Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - We Played Star Wars Jedi Survivor for 3 Hours! - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

In a rare appearance, Barrett joins the show proper to talk about his hands-on time with Star Wars Jedi Survivor! B-roll shown was provided by EA from a work-in-progress build that may not be representative of the final game. Time Stamps - 00:00:00 - Start 00:04:24 - Housekeeping 00:05:42 - Overall Thoughts on the Jedi Survivor Preview 00:10:30 - World & Design 00:26:49 - Ads 00:29:02 - Cal and Combat 00:40:29 - Customization 00:47:13 - Story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller, alongside Forbes 30 under 30, AKA the OK Beast, AKA the champion in my heart of Kind of Futey. Oh. You never get to play.

You never get to play, so you can't be a champion, which sucks, you know? I've talked to to Roger about this, the idea of what if I could eventually play a game of Kind of Feudy. And I've just accepted it as, you know, sort of a burden that I'll never get. get to experience my best work. Yeah.

You know, like, you know, good for you, Tim, maybe to get to participate in the masterpiece that is kind of feudy. But, you know, it's part of the burden of being an artist. It's blessing at E.O. Ye.

June. Did you know that there's a phenomenon right now where people are just making fake podcast, like fake podcast clips to put out on the internet? Oh, the AI generated ones? No, not even the AI generated ones. Like,

people will sit down, they'll record two minutes of a fake podcast, and then put that up on TikTok, and it'll blow up. But, like, the podcast doesn't really exist. Why are they doing it? Just for TikTok fame?

Just for the TikTok? Yeah, because that, like, that format is actually pretty good for TikTok. Gotcha. Yeah. Like, people are just, people are into, like, the candid conversation thing, but I think. This is what we do all the time here. Why aren't we more popular? We got to break more of our stuff out.

We got to make more fake podcasts. We got to be funny. Me making fun of the PC kids did real well on the old TikTok. Yeah, and that was mid-pockets. Yeah, we just got to break out more content. Or we can just, you know, not record hours of content, come in, record five minutes, have Roger edit that down to two minutes put it up. You're right. So like

already we've finished this episode of the Gamescast. Exactly. We've just done it. All right. I appreciate that. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for watching. Joining us for his rare on camera appearance, of course, is the boss baby CEO Jr. Barrett Courtney. Hello, Barrett. Hello. We're talking about some exciting things today. Yeah. But I don't want to rush past the tragic event that occurred over the weekend

because this is going to be posting on Monday morning. Sure, sure, sure. Um, rest and peace. Sonic. Yeah. Son of the headshot murdered, it turns out. That sucks. Who do you think did it? I think Amy Rose. Amy Rose, who you're going with?

Knuckles. I was going to say, do we think it's one of the things that Trump has been indicted for? Jesus Christ. He got him to the Matrix. He got a murder crime. It's like there can only be one. Of course, you mentioned it, Barrett. You are here for something exciting.

Of course, you got to go play Star Wars Jedi Survivor. The first time any of us have touched it. Of course, Star Wars, Jedi Fallen Order, our game of the year. for 2019, so we're all very excited to talk to you about that. So let's just get it out of the way. Before all that, this is the Kind of Funny Games cast each and every week, four, sometimes three. Best friends gather on this table come to talk about what they love

and sometimes don't love in video games. If you love that, head over to patreon.com slash Kind of Funny. Over on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny, of course, you can get each and every games cast ad-free. You can watch us record it live as we record it, usually, when not when it's embargoed like today. And, of course, you can get dozens upon dozens of exclusive episodes of shows over there, including this

one of, I guess we do two remember blanks a week. One of our remember blanks this week is going to be what's your Star Wars game. Talk to me about that. You know what I mean? We're talking about Star Wars. What to you is your Star Wars game, ladies gentlemen? chime in on kind of funny.com slash remember blank, then watch that over on patreon.com slash

Kind of funny this week. But I digress. If you have no bucks to us our way on Patreon, it's no big deal. Of course, you can get every episode of the games cast for free with ads. None of the bonuses over on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games and podcast services. around the globe. We should like,

we should make up a fake Star Wars game and like not tell Mike, uh, and like, okay, if we can get a, like a Mario Party Star Wars game that like, you know, never existed. Figure out like some fucking crazy ass premise for it. Yeah.

Just talk about it. And like we both act like, oh yeah, like I've heard of that and see if Mike catches on. I love that. Yeah. And then get like include two ridiculous other Star Wars games that are like actually real. Yeah.

And at the end, make him guess which one is fake. Like two truths and a lie right there. And like there's like the weird dancing game. right? Oh yeah, where you get to play dance as Han Solo and he goes

I'm Han Solo. Yeah, they're doing the Jason Gerulo. Yeah. That's just just just dance, wasn't it?

Wasn't it? I thought it was something. It was like Star Wars. I think it was a Connect Star Wars dancing game. Yeah. Oh my God. At some point,

you know what I mean? Uh, ladies and gentlemen, a little bit of housekeeping for you. Of course, tomorrow Tuesday, Meet Your Maker is taking over our Twitch channel

at 8 a.m. Pacific to show their game. There are a couple kind of funny best friends who work on the product and they said, hey, what if we sponsored a stream

when we came over and just talked straight to the audience and we're like, cool, sounds great to us. So 8 a.m. come hang out with them meet your maker folks

to celebrate their launch for an entire hour. You can see the game learn about the future roadmap and more. That's on Twitch. dot TV slash Kind of Funny Games

Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific. Over on Patreon, a new next gen podcast is up right now. Roger, Barrett, and bless. Talk about dealing with trolls

and the time Barrett made a girl cry. You know, I don't want to know anymore. I want to listen to the show. Don't tell me anymore about it. That implies that's the only time I've made someone cry. That's not.

