The Besties - Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is the Ultimate Make-Good

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

We can't believe it either: Cyberpunk 2077, a game we tore a new one when it first launched in 2020, is GOOD now. Like, really good. Find out what's so great about its new Phantom Liberty expansion, and what players can expect from the new 2.0 update! Also discussed: Sea of Stars, Blasphemous 2, No One Will Save You, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead Subscribe to our newsletter at besties.fan! Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I love zeroing gonks with my chooms. Me and my chooms were grooving down the tube, and we were zeroing gonks. Yeah. Zeeped out of our fucking gourds. You gotta be. We were zeeping on dwarfs and zeroing gonks with my chooms. Dorfs and zeroing gonks with my chooms.

I was going to tell all the, I was going to start by telling all the gonks that listened to our show that we had a real preem brain dance form. Yes. Well, the gonks who listened to our shows need to get zeroed by me and my chooms. No. Okay.

The gonks, we don't zero. Okay. Gonks. We might zero or possibly flatline. Yes. But our chooms, they are our friends. We do not want to zero them or flatline them. We want to treat them to a nice XBD, extreme brain dance. Yeah.

Maybe give them some eddies. I would love to give my choops some eddies and zero my gonks I can see why they want to keep writing these it is fun to do it's fun to just talk like this My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the most extreme brain dance of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy. I'm Ray Jack.

And my name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Rushton, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a video game club. Just by listening, you've become a member. Now these games, these games have come a long way since Cyberpunk 2077. They sure have. In this particular exact example, yes. This has come a long way.

This week we're talking about Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, which I really did think was about Metal Gear. But it's not. And it still might be. It still could possibly be. Well, let me tell Escape from New York. The DLC also comes with, well, actually, anybody who has a game gets this, the 2.0 update, which fixes a lot of things in the base game. New upgrades, fixed up skill tree tree a police system that actually works uh the game's great now and we're gonna talk about it right after this break cyberpunk 2.0 phantom liberty

pain remembered fuck all about their experience with cyberpunk 2077 i remember he was uh keanu showed up and he was in my head. Yeah, we know that. I remember that part. And he's still in your brain. He's still there. He's still in there. He's still cozy and safe.

I remember a general, a general sense of irritation. Yeah. I remember how I felt but not like what happened. Yes. Well, here's a show of hands. How many people skipped to the DLC?

Because when you start the game now, you can either start from the very beginning and you'll work your way up to the Phantom Liberty event. I think you need to be like level 20 or something to do Phantom Liberty. I don't know. I think it's gated to a story thing. I would recommend everyone do what I did,

follow my path, which is I started fresh fresh new character and there's like a very brief intro sequence depending on what background you pick uh and then it there's like a vr tutorial that is very in-depth and very detailed and then once you do that if you've played the game before then you start over and just skip right to the do the skip to Phantom Liberty choice. Because this game is got a lot of mechanics that you are not going to remember because it came out three fucking years ago. If you have not played the game to completion before, you could also do what I did, which is the exact opposite, which is I played Phantom Liberty for probably like three hours um and i was like wow this is really good wait is this whole game good now stop phantom letter liberty started a new game from the very beginning and discovered yes the whole game is good now the whole fucking game

is really good it's really really good i remember so i did something kind of similar to plant which was when i downloaded it there was some issues with i was playing on xbox and there were some issues getting the dlc but i did have the 2.0 update so i was like maybe i'll just do side stuff in my save game that is like more or less right at the like point of no return right before the ending and i ended up like getting totally absorbed in that. And I was like, holy fuck, this game is like fun as shit.

It took me like two hours to remember what the buttons did. But once I was in, I was like, so in. It's a lot. It's a lot to get back. I just started going for it. And it,

I do not recommend that because it was a pretty chunky first hour where I was trying to get my sea legs under me. There's still a lot in there. You did it with an existing save, Justin, or you started from scratch? I did start from scratch, and I did finish the game, but for code-obtaining reasons, I started fresh on PC with just jumping straight into Phantom Liberty. just jumping straight into Phantom Liberty. I watched a recap video of like the events of Cyberpunk 2077 and as much of that as possible, considering it was a game with like a branching narrative choices, et cetera, et cetera.

But I remembered absolutely none of it. And it's not really that important. The stuff, the idea that Johnny Silverhand, former punk rocker slash army. Nuclear bomb dropper. Yeah, right so the the idea that he is living in your head has not really resolved itself by the end of 2077 uh there's a couple different options you can go with it kind of this dlc assumes that he's still uh still kicking it in your head and but you don't like story-wise you don't it doesn't refer to the other stuff it's it's pretty

well it also this takes place before the end of the main story that's true yeah and it and it also is like in an area that's fairly like self-contained right like yeah this the new stuff is here you're not running all over the city dog town i think the plot of the dlc is they that's all you need I think to sell this because you are cool street hacker v and the president's airplane crashes into a very bad part of town and it's are you a bad enough dude to save the president uh from dog town that's a cool ass premise for any uh for any game i think all dlc for that matter for all yeah yeah which is escaping but listen hey all dlcs elden ring dlc save the president yeah fucking any game could be improved by teaming up with interest elba to go save the president there's a president in elden Ring? Well, there's demons and gods.

