The Red Dead, if you will. I think in a lot of ways people are using that nowadays because they know people skip cutscenes and they want to give you more information and they want to give you this world. And like, that's a good question. But that's the thing. Like what? There's a difference between, hey, you need to have the story beat and hey, we're holding you

hostage. Oh, I know. I'm not arguing for it at all. I'm just saying I think that's what it is. But for me, and I know everybody's different, but I just look at the gameplay and there's no gameplay there. Sure. It's just sure.

building and like I want to play the game. It's just an excuse to put another thing on your map. We can talk about the people who do it right and do it wrong, right? Like you're talking about the days gone stuff which I thought did it wrong, right? Which did hold you hostage. Here's all this stuff you do for no reason, right? There's too much repetition with the whole thing. God of war, right, is the one cut the whole time.

And like when you are walking or in the boat, like I've, I know it's a tired Greg story, but like I wouldn't get out of the boat till the conversation that was happening just for the bullshit. Those memories are the best part. Right? Like I was like, yeah. But you could get out of the boat. Yep.

And the stories were actually awesome and the performance was awesome. So that's the difference. And the cool part about that is like you would get out of the boat and he'd be like, oh, finish it another time. And then you'd back in the boat and he would finish the story. I mean, that should still happens

in fucking days gone. The amount of times when I'm having a conversation I get attacked and I pop off and I get back on it. I'm like, all right, what were you saying? I just got attacked by a fucking giant freaker bear. I just think about, you know, the heartbeat of the game sometimes

and it's like I think we get a little carried away sometimes with all the... I like story. I'm definitely less so than others, but I think we really got to look at the heartbeat of these games and be careful. Yeah.

Not to go on these long stretches or put too much in because I'm with you, man. I actually like Days Gone more than you. And I think there's an amazing 12, 15-hour game. Totally. 100%. I think they had that at their fingers. I mean, even with rage, there's the very big line that needs to be drawn between quality versus quantity. If I just get to the point where I feel like you're just feeding me quantity, that's when I start feeling like I'm wasting my time.

That's when I start feeling things that are a chore. And I don't want these games to be a chore. I want them to be a fun net. What's the next fun goal? Which brings me to my only other criticism. which is, sorry Andy. Andy threw his hand up. Andy's raising his hand.

Which was that fast travel in this game needs to be way more. Oh, really? You have more options? And it's possible that I haven't upgraded a perk yet to it. But New Dawn did something really great where they just like, let's call a spade of spade. If you discover an area, you can immediately fast travel there.

Which when you're jumping around the map as big as that is such an integral part. That's the one thing that kept me from getting bored in New Don. Was I was like, oh, well, at least I can just fast travel over that location, take a boat real quick, and I'm there. Whereas here, they want you to drive a lot. And I'm like, after the first hour of driving, like, I don't want to fucking drive anymore.

I just want to get... So I felt about horseback riding in Red Dead after 35 hours. Also, it does this really, really bad thing where when you are... And it doesn't do it enough to where I feel like it may have been like a last centicate addition to the game where when you're introduced to a character, it like does this thing where it becomes a still shot of them... With this motion graphic and it's like, this is so-and-so. He's been my friend for forever.

53 years old. Do we know the blah, blah, blah. He's got a lot coming. It does like this really crappy thing. And it does it like three times in the first 10 minutes. And then it didn't happen again for like five more hours. Where you're introduced to someone else. And you kind of forget that that's a thing that they introduced.

It doesn't happen enough. But I, it may be that it doesn't happen enough because I spent so much time doing side missions and stuff. And then you get finally to a story beat where it's like, Professor Such and such. This guy, but it's just like, oh, it's so cringy, dude. I want to go, I'm gonna YouTube those clips. It's really, really bad. And then also, the game, I'm playing on PS4 Pro. And so I don't know if...

PC sucks, fuck you, Fred, fuck it! Oh, this is a really important point. I don't know if they are, if they were really going for the goal of 60 frames per second and thus the visuals suffer quite a bit. Because this game is not really pretty at all. Like compared to a game like Doom or Wolfenstein This game is really unattractive, I think

Yeah It looks good up easy, I haven't seen it It just feels really bland and like It doesn't look sharp It doesn't feel like What it reminds me of is when I played It feels like an HD remaster Of like when you play Bioshock Infinite

From last gen and it's like you're playing it now My guess is they did shoot for the 60 Instead of the fidelity Which I appreciate it does it run well at 60 Oh yeah it runs great Yeah I haven't had any hitches or anything like that But I do feel How does it compare to Apex on PS4 Pro?

Visually? I think Apex looks much better. Much better. Yeah, but it could be a thing that, like, I've played on 4K, I've played on my 4K TV, whether it's putting out a 4K signal. I don't know. But I do think that it may be putting out at like 900p or something like that, because it just doesn't look like.

I thought on PS4 was all checkerboard anyway. Even when I'm on my monitor, my 1080P monitor, when I'm playing on my, like, desk setup, it just doesn't look like a really new game. I don't know. I'm playing on a plaza. my antennaity p. I think it looks great. So, I don't know. I have not noticed any

visual. I think it's, I thought it was pretty stunning. Far Cry looks awesome. This game just kind of looks like, like muddy, like there's a film over it. I don't know. Some of it could be the motion bar. I actually had to turn motion bar off on PC. Really? It was insane. And I have, you know, normally on a powerful computer when you have motion blur

like it can be blurry, but it doesn't make everything look blurry. This just was way too blurry for me, so I turned it off. Interesting. Maybe that's part of it, the way it's translating. It's not bad on console. It's not that bad. I've noticed the motion blurring. It's really very on a PC. For me, anyway. But I think as well, last note is that Rage 2 on, I think, PS4 and Xbox non-pro, non-X, it's 30.

Have you heard this? Of course it would be. Which makes sense. Yeah, no, the base consoles can't push a game like Rage in 60. I mean, they could. They just got to, there's so much work to be done, you know, to drive it. I don't, I honestly don't think the base PS4 could do it. Well, I mean, of course it can.

It's just they have to strip so much out to get 60 frames, you know. Right. It's possible. It just would look. There's no textures. Okay. It would just be colors. That's all you would get.

In a world of black and white. Yes, it's possible. I just don't want people to think that we don't believe that PS4 can do 60 frames. It does it with mini games, but not at this detail. Anyway, that's why you play on PC, everybody. No, that's not. Hook it up to your TV, even. Get your compact brassario.

Your Navo, Navo. Lenovo's out of here. Lanova. Corporately you, I'm telling you, man, once you get a

dual shock or an Xbox one controller connected to a console, it doesn't get any better. Yep. I was thinking

about how rage is actually hard to play on mouse and keyboard because it's not that's all I'm going to say.

Really, I was think it would be easier because the ability like that's it's so many buttons to press. Well, yeah, but everything else

is just done with like, what is it, left bumper? And a button? Not really. You've got to focus and you got

to press two buttons at once all the time. So you're constantly on the keyboard doing that. Oh really? It's pretty tricky. Yeah, it's not as easy on controllers there. Nick, thank you so much for your time and your least your impressions. Thank you, Andrea. Go back to watching your MMA YouTube videos. Heck yeah. We'll do.

Andrea. Yes, Greg. We went to lovely Santa Monica, sunny Santa Monica to play a bunch of games for Judges Week. Of course, this is pre-E3. Of course, the majority of these things all embargoed out the wazoo. Yes. However, there are a handful of games that are not embargoed out the wazoo that we want to talk about. Andrea, tell me about Rocket Arena.

So Rocket Arena was announced this week. It's being published by Nexon, and it's being created by a new studio called Final Strike Games. This is a bunch of ex-Halo devs up in Bellevue, Washington, that are making this 3V3 arena shooter. Projectiles only. Yes, but it's non-lethal. So you don't die in this game.

You just get knocked out of the arena. So it's a rocket base, and so that means not only do you shoot, rockets, but the idea of leading your shots because it's a slower firing projectile is a huge part of the gameplay. And then, of course, you get some really cool rocket abilities as well. And there's gameplay up or a trailer. Yeah, they dropped a press release this week, has some stuff up. Yeah, the beta, I believe, begins on May 23rd. Yeah, 23rd through 29. You can get in on the Nexon launcher and Steam. You can get in for the beta there. Later, it's coming, of course, to PC Xbox 1.

It's going to be cross-platform on PC and Xbox 1 at launch with PlayStation 4 currently in development that says. I definitely want to check that out. Yeah, but the idea here, right? Yeah, throw it up, Kev. Thank you. Yeah, it was really, really, really fun. It's really, really fun.