Was it when you were trolling? Were you trolling this girl? It's the proudest I've ever been of making someone cry. And I'll just leave it at that. Easy, crazy. Barr came to this with this topic. And me and Roger were like, this is a very specific topic. Like the proud moments we've had in making somebody cry.

Like, I don't think I've ever had that. And Bear's like, I got some stories. Jesus, and he has some stories. All right. I'm into it. Thank you to our Patreon producers who can listen to that next gen podcast. And of course get our shows ad-free. TryPod Plus.

us in Delaney Twining. Today, we're brought to you as Shady Rays and Evil Dead Rise, but we'll talk about that later. For now, let's travel to a galaxy far, far away. Barrett, give us the synopsis. What exactly did you play? How long did you play? Where did you play? What were you wearing? Yeah, quickly, I just want to shout out thanks to EA and respond for flying me down to be able to play the game a little bit early to check out three hours of the game to preview. Yeah, I think the, what was it? Like, they set us up roughly what they said,

like an hour into the story. So, like, what I imagine we didn't get to see was, like, kind of the big intro. Like, that piece thing, kind of like what Braca was in the first game. So this was a little bit after that, getting kind of more settled into, like, what maybe the game is going to look like as a whole.

And, yeah, I played for three hours. Let's see, I played on P. just to let you know that, just to give some context there. And yeah. Were you wearing? What was I wearing? I don't remember. Han Solo.

He's bounding as Han Solo. All right. So, you know, the specifics and the requirements out of the way. What did you think? Like, you loved Fallen Order, right? Yeah. Yeah, I love Fallen Order. Fallen Order is like one of my favorite Star Wars, like, pieces of media of all time.

It's like definitely up there. And so, yeah, when we started seeing more in the last couple months of trailers, kind of like the obvious things to me from trailers were like, this definitely seems like it's going to be a step up for gameplay. I'm still kind of questioning, like, where they're going to go with the story, if it's going to be something that hits for me. And I'm kind of, I'm still right there after three hours of playing the game. But with that, it's like, yeah, the gameplay is definitely stepped up in like really,

really cool ways. And, you know, we'll talk about what I can. with the story and just I wanted to say really quick any B-roll that we showed today. I was sold a note that is work in progress B-roll. It might not be representative of the final game. Yeah, it does look good. But yeah, I don't want to understate that of like, oh, I felt the same way after the preview. Like, I was sold even more of like, yeah, this is really going to be a step up for gameplay

and world design and going on what feels like your very own Star Wars adventure. And the story side is, you know, I didn't get to see a lot and I can only talk about so much of what I saw. Okay. But it's still like one of those things where I don't know where we're going on Cal's next big adventure, but I'm still really excited. After my three hours of playing the game, I will say it's like all I wanted to keep doing was just keep playing the game.

The next few weeks are going to be torture until this game actually comes out because it's all I want to do. I'm bummed right now. Like I'm excited to talk about the game right now, but I'm bummed right now that I'm sitting down to talk about this game and not playing the game right now. So, yeah. I think everybody who's at the event was really excited. you know, people who were there to preview it,

devs alike. I think the team knows that they have something special on their hands. So, yeah. So my top level question, because if I know anything about you, Barrett, you are a detail-oriented young lad. And I'm sure you have copious amounts of notes and bullet points you want to dive into.

Got a good three and a half pages. So my question would be, I know it's hard. You're at a preview. I've been there so many times. You can't talk about the entire story. You don't know some things about it. Gameplay idea.

Yeah. From what you got, this vertical slice, this glimpse, do you think this has the stuff to outperform Fallen Order? In what sense? I mean, it was our game of the year. Do you think it's possible you're going to enjoy this game more than that game? I think from a gameplay standpoint, 100%, like if it was already our game of the year for 2019, right, for Fallen Order, like I think this is going to, I think they saw what made Fallen Order special, and they're just going in and enhancing everything.

again like I said the story and stuff is still like that's what made fallen order special to me were the characters in story and it seems a little bit bigger this time like the things that I can talk about like the you know fallen order felt like it had such a small cast but now we're introducing a bunch of new people throughout it like building on top of the smaller cast that we got from the first game and honestly like I think the low point of this of like where the barrier for the story is is like at minimal we're just going to go on. another fun adventure with Cal and BD and I think at most we're going to get a really another great introspective look into you know this surviving Jedi after the events of Order 66 still trying to find his place in the galaxy so yeah I definitely think it's it's got the makings of a game of the year contender even though this this year is already pretty stacked from what it seems like I was exploring the environments you know the last one I think we compared a lot to it feeling a bit Metroidvania is right you look at the map and I know a lot of you hate the map, but like...

Christian writes in and says, well, it release with the second worst map of all time only behind Fallen Order. There you go. Yeah, and how does that apply to the level design this time around? You know, it looks from the trailers,

it seems like it's a bit more open in the environments. Do that reflect when you're playing the game? So, yeah, first thing I want to address is the map. I did see a lot of people kind of asking about the map. It definitely feels easier to process when you bring up the hollow map from BD1. They've got kind of different areas. is segmented.

And so in the first game, you know, especially if you were trying to platinum the game, you had to do like 100% map completion, terrible trophy. And like the way that the map kind of like unfolded in ways, when you were exploring that 100% in the first game,

it definitely was hard to like kind of figure out like where you, where you had been and things of that nature. And I think the little tweaks they've made here and there for the hollow map definitely makes it easier to process of like, Where did you just come from? Where have you been so far? How much of this area of the world that you're on has been explored, how much of this area? And so it's definitely easier to kind of understand and process.