Yeah, there's a great, there's a great like very early before, like great title sequence drop when it's just like you've been running around shooting people and then a plane starts crash landing and on you, basically. And your character's like, okay, let's go save the president. And then they jump out of the tube.

And then cyberpunk Phantom Liberty. It's hot shit. It's really good. There's a moment very early on where you're kind of introduced to the area and you they're like okay you should get in this vehicle whatever motorcycle something like that and you're just driving to where the plane is gonna crash and like people are like running alongside i mean it's it's a scene that is directly ripped from escape from new york yeah but it is captured in such fuck this game is so fucking pretty now and i'm playing on xbox this is not like a nine thousand dollar pc i'm playing

on xbox series x and it looks fucking stunning and the fact that that like they have pulled this game from the ashes to become one of the best looking games and honestly one of the best playing open world games I've played ever. It's amazing. I was trying to figure out like, how is that possible, right? Because I remember listening to y'all's episode.

You did it with Ron and it was, people were pretty bummed out by this game. I was pretty bummed out by it. Have we been doing episodes with Ron for that long? That's wild. I did not believe that this game came out in 2020. Yeah. And here's my theory on how they were able to fix it.

The original Cyberpunk, you know when you go to a Disneyland dark ride, like Pirates of the Caribbean or Splash Mountain, and they haven't fixed it up in a really long time, and some of the animatronics are working, and some of them aren't working at all, and most of them are like kind of off. Not at Disneyland, but I understand what you're saying. Yeah.

And it just looks like really weird and kind of like discomforting. That is kind of how playing the original Cyberpunk felt at launch. A little bit. Yeah. It is definitely that sense of like you can tell. You feel like if you walk behind any of the buildings you'll see like it being propped up on two by fours it's just a facade that you like the whole world is just barely kind of hanging together yeah but the weird thing weird

thing and this dlc kind of highlighted that is like how many people did like kind of an amazing job right from the jump of cyberpunk like right when it launched and i'm talking about like the art designers the world designers the like all the like visuals are there and they're spectacular the game and the writing i feel like the writing this game gets a short shrift because of the like wild amount of street lingo that they have that they implement in it but there is there are sequences in this game that i think put a lot of other like open especially open world games like writing to to absolute shame the number of like little like stories and really intense scenes that you encounter is is really impressive just, just to mention it,

it's also like, for me, the best, I can't remember better, like face, like recreation, face mapping, whatever you want to call it.

Like the digital performances look really, quite really good. I mean, you really do get a sense of the full performance, not just like we put Bruceuce willis's face on this character you know with 20 polygons available to us like it feels like you are watching a scene and it's pulling off some like something that very few games uh that have this kind of like i don't know if it's performance captured or if it was rendered by hand, but the communicating things outside of the dialogue with face,

like with movements, tiny gestures, things like that. Most games don't have the confidence to do that, right? Like all the story, all the emotion has to be communicated through the words, through the voice performance. And they really have the wherewithal, I think, and the confidence with what they're doing to let the performances carry a lot more of the story and the narrative rather than just relying on the script. Yeah, the pacing also is just incredible of the base game the first i hour and seven like hour and three quarters about a movie length is whatever original opening that you pick because you can pick between three for your character it is meeting your effectively best friend for the game with a killer opening

montage that sells you on these two people actually having a friendship and uh and getting your first implants and your first mission together and by by the time like a movie would end you are stepping out of your apartment for the very first time and getting into like what will be the game well at that point uh three years ago there was a big crash and then you play the game for three weeks but now it actually works yeah the two things i remembered when this first came out was there was the mission from the original demo that was so cool where you go into the apartment and pull the body from the bathtub. And that that was a disaster for me when I played it the first time. Now it actually kind of feels like that original presentation. It feels like a part of the

city rather than just a little closet where a mission happens yeah and then also the apartment i just got stuck when i played it originally it kept uh breaking the waypoint so i spent like an hour just wandering the apartment trying to figure out what i was supposed to do um yes it's so much better i think this this like may this like campaign which is pretty beefy for i mean it's always weird expectation setting when you're talking about length of like standalone content or dlc i've done nothing else i feel like from what i can tell i'm maybe like two-thirds of the way through it um through the dlc you're talking about? Through the DLC, through the main thrust of the DLC.