It's easy to get into, as Andrea said, 3V3. It's all five-minute matches. There's a bunch of different modes to get into, and everybody obviously has unique abilities. It looks like a C.F. Power's Rocket Arena. Yeah, so... Is that the highest rest of?

I thought that the art style reminded me a lot of Fortnite, even down to some of the fonts that they use just felt very Fortnite I mean like if you even just look at their beta like this is almost a Fortnite font 100% yeah right oh yeah it's a little fortnighty as well in style you right

so the art style is kind of like oh that's you know you guys really maybe pulls it on real engine inspiration oh yeah look at the trailer it is cut like a Fortnite trial now that you're saying it sure it's got I get it and that's their whole thing is they I mean they're going for a kid friendly vibe to it is free to play I think that's smart actually

it is to jump it does have you jumping in it as we said yeah no killing what it is basically smash bro as you see right there, that's that guy getting eliminated. When your health bar gets up, you start getting a flashing thing of you're about to, and then it's basically one more shot. It'll kick you out of the world. You'll lose a life or whatever the game mode is,

and then come back in, skating on a rocket, come back in, and get ready to fight back again. We did. So we played a couple of different modes. So the three modes that we played were... I got it as knockout? Yes.

Where you get three pips, you lose them and you lose or whatever. So you have three... It's three V3, so everyone has three badges. And then every time you go, get knocked on the arena, you lose a badge, and then the first team to lose all their badges loses, right? So the idea is you don't

want to get knocked out and lose a badge. Next one we played was Mega Rocket, which is basically capture. Yeah, so you just capture points on the map where the rocket is, you capture the rocket. And then third one was Rocket Ball. Correct. There's a, you know, there's a ball rolling around, you got to get it and then advance it to the goal. But people are shooting at you, you can lose it.

That's been like capture the flag maybe, but it does feel a lot like capture the flag. Yeah, exactly. They called it basketball meets football, but there was really no basketball element. The one thing is that you can throw it, so you can kind of shoot it, but like, whatever. Yeah. You can pass the ball between the people on your team. And so they showed us a couple different characters.

The character that I really enjoyed my most amount of time with was Amphora. Me too. So she was super cool. On the website, they say she's the pride of the undersea Crystal Reef colony, raised by a pair of brilliant scientists. Mfora has all the intelligence of her parents and unleashes fast-firing charged torpedo and devastating undersea minds. But more importantly, she can turn to water like Alex Mack.

Well, it looks like she turns into a stingray. A stingray made of water. Yeah. But if you sit there and you go, this is the sequel to Alex Mac, you can just pretend she's Alex Mac. So I might have missed this a little bit. If you mentioned, there's classes that you choose from?

It's not classes. You have individual characters. It's hero-based. So, yeah, I think it's like champions or it's like a fort. Like Overwatch. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's what I meant by that.

Sorry. But there's different characters that have specific loadouts. It's not like Fortnite or anything where everybody has a same. Correct. No, it's not like where you can interchange your inventory with the... Is there a loot?

Not that we were aware of. You find weapons on the map? No. You come in with your weapons and your abilities and use them there. Yeah, it's more like Overwatch than Fortnite gameplay. Just the art style

or reminding me a little bit more of Fortnite than Overwatch. Absolutely. Yeah, so each one has like a throwability usually or a gun ability and then a special. And so kind of, you know. You mentioned C.

thieves. I played a lot as Blastbeard as well, right? He's got an area of effect smash to get everybody away when you're trying to use the control point. Yeah, but you also have a giant charge shot for your cannon, you have a smaller cannon to do stuff. And like she's got, yeah, amphora has the mines, or the missiles that she was talking about, right?

Where you shoot them off and they actually track on their own and go after things. The charge torpedo, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other character I really liked was Isal, and so she hails from the gemstone jungle. So she's got a spear and then bolus snares. which is great because so her ability kind of closes the gap. And so what's cool about her is that if you're a more aggressive player,

you know, she can do a lot of charges and close quarters attacks. I mean, when they say it's an arena, it does feel like an arena. It doesn't feel like a map where there's like a lot of corridors and things to learn. Like you can see pretty much everybody all the time

where everybody is on the arena. You're not going to be having to go hunt your opponents down. You will see where they are. It's a little more halo arena, if you will, right? Yeah. A map design that's not too. big. I would say it's more unreal tournament. More UT. Yeah, it's meant to have you

frantically playing and going and shooting each other. It's like super fast matches. As you play, you're unlocking or you have artifacts. You're leveling up, which unlocks artifacts, which you can then apply and choose to your character. What artifacts do for you, yeah. Exactly. If they're going to make your special come quicker, if they're going to do

these different ideas, right? So there is a leveling system there. You didn't get to see much of it is what you're not really. They had a whole bunch of shit unlocked, but we weren't so you're applying it yourself. But that's the idea of keeping you coming back. things that we saw that are under embargo for a couple more weeks, I believe. I see what you did there, friends. What I really liked about the customization, because as a free-to-play game,

obviously they're going to rely on microtransactions for cosmetics in order to get people excited about making purchases in the game, just like Fortnite does. You can customize the rocket trail. So you have like this tail, right? Oh, like the Contrail? Like the comet tail kind of. the thing. And so you can customize the color of it and the style and the look

of it. They have a bunch of different costumes. Yeah, different skins for you to put on the characters stuff. Shaders. It's interesting. Weapons skins? No, I didn't see weapons skins, but I think some of the weapon skins might go along with the full costume skin, but I would have to go back and look

to be sure. I believe there is emo? I think there was stuff on that. No battle pass on that. We saw. There was nothing. Wait until you guys were like, I couldn't say. I thought I'm waiting to tread into that. I'm seeing what we saw, Franca, winked week.

Exactly. Who knows what's it? Andrew, what was your takeaway from it though? Is it a game you're going to play

at launch you think? Which is when? It was just closed beta. Yeah, we don't know when the actual launch is going to be, but I definitely will check it out.

I like that it's fast-paced. So many of these PVP-only games feel like, you know, you're constantly dying and respawn, dying and respawn. And it's just,

it gets exhausting. And I like that you don't actually die, you just get knocked out the arena so it doesn't feel like you're getting punished necessarily. And I think the modes of from what we've seen are really easy to pick up. But this is not something that I can imagine myself playing for hours and hours at a time. I think it's fun. I can see, I think there will be people who want to get in there and play for hours and hours at a time and actually get in there and grind it

out. It is when you're talking about if you're drawn to that kind of gameplay, why not Fortnite? Why not Overwatch kind of thing? I don't know if it's got from what we saw in this first taste gave me that. What it did though is 3V3 definitely was, oh man, this is going to be a party mode. Like, we have to do a party mode of this of us, hopefully getting six of us all together to play each other on it. Because it was fun, it was frantic, especially for, you know, getting dropped in and just playing a bunch of rounds as we did for like, what, 30 minutes, 40 minutes.

Like, I felt like by the end of it, I had a pretty good grasp of how to be M4, all right, and run around and do things and actually be competitive, which is something for those kind of games. Yeah, it's a, from the distance, it sounds like a pretty smart and unique mix. I like that it's sort of for everybody, that it doesn't go down this road of being ultra, you know, violent or whatever. and I think Fortnite nailed that and is a big reason for its success.

And even then, it's got real guns that sometimes parents or others are sort of concerned about. But that's Smash Brothers model the more I think about it. Like that's one of the things that made Smash Brothers special. Like you get the crappy out of you,

but you had a stock and like, it's just fun. And like when you play other fighters, even if they're, you know, different styles, like just getting knocked out or beaten up after a few rounds is pretty,

it's a little more hardcore or called professional vibe. So maybe this will have a little more of that just like fun arcadey get in, get out. But with a skill gap, you do still need a skill gap in it. For sure. But that's why, like, honestly, when I go into Fortnite on PC in particular, but any of these platforms,

an Apex is the same. Like, people have gotten so good. Yeah. And part of it is the style of gameplay. So I'm kind of curious if this maybe can keep it from going too far to the end of the skill gap. Although that's, again, arguably, what attracts a lot of players

is when you can go really high and be really good at it. I think it's one of those that there's going to be the dedicated who want to get in there are going to have strats that allow them to actually fucking own a map, but I don't think they'll be unbeatable strats. Hopefully it does. I mean, Smash Brothers has that.