Say, like, the controls of, like, moving the map around and stuff like that are still a little finicky. But that was, I think they made little adjustments here and there because I remember, like, the map, like, the kind of areas that you could walk around. They kind of made it look a little bit more like how it looks in the world and made it look like a little bit like, a little natural, but I think that was to a detriment. So it's a little bit more clear of what paths are and things of that nature. So yeah, shout out to definitely an improved map

to process. Still the top of it all right. You know, Timothy Iceberg, Juan Lobo wrote in and said, what were the biggest improvements? Is the map on that list, or were there other things you think that speak out as? Oh, this really stands out. Map is definitely,

you know, one of the highlights, but I would say even more so is just the fidelity of the entire game. I think this is next gen only for consoles. You can correct me if I'm wrong there. And granted, we were playing on a PC build, but yeah, the fidelity of it all was just something like every time we got from a cutscene back into gameplay, you know, you have that moment.

You're like, oh, right, this is a video game that I get to play and kind of like exist in. It's much more improved. Like, I think the easy thing to look back at for Fallen Order are the Wookie's. like oh my god it was awful awful uh i did not see any wukies uh in my preview event but there was like you know what we didn't fix them out we're not gonna go to see them like this man but uh there was an enemy type called the the mogu which is if you remember from empire strikes back there's like the uh snow monster that uh takes luke it's like their version of that but uh it has like more brown hair because uh cobo the planet we got to explore isn't like a ice planet or anything

and so they definitely have like that similar like hair-touch texture and they looked much better. And so, like, I think, like, being able to focus on next-gen consoles and just, like, really bring up the fidelity and the look of the entire game was, like, really impressive. And I also want to shout out the kind of added little thing that they did was letterboxing. You know, the black bars, like, that you usually see in movies. Whenever you get into cutscenes, it'll, like, slowly, like, get into letterboxing. That Fallen Order didn't do.

And I think it works in, like, two really cool ways where when you're in a cinema, like a moment, it really makes you feel like you're watching like a Star Wars like cinematic like movie or something like that. But then like when you get out of the cutscene and then go back into gameplay and it goes full screen again, you're like kind of re-immers into like, holy shit, I'm playing a video game. And yeah. And so that was that was like a little tweak of presentation that I feel like goes a long way. So I think it's things of that nature of just honing in what they kind of almost had in the

first game and just making little tweaks here and there just to really sell more of like being on your own Star Wars adventure. I don't know how much you can talk about characters because you talk about they're introducing. Greasy money baby. What's he up to? But like, you know, where the character is hitting for you? Did it feel like the expanded cast felt like, oh no, I like these guys. I want to see where their stories are going to take us? So it's interesting. The characters that I can talk about and that I'm only like willing to talk about for for this. I also, dude was hanging out. grogue. He was. He was. I kind of want to talk about that in tandem with Kobo,

which if you had been following any Star Wars coverage before this, Mitchell Saltzman got to kind of play around with Kobo a little bit for the IGN first a couple months ago. And Kobo, yeah, definitely feels like your hub planet. That feels like really big. It was the planet that they showed off in previous trailers where you're like you're using mounts to get to certain places and things of that nature. and it kind of works in two parts. Like, Kobo feels really big to explore and get lost in, like, a couple of different, like, areas and go down, like,

little adventures and things of that nature. But then also, you have this town that you can go and hang out in and, you know, kind of, like, get connected with the community. So, like, the cast of who I met so far from that town, it feels like more of just, like, little ways to make Cal feel connected to a new place, a place that he could possibly call his own in certain ways. So, yeah,

I want to look back at the characters that I met throughout the town. Yeah, there's like, Mosy who you meet on the way to town, who's like a ranch hand, who like kind of, as we see here, we have the Neko mount. And if you, like, find a Neko mount, you can bring

it back to, like, the ranch and put it in a stable and, like, save it for, like, future adventures and just like store it there. And then, you know, maybe fly off planet, come back, and then grab it again because you know you want to go down this path that you might need that mount for. Grease is hanging out there.

He's great. That was kind of one of the moments where when Cal meets up with Grease for the, it seemingly for the first time in a while, it kind of brought me back of like, I don't know where they're going with the story, but at the minimum amount, I'm just excited to see these characters hang out again. Shout out to my boy Tergle, who's like this weird frog-looking alien dude, who I think might be voiced by Richard Horvitz, possibly,

the voice of Invaders, Zim, and Rasputin from Psychonauts. If not, it's just someone who sounds really like him. Just like a goofy little character, again, not much, but something to just kind of feel like the galaxy is bigger than just Cal and

the Mantis crew. And then Doma was someone else that I met who seems to be the kind of like appointed mayor of this little town who kind of feels like the, you Yeah, kind of like the parent and like just making sure that like everybody's being taken care of. And so with that, the thing that really, what Kobo really reminded me of, of especially like the community and the town where you get to, you know, meet up and talk to new members who might, you know, take you on like a little journey or give you a side quest and things of that nature. It's the same place where you can also, like, there's a little garden where you can like plant and like kind of organize your own little garden based off of like seeds that you find throughout the planet.

There's a little fish tank that you can go and catch fish and, like, put them and display them in your little fish tank. It brought me back to the homestead in Assassin's Creed 3, where it's like it doesn't seem like this is like very integral necessary to get to the golden path and things of that nature. But I think it's like a really cool thing to kind of make you feel connected to a specific point in the galaxy and make it feel like your own and kind of build this community and all that stuff. Obviously, this first time we've heard about it, you're talking about it. It kind of seems like a way more fleshed out way of making you feel connected. Because, like, remember, in the Fallen Order, the Mantis had, like, the Terrarium. Yeah, exactly. And it was like, oh, I guess I got that thing.

