The Ringer-Verse - ‘Elden Ring Nightreign’ Reactions and ‘Elden Ring’ Movie News | Button Mash

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Ben, Matt, and Steve party up for a three-person podcast about a three-player game! First, they discuss what the cancellation of Electronic Arts' Black Panther project portends for the future of superhero games and Triple-A licensed games. Then they have a spoiler-free discussion of FromSoftware's fascinating 'Elden Ring' spinoff experiment, 'Nightreign,' focusing on its difficulty, its genre-spanning appeal, and its technological drawbacks. After that, they react to the news that Alex Garland is writing and directing an A24-produced 'Elden Ring' movie and try to figure out what the adaptation could look like, before honoring 'Mission: Impossible' by identifying other major media properties that historically have been the most underserved by video games. Intro (0:00)Black Panther + Game Cancellations  (2:40)Reactions to 'Elden Ring Nightreign' (11:13) 'Elden Ring' Movie Predictions Most Underserved Franchises in Video Games (56:46)Outro (1:16:48) Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Steve Ahlman and Matt JamesProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everyone? It's Rachel Lindsay, and if you love all things Bravo, then you need to be listening to Morley Corrupt. Every Tuesday and Friday, your favorite ringer podcasters and I dive into Bravo's biggest moments and dish out hot and always unfiltered takes. And guess what? Now you can watch us too. That's right, Morley Corrupt is now available in video on Spotify. So whether you're listening in your family van or watching next to your white refrigerator, don't be all uncool. and miss out. Catch new episodes every Tuesday and Friday, only on the Ringer Reality TV feed. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Trimphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Trimfaya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject trumphia, proper training is required. Tramphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's

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I am Ben Minberg, senior editor for the ringer, button mash host, and easy prey for the night lords of Limfeld. Just as it takes a trio to have any hope of completing a run in Eldon Ring Night Rain. It will take a trio to complete this podcast. And so, mere hours after we were wiped out in a boss battle while yapping on PlayStation party chat, I am joined once again by Steve Iron Eye, Alman. Hello, Steve. Yes, I've just got to really connect that party mic and make sure that it's all working properly. Hold on 15 more minutes. I'll be right back. There we go. I can hear you. I can also hear Matt the Wilder James. Hello, Matt. I am ready to revive.

Thank you. I am, of course, Ben, the recluse Lindbergh in real life, but not in night rain. In night rain, I am also an Iron Eye archer because if I stay slightly farther away from the monsters, it might take them a little longer to kill me. That's my basic strat in Night Ring. Can you imagine if we had to record a podcast while a wall of flames contracted around us with that make butt mesh better or worse? I think worse.

I'm going to say worse. Some people feel it makes Eldon Ring worse. Yes, we will discuss that shortly. We will talk about all things Night Rain, the latest edition to the Eldon Ring universe, and then we will consider the newly announced next edition, a major motion picture that's being written and directed by Alex Garland, an adaptation of Eldon Ring. We'll also discuss some of the most underserved major media properties in video games, but first, relevant to the interests of a lot of our listeners, Electronic Arts has canceled a planned open world Black Panther game and disbanded its developer Cliffhanger Studios,

which was formed to make this game, so it never even got a game out. That news comes a few months after Warner Brothers shut down Monolith, which was making a Wonder Woman game. Also, the new Skydance Adventure game from Uncharted to Amy Hennig, Marvel-1943, Rise of Hydra, was just delayed into next year. Matt, what does it all mean, if anything, is this? a reflection of the state of superhero games or AAA games or licensed games or is it not enough news to constitute a trend?

Well, first of all, I'm upset. I was really looking forward to this Black Panther game. Yeah. I think perhaps what's happening is that when you make a Marvel game, it has to be a bangor. It has to be. Like, we can't have another situation with Avengers where you have a game that doesn't quite live up. expectations upon release, and then you realize that as a production company, you've wasted millions and millions of dollars. It has to be a hit out the gate if you're making a Marvel game.

And I think that people are realizing maybe we need to pull the plug on some of these things if it's not going in the right direction. And it just, it really sucks. It really sucks that we keep having cancellations of games that from the outset sound like near, guaranteed successes, especially for, you know, such experienced developers. Yeah, it is not enough to just slap the Marvel label on something and have it do well. I mean, we've learned that in movies and TV, but also in video games, even when the game is well received, even if it's Guardians of the Galaxy or Midnight Suns, it's not automatic that that's going to be a big hit.

But we've seen some serious misfires, obviously. And we've seen some successes. And you still have Marvel rivals going strong. though less strong than it was going. Some months ago, the player count has declined pretty precipitously. Steve, what do you take away from these cancellations? I think it's more, if I would ever be alarmist about news like this, it's actually not in the world of IP licensed video game adaptations.

I think it's more in the AAA space that overinvestments in things that seem like guaranteed successes, while the bloat of budgetary restrictions and the bloat of investment needed to make this game the thing that... I won't even say fans, but I'll say companies think that fans demand has kind of become kind of corrosive and a little bit overwrought

because we keep hearing about all of these big, grand things that are going to be coming out. And I think the Captain America game that's slated to come out, Obviously, Amy Henning and her studios are, like, well regarded and, like, couldn't possibly come with a better pedigree to deliver something as big as that. But when you have the likes of EA and Warner Brothers games, as tough as their development cycles have been, they're kind of the companies to do these things, to cancel games that have kind of been, like, majorly, majorly anticipated and overly invested in and then realizing that it's not going to be making that investment and then, cut short. We didn't even really know what the structure of that game is going to be, mainly due to

is it a live service game? Is it going to be a seasonal thing with like multiple expansions? Like obviously there's going to be these things that in AAA titles will inflate the cost to the consumer via a season pass or something like a live streaming service or a live service, excuse me, like that it was an Avengers. And I think that's kind of the main trend that I take away from this where

live service games and bigger investments to players are actually starting to bite investments in the ass a bit. And we might just want something a bit more simple. Like, just give us a game. Yeah, I think that's part of it. We've also seen some games bomb suicide squad. You try to force it into that live service box and it doesn't fit or something like Star Wars outlaws, which was sort of a sales disappointment. And there was a Star Wars first person shooter from respawn that was canceled last year.