Like, there's just player too incredible. When I was playing as Amphora in the 3V3, you know, stock lives match, I felt like, oh man, I'm doing a great job here and I saw other people being Blackbeard, whatever I call, blast beard. And I was like, oh man, I want to try him in the next one. And the next one was the, you know, capture control points thing. And like, at first I was like, oh, I'm getting

worked. They're shooting faster than me. They're dealing more damage. But then when I figured out the AEO attack, right? That was like, oh, how to clear people from the zone, keep my team in and actually go with it. I could see where you can actually have a strat there. If you wanted to get that deep into it with your three of like, all right, cool, it's this kind of thing.

I'm going to run Blastbeard. You run this. You know how to do that. We'll see that. I want in on it. You said around May 20th. May 23rd is the start of the beta. Third. That's soon. Next week. Yeah. It's on PC. So there you go. Yeah.

Loser. Andrea. Yes. After we played the new splinter cell, we went off to independent game. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Damn, I kidding. I don't know. Pretty sad. Now if we ever do break an embargo, was I really breaking the embargo? Yeah, fucking Ubisoft. So as you recover like that and you'll never know. Nobody knows, you know what I mean? Now, we went to the independent game night, right?

One of my favorite ones at judges where basically all the Indies get together and like, listen, we can't afford one of these expansive hotel rooms. Here's a place for you to drink a bunch of beer and play a bunch of games. We go, yeah. Some of those games are embargoed. However, you and I took the internet by storm playing supermarket streak. We sure did. Of course, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you're familiar with Supermarket.

market shriek. It was in the original Kind of Funny Games showcase back in December. And the idea, of course, is that it's a person and a goat in a shopping cart that yell and their voices propel them through the maze, basically, right? The track of obstacles to get you to the finish line inside of a supermarket. However, Fram, we've seen it before, and we've understood, of course, your right, your right, your right, you know, your right, your right, you're right, you know, your right, you're right, you know, you're right, and that you hold the thing and that'll push out the sound and that it's, think of it like you have two jets, right? So if you only use one jet, you can then turn whatever direction

that jet's pushing you on the side of the car. Or like you're in a canoe. Or a canoe, I guess, sure, if you think like that, right? However, what makes the game super interesting. Can you bring up another trailer while we talk about it too? Yeah, I would love to get, I'm like a little lost on. And this is the way we will play it for party mode. We will play it. And you and I got,

the way Angie and I did is that, of course, you don't have to use the controller. You can plug in microphones and just shriek. And scream. So it'll sign the microphone to the right of the left and then you get to go. Oh, it was great. That's pretty hilarious. I love that. My wife was telling me

because she was there working. So you can see on each of the sides the right or the left side the audio bar. And you turn by screaming. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like sensitive.

So if you're using the controllers here on the audio bars, right, for your shoulders, you can just give it a little bit of juice or a lot of juice. But if you want to yell in yourself, there you go.

So you see, this is actually an interesting one. This is an earlier build, I think, because the build we were playing, correct me if I'm wrong, Andrea, had far more pronounced

like audio waves coming off the people. So you saw, and the goat. Wait, I got an idea, Kevin. Yeah. Can you replay that? Or just what are the gameplay, just so we can see the gameplay.

I was like, can you guys show me what it might sound like? Yeah, so there you can see it there. The audio waves coming off. Yeah. But what would you be doing right now? You don't even have to do that. You have to do that. Go to Twitter.com slash game over Gregie.

Oh, yeah, we can find it. Game Informer had the exclusive. We gave them the rights that they could put up the exclusive clip there. And we did there. Greg was just going, eh. Why? Because initially when I saw, started going,

ah! It was too loud. Like everyone in the room up there. I was talking to Jen about it last night at dinner because she was there working creature in a creature in the well. And she was like, yeah, no, when you were doing that,

everybody, it was like, that's your husband, huh? And she's like, yeah, that's my husband. That's what he does. Keep scrolling. But I was making, I was making goat noises. There is, there is. You just passed it.

There is, yeah. Imrah. Oh, you were there with Imrah. Yeah, I'm breaking the news over there. Are you able to hear? Maybe is the sound turned up on the TV? Don't worry if not, Kev. They can,

They can pretend. Here comes. Here comes. Kevin's prepping it. Here we go. What a professional. Two, one. No sound.

No sound for us. There we go. So this is after I started dialing it down. Party mode. I'll be fucking yelling and doing it. It's your house. You can do it. And there you go.

One star. That's what we got on it because it's hard. It's really hard. It's really hard. But here's the thing. It's fun. It reminds me of somewhere between overcooked goat simulator and Octodad.

Right. where part of the fun and the challenge is the fact that this is a far-from-precise control scheme. And then it's the overcooked method of working together. And you didn't go. You know what I mean? And then with the microphones, I couldn't communicate. I was the only one playing on a mic because the other mic wasn't working.

So, Andrew would be like, do this, do that. And I was like, I can't tell you what to do. I need you to do. Because if I do, it'll really go. It's part of a challenge, right? If you talk, it'll like screw it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So I don't know how it's going to work for single player by using a microphone because yeah I don't know if it can right with independent I think you maybe have to use the trigger

streamers you need a way to mute that you know no you want that you want that every time you talk to chat yeah exactly

yeah but like it's it was a dumb fun game it is and that's what I think I don't think they're looking for anything else from it

right as in terms of what it is but I like that the you know the first ones we did Andrea right were all right all right cool

you're going through the shopping or the supermarket and it's basically like bumper bowling right where you're just hitting the size

and no big deal and you get corrected and you go. Whereas later ones were, all right, now there's axes swinging back and forth. There's this fire hazard. There's these things that are propelling you up in the air. There's a super hot level and the world only moves when you shriek. So it's like, it's cute and it's fun.

From the taste of it, I think it goes, when I saw it for a showcase and I'd seen it, I think just in video form, it was that question of, ah, what a cute idea. Is it something you'd want to play for a length of time? No. I think watching it, like, I think that levels progress enough that I do think it's going to be, in the same way I would

overcooked for Joey and I or Poe and I right where it's like cool we did it well I mean we only got two stars I bet we can perfect that better because I screwed up here and I shouldn't do this and yet yeah and go back and do it again and then the next level keep getting harder and challenging and doing these things I think over time there's a lot there to go through and play so it's funny it's definitely funny

it'll be an interesting one Andrea yes Sionara Wild Hearts was there did you play this did not not my thing I won't yeah I've talked about in games cast before yeah it's the one that's like a concept album. I watched the demo I didn't play it. It was the same demo I played back around GDC or whatever. Still

super high for that game. Still think it's a super cool cool indie music album with cool party mode pinks and purple. It looks cool. Shooting and kicking and getting hearts and sush. Do we know around when it comes out? No, I still don't think they have anything closer than that. You know how these indies are? One of those. One of these things. Well, get it when we get it. You know what I'm saying? No, but you did play

The Sojour. Yes. Tell me about the Sojourn. So I started playing this game. So this is a first person puzzle game being published by Iceberg Interactive and the name of the dev is escaping my mind right now and I don't have my I had to handwrite notes for this one because I didn't bring my laptop with me to the independent evening but I started shifting tides shifting tides shifting tides that's it I started playing and then the sojour the problem with playing a puzzle game at a event with so many people around the guy screaming to be a goat behind you everybody wants to backseat

game you too and so no and I was like I hate that and I got to I got fostered because so many people were like, no, try this or go here. And so I just, I put the controller down. I was like, you know what? You go ahead. No one plays it now. So Seimer picked it up, picked up the controller. And I sat down next door and watched her play.

And we ended up working together a little bit. But it's a really. You started screaming out of no go over there. Did not. Dude, I can't wait for one of the games we played that was co-op for the Embargo to lift because I was doing another demo, Fran. And I took off my headphones and I tweeted it. But I heard from the other side, what was it?

It was like, God damn it was Andrea. God damn it helped me. And Stimer, let's come over here. I said stop yelling at me because Stimer kept yelling at me. Because it was a co-op game that you really have to work together on. And like we just, we were having, we had a rough go. Then we ended up doing really well. We were one of the only people to get us far in that demo.

Very nice. The people next was gave up. Really? Wow. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited. But anyway, I don't want to accident until I talk about that game. No, no. I mean, McAfree did it?

No, no, IG for the win. Did you get to? No, we'll talk about it. I know. No, it was right when Sam Fisher came back and was like, it's your turn, kid, toss me in the goggles. Pee-o-you. So the Sojourn is a game about lightness and dark.

And so that's a puzzle game where you shift between the light mode and the dark mode and certain puzzle elements will show up in each mode. And so in order to shift the mode, you walk through the level and you'll see these little flames on like the walkway. And so you step into the flame and then it shifts to the dark mode. When you're in dark mode, there's a meter attached to how long you're in the mode for. If you're standing still, the meter doesn't move. But as soon as you start to move, the meter starts to go down.