I have to say, like, I think this would be so weird to play as a part of a main playthrough of your campaign because it's so propulsive. Like it's so like you don't really get a lot of downtime. Every once in a while, Idris Elba in his infinite wisdom will be like i need a day just to like figure this stuff out so go i don't know whatever you do when i'm not talking to you well he also there are moments also in the dlc where you'll like like there's some side missions that they added as part of the dlc where you'll steal a car and what kind of blew me away was you'll steal a car in dogtown this is the new area and they'll be like okay deliver it and you don't really know

where you're delivering you just follow the waypoint whatever and then like without even realizing it i'm suddenly in the main map of the normal game and there's no load screen i mean there's like a brief like checkpoint moment yeah but there's no load screen it's totally fluid and so you have these moments where you are kind of bouncing back and forth a little bit and that's pretty fucking like amazing. Normally these DLCs are like, so like you think about like the Skyrim DLC, the Fallout DLC,

they're so self-contained. They don't really exist within the world itself. And a lot of this granted does take place in this DLC area, but they were, I think really smart in integrating this map into the overall rest of the map. It is also stunning how rich the world is with with different things that are actually interesting that happen to you like scenes that you just

walk up on and that are not like directed or anything it's just like you're encountering it there is one uh beat where very secret agent um you, you are undercover at a party. And the party that you're at, you get the mission objective to enjoy the party. And I didn't quite understand why, but once I got into it, I realized it is – I've never seen anything like it. There are probably 200 different people in this party. And as you're walking around, there are dozens of conversation, like all around you, conversations are happening and you can like walk up and listen to one, walk away, walk over somewhere else.

And someone's having a completely different, absolutely believable conversation. And I've never seen anything. It is absolutely like a show, like a've never seen anything like it is absolutely like a show like a a bravura like here you go look at this yeah we made a whole party they're showing off a little bit but i think it's like so after some of the other um sci-fi open world games we've uh partaking of this year uh playing a game that is that like rich with stuff where you don't feel like time is wasted where you really legitimately are pulled off the main trail by something that just like looks cool

that you want to investigate they're they're like you get like weird item drops like you uh that you would see in like a fortnight or something like that by the big rich guy that's trying to keep everybody on their toes and he'll just drop uh items and you see this like red plume of smoke and everyone in the area is suddenly sprinting for this like all the npcs like get guns and are running for this thing and you're running for it too it is it's uh it's so rich uh in a way that puts other uh titles to shame it definitely feels like they were trying to this was like they knew they had one shot at like redeeming this effort and they've been trying you know they've released a variety of free patches over the course of these three years but yeah you know i had tried 1.5

which is the last big update and it still wasn't quite there but this was them basically saying yep we finally got it to a place and i don't know that it gets to this place without feedback and without the reaction i don't know that they spend the amount of time that was required to fix this game if the game came out and it was like a b plus like i think they really felt like this was their shot to make this a redemption story in the way that like no man's sky was and they kind of fucking knocked it out of the park i mean what choice did they have right like i mean the choice was just to move on to like the old choice business end of this at all like they really needed to turn this one around they did but like the traditional the traditional

choice in the game industry was well sorry next game, next game. And they'd go and make Witcher, and hopefully that was better. But obviously, you know, their business would be pretty diminished. And a lot of games honestly aren't built in such a way that would allow for such a miraculous recovery. Like most games are built to be pretty rigid and not allow this level of customization

without like a full sequel coming out. Like you look at at destiny 2 which required like a pretty major overhaul so or anthem i mean that's anthem which never came back yeah does this bother you guys to like i'm feeling very conflicted because there's this one hand where it's like man they really have turned this thing around it's really fun now it is three years like since they were charging people 60 70 bucks for this thing like does it feel weird to compliment someone for finally making the game that they said they were making three years ago if this was the only i don't feel that way necessarily but i'm curious what you guys think i if this was the only big change like the 2.0 update like refines a lot of stuff,

but they have been like fixing cyberpunk since it came out. Russ mentioned the 1.5 update, which was pretty huge. Like this, when the original game came out, it had a lot of technical issues. I think more than anything else, that is what killed it for me is that it would just crash and not work a lot of the time.

And the physics would get really fucking weird. And driving anywhere was a nightmare. And they've sort of slowly polished off the rough edges. I don't actually think the 2.0 update, if you look at a list of features, is that wild. I get rebalances, how the perks work. Yeah, I think the skill tree is like foundationally a shift of how this game is played and we haven't really talked like i could dive into it but it is i mean i don't know that it does it doesn't reinvent the wheel it's just like a better

skill tree i think it reinvents it in so far as you know the original skill tree was you do 10 more damage with an assault rifle or you do 20 more damage with a pistol the new skill tree is when you dash you can now slow time while aiming to get a headshot and if you land that headshot it's an instant crit like that or you can now off a car to get into combat immediately like the skill tree is now like the ideal skill tree we taught i think we talked about this in the original episode like no one wants the three percent increase to damage yeah like skill that sucks yeah but they knew that now they learned that lesson and they've gone through and made that change across the board for every play style.