So I think it is partly that. It's companies like EA and WB just trying to get in on what they saw as a way to print money. Just live service. It will generate profits forever. And then it turns out that's not actually easy to do. And also everyone already has a zillion other live service games that they're already just tied to. So I think it's partly that. And to be clear, there are still plenty of Marvel games on tap here.

There is still an EA deal with Marvel. and supposedly they've got three games coming. We only know about the Ironman game that's in progress. Plus, there's Insomniac with Wolverine and Spider-Man games. So we will get more. But I think there is also just, look, there's a democratization of game making and a video game success now. It can be a small team.

It can be a one-person developer using the Unreal Engine or Unity or something. And so that's bad in some senses because it might mean that a company decides to downsize and says we don't need to employ this many developers, or it could be good in the sense that it opens up the game development space for more people potentially. So I don't know, there have been various people who've sort of sounded the alarm about, oh, it's the end of single player gaming. And that would be bad for me because I love single player games.

But it seems to me that it's more about certain companies prioritizing multiplayer and online and others doing other things. And then sometimes there's just a pivot. like we've seen with Sony and PlayStation, where they were all in on live service. And then that basically has bombed for them. And now it seems like they're kind of recommitting to more of the prestige single player game. So I think there will always be a mix of both for everyone out there. And it's probably a mistake to overreact to any particular cancellation or studio closure.

But it does stink in these cases because these games sounded promising. Yeah, they did. And I also wonder to a degree, maybe it's also just that. every time there's a Marvel project, it's in the spotlight. And we know that for the most part, that there's something in development here. Whereas, you know, a lot of games that aren't Marvel or aren't a big IP are, you know, in development and then get canceled and we never even really hear about it. But all of these are going to be in the spotlight.

And so maybe there is a little bit of that at play too. Yeah. And if this is the year of Game of the Year, Claire, obscure expedition, 33 or blueprints or whatever it ends up being. There's a lot of gear left, but that would potentially open things up to the indie game. It doesn't have to be the big, super polished, big budget AAA title. There's still always going to be a place for that. We want there to be a Grinthepht Auto 6, I think, and a company that can spend, well,

I would like them to spend a little less time making that game. But I want there to be a place for huge blockbuster games that take many millions of dollars and hundreds or thousands of people to make. It's just that it's also nice when you can have a single person doing stuff or outsourcing development. These games specifically, though, we were going to see some nemesis system action

because Wonder Woman was coming from Monolith, which made the Middle Earth games with the nemesis system. And Black Panther, which seems overdue for some sort of game, that was a studio that involved some former monolith people, and they were sort of working on some evolution of the nemesis tech, I guess not exactly the nemesis system because no one else can use that. And seemingly now no one will be able to use that until next decade, potentially,

until that expires that exclusivity. So that stinks because it seemed like there were some interesting things being done with those games. It wasn't just your standard slap a recognizable hero or property on something and do a quick cash in. In fact, it seems like they were taking too long to make these games. at least for the corporate overlords. So we will return to the topic of license games at the end of the episode, but first, let's discuss the latest incarnation of Eldon Ring.

Eldon Ring Night Rain, developed by From Software, published last week by Bandai Namco. I might need some help from you guys to describe this game. It is a spinoff of Eldon Ring. It's an open world, online, co-op, Soulsborn, Meets, Rogue-like, Meets, Battle Royale. Does that about sum it up? Any other genres we should throw in the mix?

I've been comparing it to overcook too, actually. Oh, that is good. And hear me out. I need you firing sauces. Yeah. If you're enjoying it, it's because you are part of a team that you're developing. It's a lot of communication with your team. It's a lot of synergies.

So, yeah, that's my, that's my quick overcooked, too. I buy it. We can throw it into the soup. So, Matt, you've played the most of Night Rain because you actually played it pre-release. You played the alpha. And so you got sort of a sneak peek at this thing. A network test, yeah. Yes.

And you were the shot collar when we partied up this past weekend, which was nice, because I like when I play a game like this to just delegate. and defer, even though I guess I'm hosting this podcast. I was not hosting our party when we played Night Ring. Matt was the one pulling up the map, pinging everything. Let's go to this church. Let's get over here. Uh-oh. The wall flames is closing in on us. So it was nice to just be a follower for a little while. It is a game where you can do a lot of stuff wrong. And it takes a lot of runs to know what you're doing wrong. So yeah, that's why I was kind of leading us through it, I suppose.

Yeah, that was much appreciated. And you can continue to do stuff wrong even when you get good at this game. But what is your take thus far, given that we will play more of this game, that there will be evolutions of this game, that there have been patches already, there will continue to be patches and balance changes. But as things stand after opening weekend, what do you make of this thing? Well, let me start by saying that I did do that network test, as you were saying, and in the network test,

you could only really play with randos. You couldn't really, or maybe you could pair up. I forget. I think at least there was trouble initially pairing up with people. I played it just with randoms in the network test, and I came away not really enthused about night ran, about the idea of it.

Because for me, a lot of what I love about Eldon Ring and from Soft Games is the exploration, the world. I like having time to kind of sit in this world and explored at my own pace. And Night Rain sounded like everything about Eldon Ring that I'm not particularly fond of. It's like a focus on combat, like very little lore, very little world building. And after the first weekend, I played with my normal Eldon Ring group and I play with you guys.

And I got to say, I'm actually loving it. And I did not expect. It must be because of your normal. Elden Ring group because it can't be because of me sucking it up. Don't sell yourself. Sure. We almost beat that nightloor. We did.

We almost beat a bus, a real bus. Yeah. I'm loving it. And again, you know, my overcooked two comparison, I think that is the teamwork element of it is what is really bringing a new kind of slant on the Eldon Ring formula to me. And I'm sure, I played multiplayer in Eldon Ring with, with my buddies. But this is a different beast.