And so you have to use the meter to strategically position yourself throughout the level to find out, like, so if I'm in dark one and a bridge appears, like, okay, how many steps is it going to take for me to get over to that bridge and cross the bridge before the bridge disappears underneath me, right? Got it. Is it isometric 2D? No, it's first person. Oh, it's first person. Yeah, first person 3D. And there's another... Gives off witness vibes in terms of a glance and it's a puzzle game.

Obviously, the mechanics are very different. Very different, yeah. So there's also a swap element. So you see these statues, almost like pieces of art throughout the level. And when you're in dark mode, you can swap places with them. So when you swap, the statue will move to where you are and you will move to where the statue was in the level. So you can use that to help solve puzzles because there's a lot of, some of the later levels that we played,

you have to position those statues in very specific spots on the map in order to progress. And so it's this puzzle of like, how do I swap it around the map in order to get it into the right spot? And then also keeping in mind this like light and dark mode and how that affects the world. And so they layer in more puzzle elements on top of it. I asked about the narrative of the game. It's like, you know, so what's happening with the story here?

And they said there's really like no structure. It's designed to be metaphorical. It's designed to be up for. interpretation, like any piece of art. If you go into a museum and look at a piece of art, everyone's going to interpret what that art means differently. And the game makers really wanted to kind of put that emphasis in the narrative of this game.

I thought that was kind of cool. Yeah, for sure. And the dark side. Got it. Exactly. It's exactly what it's about for you. Sojourn means a temporary stay, I guess. I didn't know that.

I don't know if that's the intention of that. I mean, it makes sense. I know that word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's off to them. They know what I mean.

It was cool. Great. And then the final one. one that we can talk about now, the creature in the well. Yes. So I had not heard anything of this game. Full disclosure. I've heard a lot about it.

Jean-V. Saint-Tong-Milleire was the one doing the demo. She propagenda represents this. And if that wasn't enough of a reason for disclosure, it's made by flight school, the people who hired me to do the crab game back in the day. So like, there you go. Don't listen to me if you don't want to about it. But yeah.

So I didn't know anything about this crab game. But I saw a couple other people playing this game. And I was really intrigued by the art style. So there's these two guys, Adam and Bo. Bo is the coder, I believe, and Adam's the art guy. That's correct. And the art is heavily inspired by the creator, the artist of the original Hellboy comics.

And so it does have this very comic booky kind of style to it. So it's top down, isometric, 2.5D. And it's an action-adventure. sort of. Pinball breakout. It's the pinball action game. We've talked about this in Washington. Creature in the Well.

On Gamescast once before when the trailer hit. Yeah. So we've talked about it. Yeah, yeah. No, it was not even that. Tim played it at Nindy's at GDC. And he talked about it. That was the reveal.

It's not top secret. Creature and the Well announcement trailer. Yeah, so here's the announcement trailer for people watching on YouTube. And I really enjoyed the combat because it built upon the difficulty without being,

oppressively difficult. And so you play as this robot, botsey. You're inside this mountain that is a weather machine that's causing this sandstorm by this creature and this creature is trying to keep its dominance over these town people. It's like the loose narrative. The general was explaining to me. And so you have this sword and you hit these what look like tennis balls almost into these bumpers that look like pinball bumpers throughout the world to charge up your attacks and use them to attack enemies. And I mean, I really loved this game.

And so I was really excited to hear. It's coming to Nintendo Switch. I think it's a perfect game. And it's also coming to PC. And then they have another platform announcement happening at E3. Yeah. Again, you know,

take over the grain of salt what I say. But I'll start from this point is that I played an early, early demo of Creature. And I was like, I don't really like it. It wasn't anything like it. I was like,

I don't get it based on any of this. And then playing it now months and months and months later of what it is. is and where it is. I was like, oh shit, this is fun and I like it. And I do like the way it's progressing. Because originally I was having trouble wrapping my head around, aiming the balls, new and stuff. But again, like pre-alpha demo, right? Like super early. Whereas this one they've come so far in terms of, I think from the get-go, it's easier to understand when you get

in there of taking these motes of light, right? Bouncing them around, taking out of the walls, aiming them correctly. He doesn't know what that means for end. I do. You said, destiny nerds. I do know what it means. Nerds. But being able to hold it, direct it, be able to charge all of. He's no longer a destiny player. Fake fan. When you're a guardian, you're a guardian for life. That's what they said. I'm not.

I'm not sure, sure. What's your light level after? I don't know. Don't even know. He's still got the terminology out. You're definitely. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

I listen to Peter Dinklage all the time. Oh, no. It was still a good memory to go back to. There's a good one. It was a good one. So yeah, creature in the well. Interesting. I'm looking forward to it now, actually.

It actually turned the corner from me. Now that you guys have played more and seen it a couple of times, is the core of the gameplay mostly a pinball eskman? mechanic or is it more fighting the enemies? It is mostly a pinball ass. I mean, the demo wise. Batting into stuff and there's a lot of things coming and dodging.

It's almost like a shooter in some ways. Actually, there is a lot of bullet hell mechanics in the game as well, particularly in the boss fight. So you have two basic attacks. You have just a regular swing where you'll hit these orbs or balls into other into enemies. And then you have a charge attack. So once you get.

So you saw maybe in the trailer there that there'll be multiple orbs on screen so you can charge up and kind of like grab them all and like this magnetic fin that you can hit them all at once and I'll send all of them flying. Some of the rooms are timed right. There's a bunch of different panels

you need to knock down but if you were to go one by one they'd reset and come back up so you need to charge them up, go out, hit them all down. And then on top of that you saw in the trailer too like the red lines will start to appear like and it'll like crisscross like a top of a delicious pie. And then it'll set the orbs on fire which will make them more powerful as an attack.

And the lattice will hurt you, right? If you get dodged that, you're dodging that. Yeah, exactly. Seems cool. Yeah, no, there's a lot of cool stuff going on, of course. Flight school, now working on, I guess, their second best game, because, of course, Island Time VR, a much better game with a better voice cast. There's no voices in a creature.

I didn't hear any voice in a video. I think so. I mean, maybe they'll hit me back up to voice the creature. There, there it is. You know what I mean? You've got a couple of ins. Or the goats sound. Getting out.

No judge is weak because I think it's. That's pretty much where the embargoes end, right, Andrew? Unless you wanted to talk about after party. Oh shit, I forgot about after party. Right. Kevin had after party the list there. Yeah, after party the demo there. I talked about after party last week, right, on this show of games for 2019. I was super excited for it.

And after party made my list. It made the list based on the trailers, the, obviously the pedigree of the studio. And then the voice cast, right? Like, you know, Janita being in it, Ashley being in it, Alana being in it. Yeah, she's the main character. I still had never played it, though. So I had never actually played it. I'd just seen stuff.

So that was, this was my first time to sit down with the demo that I think it's the same demo that's been around forever. I think it's a GDC demo. Yeah. Beer pong, right, to try to get up into the party at hell and stuff like that. And man, not only, I was already on my list based on everything I just said, but actually playing it and getting into it, it's even higher, I think on my list because even though, what was the last game from them?

The name, always escaped. Oxen free. Thank you. Oxen free didn't click for me in the way I wanted it to. I enjoyed it fine, but I didn't think it was crazy. Yes, this is what it looks like. Exactly. This one is already there with the humor, the setting, the story.

I'm way more involved, of course, with these two kids that have been sent to hell. They don't think they're supposed to be there yet. And through the course of this demo, they're working on how to get out of hell or figure out. They have to beat the devil in a drinking contest. They have to out party the devil who parties every night, right? But it was that you go in there and you go to the bar and it's all conversation based, at least from what we've played, right? So, like, you go there and you're talking to people and there's different choices which lead to different options. There's a couple like mini games.

That's right. Oh, we get to, yeah. When you get to the bar, though, you can order drinks, and the drinks give you different abilities and give you different options or whatever. Do they always talk in tweets? No, no. This is just, this is like as you know. This is the demo I played.

This is the demo I played. Yeah, the style and the animation and the lighting is really cool. But then, yeah, so the drinks give you different abilities, which give you, or different conversation options, which then can get you into different parts of the game or whatever. But then here, what's going to go on in this demo is that you go and play beer pong, which is one of those mini games, right? Yeah, where you're throwing it. And as you drink, the screen starts, you know, getting more and more shaky and it's harder

to play the game of getting your beer thing. Seems like a Tim Schaefer game in some ways. Totally. No, 100%. Yeah, you can see that 100%. Yeah. Is it funny at all? Hellelous.