And again, like I've been saying, like, it feels like they knew what, like, the cool little things that made Fallen Order special, and they're just, like, expanding on them in really big ways. And so, Kobo, with that kind of feels like two different planets from Fallen Order, they kind of mention on Bagano, that's like the kind of your first like tutorial planet where you go and kind of like relearn like like wall running and it's got that Jedi temple and they kind of talk about like

oh this is like a nice little safe haven from the empire but you don't really like hang out there that's not like really a place that you're building like a town and community with but then also it reminded me of Zepho which I feel like might be the biggest planet in Fallen Order maybe Dothemir where it's like all of these different little like pathways to go on little adventures to

find little side quest things to go on and uh, cobo feels like a combination of those things. Uh, I, I know something that you were wondering about is like, does cobo feel like an open world? I got to talk to a little bit of, uh, with the developers and they, like, cobo is not open world.

Like, that's not what this is. It's just, it feels like a bigger kind of, um, version of what we've seen from fall in order. Like, one of the clips that, uh, Roger was showing earlier, had, I don't know if it was Cobo. Yeah, all of the footage today and all we saw was of Cobo. Okay, so yeah, he was gliding over the land, right? And it looked

like just mass, like this clip exactly right here. Yeah, this looks, I imagine this is all explorable here, right? And this is way more open than I remember Jedi Fallen Order being. Yeah. It seems like, I remember specifically that one planet, like the first one with the frog, right, where it was like so many different levels and going

back to it. Yes. But even that didn't look this diverse, this many The center of the planet felt like, okay, it's going to be really open over here. There's going to be a lot of little things to explore. But then outside of that, it doesn't continue being like really big and sprawling. It's like more of like finding like little paths or maybe bigger paths, but like a bunch of explorable ways to go, you know, find little adventures, find upgrades, cosmetics, things of that nature. So, yeah, I think like I think some people, especially when mounts were introduced, people were

a little bit nervous of like, oh, how big is this place going to be that we have mounts and stuff like that. And speaking of mounts, like, the thing that I kind of took in and it really clicks with me when, you know, being able to glide around on the little bird creature and riding around the neco, they're not to like, shorten the time of like distance because the planet's so big. They felt more of like solutions to, for, you know, being able to get from point A to point B. The two footed neco mount like can help. help a cow get up like mud slides that he wouldn't be able to on his own. Right here you see like you can jump and then jump off of him to get even higher like to places that are a little bit too high for cow's double jump and things of that nature.

Like the gliding felt like, okay, I'm traveling up this like kind of side quest area and now I've made it all the way down up this hill or up this cliff, but I don't want to like backtrack and make all my like go all the way back down just to get back to the town. oh here's this uh here's this glide mechanic that I can kind of make my way down and get back a little bit quicker how much distance you're traveling with so quickly too because I think where you know you know

there are two kinds of glides I feel like you can have in a video game like this you know it's either like the breath of the wild where you can fucking like you can get pretty far at that thing or it's like no here's a glide so you can get back to earth safely without taking fall to me exactly won't hurt yourself yeah but this looks like I can actually travel pretty far with that glide which I'm all about yeah and there's a couple fun sequences I got to experience where it's like you kind of need them to get like over ravines and things of that nature.

Some really cool stuff. So yeah, it's going to be interesting to see like what Kobo is in the greater context of the game because I've had like a couple of different thoughts about it of, you know, thinking back on Fallen Order, you only got to go to like four, maybe five planets throughout the game. And, you know, there were smaller levels like Illam, which is the ice planet where you get your saber, crystal from and then you know there are the bigger planets like Zepho Chyber crystal. Oh yeah

yeah yeah um you know there's uh Zepho and Kashik and Dothamir that all felt like kind of big and sprawling and while visually they all felt like pretty varied I feel like in size they were it all kind of felt a little bit similar traveling from planet to planet so thinking about Kobo in the greater context of what survivor might be I'm wondering if like they really want to

one planet so they could do the like sprawling like let's go on these like kind of like winding paths to explore and get loss on these little side adventures like you would in zeffo or cacheek but then to do that maybe we get a little bit more opportunity to maybe show off more planets that might be a little bit smaller but still have like that design that we know from the first game and things of that nature or maybe like i'm completely wrong and maybe there is like a planet or two that are the same size of Kobo, but you're probably just not doing like a settlement town thing there, you know?

So I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how it all fits. I want to jump tracks, but before I do that, I do want to ask you one more thing. You're talking about, is granted three hours vertical slice yet at one planet. Alec Bobko wrote in and said,

how are the companions this go around? It seems like they might be more incorporated into gameplay this time around rather than just quest givers slash info dumps. It sounds like you saw a greasy money, my boy, but it doesn't, I also don't know if you have enough information on this. Like I doubt Greasy ran off on the mission with you, right?

Yeah, so I know as much as you do, Alec. I think it was in that recent story trailer that dropped like a week or two ago. It was during GDC, I think. It seems like, yeah, like some of the companions are going to join you on certain, like, story beats and things of that nature, similar to God of War Ragnarok comes to mind with that. But yeah, I didn't get to see any of that. Like this, again, this feels like very early on Cal and BD are like kind of getting their footing again. so there wasn't like a big moment of like,

oh, now this person's like going to go and like fight alongside you or anything like that. How was using the mounts? Like did they control fine? They were serviceable, you know? Like, again, it didn't feel like a thing of like, oh, I want to get from point A to point B faster. It felt more of like, all right, yeah, I'm moving it around.

It's a faster way to move. But barely. It felt like, again, more of like solutions to get over like certain objects and things of that. They felt more like solutions. So like they felt like puzzle mechanics almost. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, they felt good enough.

They didn't feel like weird or jarring or anything. So I think they'll, they'll just kind of be an added layer to what I think is already going to be like a very improved, like platforming. And kind of like puzzles combined with platforming a little bit. I saw a lot of in the, in my time with it of, oh, there's this kind of like side structure getting in the way of like a zip line. Like how to like, all right, I got to go. around this way.