And the speed of it and the combat and the way you can revive each other and the way your skills like sort of interlocked with other player skills and finding the right build and finding, you know, the right synergies and going across the map and being like, oh, we got to get this for this character and you've got to make sure that I have this. And just getting better at the. that loop and getting better at team play, it's a fun cycle that, and I did not expect to be enjoying it so much. What about you, Steve? I am constantly fascinated with the amount of things

that this game does that is pretty much the antithesis of what I would imagine a Dark Souls experience to be. I've played Eldon in Ring for a very, very long time. I've enjoyed it greatly, and I've always understood and seen the appeal to the Dark Souls franchise in general. And while that series is very wrought with criticisms about how accessible it can be, about how difficult it is, how difficult it is to merely do things

that most games do very easily, such as multiplayer, such as a sort of like communal experience that isn't exactly what these games are about, this feels like they throw almost every possible typical and popular gaming convention in the modern era into a Dark Souls game. And for the fact that it isn't a disaster

is actually incredible. Because knowing that it follows this many trends, the fact that it tries to like satiate a fan base that like desperately wanted something in the realm of multiplayer, in the realm of communal or like something that you could pick up and play with your friends. Definitely not as easy as like, say, a Mario Party or something like that to just pick up and play with your friends. But still, by their standards, very, very accessible.

It's quick. It is hectic. It is not very forgiving in the sense that you don't take your time at all. there isn't that much time to learn. And in that way, it's kind of also very much like Dark Souls. It doesn't necessarily tutorialize you that well, which again was my biggest criticism to understand what the game you're playing is. But if you've ever played a Souls game, if you ever played Eldon Ring before and you

actually like playing with friends, this is really good. It might not be exactly the thing that Eldon Ring or the Souls franchise should be at all, but as an interesting experiment, I kind of love it. It is such a strange amalgamation of so many genres. It is really a fascinating experiment. And for those who haven't followed it, I guess we can just summarize the Eldon Ring Night Rain experience. So yes, you can select one of several classes, and then you are plucked into this sort of procedurally

generated world where you have a set amount of two. time to run around, level up, collect flasks, get some gear, and then that blue wall of flames starts closing in and starts closing in very quickly. You can barely outrun that thing. And if you get caught outside of it, you die very quickly. And this funnels you into this center portion of the map. And along the way, you can encounter other bosses and mini bosses. And when you get to the end of that day, there's sort of a three-day structure. It's the Majora's mask, I guess, of like a battle royale game. And then you fight a boss at the end of that day, and then there's another day, and you fight another boss. And these are sort of a remix of past bosses, mostly Eldon Ring bosses, but also some

Dark Souls bosses just mixed in there. And most of it, almost all of it, is just reused Eldon Ring assets and settings. It just, it looks like Eldon Ring largely. And then the climax of this all, if you survive this long, if you make it to the end of this expedition, is that you fight one of eight dedicated night lord bosses who are specifically designed for this game. And that's the game, essentially, is that you're here to beat these eight bosses. And even if you have an unsuccessful run, you can still pick up some run that you can then equip and that can help you on your next run. But you're going to die a lot. So be ready for that. And I think what it's out to be most is that it seems almost as if it's chasing trends, but it's the from software

version of chasing trends, which is kind of doing the antithesis of those trends, even if superficially it looks like they're trying to get in on, you know, the fortnightification of everything, the pub g of everything. You soar in, not on a battle bus, but on a bird, and you drop into this land, and there's the ring, and you have this shrinking play area. And so I'm just, I'm just, imagining someone who hasn't played Eldon Ring before and it's just thinking of this. It's like, I'm going to go from Fortnite to Night Rain and that'll be a smooth transition. No, not so fast. And if you were expecting a From Software game to tutorialize you thoroughly, then that's probably

on you at this point because that's never what you're going to get for them. So there's very much, it's not even a learning curve. It's a learning mountain and you are meant to stub your toe repeatedly on this thing in order to have a hard-earned eventual understanding of what you're supposed to be doing. Yeah. And so they do tutorialize, obviously, the controls of the game, just in case you've never played Eldon Ring before. And also, they have to introduce you to the new mechanics of each class's special abilities,

which is nice that they do that. But what they don't tutorialize is your flow through each day in the game. They don't tell you what the different buildings, on the landscape do. They don't tell you what kind of upgrades you can be getting in all of these places. And learning all of those things, learning what your flow through a day should be, what to prioritize, what to ignore. That is really at the heart of the night ring experience. And I've found throughout my playtime that the more you learn those things, the better you position yourself by the end of day two,

the greater chance you have of beating that night lord. When we went and got that night lord down to like, I don't know, 15% health, like we had a really successful first two days. We got ourselves to a much higher level than we did the days before. We got some good weapons. We had plenty of flasks. And so, yeah, sort of like understanding that flow is the game, for the most part

and maximizing your decisions and your time. I changed the urban dictionary definition of Locked into a screenshot of the three of us playing that final boss because I think that's actually like the peak of what this game is achieving or at least attempting to achieve. And

again, like the amount of times that I can find myself kind of relieved about the idea to know that I'm not playing a Souls game directly to like to know that when I level up, I just press the button at the campfire and I'm just leveled up. I don't need to look at my character sheet. I don't need to worry about picking up a weapon that isn't meant for my quote

unquote build. I don't need to worry about picking up, like doing that many things wrong in the moment to moment experience of a Souls game that while spending all of that time and spending all of the methodical ways of picking a weapon to maximize a certain amount of stats and everything, you kind of just make it this thing where you get up and go and you learn and you fail and you learn and you fail. And that is still a Dark Souls and Eldon Ring experience, but truncated in a way that is still unique and challenging, obviously, but not at all that frustrating to me if you're even remotely familiar with a Souls franchise.

And to know that you can do this with other friends, they kind of just made this a little bit like Monster Hunter. And I'm really, really excited about it. Yeah. I think it could be more like Monster Hunter if they wanted to go in that direction. And it might be less frustrating because it can be quite frustrating at times because so much of it is random. and that random number generator aspect to things, just how the world is generated, what gear you run across,

that can just sink your run. Like we had runs when we were playing where it was just like, well, we're sort of screwed. We'll go through with it anyway. We can't get around this mountain in time. Yeah. I guess we've got to fight the sky anyway.

Okay. Yeah. And so if you're there for the hang and you've got buddies, then that's fine. But if you're there in a focused way, like I want to get something out of this play session, I want to make some real tangible progress.