I think there was a perk in the original skill tree that was stealth attacks from underwater deal like 10% bonus damage, which was not a use case that ever, ever, ever appeared in the game. cannot think of another i'm sure there's there's some another action game certainly first person action game where there is this much like flexibility in how you approach different scenarios like different not just like weapon selection but like the extent to which you're leaning on tech the extent to which you're like hacking and and doing stuff like that or relying on just like pure strength and blades. I mean, you could just be that if you wanted to. I think it's really like the amount of options they give you. I will also say for whatever this is worth, I did not have – jumping in straight where I was,

I have not had much trouble in terms of like keeping up with the difficulty difficulty curve i think it sets you out at a pretty good uh pretty good place you do get like a lot of junk you pick up a lot of stuff and there's probably still a little bit too much like dismantling of the 20 hats that i have um for for my taste but uh um there there are there are a ton of of different like play style options those perks really highlight that too can we go through like how how are people playing i i just want to go back to the the question about you know is it okay for the game to get fixed up like this and how do we feel about that i i think there's something interesting here in that games are both like art and then also like buying a car that you expect to work versus movies we're like marvel releases a movie and the script fundamentally doesn't work

and the cgi is like looks incomplete and we just say that's like a bad movie and then we like move on and then marvel never fixes it though with cg maybe that's changed a little bit um i mean they fixed star wars with the with the remakes and i mean yeah we're making much better justice league with the snyder cut you know yeah yeah but i i think with games there's this weird thing at launch where people are like well if it doesn't work they didn't put in enough effort and this is like a dishonest product more like a car that you would want to be recalled. And I think – one, I think it's just great at all that companies fix this because no company is releasing this trying to like scam people. They're releasing it because they feel some economic pressure or maybe it's investors or maybe it's whatever else.

OK, OK. But this is kind of what we're going to talk about in the B segment. Right. So I think we should return to I will say people scam people because of economic pressures all the time, especially corporations. Right. Like this is not where we had to for money. Like, yeah, no, no, I, i i i agree with people because we needed their money i i think there's a difference between like shell oil and like a company that releases one game every six years and it's like name depends on its success you know like i i just don't think that they were rushing this out to like intent they didn't make a game as a scam you know the business model wasn't it wasn't curiosity

yeah we weren't just clicking boxes okay well i want to talk about we're in the b segment but focusing on on this uh i it just help is great by the way um fucking great it just was great so dialed into this um there's a real like it true to like secret agent stuff there's very much like who do you trust whose side are you on who can you believe and it kind of it's tough for me because like it's probably gonna be idris elba for me man he looks at me with those eyes and he's like do i have your trust my hell yeah you do hell yeah, you do, Idris. Let's get out of here. Fuck yeah, Knuckles.

Let's party. Hey, there's a whole other, do you wanna just hang? There's like a whole city here. We can just go fuck up stuff together. Like, it's no problem. We can just hang. What was your guys' play style?

How are you? I just respect to a gorilla arms-based play style and I'm never looking back. So you just go in there and you just Donkey Kong it out. I go berserk. I turn on my berserk chip, and I let God handle, God sort them out. Zero the donks.

I have an explosive pistol that I use to shoot people, and then I have a smart SMg that i use to kill to kill people and then i i tend to use the uh tech stuff just as like a little bonus magic just like cast some spells on people to keep other people busy quick hacks and such quick hacks there's stuff like there's cool shit like being able to like glitch people's weapons and it's so neat to be able to like reboot someone's vision while you're killing someone else and they're like hey you just keep them busy for a second while i'm killing someone else um so i you start with kind of like a balanced one if you just skip right to the dlc uh but i did try a few like the relic there's one relic that allows you to go

uh invisible like this is a new this is the new character added in the DLC. Yeah, it's kind of superhero-y almost. The one that I liked was you can find a character's weak spot, and it's not just like a headshot anymore. It can be like their kneecap. And when you shoot that weak spot enough, there's like a little square around it that, you know, slowly disintegrates. It breaks and it deals 100% crit damage to them and creates like an explosion to nearby enemies.

And it's awesome, especially if you like build a smart weapon build for it. And you have something that's going to auto target that. It's just magnifique. But then I restarted, and now I'm focusing on, like, a really fast-moving, invisible, probably a sword build. Okay, I'm going to suggest something that it took me a while to come to this realization, but it's extremely cool. Throwables. This is a build that I never, ever play in other games because, for obvious reasons, no one wants to manage your 16 knives in a whatever. But here, when you do a throwable, in this case a throwing knife, they're basically on cooldown.