Yeah, we showed in the B-roll earlier. You have to, like, kind of get around to it to, like, push it back into the side of the cliff to be able to, like, get the zip line there. There was, like, another time where I brought platforms out the side of, like, a cliff or whatever, but then they started slowly moving back. And I was like, oh, I just need to, like, pull them out, like, pretty quickly. But then that wasn't connecting. So it was like, oh, I got to go in, like, a specific order to, like, pull these platforms out,

then jump to the first one, then to be able to jump to the second one, and so it feels like they're incorporating a little bit more puzzle elements to being able to scale to certain places, which I really enjoy. Like the platforming was really fun. I like that they're kind of getting experimental with it and like kind of keeping it fresh and new. The question I have for you, we're talking about all these different things.

The mounts, we're talking about the planets, we're talking about the companions. I want to talk about Cal. But before we do that, I want to remind you about patreon.com slash kind of funny. Over on patreon.com slash kind of funny, you, of course, can get each and every episode of the gamescast ad for

You can usually watch us record it live as we record it, and you can get dozens and dozens of exclusive episodes a month. Like Remember Blank, where we are remembering your Star Wars game this week. But I digress. You're not on Patreon. So here's a word from our sponsor. Shout out to Evil Dead Rise for sponsoring this episode. You can get your tickets now to see Evil Dead Rise in theaters, April 21st.

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You can get 50% off 2 plus pairs to polarized sunglasses. You can try for yourself the shades that are rated 5 stars by over 250,000 people. promo code, kind of funny at ShadyRays.com. Barrett, one of the things, I think a lot of sequels, especially action RPGs or whatever you want to call it, is action with RPG elements that you fall into, right,

are you spend an entire game building the character up, getting all the cool moves, doing all the cool stuff, and then in a God of War II fashion, you're thrown into the underworld, you lose everything, you've got to rebuild it. When I went and took the demo for this at Game Awards and was talking to EA and talking to Cal himself, one of the things I thought was really cool

is they said, oh, no, you're starting where you left off. You're starting as a badass Jedi, and then it's about learning new stuff. Yep. Did you get that? Was it easy to feel like Calligan, or did you, how are they, what are they giving you new? Like, are we using the same stances? Like, what's going on? So, yeah, there's a lot to break down there with Cal as your character.

Yeah, from our preview at least, it seems like everything was, every, like, major force power that you unlocked throughout the first game was there from the jump, force pull, force push. Like, that's not what this, seemingly that's not what this story is about. Like, to me, that made sense of how they slowly rolled out force powers in the first game, connecting to Cal's story. But, yeah, it's not like he's, you know, stuck, you know, mentally from five years ago or whatever. So, yeah, you're not, like, doing that whole thing. I imagine in that first hour somewhere, there's a little segment of, like, here's your force book. How do you remember all this?

You know, your force pulling things of that nature. So, yeah, don't worry about the game like Metroidvania, like, you know, some evil like palpatine comes down and sucks all of his powers you got to like uh relearn everything but yeah definitely you're building on top of things like as we're seeing here in the b-roll one of the new force powers is uh you get to use july mind tricks and you get to uh use them on enemies to trick them into battling uh other enemies and things of that nature um which was really fun to to use and uh i was seeing some people kind of use it in ways that i wasn't expecting there's your dude you're brown oh you locked off his arm Jesus Christ yeah really quick uh

like with enemy variety, I just want to shout out, like, how fun it was, even for just one planet. Like, I can only imagine, like, what I haven't seen from other planets that I didn't get to explore. God, I can. But, like, the mogu was really fun to fight because, yeah, if he grabs you, you can kind of press down on X to cut off his arm. But then he becomes way more aggressive in his attack. So, again, just little things that I think that they're doing with these enemies to kind of make him feel fresh and varied each time you face off against them. But yeah, something that they talked about is like all the stances for this game. There's five this time around, whereas in the first game, there was really only two.

There was the single blade and then there was the double-bladed. And then you kind of did like the dual-wheeled one, but that was really just like a special move. And I think they talked about in the IGN first, that was something that they originally wanted in that first game was the dual-wheel to be its own stance. But, you know, time constraints of things of that nature. So I remember from the IGN first, when they first started working on this game, they're like, all right, let's figure out the dual wheeled. So yeah, in this game, you have single-bladed, double-bladed, and dual-wheeled, which in our preview, all three of those were available from the jump. And those were the three that we got to play around with and really, like, kind of get into the weeds of how they build on the first two stances and what is new and introduced with the dual-wheel stance. and then the things that we did not play

where the crossguard which seems to be the Kylo Ren like Hilt's lightsaber that seems to be the kind of heavy weapon you know it's doing a lot of damage sword really yeah it's like your great sword but like you're really slow but again didn't get to play that so I don't know like how that really

feels and then the last one was the blaster where I think you're like holding a lightsaber and then you have a blaster in the other hand we didn't get to play them but they did show them playing it at the end our preview event. Yeah.

And I only got so much out of the cross guard like looking at it watching it being played but the Blasterio, let me tell you. Yeah. Looks really fun.

There was one moment where I was like did he just parry with the Blaster? I might be misreading like what a certain animation was. I hope so. But let me tell you what got the crowd

fucking applauding was, you know, the kind of preview that they're showing off. I think it was the lead combat designer who was like showing off all this gameplay

and showing off all the different stances like kind of being used and like what combinations you can do at one point when he was using the blaster stands he like force pull like everybody up into the air slowed them down and then brought his blaster out

and what seemed to be a red dead type dead eye mechanic where he slowed down time selected five different enemies and went and it was I think the hypest thing that we saw that day in terms of gameplay and it was really cool. Something to be clear, though,

you can only equip two stances at a time, which I think is really interesting and cool and something that I felt even with only three stances available of like, you're still used to being able to do single and double-bladed, but then if I'm doing single and dual-wheeled, and then I come across the Storm Trooper enemy who has like the Gatling gun,

usually what you would do is bring up the double-bladed to like do the quick pairing, but you can't do that. So it's like you kind of have to think of like, all right, what are different solutions to be able to take out certain enemies if I'm only equipping this stance and this stance? And I imagine it's going to be even

more so with two stances on top of that. Can I only equip the two stances at like the meditation points? I can't just in the middle of a battle. That is correct. That'll be something that you do at meditation points. I think also at the work benches as well. You can choose which stances that you're doing.