You might not. And it's also frustrating in the sense that, you know, in Eldon Ring, if you die, you might have to run across a map to get back to that boss battle, but you can just go directly to that boss battle and try it over and over again and learn through failure and pick up on the patterns. And in this game, you're in for a large investment of time, what, 45 minutes or so for a full run if you make it that far? And if you get to that last boss and you instantly get wiped, you can't just fight that boss again.

You have to go through the entire three-day run again. Right. And so it's not a game that you can just sort of pick up and play casually in bite-sized chunks and come away feeling satisfied by your progress necessarily. Yeah, especially if you play with randos. If you don't, I really feel like playing with a recurring party of people who you can actually talk to. is by far the way to play this game. If you can't build chemistry with your team,

if you can't communicate properly, it's just going to be a miserable experience for you because so much of your success depends on having an efficient path through those first two days that leaving it up to the random people you connect with online who are varying skill levels

and varying, you know, that one person might want to run really fast through everything and not listen to what anyone else is doing or like pay attention to them. You can really have a bad time in this game very easily if you're playing with people you're not talking to.

And so a lot of people are going to bounce off it right away. And a big ding to mention is the fact that like matchmaking and communication tools for this game are actually like not that great at all. No. There's no in game chat

for random people. Like you, actually like just can't get on mic and be like, hey, what, what's your name? Let's go to this place. Like, you can't do that. So you would have to rely overly on paying a map and assuming that people want to cooperate in that direction. There's a lot of buy-in for somebody who doesn't have that friend group or doesn't have that like set of people that they would want to trust to play with. And there's no crossplay. It's a very, very small game. You actually can't queue in with solo, I believe, to my understanding. Like, it's, it is available, but, like, the primary, like, game is designed for co-op and, like,

you will have a very hard time scaling your character to all of the things that you need to do. Again, I don't know if I want to fault it that much because if you want that single player experience, if you want to use your, like, wits, to, like, have that more of a solo experience, you would just play a Dark Souls game, though. You would. Yeah. realistically it does drastically limit how much I'm going to be playing this game. Just at this stage of my life, I know.

I have a kid's just unpredictable work schedule. I just don't have sort of a standing squad and gaming night. And so it's a whole production to have to schedule this essentially. And it's just not going to happen because there are just too many other competing concerns and too many other games. I don't know. You guys know the Switch 2 is about to come out. You know, it's not going to be at the top of my list, even though I was having fun with this. And those aspects of just obtuseness, you never know if it's Remsoft being intentionally obtuse because they like the friction that that generates.

Like, the lack of crossplay is bad. I mean, that's just bad. There is cross-gen play. So if you're on a previous generation console in the same console ecosystem, you could play. but you can't play PC and PlayStation. And that's bad. And that's just going to split up gamer groups who might otherwise play that.

And the lack of voice chat, as you said, I mean, what year is it? The plus side is that you don't have any little kids screaming at you and dropping slurs. But the downside is that you cannot communicate. Now, that does lend itself to maybe players who play out of the goodness of their heart and sort of a spirit of generosity.

And you have the let me solo, her types who are just going to show up and and shepherd you through the map. And that's always memorable when you just have some silent hero who is steering you through and carrying you through a run. But it's not the same. So this is going to be highly contingent on when you can play this and whom you can play it with. And so that's why I wonder about the long-term success.

There were two million people playing this in the first 24 hours, which is good, I guess, because every other gamer is playing Grow a Garden in Roblox right now. So it's nice that there were 2 million people left over to try this. But, you know, there's a built-in install base of 30 million people who played Eldon Ring. And this is a budget game. It's 40 bucks. But it's still just a giant undertaking in terms of familiarizing yourself with the systems and the difficulty and the hurdles that you have to clear to play this in the optimal way. Yeah.

I think that there are a lot of, you know, criticisms of this game that are somewhat valid. You could kind of, you could argue either way. But I think what is undeniably a valid criticism is that you've made a multiplayer game here and you haven't built out the infrastructure for the multiplayer game to not have voice chat in the game, to not have more advanced matchmaking tools. There's some weird things about connecting to other players, depending on what events are going on in the game, as we unfortunately discovered last night when we were face to face at that volcano crater level when we didn't want to be.

There are definitely some growing pains here regarding the multiplayer aspects of this multiplayer game. So that is definitely valid. And a lot of the other stuff, your mileage may vary, right? It's so strange because I keep thinking about what the philosophy from Soft put into this game because it feels like almost resentful to do it. Because like, all right, y'all, you've been screaming about wanting to just play with your buddies.

So we're going to make that one thing easy. And then we're going to make so many other things about that hard. The monkeys paw curls. By the way, you can't talk to them. You can't talk to them. You can only play with two other people or else you're going to get killed. Your characters are going to be prefabs. Leveling up is just going to be one thing.

Like, you might like it. If you don't, tough cookies. but like I don't, they're not without forethought. They're not without intentionality when it comes to making decisions like this because they've made incredible games for single player. And I think that this is by no means a bad idea at all. I'm rogue like Randy. I love me some like tighter, shorter, truncated gameplay experiences.

And if you manage to make that into Dark Souls like game, I'm like, I might be the happiest of clams, but it's so interesting to know the things that they decided to pay attention to, to keep and to strip away for the sake of a faster gameplay experience. And I think we're good with this. I think we are. But until you come out with Bloodborn, too, like, I guess we'll take this. We'll eat this.

So I should say, just for context, like, I don't like play. multiplayer competitive online games all that much. I don't have my battle pass game that I play. I usually play either single player experiences or co-op games. So this has been really enjoyable co-op experience for me. And I have been enjoying, as you were saying, not hearing teenagers screaming at me over the mic. But I think that, you know, will they do more multiplayer stuff

like this, we know that the Dusk Bloods is coming for Switch 2. At the start of that trailer reveal, I was like, oh, my God, Nintendo's getting an exclusive from Soft Game, and then everyone learns it's like multiplayer, and then expectations kind of plummet. And that was where I was. And now after this experience with Night Rain, I am at least 50% higher on my excitement level for Dusk Bloods.