So you just get it back after whatever the cooldown expires. tree that's dedicated to reducing that cooldown and increasing knife damage such that you can fly into a room knife throw people instantly get the knife back knife throw people and do that like six times while your slow down cyber deck is going to the point where the entire room is dead before anyone even moves it's fucking awesome highly recommendly recommend it. That's, I mean, making a value judgment always seems weird, but I think it's pretty darn reasonable, considering if you want an excuse to jump back in, which is really, I mean, I haven't touched it since I finished it, obviously.

But I think it's great. I mean, also, just the original game. It's like mean also just the original game it's like i think the original game is 35 dollars right now is there yeah my my advice would be if you're not sure well first of all if you bought the game and it's just been languishing in your steam account or playstation account whatever boot it up just do side missions and see if you're into it like if you're vibing with it chances are you're gonna get to the end of it and be like oh shit this is fucking great i want to see more i want to unlock more perks whoever it is bam the dlc is waiting for you but i don't think there's

any reason if you already own the game not to like get your sea legs first before just buying the dlc even though i agree with you justin it's fantastic um i think it's you know sitting right there for a lot of people um fantastic well well uh we're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna come back and talk more about uh games that have been given the space to to grow and uh whether or not we'll see another game like cyberpunk again now let's make some eddies so cyberpunk as we all as we've established multiple times in this episode launched in a total fucking disaster um the the frequency that this happens is not a ton like when there's a game

that has this big of a budget that has this big of a team that is in development for this long, invariably, usually I would say like 90% of the time the game comes out and it's like either fine or it's great. It's never or at least very rarely is it terrible and a total disaster. like cyberpunk and to a lesser extent no man's sky have kind of laid the groundwork for studios to make the argument that hey we do not want another cyberpunk on our hands and i think you're starting to see publishers more willing to delay games to avoid that potentiality i would okay i have a question for you for you guys would you rather play to completion 1.0 cyberpunk 2077 or 1.0 starfield i mean i i did both so yes wish us but but i'm saying to you right now you've got to do one of them again which would you do? Starfield. Starfield functions. It works. It's whatever.

Like, you know, the gameplay didn't necessarily throw me, but the game works and has some moments to it that are, like, enjoyable, and it was fine. And to Frascia's point, they spent a lot of time polishing that to not have it be the typical Bethesda release. Yeah, if you look at the version mean it doesn't have bugs but yeah what cost when starfield launched if you look at the version

number it was like 1.56 which is to say the game was at 1.0 eight months before the game released and they just spent all that time addressing the classic, you know, Bethesda Game Studios critique of like, oh, these games launched a mess. And yeah, no, I mean, they did it. They were able to address those problems. I really, okay. So we were kind of hitting at something that I think is worth returning to.

Is it, should this be the way things are? By which I mean, launching a game, doing a full launch, charging full price with an understanding that over time it will improve. Is that something that only like certain developers can get away with maybe? Like can the CD price, or is it, or or would you prefer I'm talking from a consumer perspective?

Is it better to get a a project that is like still getting tinkered with right and still getting patched up and still getting fixed? that this with the scale of these games i don't know that it is realistic anymore to expect someone to um get a game of this scale to like a hundred percent um yeah well we have an example that we can look to very obviously and very recently that's baldur's gate 3 came out in early access i think the same year as cyberpunk i think it was a 2020 early access release and i mean it wasn't broken as fuck but it was only a very small portion of the game and there were a ton of bugs because it was early access and the general understanding was yeah it's early access so it's fine i think that needs to be the approach if you're making a game that is so big that you don't think that you can release it without a ton of bugs, you need to be very upfront with people.

You need to make it clear that, hey, this is going to have some issues, but it's early access, and we will get there. You just need to give us time. What you can't do is what Cyberpunk did, which was launch it, say it's a great game, and y'all should play it and look at these great unrepresentative trailers. And then everyone realizes it's a great game and y'all should play it and look at these great unrepresentative trailers. And then everyone realizes it's a sham. That is where the corporate scamminess that we talked about before gets icky with Cyberpunk in particular. Is the, especially the way that they presented the game versus the last gen console stuff. That is shady as fuck. I forgot about that.

I mean, even if you look at the like e3 trailers and granted we all know that e3 trailers are kind of bunk to begin with but like there's a lot of that stuff in the e3 trailers that still isn't in cyberpunk like it's still not in the 2.0 update so like yeah there was definitely some like not great communication going on there that bordered on maybe not honesty. And that's where, again, I, you know, I'm incredibly impressed by what Baldur's Gate did and no one dunked on them for releasing an early access game because the understanding was that it would get addressed and it was, and it came out and it was fucking amazing.