So yeah, there's that. And something, a tidbit that I did get out of some of the developers that I thought was interesting because one of my questions for them was that they fit like when they hit five stances, that they like all right, this is it? Like we know that this is

we're happy with this or there are so many ideas for stances that they had to like cut themselves off or things of that nature and the tidbit that I got was the I believe it was the art design director said the amount of stances that we have in this game felt appropriate for the size of the game. And let me

tell you the three stances that we had in just our three-hour preview felt like a lot on just this one planet. So I think that's interesting of like how big is this game going to be compared to Fall in Order? And it got me really excited of like, damn, this is, it's going to, it feels like it's going to be a big one. Oh, yeah. So how's the combat hitting compared to the original game? Like the one of the things I was talked about a lot with Jedi Fallen Order was it feeling a bit more soulsy, right? And I think a lot of people compared even more to Sekiro because Sekaro was a bit more fast-paced. after, especially you now

actually playing the original in 2019 and now being in a post-Eldering world and you playing through Eldon Ring coming into this new one, is it immediately apparent of oh man, the combat feels any sort of revamped or improved or anything? And also, you know,

does combat feel different after playing Eldon Ring after playing through a long ass souls game? It doesn't feel different in that sense. Like it definitely feels like, all right, like this is similar to what we had in Fallen Order, but definitely improved something that I think maybe possibly story-wise of why they did this.

But to me, after playing, I replayed Fallen Order a couple weeks ago, Cal felt slower a little bit. And because I was thinking back to Fall in Order, he's really fast in like battle interactions. And I felt like sometimes like going back to that game after a couple of years, he almost felt like too quick and floaty. and I think they like kind of taking advantage of like this being five years after the events of Fallen Order Cal's a little bit older, he's a little bit more He's a bit more experience

The old metaclorians are settling down So yeah he feels just like a little bit Slowed down just a bit to have Like each of your decisions in combat Have a little bit more weight And I know when I say that You're probably like oh god this is going to be Kratos God of Orr 2018 Ragnerach

That's not what I'm saying It's just little a job adjustments. He always felt very jumpy. You know what I mean? He was very light, like almost too light on his feet. Yes, exactly. And I think they kind of brought that down just a little bit. And I think it works for, you know, he's a little bit older. He's a little bit more battle ready and experience because, you know, when we play Fallen Order, he hadn't really been battling anybody for five years or anything of that nature. So I think that was like a maybe smart kind of like being able to explain why they just slowed him down a little bit of being like him being five years older. And so, yeah, it. It feels like a really good and slight adjustments to make it feel a little bit more important in decisions that you're making. I know it's something else that you were wondering of like, does it feel soulsy even like with the kind of big areas? Yeah.

And like the, even though Kobo does feel like pretty expansive, when I'm going down like a certain pathways to go on like little side adventures, like you're going through like caves and stuff and it still feels like tight. And I would say that survivor probably in design of, like, enemy placement and things of that nature, it feels a bit more soulsy than Fallen Order did. And a bit more mean. Because I would say, like, you would only get that experience in Dothamere, because Dothamere kind of was the hardcore planet of like, all right, you're going into this room. Ah, there's an enemy right around the corner. They're doing that, like, on this planet way more. And it definitely brought me back to like, oh, God, I'm more playing Eldering than I am Fallen Order, which I really enjoyed. And so, again, when people say that Kobo is going to be a big place to explore, I don't get scared about like, oh, it's just going to be an open world.

It's just, it's going to be a really intricate big map to kind of get lost in. Did you get your hands on a grappling hook? I did get my hands on a grappling hook. Hold on. So let's see here. Where did I put that in my notes of three pages of notes. Did you go left? Yeah, it felt like an added kind of thing for platforming.

and so again, I think it was just like a little, a little detail to kind of like make platforming feel a little bit fresh and not like you're just playing Fallen Order again. So I think that'll kind of lend itself to being like, how do I get close enough? Because you have to be a certain amount of length to like be able to grapple to certain points. So then you're like, you see the grapple point.

You're like, wait, I'm too far. Like, how do I get there? And so I think, again, I think it's like just an added level of kind of like slight puzzle, how do I get closer to it? And the feel of it, definitely think of like, Kratos, the chains of chaos, how they were using Ragnarok and kind of like pulling himself up, things of that nature. So nothing like huge, but it was definitely like an added element to what I

thought was already like a solid platform experience in Fallen Order just to make it like fresh a little bit quick and like a little bit more out of depth of like, all right, like how do I get over there now? One of the things that was a stump, I mean a stumbling block, but one of the criticisms, I guess, have fallen order. And obviously, one of the things I love the most in just about any game is customization. Michael J. Cohen wrote in and said, how much can you customize a look at your character and accessories?

I'd go one step further because I want to know all that. Obviously, it was Pancho Gate 2019 before with Cal. But my other question I had at the time for EA at Game Wars that they were like, that's a really intricate question. And I'm talking like, you know, other people. So it's not even the dev. I was like, can I, as soon as the game starts, which I know you didn't, but you would be able to answer.

Can I change my lightsaber crystal to what I had it as? in fallen order because obviously that was such a huge moment that made my Cal like bam i want to make sure that i start the game and look like the at be able to look like cal so answering that question at least from where we started in cobo yeah yes okay perfect all like lightsaber colors or what's available in the game at least from the jump are available to kind of move around in got it great there's a lot of pieces to kind of select from and customize even more um i was trying to make note of how many collectible pieces there were.