I am optimistic that they're going to learn a lot from this night rain experience. And I think dustbloods is going to benefit greatly from what they're about to learn here. I mean, you just got to make sure that, you know, enough people have a switch to in order to play it. Yes, that would have. I'm praying my Walmart pre-order doesn't get canceled still. Yeah. This just, it feels like a side project to me.

Hideata Miyazaki did not develop night rain. He's working on the dusk bloods. And this felt to me like, okay, what can we do with this valuable property without just tying our entire fortune to it. And I respect that because I like how they handled this huge hit on their hands. It's not as if they hadn't made successful and, of course, critically acclaimed and beloved by the fan base games before. But Eldon Ring, that was a level up in terms of just, you know, the massive popularity

of that game and Game of the Year status, et cetera. And it was such a huge hit, I think, in part because it was more forgiving than previous from games in a relative sense there. I just mean because if you got stuck, it was an open world, you could just hop on Torrent and go somewhere else and explore. And that kind of opened things up,

I think, to people who wouldn't normally play a Souls game. And here they're kind of closing it back down again, I think, because this does feel more niche, even if the pitch sounds as if, oh, anyone could play this. I'm not sure this feels like it's maybe more for the hardcore, ultimately. But I like how they've handled this. They have a huge hit drop into their laps.

And so many other companies would say, well, we're just going to mine this forever. And you're going to get Eldon Ring 2 and Eldon Ring 3. And we will forever be making Eldon Rings now. And they said, no, we're not doing that. We're going to drop DLC, which was essentially a full-flage game on its own. My God, that was huge. Massive.

And also we're going to put this spinoff out, which is an experiment. It's almost like the kind of for fun things that studios incubate sometimes with a smaller team of developers. And sometimes it goes nowhere and sometimes it turns into something. And that's what happened here. And it's not meant to be an ongoing forever game. It's not really a live service game. There are no microtransactions.

I doubt they're going to be supporting this forever with new bosses. It feels like it's more of a finite thing, which is fine for 40 bucks. But I like that they figure it out a way to make more Eldon Ring without committing themselves to just make exclusively Eldon Ring for all time. And some people are saying, oh, it's just a cash grab. And I don't think it is. Like for one, it's $40. Okay.

And secondly, more importantly, like you were alluding to, Ben, like the target audience for this is so small compared to like Eldon Ring. First, you have the people who have already played Eldon Ring. And you're drawing very few people from outside of that. And secondly, within those people who played Eldon Ring, the only people who can play this, really, are people who love Eldon Ring so much that they happen to have at least two other people in their lives

who are also that into Eldon Ring. And if you don't have that, it's really, you're not going to be playing it. It's an exponentially smaller group of people that they can pull from. The final boss of Night Ring. Which is not how you design a cash grab typically. If anything, it feels like a vanity project at this point,

because it seems to be the thing that you don't do after you follow up with a massively successful game and a massively successful expansion to that game, let's completely throw out that formula and do something completely wildly, small, multiplayer, and different than this. Yeah. And I'll infinitely respect them for it

because, again, it does not feel like it is either predatory or cash grabby to my sentiment at least. Like, it's a fun, worthwhile thing for the people that love these games. and I don't think that it's going to be for everybody that even likes those. But it's a very cool side project for this. I think we've been conditioned in recent years to hear multiplayer and assume we're getting something that is motivated by money.

And I just don't feel like that's the case here. Yeah. I like when games get weird. I like when an established developer has a huge hit and decides to pivot and try something else instead of just doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on that. And I don't think this is the final form of NightRame either. I mean, we know it's not. They have promised that they're going to be patching things they already have.

I do feel that it's super rushed, as you were saying, Matt, and there just is this conflict between exploration and atmosphere and the time pressure. You essentially need to speed run this game to be good at it. And that just is not how I would normally play Eldon Rink. Not at all. If you have a beer open while you're playing this game, it will sit there for roughly 32 minutes before you take another sip. Yeah.

Yeah. It's tough. I mean, you can't even linger. You pick up new gear and you're just reading the hovering tooltips. And you're like, oh, my God, what am I going to pick up this item or that? I don't know. We got to go. I'm falling behind the rest of my team.

So it's really harried. And I think that can lead to some fun moments. But, and, you know, when you get the hang of it and play many more hours, then it'll start to become a little more routine. But I do wonder how they will adjust it because they have already made it a little more palatable for single players. And they've teased that they will be making further changes to the single player experience soon, like this week. They have acknowledged that they've at least considered duos. And why not really? Because they have a single player mode in there where unless you're amazing, you're just going to get slaughtered.

It's not like it's finally tuned or rebalanced for single players. So why not just throw double in there too? And there's a PC. There's a PC mod available already a mod. Right. So the modding community will be all over this. And I'm curious. I don't think because it's from software,

I don't think they're suddenly going to decide to make this easier or something. But I do wonder how they will tinker with this. And will they improve any of the performance problems? Will they make it easier to resurrect someone, which currently you can do by whacking someone while they're crawling around on the ground. Once you die and you de-level, it then becomes quite difficult to catch up again. We'll see if the community sticks with it, but months, years down the road, I would imagine that this will look different and it'll be more refined and possibly a better experience because I was just at war with myself, because I didn't

want the circle to close. I wanted, even if there were a... Yeah, we never do, do we? No, if there were a mode where you could just run around and explore, like a free play, kind of a Mario Kart world style mode of just getting to know this world. But maybe they don't want you to have that because they want you to feel like you're out of your depth. If I could just build a set of stairs anywhere while wearing a Star Wars skin. Yes. I think compiling materials actually would be a very good use of this game's time.

Yeah. And it is nice, I think, that they have at least. made some accommodations for how rushed you're going to be because there's infinite sprint. You don't get a mount. You can't ride around, but you can run around really fast. And you can climb now, kind of, but in the most janky way imaginable, you're just kind of like. Flamming that jump on. Yeah, baby.