So yeah, I think, I think it's just too big of a gamble for this to be like a a conscious business model. You know, like I think there's a conspiracy theory version of this of like, hey, developers know they don't have to finish the games now because like you can just get this this story of, you know, redemption and you can build it into your PR campaign. And sure, when it when it works it it works really well and there's there are a number of examples elder scrolls online is another one but in a big butt here you can still be anthem and you can lose oh wow that's such a good call plant that's such a like oh yeah you think it's a gamble worth taking? I present Exhibit Anthem. Yeah, and like on the nasty shareholder level, nobody likes to see your terrible headlines.

It just, it feels like such, such a risk to say like this is a business model. And I think that is why everything from Zelda uh zelda to starfield we're hearing that these games have been finished for a long time before release because they they do want to get it close to right that said i think you're also right justin that even if you get it close to right i mean unless you're elden ring well even, even Elden Ring had some bumps at launch. You know, we've kind of erased that from our collective brains. But, yeah, I don't think it's like a coherent business model that every publisher is going to aspire for. I just think you've got to have the – like I think there's a lot of people that are willing to pay full price to start playing something early, right? That's kind of what the early access thing yeah what was all about and why i think you're tell

me if i'm wrong because you guys pay a lot closer attention i feel like for a while everybody was doing early access even the bigger companies it feels like there's less of a um like it's harder to get a marketing campaign going around a game that's in early access so you're not seeing it as much but that's my own i think you're seeing in the in the triple a like big big studios well i think with balder's gate there essentially wasn't much of a market i mean there was a marketing campaign but it was pretty light while they were through early access like going through those multiple years and then at launch there was like a big push to be like okay this game is done honestly like so long as you kind of hit a bit of a baseline with the early access

in terms of sales, you don't need to sell a ton of ton. You just need enough that's like, the word of mouth is relatively good and people are talking positive things about it. It's fine. And then eventually, like, the game will come out and it's great.

I mean, this is for a bigger studio. Obviously, for an indie, if you're launching, you might need that early access money to help fund the rest of your development. But for bigger studios, like, you know, the demands are less. Yeah, I also feel like this is just being married to a business model that doesn't exist anymore. And it's specifically a marketing model where it was like movies. You know, you build towards a big release promote promote promote and then it

goes out and that week you get most of your sales and then you move on to the next thing when now you know grand theft auto 5 is in the top 10 games on steam forever for you know a decade it's not unusual for a game just to continue to sell so and i think i hope balder's gate and to some degree cyberpunk is a great example for publishers of like it's okay to launch and be transparent and then get your big moment later on that will get you even more sales like this is not going to you're not going to miss your one opportunity to sell the game, especially if you're very transparent from the drop. Yeah. Or if you can afford it, just delay the game until it's ready.

Yeah, that's another great idea. I mean, I think that it's not – I don't think it's a mistake that CD Projekt Red also had a big franchise like Witcher that they could probably lean on for a lot of additional sale. And this game sold great. It's hard to say that it didn't work, right? It's very similar to the story with No Man's Sky, I think, where it was so hyped, it had a big launch, it got a lot of money,

and it was able to use that like lead that little like that oxygen that that allowed them to keep working on the game like it it it seemed to have paid off in both of those cases right yeah in in the end yeah oh it's in i don't know it's it's it's it's interesting it's also kind of a weird aspect specifically the c Projekt, just because by nature of them being a public company, but also being a company that releases so few games, it's not like, you know, obviously Activision's a public company, but they can like mix it up with Call of Duty and Diablo.

They can like, if one thing fails, it's not necessarily the entire year. And so here, I mean, you look at what their stock price did. It was at $30 around launch, and it's, you know, now at $10, $7. It's funny that this would happen to a game about cyberpunk because what just an example of how complicated it is when art and, like, commerce meet. And I'm sure that there are a lot of people in the studio who wish they could have just worked on it forever. And I'm sure that there

are people at the studio who are like, hey, we need to get this out the door because we need the money. And I'm sure that there are people in the studio who just wanted a bonus and maybe we're all commerce. Like, I think it's, it's easy to forget that there are a whole bunch of different motives within a company like this that range, like, the entire spectrum of what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah. Video games are hard, man. Yeah. Video games are hard. That's why I don't make them.

How do they do it? How do they do it, man? You know? Hey, should we open up the reader mailbag? Yes. Yeah, what do they want okay uh fresh do you want to grab this first question sure first question uh okay so uh this question comes from max g have you all seen the craziness with titanfall 2 reviving and the tinfoil theory

surrounding it do you think there will ever be a Titanfall 3? And are there any other games you'd like to see get a second chance or a sequel? So the craziness, my understanding, and I'm not like big into the Titanfall community, but Titanfall 2 got an update, a software update just recently, which is pretty weird to see for a game that has essentially been untouched for many, many years, for there to be an update that addresses some exploits and patches and various other things.