And yeah, Greg, you're going to be really happy with the customization here because it's not just the lightsaber anymore. It is BD who you can also find in chess like little parts to make him feel like your own little droid. And Cal himself. There's a lot of like, it's not just like full outfits

anymore. You can customize. Oh wow. We're going to do the beard and everything else. Oh yeah. We're getting into full like he's got some interesting haircuts. Let me tell you. There's some hair styles and Does he have cornrows? I don't think he has cornrows. That'd be a questionable option,

but he does have this mullet vibe. And yeah, you can change the jacket, the shirt, the pants, all of them have, like, they're different,

like, something else that you'll find in chess are, or you can buy in shops, are like the color palettes that you can also use for certain, like, pieces of clothing and things of that nature.

So there's all of that. And, yeah, you know, there's fashion souls, definitely. and ring. This is going to bring about fashion wars of like, what does

your cow look like? Does he look cool as hell? Obviously, you see here, like, there's some currency that you can find across cobo that you can go to the DOMA's outposts and unlock more things. But that's not the only way to be able to get those. Again, like I found a bunch of

items throughout, like, just chests and things of that nature. So if you want to customize cow, but you don't want to like do the whole, like, I got to hunt for this specific currency to do so. There's a little bit of both. So if you're as interested in like hunting down currency and like going through the shops and things of that nature you don't have to so yeah so yeah it's it's it's gonna get it felt pretty deep and again it felt like what i saw was surface level of like how many like varying uh uh outfits and a beady parts and

uh lightsaber stuff was available so yeah it's you're gonna be really happy with that i can't fucking wait um and then on top of that uh something else uh similar was the the skill tree again we only had so much unlocked but you know seeing the three different each has their own skill tree. At first glance, it feels like, oh, each skill tree is a little small, though. But, like, because there's so much available, like, there's five skill trees under lightsaber, there's three under force, there's one under survival. It just feels like a lot to take in of, again, building on top of what Cal already knew.

I like this way better, honestly, because when you have a big skill tree, even when it is, I look at God of War, rack and rock around. It's like, oh, yeah, I have a skill tree for crado. I'm not even losing this shit. Yeah, and it's like, oh, man, I'm not doing half of these moves. And so when it is, hey, here are fewer skills and they matter for what the dual wheel stance is or what the double blade stance is.

Honestly, I prefer that way more. Yeah, and I think it really gives you more credence to make your Cal your own. Because, yeah, the skill tree from the first game was like kind of like, you still had like it separated into sections, but if you wanted to go all in on lightsaber stuff, it was like, all right, I got to like unlock this like single blade move to get to like a double blade move.

Whereas, yeah, each stance has its own thing. So if you want to go all in on like the Blaster stance or the dual-wheeled stance, you can do that and like really just like hone in your skill level for like each stance. Yeah, I want to shout at the dual-wheel, which is the new stance that we really got to play around with and how like different it felt from the other stances. Like the single and double-bladed felt kind of pretty much the same. Again, it was very early on in the game. So I didn't get to really build.

on top of what they already were from the first game. But dual wield, I really enjoyed. It felt very methodical and kind of a little bit more dangerous to use from both good and bad. It seemed like because Cal is a little bit faster with the dual wield and kind of like every time he strikes because he's a little bit methodical, you know, he seems a little bit more vulnerable to attack when you're in the middle of an attack and things of that nature.

But yeah, I think each stance has like its own, good and bad sides of like, and it's all about, you know, personal taste of, like, what you want to, like,

hone and, uh, get skillful with. So, um, yeah, and I think each stance has their own kind of like, unique,

uh, force power, um, that you can use. I think the, the, the, the,

the, kind of like, big stab move from the, the, from, from, I believe the first game. Uh,

the, the double blade, I forget what it was, but the dual wield was an interesting one where it was like, um, you would hold down one. why and then Cal would kind of like hold his lightsabers like in the air and then it turned into like this slow parry situation where you had to like time it correctly and then if you got it like

fully equipped as a parry when someone hit you you would parry them but then follow up with like a flurry of attacks and so like an added like a different way to be able to parry and follow up with a bunch of damage rather than just like the kind of normal perry that you get for every stance well at least these three stances I don't want to again assume that you know the blasser has a Perry, but who knows? Hell yeah. Do you, would you say that, it sounds like the answer is yes, but would you say that you're more excited for this game now that you've done the preview than you were even before? Because you were already very excited about this game. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking

back this morning to when Greg were you were like, you got to kill one of your babies, either Zelda or Jedi Survivor, and you only get to have one. And I was like pretty quickly like, all right, I'm killing Jedi Survivor and like, I want Zelda. And after this, after this preview, I'm like, I have a little bit more pause on like, I don't know which to kill because I'm yeah like after this I'm just I'm really really excited and and it got me like kind of back into that like fresh Star Wars feeling like you know you've definitely got my I'm like I got to get a replay in yeah on order I again it's all it's like the next few weeks are going to be torture because all I want to do is play this game um yeah I'm trying to think if there's

anything else uh to add on I want to give you one question that I'm not sure if you saw anything or even if you'd be able to say anything about it because I know you're saying you're I don't for the record, don't know what you're saying you can't talk about for stories. Okay. Sammy Boy 54 wrote it and said, is there more referencing slash related to the High Republic than just the mysterious Jedi? I have no knowledge of what he's talking about.

When we watched the trailers, you had a whole bunch of theories and this, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I can't say anything. And I don't want to like really get super into story stuff anyway. Sure, sure.

Even if I was allowed to say, say more than what I could, like I just don't want to like give too much away of like what the story. Please don't. I don't want to ruin. But yeah, I will say for at least what I will talk about with the story for fallen order, because that's the thing where I'm still kind of questioning of like, where do you go after Fall in order?