Yes. That's the whole point of it, right? Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Yeah, because it's night's cool, right? And I mean, that is, I think even Oxen Free, like that was one of the big things about it for me. And that's where I think oxen free for me just got weird at the end where it was

just like, with the, I like, I liked them interacting and talking to each other. And then when they started adding in the really super weird stuff, supernatural stuff. I don't know if I needed it in this, in this game. about being a teenager or whatever in this but in yeah totally I'm very I got a little confused it is night school and flight school yeah night school flight school

you know when this is coming out anyone I think for our after thought it was late 2019 give it a Google real quick I forgot let me see on my notes of course well it's because they're all indies they're not they're not fucking tied to anything you know these people frame they're not even they're like oh I don't know we're still working on it that's normally the answer

there was one of the games we saw that was coming out summer but I can't remember which one that was you pre-order it was creature Creatures trailer I did with the Summer didn't. Sounds right. It's not like usually it'd be on the front of it. Go to the store. Is it right there Kevin? The store? Probably not. I think it's

2019. That's it. I don't know. Don't worry about it. I just always, you know, I'm always thinking about that. No sweat. You're probably right that they don't have it yet. I don't think, I mean, I think it's just on Steam. What do you got from me from Steam? And it does not seem to

have a release date. You're right. These Indies, man. There are no rush to do anything. You know what I mean? That drives me crazy. All those resources. I mean, come on. Put them to good use. I'm looking.

Even all my things here? No. Did Creature in the Wellhead release day, by the way? The trailer we just watched. I think summer 2019. That was it. That's right. That was a summer game, wasn't it?

Yeah. The trailer we just watched that summer 19. So then getting out of Judges Week because now we're officially abargo and everything. You know what I mean? That's all I can say. It's an embargo frame.

Don't twist my arm. Don't break my arm. Let me ask you this. Is there an embargo day you can say it's coming out? Dude, there's so many of our days. No. There's so many fucking You can't even say.

No. It's a pretty... Most of them are during the week of E3. There's a few drips. The deluge is the week of E3 when the show starts. No, like most of them are like when the show proper starts. Like after the conferences.

And ninth is when things start to really heat off that week. Yeah. So Tuesday the 11th is day one. Officially of E3 first day. But the conferences and stuff. Okay. So on the way to judges week, Fran Mirabella. You know what, actually?

You got in a challenge with. the devil. No, I wish, man. I started a little game called, what? Is there a sponsor read that we should maybe do? That's what you saw, you saw my gear click. You saw my guy. On the way to Judges Week, I played a little game called American Fugitive. You don't say. And I'll tell you about that after a word from our sponsors. Today we're brought to you by Robin Hood. Robin Hood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptos all commission free. While other brokerages charge you up to $10 for every trade, Robin Hood doesn't charge any commission fees. So, you can trade stocks and keep all of your profits.

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movement so you never miss the right moment to invest. Robin Hood is giving listeners of the kind of funny games cast a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help you build your portfolio. Sign up at greggie.robinhood.com. That's greggie.com. Played, started a game called American Fugitive. So what I'll say is I'm super, super early in it. But this is what I do usually is I get people all the time on my email. Hit me up right with the, okay. Hey, we got this game. You want a code or whatever? I take the code. I put on the thing. I play it. on a flight and I'm like not for me okay I get it I don't know blah blah blah American fugitive I was like I was actually talking to them it was curved digital right

I'm talking to them about another game I think for the showcase like hey we got this other game coming up coming out on May 21st for PS4 and PC May 23rd for the Nintendo Switch do you want to code it's called American fugitive I was like seems like an interesting name sure took it downloaded it started and it's one of those that I played out maybe all of 30 minutes on the end of my LA flight because those flights are so early and it's one that's now been sticking my brain like I got to get back to that the idea here is a imagine a throwback

to classic GTA but with more modern stylings so it's that top down you are a guy who's been I wrote down his name

right yeah Will Riley you've been accused of the murder of your father Kevin if you can throw up a trailer for this American

fugitive yeah I was watching yeah it's telling you this narrative and stuff because Fran knows he's faster than you can just get it done

you know what I mean I mean I would like to see it on the television Kevin you know he's going through his impressions and so you can see it here it's got this like top down look You see him carjacking right here, running against the cops.

You have this star meter down there. You have a health thing over there. And I think this is what I saw, which got me interested in it. So I'm like, okay, sure, let's do more GTA, right? But then jumping into it, it does a bunch of different interesting things where, sure, you've been accused by murder. That's awesome. But immediately when I was playing it, it's like you're running around in this open world, if you're watching right now, you know, top-down, elevated style here. It very much looks like GTA here.

It's slightly tilted full 3D. Right, right, right. But like there was, I went to the house. Like it was, the thing wakes up and it's telling you a story and like giving you dialogue choices of like just like the guy's face talking to his dad's face. You know what I mean? Like the words there and yeah. But then it was like, all right, come to my house. And when you go to the houses and like you can break in this open world, you can run and break into houses.

You can do you come up on the houses, right? And it's like, do you want to peek in the window? And you can like peek in the window. And it doesn't show you. It just says what you see or what's going on or whatever. And then when you break into the house or enter the house, what happens is you don't go in as a. a character, you get like the blueprint and then like in this like, I don't even know, adventure style. It's like a mini game almost. All it is just, this is not exactly, but you get the house pop up and

you say what room you want to go in and it'll just show you, it'll just like light up that room that you're in that room now. It's like, do you want to search? You can search. When you run into people in there, like where I was playing, like I broke into some lady's house, I went into a room. She was there. And so it pops up and it's like, do you want to intimidate or do you want to flee? Like it's like all these interesting choices on top of it. It's like a layer, it's a new layer to a GTA game because of course back in those days, right, we weren't going into the buildings.

It's not the same, but it's almost reminded me of like, obviously when Bioshock added in their little pipe puzzles but it's like a different layer in there. Yeah, it's taking you. You're sort of playing this mini game, but there's, this has got dialogue within it, which is interesting. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You're going through. So I'm super early in it, but I'm really anxious to get back to it. It looks cool. Yeah, I like, I mean, I loved the original GTAs. Like, you know what I mean? I remember, you know, being a huge GTA2 fan. Me and my friends play that nonstop.

Terrible game now, though, huh? Of course, yeah. Just bare bones that game. Now, but that's why this one's interesting, right? Of giving me a narrative I'm interested in of this guy trying to figure out who really killed his father, then this interesting world choice stuff in there. I put out more information from it, right? Like, yeah, May 23rd on Switch, May 21st, PS4 and Xbox.

And... So we know... Hold on, what are you going to do at trophies? May 21st, PS4 and PC. May 23rd, Nintendo Switch, and May 24th, Xbox 1. I left that off, sorry. It's Fallen Tree Games. The original, it's originally two guys.

Now it's five people. The two studio founders have extended AAA backgrounds, including Timeswitters Crisis, black and golden light, 007 reloaded. This is something like X Rare and what was the name of the Time Plurter Studio. It'll come to me later.

This is what happens when you've been doing. This is long you had thousands of developers. Dude, today I couldn't remember the turbographics. Like, that's how much information is in my head. Now I'm like, fuck, bonk. Where was Blunk on? You know what I'm going to be? That's good people.

That, you know, the games out for full next week. Hopefully I'll get the chance to play more of it on this Florida trip on the flights. Free radical design. Free radical. I was wondering, is it David and... David Doke? Is that who went on to do this? I think they would have named them, right?

That's a name name. But I don't know. Whatever the case. Looking forward to playing more and I'll get back to you more on the next game cast I'm on, which I don't think is next week. Andrea. Yes, Greg. You were playing Dauntless. Yes.

So I won't spend too much time on this because I did a full preview for the third segment of what's good games this week. Where can I get them? You can get it on the services where you download the kind of funny gamescast. You can get it on podcast or at YouTube.com slash what's good games. And so I talk about it there for about 30 minutes because I did a really deep dive preview. I went over to the Phoenix Lab studio. It's down in San Mateo just down the road. Got to meet some of the satellite team that's there because they have two studios.

They have the one here and then the bigger studio, which is up in Vancouver. So they've got about 100 people that have been working on Dauntless. And so for people who have not heard anything, Dauntless is an action combat game in the hunting action genre. So essentially this is their take on Monster Hunter. Hell, yes. And I first saw this game and played it at Pax South 2016. Oh, wow.