So that has resulted in theories of Titanfall 3 coming out. Now, obviously, Respawn has a very successful Titanfall franchise in Apex Legends that is in the Titanfall universe. So I don't know it's interesting it's possible i love there's some weird stuff too they put out like their patch notes and there was like weird unix code referencing oh i didn't fall one and two interesting i don't think it would be that big a surprise people it's also the titanfall 2 frequently goes on sale for like $3. So if you've never played it, get that fucking game for $3. It's insanely good.

You get to be Matthew Mercer. I mean, can you imagine the dream? Do you think a Titanfall 3 would be good? Here's my answer to that. If we knew the answer to that, we could just save them a lot of time. It guys will be good here's my answer to that we could just save them a lot of time and guys will be good my question is titanfall as an ip is like not i think like a life-changing ip but the writing and level design in titanfall 2 was incredible like valve level good and i don't know if the people who made titanfall 2 still work there maybe they do but it's been a long time and the studio has been doing a lot of different things i mean a lot of the level design that worked in titanfall 2 we've seen in star wars

jedi survivor and stuff like that so i think that you have some of those chops still and the writing as well like is is good in jedi survivor you know the larger question is like do you make a campaign centric shooter these days i mean it's kind of just call of duty pushing that needle and even call of duty their campaigns are like three hours long now um i feel like it what would make more sense is some sort of evolution of apex like folding the two together i think like they're in the same world already like would they make a titanfall 3 before they make apex legends 2 like i i i don't know i i feel like that's where the money is uh uh these days so i don't i don't know i'd like it though yeah i mean apex is the valuable of the two people have actually heard of apex legends at this point whereas titanfall

has been languishing untouched for decades. Have we ever been more off-base than when we heard about Apex Legends before it came out, and we're like, really? A Battle Royale from Titanfall and they didn't even call it Titanfall? They're calling it Apex Legends? They kind of surprise dropped it, right?

It was kind of out of nowhere, yeah. We definitely fucked that one up. Whoopsie. Take everything we say with a grain of nowhere, yeah. We definitely fucked that one up. Whoopsie. Take everything we say with a grain of salt. Yeah. Oh, well. Okay, next question. This one's from Connor.

With spooky season coming up quickly, what are some of the best horror movies to watch if you aren't necessarily a fan of them? Oh, my gosh. This is a good question. Can we... Maybe Halloween movie. them oh my gosh this is a good question i can we get hallow maybe halloween movie you know like if you scary movies if you like scary movies i don't know how to recommend that to people like but like halloween movies there are things that i don't think are that are not scary that i tend

to watch every halloween you mean like hocus pocus what are you talking about no i'm talking about like um the american scream is one that i watch every single year if you've never watched it is a documentary about home haunters uh that all live in like one town and their relationships with each other and why they make home haunts like turn their their yards into haunted houses basically um and it's a it's like beautiful and human and it's very much like a celebration of the idea of halloween in the way that like most christmas movies are really uh nail the tone of like what makes that holiday special this is one of the few that like i think

gets halloween really right so the american scream is one that i watch every year it it is uh fantastic um i always say the thing it's my favorite um it's one of my favorite movies for people who don't like scary things yeah i mean it's i don't know what to tell you about scary man you asked for a horror movie so um that's why i adapted it uh yeah no but it's a horror movie so it's gonna have... I don't think that The Thing is terrifying. I think The Thing is fucking cool. That's so wild, Griffin. That's a wild take.

What are you saying? I can make another recommendation since Griffin is just really, just really... I don't know. I stand by my recommendation. I don't think The Thing is a particularly terrifying movie. I think it's a cool survival tale. More of a thriller.

This is about... It's about ingenuity and survival in the face there's a cute dog in it there's a cute dog and there's lots of um there's you know it's it's like uh have you guys played Among Us uh-huh it's like that it's like they may have moved yeah it is kind of like Among Us whoa yeah. Yeah, I can't recommend it. I have others, but I can't recommend anything else right now because of the ongoing strike. So happy that the WGA has a deal.

I hope that SAG-AFTRA gets a deal very soon too. Because I'm a dork, I put together a list on letterboxd that i'll link in the newsletter so you should go subscribe to besties.fan and i have a whole collection of movies that i think are like a perfect match for this just to name one of them tales from the crypt demon knight perfect what's the last question we got uh this comes from Michaela W. Apparently, the intro of this week's Only Murders in the Building episode has a cast recording a podcast that starts, The Besties Are Back.