Just somehow scale an almost vertical cliff. But you also can jump from any height. There's no fall damage. And more and more, I have found that I'm anti-fall damage. I think there are some games that should probably have fall damage because they're prioritizing realism, but I'm almost never upset when I fall and don't get hurt. I know you sometimes need a challenge, but there's plenty of other challenges here. And it's just nice to navigate this world by being able to just plummet from the tallest peak to the lowest valley and take zero damage because everything else in this world will kill you. Yeah, if you have a control system that is very good for tight platform.

then fair, fair, have fall damage in your game. But like, Eldon Ring was never built for platforming. And the fall damage is just, yeah, that's another mean way to hurt you. So, yeah. Which was funny. But I think there should be like a little Hall of Fame for poorly calibrated fall damage. Because I, nothing, nothing got me more than like when the Witcher 3 first came out. And if Gerald would fall down like the equivalent of three stairs, you're at half health.

Right. Like it's, it was, it was sometimes you got to get. that right. It is a science, not an art. Yep. But you're right. If it's not based on precision, navigation, and traversal, then just jank it up. That's what they're doing here. All right. Let us look ahead

at what is coming up, not for Eldon Ring yet, but on this very podcast feed, it is draft week, de facto draft week, at the Ring of Versen House of Ar, the Midnight boys, phew, will have their racist movies drafts coming up midweek.

Steve, be careful. Pray for me. please. Watch your words. Or don't. I'll say as few as possible. Yeah. Deep Shadow Protocol.

I'm guessing will be in effect at some point during that recording. And we will have on House of Arm Mal and Joe a conversation with the legend Tony Gilroy of Andor Fame and then a mission impossible draft coming up later this week. And I reminded everyone about that new console launch. We'll be back here in a week on ButtonMash to talk about Switch 2 and Mario Kart and everything else that came out of summer game fest. So there's going to be a lot of news to discuss. You can contact us, as always, at ringaverse gaming at gmail.com. This episode is brought to by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess. You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping.

Then you'd want a cargo liner or road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those WeatherTech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. This episode is brought to by Nass Energy, introducing new Nass Energy Grand Prix Guava. For those that want to be fueled up and fired up with a hundred-bound hour tropical tasting power, ignite your taste, start your engine, shift your flavor to high gear with new Nass Energy Grand Prix Guava. Hit the street, grab but can get after it.

This episode is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session. And this summer, Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice. Off campus, L, every year after, the love hypothesis,

Sterling Point, and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Okay, let's talk about the next evolution for the Eldon Ring trends media franchise. Almost a year ago, George R. Martin blogged on his Not a Blog. I will quote him here.

Oh, and about those rumors you may have heard about a feature film or television series based on Eldon Ring, I have nothing to say. Not a word. Nope, not a thing. I know nothing. You never heard a peep from me. Mum, mum, mum. What rumor?

Around the same time from Software. Miyazaki said he would be open to another interpretation or adaptation of Eldon Ring, a movie, for example, but only with a very strong partner. Well, now we know the partner or partners. Alex Garland, who is writing and directing an Eldon Ring movie that will be produced by 824 and George Arr, as if he didn't have enough non-win's projects on his plate. You know Garland from writing and or directing 28 days later, Sunshine, never let me go. Go ex machina annihilation, devs, civil war, etc. Garland is a gamer. He is one of us.

His movie Dread is basically a video game movie, even though it's not technically. He has said that Resident Evil inspired 28 days later. There's a video game scene in The Beach. He was at one time attached to a Halo adaptation, which, if it had happened, might have saved us from the Paramount Plus series. Sadly, that was not to be. He wrote for My Fave. enslaved Odyssey to the West and DMC Devil May Cry, so he is a game writer. He loves The Last of Us.

He loves Animal Crossing and he loves Dark Souls. Now here's an illuminating quote from Garland. Back in 2020, he said, the Dark Souls games seem to have this embedded poetry in them. You'll be wandering around and find some weird bit of dialogue with some sort of broken song with a bit of armor outside a doorway and it feels like you've drifted into some existential dream. That's what I really love about Dark Souls. These spaces are so imaginative, and they seem to flow into each other and flow out of each other. It's very dreamlike. And then here's the money, quote, I can't imagine how that would be adapted. The quality that makes

Dark Souls special is probably unique to video games. And you could probably lump Eldon Ring in that category. So I hope he can imagine how that would be adapted now, because that's his job. So do you think he's the right guy. And do you want an Eldon Ring movie to begin with? Matt, is this something that you have imagined? I don't typically crave a movie adaptation for games for the most part. However, yeah, man, I feel like he is the man for the job. He's the best person they could have gotten for this based on, you know, his body of work

and his clear interest in video games. And from the sounds of what he likes about Eldon Ring and From Soft games, it sounds like he's going to hate Night Rain, just really hate it. Yeah. Which probably is the thing that we need for a movie. Yeah. Steve, are you bullish on Eldon Ring the movie? Only a tad because I don't really know where to go.

Like, Eldon Ring, for the real heads that love Dark Souls and that love Eldon Ring, I don't think that there's any amount of media that can actually engulf all of that lore that people either project onto it or seemingly gleam from it because it's so dense and it's so incredibly rich that the more that you kind of dig into the lore of Eldon Ring, it becomes the known universe

and it just kind of shifts and then gets more clear and then fades away. I love the idea that Alex Garland can definitely make a visually splendorous while ultimately like morally complicated type of movie. He's good at those things. He's made ex machina annihilation.

Writing for 28 days later was exactly those things. And I don't exactly see a sort of like straight through line adventure path for a movie that Eldon Ring is. Because if you just think like Knights, wizards, dragons, monsters, you're just, okay, you're a guy that's going to be fighting

and like for the sake of the queen or the princess or whatever. Like, you could easily imagine those things in a lesser state, but Garland knows what's up. Garland knows what Eldon Ring is and knows, like, I guess, how to spin that in a way that you can truncate into two hours, two and a half hours, I guess, maybe.

It's interesting. I don't quite know. Here's what I do know. It's that it will be very interesting and challenging for the people that watch it. Yeah. Yeah, do you take the tarnish? and just you're in Limgrave and you're kind of following the path of Eldon Ring.

Does he die 80 times to a single dude? Yeah. And get worse and worse looking because of it, maybe. Yeah. The quality that Garland is highlighting there would seem to be pretty resistant to a linear narrative that you are passively experiencing because so much of the joy of Eldon Ring is just wandering around and stumbling on stuff, which personal discovery. Yeah.