So wow. Yeah, and it's come a long way since then. So it was in closed alpha and then it was in closed beta and then it was in open beta. And now their launches next week, May 21st on Xbox 1, PS4 and PC on the Epic Game Store specifically. they haven't detailed their crossplay plans just to say that they are going to do crossplay which I thought was super exciting because that would have been really helpful

when playing Monster Hunter World and so it's four player co-op or you can do single player matchmaking if you prefer and you play a Slayer and Slayers live for the hunt you are a silent protagonist but you do get to customize the character creator is fantastic

there's a ton of options to choose from they don't do a gender system They do more of a masculine and feminine body type, but then you can kind of mix and match feature sets. You can really make your character gender fluid if that's your bag. And so I thought that was really cool that they had so many customization options

in the character creator. I had specifically asked about freckles because I couldn't find the freckle option and they're like, and they like had one of the artists send a screenshot. They're like, it's in there, it's just not in the builder plane. I love with that.

And I was like, that's so cool. Meanwhile, division can't even make red hair for you. That's the difference between getting to see a game at the studio, right? So it was really fun for them to invite me over. The art style I wrote looks like a mashup between Sea of Thieves and Fortnite.

That was the biggest thing for me is when I got an email about, I remember I couldn't do the demo, but I looked into it at the time. And it was like, this is interesting. Just at a glance, it looks really pretty and it looks different. Kevin, can you bring this one up, don'tless? It's like, okay, like I'm interested in this.

So I'm glad, oh, I want to hear more. You liked it, though, right? Yes. So I spent about 60 minutes playing. a couple different hunts in the game where they showed me a couple of the newer behemoths that they're introducing.

So there's 20 distinct archetypes of behemoths in the game and each distinct archetype has a lesser version, a dire version, and a heroic version which is like their end game content. And so each of those different versions of the behemoths, of course, come with different armor sets,

different weapon classes. There are six different weapon classes. They have a sword, an axe, a hammer, chain blades, a repeater, which is dual guns. and then the war pike. So you've got the great sword on the player on screen here. And take that.

Yeah, so I mean, it's very much like the combat is very Monster Hunter. You know, you have to dodge and roll. Dodge and roll. And I don't mean this is an insult as we watch it, right? But it seems like the HUD's more forgiving. It's less involved than Monster Hunter. Is that correct? So one of the things that attracted me to the gameplay style of this is that it felt a lot more

approachable in its RPG and combat systems. than Monster Hunter. I played 75 hours of Monster Hunter World, and I know that's scratching the surface for diehard Monster Hunter players. But after 75 hours, I should have had a firm grasp on all of the systems,

and I didn't. There were still plenty of crafting systems and things that I never even touched in my play-through, and I never looked back, and that was something that was really exciting to me about really diving into Dollis, is that there is a deep progression system,

but it's not overly complicated, which I appreciated. It's free to play. You got nothing to lose. Exactly. And so they have a guild system. You can do 100 players per guild, which is cool. And then they're doing expanded social systems and guild rewards coming later in the summer.

They have armor crafting, of course. There's like a whole cell system. The biggest takeaway I had with the armor system, which was like mind-blowing for me, is that they have transmogrification in the game. Oh, wow. Because whenever you talk about a system or a loop grind that has a heavy cosmetic element to it, transmog is super important because otherwise why are you, grinding for a gear set that maybe you're going to

out level in a couple hours of gameplay. I talked to them about destiny. It hurts my heart that I can't wear some of the cool armor sets I've gotten in destiny. For those who don't know what transmogging is. Oh, yes. So transmogrification transmogging is when you get to take a piece of gear the cosmetic of it and keep the way it looks,

but then you take another piece of gear and kind of strip the stats away from that gear and put it into the cosmetic piece you want or vice versa. You can think about it. Yeah. So you get to look cool, but stuff. They'll have the abilities of this other item.

And it's been like a big combo thing for a long time, obviously. Exactly. I mean, yeah, it's been like, it's a standard feature in MMOs. And it just hasn't been in a lot of these live service games. And I don't know how difficult it is to build it into your RPG or your armor progression system, but I would just love to see it in more games. It's great that it's in there. So, yeah.

So, I mean, it looks cool. Obviously, because it's free to play, there are microtransactions. But it's emotes, dyes, armor cosmetics. You could also get all of those for, they will drop on hunts as well. And depending on the level of hunt and your score, because they have a ranking system, like an E through S, so E-D, C-B-A-N-S.

So how well you do on the hunt, how many potions you take and things like that. Oh, you're ranked in each hunt. Yes, each hunt has a rank. And then they have unlimited inventory slots in Ramsgate. So you have limited slots, which you can take on the hunt with you because obviously you can't, like, take 100 grenades with you

is the example I used in what's good. But your, like, stash in the world, old is like, they're not going to put restriction. And I was like, yes. I know you only played a little bit of it. Like, how long is a hunt? Is it super involved? Depends on the level of the behemoth that you're fighting and how many people are with you, right?

So if you're taking on, you know, one of these heroic behemoths by yourself, it could take you, you know, probably 45 minutes or more because it has the same hunt mechanic of you have to go out into the world, look for signs and for indications of where they are, like other birds like flying up somewhere. It's like is the behemoth over there. And there's a flare system. So when you're playing co-op with people, you can look up into the sky. And they have customizable flares.

Nice. For the sky. And I was like, that sounds so awesome. All right. That's neat. I'm interested. Like I said, it's free to play. So it's going to literally cost you nothing if you like the hunting action genre.

And any of this sounds intriguing to you. It comes out next week. Awesome. Yeah. One interesting thing from the devs they were talking to Casey DeFries over at IG. Who's like a huge monster on a fan. and I believe likes this game as well. But they were saying that when Monster Hunter came out,

they're like, oh, crap. Because you're free to play. You don't have maybe the deeper, you know, sort of polish in systems that's something like that has. Well, they don't have the budget of Capcom. Yeah, they don't have it. And the marketing and everything,

they're like, oh, no. But as it turns out, this genre isn't, like, widely spread. And like, if you like Monster Hunter, there's not a lot else out there that's quite like it. And so what they found was on weekends, the first week, it kind of went down

the player base of the beta players. But then the weekends, there notice and people were coming back in more droves, that it actually seems like a really good example of when you make a free to play based on some other games like this, that the community is getting bigger at large because there's more to play. And I just thought that was a really positive side that you don't, you know, hear as much. Like sometimes you think that these big AAA games eat everybody else's lunch.

But it sounds like it's been a good thing for Daltless, and it's just going to grow the player base. And the live service features that they're implementing, I detail more in the what's good games preview. if you guys want to hear about like the hunt pass and what that means and like their public roadmap. It sounds like they're designing this around like daily quest, weekly quest,

trying to get people into that, that grind to get them back into the game, you know, on an ongoing basis, which Monster Hunter does not do. Awesome. I'm really interested. Good job, Andrew. Thanks for doing your on the field reporting.

You can already tell us one of those games. I'll be like, I'd love to play that. I don't know when I'm going to do that. I never got to Monster Hunter. Exactly. Because where are we going to find the time as we close out the show here, talking about the division fucking two.

As we record this, we are mere hours away from going and doing the Raider for the first time. Andrea is running with what's good team. Fran and I run with the kind of funny games team. I figured we should have a little bit of talk here. You know, what are we getting into? What are we ready for? How are we feeling about this? So I am a little nervous.

Based off what I've seen so far, it looks like you really have to min-macked your specific pieces of gear towards specific types of enemies, mostly like elite damage bonus. is. The world's first on PC happened in about five hours. That's how long it took them, right? Right. But I think it actually did, what I thought was for some reason they were,

it took them much longer to get it done. But maybe they didn't start until later. Anyway, I walked that. I saw the screencaps say five and a half, like $5.20. Yeah, you know what? I didn't see the screenshot until like 15 hours after it went live and I think they just didn't tweet it out maybe or something. Yeah, division didn't say any official till

today. But it was a very long time. I thought we were going to hear early was the point. And as of recording the show, there is not a console clear yet. Yeah. A team of all console players have not done it yet. Tonight. Tonight. What's good. Yeah. So like you talked about like from what you've heard. What's, I've, I haven't watched

the trailer for the raid. I haven't watched any of the streams for the raid. I know nothing about the raid. Like, where are you guys at? I'm blind. I'm blind as well. No spoilers. Yeah, I haven't looked at anything visually. I've just been like looking in you know, our Discord and we have like our PS. And

chat going and kind of us talking about like how we're going to prepare with gear, but I haven't looked at what the raid looks like at all. That's the best part about raids. I watched the trailer, which was fine. It didn't really spoil anything except for the location. I don't know where it is. Yeah, I'm not going to tell you. Not going to tell you.