Yeah, I saw that last night. That's some bullshit. That's our trademark. Well, okay. We are always saying The Besties Are Back. Yeah, the listener and fan of the show back yeah the listener and fan of the show josh briscoe texted me about this and he noted that they say the besties are back three times which is also the number of times this show has been revived from the dead okay wow okay so like maybe it's some sort of like they're like reaching out to us arguably we provide this show every week from the dead yeah this show can disappear at any

moment so it's always true i can keep the audience on their toes um do we got any honorable mention honorable mentions yeah point you have a thematic one. Yeah, Cyberpunk Edgerunners is an anime on Netflix, and it is absolutely fantastic. And here's a word of warning. Big R rating on this. Yes, it's a cartoon, but cartoons, they're not just for kids these days. And this one is very adult. So keep any children away unless, hey, you know,

you want them to see some really, really terrifying, upsetting stuff. Yep. Makes them tough. I'm recommending a movie, which is called No One Will Save You. It's streaming on Hulu. We are going to talk about it on Resties more. Plant, you just recommended this to the Austin group chat, right? Is this the film you were talking about?

Why am I still allowed in the Austin group chat? Why am I still allowed in the Austin group chat? My recommendation for No One Will Save You is, so long as you're okay with some spooks, some scares, don't read about it. Just jump right in and have yourself a a time it's it's a nice tight 90 minutes long which i'd love to see and uh plant didn't give me any more uh notice than that and uh yeah we're gonna talk about it more on uh resties on tuesday so if you want to be

up on it tune in over the weekend and enjoy yourself because it's quite the ride um i've been playing i tried blasphemous 2 again at russ's constant behest i think i haven't talked to you in like a month about blasphemous 2 you just knew in the back of your head i'm like a little angel shoulder you feel i feel the i feel the the the the heat of your breath on the nape of my neck as you just whisper things catholic things, over and over and over again. Yes, yes, yes. It kicks ass. I'm so glad that I got back into it.

I'm playing it on Switch, which is I'm having a much better time because my Switch Lite is so much smaller than the Steam Deck. And I have frail hands and forearms. I have frail hands and forearms. I'm doing my best to improve that. Hitting the gym so I can handle the Steam Deck's big, powerful, virile frame. Hey, no cap. Okay. No cap.

When I play the Steam Deck, I have to have a lap pillow to support its weight because of my carpal tunnel syndrome is so bad. I can't support this beefy boy i gotta have a support system i'm hoping they'll come out with some sort of neck brace that could just keep it hanging in front of me that would be great yeah at that point you you are just building kind of a shitty home pc so i wouldn't recommend that so i think we're going to talk more about blasphemousous 2 next week, I believe. Everyone in this room will someday be dead by Emily Austin is a book I read this week. It is the story of a atheist lesbian woman who has a lot of anxiety. a lot of anxiety. And she, to a point where it's almost sort of destabilizing for her,

and through a variety of circumstances, she finds herself as the secretary at a Catholic church who no one knows that she is not, in fact, a Catholic. And it is a really, I have never read a book that takes you inside what a panic attack feels like or what like baseline anxiety feels like as sort of well as this book does. It really, it was one of those that is is tough to read but it's also kind of

like reassuring when you see things echoed that have gone through your head in the past as well it can can feel nice it's funny it's it's it's humane in a way that is very earned and doesn't feel sort of like cheap or easy um and uh I read the whole thing in one day because I just thought it was fantastic. So it's called Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin. If you're in a rough headspace, I would maybe give it a pass

until you're feeling a little better because going that deep in the paint, as it were, can be a bit much if I was in a worse place emotionally, I think. Do you like it, Plant? You like stuff that upsets you? It does sound really my speed. I'm already

looking at it on my little bookstore's website. He's a sad little boy. Yeah, but it's good, though, because he's like, he stays one step ahead of everybody else. You know what I mean? He leaves it in the movies, and then he just has a of everybody else. You know what I mean? He leaves it in the movies and then he just has a heart of joy. You know what I mean? He just gets out all the

demons with the movies and books. Speaking of demons, I'd like to thank the following people for writing. I have to keep updating everyone. I have to keep updating everyone on the most unbelievable story of the year. I'm still playing Sea of Stars. i've almost

completed it i am now running around doing final in-game content in an attempt to collect everything after 30 hours i'm finally about to beat sea of stars i know amazing for a game that when we talked about it the very first time i said no thanks that has turned to a yes please i'll take all that you have so cool I really would like Griffin to play more of it I keep begging him just like brother I will I will it's next after blasphemous

speaking of demons thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple podcast we have Colin Denton old boomstick and physics student 999 thank you for writing reviews to the besties on apple podcast thank you to everyone else who's written reviews or talked about the show or shared it or subscribe to the newsletter at besties.fan next week we're going

to go out to the to the indie fields to see what crops have reached their full potentiality and we're going to take the most delicate juicy berries and bring them back for you to enjoy with a wide variety of games. I know we're going to be talking about Blastmas II some more. El Paso Elsewhere. Chance of Cenar. I might try to make everybody talk about a new,

the Isle Tide Hotel, a new FMV game that is out, we'll see if I'm successful in that yeah, so much more so catch it next week and be sure to join us again next week for the besties, because should the world's best friends make the world's best games. Besties!