And that happens to some extent in night rain, but much less so than in the base game. And so I don't know quite how you translate that. As an anime series, yes, I see the vision. As a live action movie, I believe in his track record, although it's not as if he has been a big fantasy film guy. He doesn't necessarily have that quiver in his Iron Eye bow to this point, at least. And he hasn't done the medieval combat kind of movie. but okay, I'll bet on the talent. But yeah, it's just what,

how do you boil down the Eldon Ring or Souls experience into a movie? Annihilation kind of, kind of. There's a world building and a dreamlike quality and annihilation that makes me believe that he's up to this task. Yes. And anyone, I think anyone who you'd put on this project who didn't immediately view it as a huge challenge, I think would be easily the wrong person.

No, and that's very true. Because, again, you look at the things like we see. You're like, all right, guys with swords and boards, fighting monsters, and you go and fight a bigger monster. All right, well, that seems simple enough. And you could probably have a decently entertaining movie about that, but it's not exactly Eldon Ring because it's so much more than that. Yeah, and so I wonder what the commercial potential of this is.

And it sounds like an 824 has been ramping up its budgets as it did when it produced Civil War with Garland. This sounds like it might be the biggest A-24 production yet, and I guess it would have to be to be some sort of faithful adaptation. But I wonder what the market for this is. Because you could say some of the same things about, okay, what's the narrative here? What is the story that you can grab onto with Minecraft? When we talked about the Minecraft movie, it's not as if there was like a set story that you could just port to film. And yet that movie was a huge hit just because, you know, there are lots of young people

who play it and wanted to go see the movie for the memes and for the participatory experience of it all in the theater. And if the narrative wasn't that strong, which it wasn't, then that wasn't really an impediment to anyone's enjoyment or to it making a bill. So now I want to see the A24 Minecraft movie. I know. Right. So do they go see?

super like high concept prestige version of this or is it more pulpy or do they just chicken jockey? Yeah. Why not? What role does Jack Black play in this film? Does he sing? Is there a musical

number? I just, I don't know exactly what it would be, which I guess makes it sort of exciting because Eldon Ring lore matters a lot to people. Not to me so much personally. It's all, you know, it's very, arcane and it's very like you you get out of it what you put in in terms of your investment

and learning about this lore and it's it's meant to be murky and sort of tough to pin down. So I don't know how you distill the essence of that experience. Like you can you can have a world that looks like that world and you can certainly have the monsters and enemies and big bosses and everything. But most of the fun of Eldon Ring is playing Eldon Ring, which you can't play the movie. And that seems like a problem. I would imagine that he would not have taken on this job if he did not feel like he had kind of cracked it. And he's not only writing, but also directing. Like, it seems like he's pretty invested in this. And so that makes me more optimistic,

even if I'm not sure exactly what it'll look like. I just, I wonder about the economic potential of this, which doesn't really matter to us. If it's a good movie, great. That's all I particularly care about. But you'd think, given that Eldon Ring was a huge hit, okay, is this going to be a huge movie, but it's not the property that Minecraft was or that Mario is in terms of just curating and name recognition of that IP. What if that's actually like the curl of the monkeys fall one more time with the Minecraft movie? Because if we don't have something that's like immediately like iconographic for the game

itself, is it worth the fan's time? Like if our main protagonist is on a cliffside and he. looks down at the ground and there's a glowing inscription that says pain ahead. And then he takes one step forward and then some skeleton just shoves him off of the mountainside. If that doesn't happen, is that even an Eldon Ring game? I don't think so. And now we know that because of the Minecraft movie. Because if they don't have a chicken jockey or a slime cube or whatever the diamond armor full set,

then what are we doing here? Yeah. Yeah. It's one of these games that it's very much an emergent experience. It's organic. It's, you know, you get plopped down in this world, and then you have all sorts of encounters. And you're the storyteller. You're the one who's telling people about this miraculous or disastrous run you had in night rain.

It's not so much about the narrative that's supplied to you, which means that the movie will have to do a lot of that work. But I'm semi-confident that it can. Yeah. And Ben, you know, a few episodes ago, you talked to Andor writer Tom Bessel about what it's like to write within the Star Wars universe and what does it like to write a prequel before a prequel? And how much in that Star Wars writing do you do you sort of turn to the camera almost and acknowledge like, huh? This is, you've been wanting to see this.

Maybe this is going to be here, right? There you go. And like how Gilroy's train of thought is like not to do that is to really not take people out of it by like inserting references. for the sake of like placating this weird desire. Oh my God. And so like putting Eldon Ring in the context of like an A-24 movie, like, yeah, you could do all of these things where like, is someone going to make a joke about like a dog

when it's an animal that's not a dog? Right. Like, do we want to see that? Like, yeah, we do. But also like, should we? Should we see that? And being being an A-24 movie, I think you expect to kind of. not see that. I think in the interest of making the best film that you can, you're going to have to

not be all that fan servicey, because if you do all of these Eldon Ring fan service things, the movie's not going to make any damn sense. And by the way, 824 is in its video game adaptation era now because last month, or it's June now, so April two months ago, it was announced that 824 will also be adapting Death Stranding, which will be directed by the director of A Quiet Place Day One. And Kojima's partnering up on that will cover Death Stranding to later this month on Button Mash. But that's a case where there's a lot of lore and a lot of story. There might even be just too much. Almost how do you boil that down to a single movie?

But there is more of a narrative. It's certainly weird, but they're like actual characters. and an arc. And it sounds like Des Stranding 2 is maybe even a little more traditional, narratively speaking. There's a lot of world building going on there. I can imagine that movie more easily than I can imagine an Eldon Ring movie. I mean, it is a movie, right? Norman Reis is already in it.

So, yeah, Kojima is basically making movies as video games. Frankly, I need Kojima to stop fucking around and actually direct a movie at this point. Because I feel like if he was actually given a shot, he might bankrupt. up the entirety of Hollywood in the span of four months. Quite possible. Okay. Closing thoughts here. I wanted to throw a prompt out to you.