Mars? But that's the best part about a raid for me is playing it blind. And frankly, that's why I was very upset when I heard that it was days away from this new reset, getting everyone together. They just sprung it on us. They said it was going to come the week after. And then they're like, just kidding. It's in three days.

It was like this hurry up and wait. We've got to get title update three done. We want to make sure everything's right and we'll let you know to hurry up and get together this Thursday. Or, and this is where I'm going with it, I'm very sensitive to like, and thankfully it hasn't gone that way,

but all the professional streamers and game folks who play all day, they get it done. Then the spoilers are out. Then the YouTube videos are up on the best strats and people start coming in. Then you eventually too, it's hard to get together teams,

which we'll talk about more, I think, here. And then you have people on your team who've watched videos and they're like trying to pretend. Maybe if I just pull this lever and she go, oh, there I win! And they start saying, well, you might not want to use a sniper there.

And it's like, what? Like, stop it. Like, I just want to experience this, experiences for myself. I would have also loved to try for worlds first, but it was just too short a time. You can try for PS4 World First. No one's taking the title yet.

But actually, that is awesome that it's still potential. I don't know that Greg's gonna stay up for 14 hours. Fuck you. Why are you blaming me? I'm not blaming you. I'm trying to win it, motherfucker. No sleep till world's first. I was hoping you're going to be the...

I thought you were going to be the guy that's like, I got to call. And then I can be like, yeah, that's too bad. I guess we gotta go. We were down in LA or Santa Monica for Judge's Week. And so I turned to Jen and like, all right, we need to have a serious conversation. She already knew what it was about.

I was like, I know we joke about the Division 2 being a burden on a relationship a lot. But now it really is. Friday I need to just raid. And I need, she's like, no problem. I'll go off for drinks. I told John Friday and Saturday are both raid days. Yeah, yeah.

Like both. But anyway, it's very special to do stuff blind. So I really just encourage the community, be respectful to that, let people have their moment. Don't do any light spoilers. Oh, it's kind of like this. It always happens. There's this, I call it human nature. Unfortunately, there's something about this entitlement of just having information.

You can't stop sharing it. But I hope that doesn't happen. We're gossipers as a species. It's tough. But I had a question. Is this going to be your first raid, Graham? No, I've done Destiny. He raided with us in Destiny.

Oh, but have you done like when they first release and all that? Do we did, was I, did I join you right away with Destiny? It was pretty, it was so when we did. We still didn't know things I remember because it was like, I mean, we did. I remember when we, it was the one with the goblin dude and when it was that thing of like jumping into the purple world and people were like, what the fuck are we doing wrong? And it was like four hours of what the fuck. I mean, that part of the raid requires such precision.

And we didn't even know at the time though. You had to have the specific DPS weapon for the final, like the DPS wave. And if you didn't, you were screwed. But it was, that was my first raid, and especially my first blind raid. And I'll never forget turning it off. And it would have been like five hours. And I was like, we made little to no progress. And it was awesome.

That was awesome. I loved that. That's why even tonight where it's like, cool, we go in there and we get cloned out after four hours and we've done nothing. It's like, that was so cool. I was thinking about it, I was going to tell you, I was like, if you hadn't rated, I already thought about it, but you already know. But I'm like, for everyone,

You usually have two choices. You can drink some tea, which is no caffeine, and it's very relaxing, and try to keep yourself calm. That's your one option. Or you get a lot of booze. Oh, no way. And you have one of two options is how you want to play. I would recommend a tea option, which I never do, but I'm probably going to try that tonight because it can be tough. And what I've heard.

Yeah, but then you get sloppy if you do. Yeah, you do. I actually. And then if you're the guy on the raid team, that's the sloppy one. You don't want that. But I was going to point out I don't know anything about it. I want to keep it that way. But I do know that people I follow who I respect have been dropping out some people who are very good.

Like M-Tashed, if you know M-Tashed at all. He's really good. He's done tons of high DPS strap build videos. And his team just like couldn't do it. And that was on PC, I believe. And I'm just like, oh, boy. Like I didn't expect this of the division rate. It's an eight-person rate as well, which is new.

Which is even tougher to coordinate eight people. I've heard that it, from what I'm here, hearing. It almost sounds like this happens. They inadvertently design it for the top 5% of players. And sometimes we'll find out later there's a build or a strat and a cheese to like get through it. So we'll see. But the fact that it's going

on this long, I am shocked. I thought within four hours, five hours, for sure right away. Numerous people beating it and I didn't get Worlds First but this team did. And it was like dead silent most of the day. So I'm pretty nervous that it's just, they went too far. Do you care that? Do you mind

that? Sort of. So here's the thing that I've been hearing is that the reason why PC players are getting an advantage is because in the final fight that the way that the AI reacts requires a lot of really quick precision shots and you also have to have the right build with your gear

having gear set bonuses having your specialist maxed out making sure you have a lot of heel effects because you're just going to be downed constantly which is normal for a raid, but the thing I'm concerned about is if they've tuned it specifically for PC players

and the DPS capabilities of using high refresh rate, higher processing speed, higher frame rate for PC, and it makes it so that people on console physically can't do it because the tech is working against them that's really troublesome. You can

already see there's evidence of that. I mean, this happened with Destiny as well, and it was for those reasons you just cited, console was behind. I mean, World's First has always going to PC. So I'm a little concerned about that, but more than anything, I'm just shocked at this game trying to get eight people together, that it's this hard. Now, sometimes there could be a side effect if it's so much fun that everybody suffers. I'm actually okay with that. That's my, on the outside right now hearing about it, like don't be wrong. I'd love to click

a time and have awesome gear, et cetera, whatever. I don't mind not doing it because I do feel I play the division every day if I'm here, right? And when I do, I'm not saying it's easy, feel everything's conquerable easily where if I need to get frayin on the thing if I need to go do it but I haven't run into a mission in the division and I mean I play challenging I'm not saying I'm not into it you know what I mean I just feel like if this is if I'm doing all the other stuff and having a great time and being challenged the level I am but still succeeding as I feel I do every time I set off on something if the raid is the one thing where they're like no motherfucker like you got to work I'm like all right cool like I can go I can go get the easy wins anytime I want over here I got to go get

that portilla black backpack bag boy yeah yeah I got to get that oh yeah One of the season past missions, channel missions. Oh, yeah, yeah. You drop in, one of the backpack blings, little weiner dog. I was like, oh, my God. Also, if you didn't know, both kind of funny logo, party mode logo, and then the What's Good logo are all in now as Klan. That's so cool.

The banner looks so dope. It's so cool to see. Thank you so much for putting us in there. But I think the reason why people are also concerned about the rate is not just the tech spec issue, but also this decision by Massive to come out and say we're not going to have the gear score. 515 drops. As we said we were, we want to keep it at 500 for X, Y, and Z reasons. And that's troublesome because generally speaking, you know, you want to have that one or two high level piece of gear

on your character to help offset the crazy DPS that these raid bosses require in order to be to be even defeatable, right? Yeah. I'm super excited to play it. What I've heard has got me really worried, but that's okay. Again, I don't mind. Like, with the state that it's at, I'm obviously I'm concerned that they made it way too hard. And frankly, I'm, well, I don't want to view it too early. I'm just worried they were looking very closely at what happened with Last Wish and Destiny and you set the specs so high to make something so difficult because you think maybe that's this prestige event, but sometimes you go too far and we've seen that happen. And it can be very frustrated. How quickly I think they'll turn it around if they did? Well, again, I don't

expect it. I think if it's too hard, they might even give it, though, like a full couple weeks, you know, to see how people adapt to it. And that's where I think it could get interesting. But I literally have seeing the people who I, again, respect dropping out, I'm like, ooh boy, because I'm, I always describe myself as a medium min-maxer. Like, my builds are like, they're okay compared to someone who's like crazy. Who's got a spreadsheet, right. Yeah.

I almost never watch YouTube videos. I just like to play the way I like to play. Because I know you know that about me, Greg, and you think of me as the min-maxer, but because you're more like, you just- Power per hour, Frank. But my impression is you play a lot by field, like you get the guns. You're not going to go crazy and set. You don't know exactly what your damage and all that is supposed to be.

That's never spoken to me in Destiny, DC Universe Online and this, yeah. And I'm telling you that I pay some attention. But then I did because the raid's coming up. I was like, well, let me just look at what some good builds are maybe. And I just quickly watch a few videos. I'm looking at some of the damage and health loadouts. And it's like, man, I'm so far from like how high you can go. And that is the amazing part about division.

and the high tier of what you can set your builds to, if you really spend like a ton of time. It's crazy. I spent two and a half hours in menus last night, trying to just clear stuff. And that's before I even got to the point of like, now I need to look through the stuff and figure out as there better options.