Fallen Order felt like a kind of complete story when it came to Cal's internal journey. And so that's like, where do you go from here? Yeah. And so the interesting kind of tidbit that I really picked up on is that after five years, right, since Fallen Order, like, from Order 66 to Fallen, the events of Fallen Order, it was five years of Cal hiding. And now the five years in between Fallen Order and Survivor, it's been five years of Cal fighting the Empire.

And he is tired. He is, it just seems like it's been wearing on him. He doesn't feel like they've been making really any, like, major headway against the empire. And even to that, right? Like, that's felt in gameplay a little bit, because he's a little bit slower. there are moments where you know you get up from your meditation circle and he'll just sigh and he's just like and so I yeah I that makes me wonder like where they're going with him of like if he decides to give up on the fight for some reason just because he you know maybe after continuously fighting the empire for years and not feeling like he's doing anything significant like I wonder like if that's the major journey or if I'm just reading too much into that so that's the that's the interesting kind of thing I picked up for

from my time with it. And like the little bit that we get to see of hanging out with Grease, like Grease is concerned about like, dude, like, you know, like take a break. Like just like relax a little bit. Like, you get to hang out like in the basement of the bar that Grease is hanging out at and you get to, you know, sleep there. And there's some things that you can interact with there. And he's like, this conversation he has with Cal is like, dude, the galaxy can wait a couple hours.

Like just sleep, you know? Yeah. And so that was like kind of the big takeaway of the story that I just wanted to shout out. And the other interesting follow-ups, like, it was cool to like be on the mantis kind of at the beginning there. You get to see the little destroyed holocron from the first game. And like you kind of see Cal like think back on that and kind of think about like. And then, you know, I just love the, you know, at one point on Kobo, you see a big federation ship because some raiders have kind of taken over. over some battle droids for their own purposes.

And Cal kind of thinks back of like, oh, the last time I saw a federation ship was back on Braco when we were breaking down things. And he thinks back to his buddy Proff, who died at the beginning of Fallen Order. So there's definitely little things here and there. Like, okay, there's threads that I didn't really think about that you kind of can continue on

and see where Cal goes from here. And I want to do a quick shout-out to the battle droids because they were hilarious. If you're a big Clone Wars watcher like myself, they're kind of the comedic relief in that show just because they're like kind of pathetic and they're very aware of it in that show and it was definitely

that same vibe here even though they're being repurposed by Raiders. I feel like they're going to be a big comedic relief throughout the game even more so than the Stormtroopers like they would say some funny things in Fallen Order but nothing that I'm like that's funny. Like every battle trade interaction

I was having a big chuckle. It's all sounds great. I can't wait. You got me very excited. Yeah, right? Good. Yeah, the... April 28th can't come soon enough. The one thing I'll say, like I said,

I played on a PC with an AMD Risen. I didn't know what the exact specs were of the PC build, and granted, I'm playing a work in progress. The one drawback I felt like to the, like, how pretty it looked, there were still some, like, performance issues of, like, frame drops and things of that nature. Like, Kobo feels like a really big, like, place to explore, so it definitely felt like,

all right, now we're loading in this area, area of the area to kind of like go around in. But again, they delayed the game for six weeks. And I imagine because they want this to not be like the fallen order launch where it was like really buggy. And like I didn't notice any bugs. Like I will shout that out at least or visually or anything of that nature. It was just like I was noticing some loading frame drops and things like that.

And then a couple other things I want to shout out because of the fidelity and how good it looks. felt like I was getting lost sometimes when you know there's like your main golden path but then also some branching paths and like what's like everything looks so pretty that like you know there's obviously your climable vines but then they look so good that like not like is this

climable no I guess not or like can I go this way oh I can climb on the ceiling now like I didn't know that so there's like a point where I was like stuck a little bit and so it maybe like got a little bit too immersive at points where you're like where can and can't I go I had that problem with Horizon a little bit

where I'm like, this is too visually stimulating. Yeah. It's like the fidelity is too good. But I will say, low as us. But I do think like the easier to process map, I think will kind of help alleviate that a little bit because I did feel like I was bringing up my map a lot to be like,

wait, okay, I'm right here. I'm trying to go this way. I can't go this way. Okay, I can go back and loop back around that way. And yeah, it seems like there's going to be a lot of little things, fun things to explore, at least on Kobo. Again, I don't know what it's going to be like on other planets, whether they're going to be as big or there's going to be a bunch of smaller planets, things of that nature. But, yeah, it seems like a lot of cool little activities to do.

And I shouted out, like, being able to grow your garden, things of that nature. But I found something called a force tear or a tear in the force or something like that. It seemed like a Cal kind of described it as like this weird force echo that was missing something. And then it takes you into this kind of challenge rule. platforming challenge room. And yeah, you've got these platforms. And then every time you jump, the like force thing changes which side you're on. Oh.

And so you have to kind of like, and I didn't get that at first. And I was like, how am I messing up the timing here? But yeah, like every time you jump, it kind of changes where that's going. So you have to like really keep in mind of like how far you are in the little challenge room. How close the force field is getting to you? Which side is it about to like jump to if you jump one more time? Things of that nature. and so that's all I really saw

and like fun weird little things to go find so I don't know if like that's the extent of like it's just going to be things like that over and over again if there's going to be other rooms similar to it but yeah I wanted to shout that out of like

fun little things remind me of you know Sonic Frontiers a little bit I didn't play that game but the way you talked about those little like challenge rooms and areas that's part of the game yeah I thought of you when I got to the Force Terror

and I was like blessing like this too bad Sonic's dead Barrett, thank you so much for going to L.A. to play this game for us. You're welcome. Of course, Star Wars, Jedi Survivor, is out April 28th, one day after my birthday. What a present.

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