I'm not even there yet. I gotta do it before we go in. Where I'm going to this is I'm a little worried that it caters to that amazing, super hardcore in terms of building. Because meaning if you have to build at that level, you will have to get advice or look at it. YouTube video. And the frustrating part about that is that it was a specific community question I got

for Julian at one of the first preview events that we did. It was either late last year or earlier this year. Somebody said, hey, I felt like I spent way too much time in the original division trying to min max my gear score. Are you guys simplifying the gear score system? And Julian said yes. And it doesn't sound like they actually have simplified it at all. And from what I've played, and I've put like 90 hours into the game so far, it's just like it feels like the gear score is like a constant chase in a way that's forever unattainable because once I get one piece of a set, then it's like, well, now I have to get like five more pieces of that set in order to get the gear score that I want.

And then the mod system is a whole other bottle of life. Yeah, and it's funny that like getting your gear up to 500 or whatever is easy now. It's the getting the thing you want. The right piece of gear. That not only is a high level, but also comes with the perks you want or you have enough money to infuse the things into it that you want. And that's where the game for me. has broken my brain and I'm frankly a lot less smarter than you all out there. I respect you so much.

When I like go to the recalibration table sometimes I'm like, oh my God, I have so many stats that I could potentially change on this and it frankly it just takes patience. Sure. But anyway, some of that is to its strength, but sitting in menus, I do, it's still one of my biggest complaints about it. I was like all my, because again, part of it's because I stream. I agree. It does need to be increased, by the way. It's too much, especially inventory for mods.

Mods drop all the time and like I don't want to have to like sit there and like am I ever going to use this thing? They're very hard to go through mods. That's actually one of the hardest things to go through. But anyway, what I was going to say is that some of that is to its strength because it's amazing what you can do if you know what you're doing.

Just worried that the raid has played into that. Are we going to talk about matchmaking? That was the final thing I want to touch on that you can't match make for the raid, which I as somebody who doesn't raid often right and the division is my game. This is not controversial. It is because they

I don't know if they had promised it for the grade specifically. One of their things said, yeah. They released marketing material and sort of said all our activities will be matchmaking. Oh, I did not know that. There's a graphic that one out. There's a zooming screenshot that people took because of it.

Well, they, yeah, I don't know. Because every time I talk to Julian in previews about the grade, he said there would be no matchmaking. And it's quite possible that that information was out there from Julian, but it was not in like the core materials. And frankly, to be fair, if you can't follow everything, the game itself, everything is pretty much matchmaking. And really well done.

Yeah. I've been running. You're talking about the public matchmaking. Yeah. I've been working on the hard missions for my trope, my platinum. And it's like that thing around. Jump in. Here's a bunch of guys. Oh, they're all good.

So I'm going to quickly side with maybe where you're going with, which is like I get why. I would like to try it without matchmaking. Although, I mean, again, I saw, you know, a few people saying like, just let people try. If they're frustrated, that should be the warning of if you're sure you want a matchmaking, it could be frustrated. At least you get to try. It has been very difficult, though, to put together an able. person team and I'm curious to hear it has not been difficult no no here's the judge is the

we did it we had two slots we were worried about we got it's true the reason why they you don't have the dedication Kevin why they can't do public matchmaking for the raid is because of the way that they do damage scaling based off the size of your group so if they did if you went in with hour one with eight people hour to Joe Schmo who is in the public matchmaking is like my three-year-old's crying, I got to go guys. Fucking kids. A-of-Ks, right?

And then you've got one less. And then this other guy's like, oh, I got to go take a shit for 20 minutes or whatever. Right? And then now you have six players that's instance for eight, right? And so that's like the trouble with public matchmaking is people just dipping out on matches. Or they get disconnected and then trying to sync up with your party again with who you were. If you're not with your friends is like almost impossible. Like I absolutely understand why public matchmaking.

is just not feasible right now. Look at what happened with Destiny 2 and the Sherpa program they did. And that kind of fell in its face, you know? I just like, I don't think that public matchmaking is going to be an option. For me, it falls back into the category and this is just removing the promise

on that marketing material that I saw too. But it falls back in the category of, okay, so the raid's different. Like, you can matchmaking and I feel like they've let you do, you can play that whole game single player if you want, right? And like, yeah, you're going to run up against challenges,

but you can eventually get them over and blah, blah, blah. I feel like this is the example of cool this is something we specifically want you to do specific things for and it is we want you to join a clan we understand you don't want to play the game that way okay like i don't know are you on the gear grind on solo that you're not like in every belongs to a community right where i feel like i've been pimping the subreddit because there's so many subreddit threads right now i have a pc clan or i want to raid on xbox and da da da da like you can get out there and find those people and do it and i understand you might say i don't want to do it that way blah blah i get that but it falls

back in that category of the people who made the game do want you to do it that way and they've given you yeah what you're I'm a hundred hours in now right they've given me a hundred hours of I don't have to do that and if I look at that and I'm still like dope seems too hard too challenging I can go fuck off and play something else

in the same world. Doing a stronghold on challenging difficulty with public matchmaking is an incredible challenge so I just like I feel it's absolutely unrealistic and the people who are being the loudest about this clearly do not raid in other games.

Yeah. Well, I don't know. I do agree that, well, look, for Stars, I'm glad to hear that seemingly it's so complex, you really need to have a full team, but also communication. And like they've designed it that way versus, you know, you might be surprised,

but playing some of the strong ones. It might surprise you. But people kind of get their stuff together and know what to do after playing a while and you can play off comms. It's impressive. But the fact that it is that much of a high challenge, I'm excited about.

So I do think there's something right about it with like, look, you've got to communicate. I know that only we knew a destiny, it was like 10% or 15% of people ever got to raid. And they, I assume, knew that choice going in. It's going to be a small population, but you've got to come together like you said. On the other side, though, it is, well, moving past

the marketing miscommunication, because that is the source of some of people's, like, but I thought it was, I mean, they can now argue that I, that's why I bought it, you told me, and like, whatever, I understand that. That is frustrating if that's what you thought. But there is the side of, and I haven't seen it done before,

but like, maybe we can get to a point where it's like with enough, I always have said, like if there's a warning and says you're opting in, this is not the recommended way to play, but just let me do it. And what if 30% of those people

had an amazing experience and came together and form a clan? Because that stuff does happen. As humans, that's the amazing part about coming together as community. So like I don't want to be on the 70% of people that are so mad.

Like this is nuts. Like they might go in thinking that it might work or have the perception. Yeah, I'll play anyway. But then they're like, that sucked. And then all the press and negativity out there.

But what if the 30% it was worth it? I'll just throw that out there. What if we try? No. And just, no. I think they will. I think they're going to. I think you're living in a pipe dream world where people don't DC all the time.

Yeah. And I agree with you. Can you imagine how frustrating that would be? They're constantly be in the middle of the boss fight of the raid and then this random that just match made with you just like dips out. Dude, I would be livid. But what if you agreed to it? There's that one layer.

I've seen you lived with your own claim. Yeah. Are you sure this is going to be incredibly frustrating? You are signing up for this. Yes. And then again, yes, you sure. No, no.

At least give me the option. No, no, no. You're wrong. It's a bad take. I disagree. So I do disagree with trying and I would love to see and maybe division's the first

to say, you know what? We're going to do a matchmaking alpha weekend or whatever. And like just try it and see what happens and give us the numbers too of like whoever, like, whatever data you have to show is that it failed or not.

Because that's what makes this hard too, is it's a philosophy. It's not fact that it won't work. Your points make tons of sense, but it's not a fact. I'll throw that out. Ladies and gentlemen, who will DC tonight as we play in the rain ourselves, Twitch.tv. com.com. com.

We'll be hosting FM3 underscore, of course, you can click over if you don't want to see Fran's inventories to watch Andrea and her clan go at it on Twitch.com. What's Good Games. The archives will be up there if you're somebody watching later on Monday, maybe. Ladies gentlemen, this has been the Kind of Funny Games cast. Thank you so much for joining us and hanging out with us. Remember, each and every week, four, sometimes three, best friends together on this table. Talk about video games and all the things they love about them.

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Roostracheteeth.com and podcast services around the globe, where the show will come to you and enjoy itself and be there. Tim and I are in Florida next week So I think it's you guys doing the games cast I don't know it's Tim plans this show I'm hosting the games cast Nice yeah Give Fran a hard time You know what I mean

Oh I always do Like she does it already Alright we got a post show to do But until next time no It's been our pleasure to serve you Later best friends