So we're talking about video game adaptations. I wanted to go the other way and talk about major media properties that have been underserved by video game versions that are ripe for an adaptation going from the screen or the page or whatever else to video games. And this is in honor. of inspired by Mission Impossible, the Final Reckoning, which despite being an almost three decades running successful film franchise with many installments, has not had a full-fledged video game in more than two decades. It's been like 22 years since there was a PS2 game, Mission Impossible

Operation Serma. They have made a Mission Impossible game in all those years. And so we could talk about why that is, why hasn't Mission Impossible translated to video games? But I also wanted to hear any thoughts you might have on other properties out there, other IP that could be, should be better served by video games. Either there hasn't been a video game or the video games haven't been good or there's been a long lull since the last game or the last good game. Mission Impossible seems like it would be ripe for video games. I mean, it's based on action and set pieces and stunts and even just performing those stunts.

Seems like it might be fun in a video game. I don't know whether it's because Tom Cruise refuses to be digitized. And you just can't. Is he? Yeah. He just refuses all VFX and doesn't want his likeness in the games. And so maybe that is an obstacle. But I don't know what else it would be.

It just, it seems very video gamey as it is. Any hypotheses for why we haven't had a Mission Impossible video game in 22 years? It's got to be the Tom Cruise thing, right? I guess. He basically, if anyone's ever in the control seat for that franchise, it's him, right? Right. I just think he must not have an interest in that because video games are not movies. Yep.

I think it's as simple as that. They compete with movies. But by the time that we've had a resource. of the, like, the height of the popularity of the Mission Impossible franchise. Video games have come far enough to where we have several Mission Impossible games. It's just called uncharted. It's just called something different. And then, like, we have little tiny bits and pieces of all of those things.

And licensed games, like, I wouldn't say they've gone the way of the Dodo, but, like, there used to be a time when we had many movies come out and then you would just get a video game time, regardless of quality, regardless of the thing that you see being at all worth your time, because there are many duds out there. I remember there was like an Armageddon PlayStation adaptation. There was like so many things on the PS1 era that were just like getting pumped out for no reason. Oh yeah.

And I could easily imagine that going that going that way. But now that we have like these interesting IP angles where a Marvel movie would would come out, but we're not getting Marvel games like that now. We're just getting games based on Marvel characters. Yes. And the hype from all of those movies and the hype from all that IP just generates that excitement. We don't need a tie-in for a movie.

Yeah, Matt, when we did a pod about Ubisoft's Avatar game, we talked about that. And I think we did a little mini-draft, our top five video game adaptations of movies, the ones that actually bucked that trend and were the exceptions that proved the rule about those quick, low-budget cash-ins that would have to be rushed to come out when the movie came out. And yeah, there is a lot less of that now. And maybe that ties into the licensing conversation that we had earlier with Black Panther and the budgets. And, you know, we've seen some good examples of this. We were actually pleasantly surprised by that Avatar game. And of course, there are still good Star Wars games being made. And EA even is making some of them. And, you know, the Indiana Jones game

was great. Fantastic. Yeah, it can be done. But does anything stand out to you guys? If you're Mr. Movie exec and you're surveying the entertainment landscape and you're saying, here's my by-low opportunity, this is a gold mine. Why hasn't anyone made a video game version of this? Anything stand out to you, Matt?

Yeah, I think this one is pretty obvious, but it's been 14 years since the premiere of Game of Thrones. and they have not hit on a single of the apparently 12 Game of Thrones games that they've released, three on console. Oh, yeah. It just hasn't happened. And you remember way back in the day during the Lord of the Rings when those movies were coming out and they were just pumping out like good, good like PS2 Lord of the Rings games.

They're on Game Boy Advance and like they're making just good Lord of the Rings games as the movies are coming out, and we still haven't had, like, a definitively good Game of Thrones experience. Now, they just released a game on mobile. I haven't really checked it out because it's on mobile. But you would have just, you would just think, like, in the 14 years, they would have figured out, you know, a side quest kind of storyline that takes place in this world or, like, a thing that maybe it's a John Snow prequel or, like, there's so many different directions you can go. It's such a big IP. I don't know if that demand is there. anymore. Maybe that ship has sailed, but it just, it's kind of mind-boggling that there wasn't a

successful Game of Thrones game during this entire time. Yeah, it is odd. And even HBO, I guess, has whether by intention or necessity has shown some moderation when it comes to milking that franchise, there's still only been the single spinoff that has actually come out, even though there have been many in the works at various times. But yeah, like, I enjoyed the telltale Game of Thrones narrative adventures, but, you know, they weren't anything that memorable. I think probably the best Game of Thrones game is a mod for Crusader Kings 3. And that seems like, why would you not just make that game?

Yeah. The point and click, the sort of strategy version of Game of Thrones, it seems ripe for that. In addition to, yeah, just some sort of brawler hack and slash kind of. a game. So that is, that's a good pick. Apparently there's a Game of Thrones slot machine game. Yes.

On your phone. Dude, have you been in a casino lately? No. Let me tell you, there are so many licensed slot machines that are actually like mind boggling. Like there was, I saw a Willy Wonka slot machine.

I saw a Wizard of Oz slot machine. Like the amount of licensing for, for gambling addicts are, is great. Yeah. Like, if you love your IP, sit down and take a trip on the Yellow Brook Road

and get some quarters. Anyway, so I was in like a big fantasy novel thought process when it came to this. So I have like three picks that are like fantasy base.

One being Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere series. Oh yeah. The fact that this is like, Brandon Sanderson's got like conventions dedicated to him in like the Northwest. Sanderverse.

Yeah. Yes. So it's not without popularity that I say that the Cosmere novels are an incredibly popular fantasy world that are begging to be adapted. I know that there's a Kickstarter for a tabletop role-playing game based in that series. But the fact that this hasn't had like any major video game attention brought to it kind of blows my mind because it's leaving money on the table, frankly. If you get something like an Expedition 33, if you get something like a, Final Fantasy, anything like that. That's, that's, it's a layup for success.

The other one that I had, uh, was Avatar The Last Airbender. The best game that ever came out from Avatar Last Airbender was like a six out of ten. And it felt like something that you could get at Burger King when the Xbox 360 was coming around. That was about it. And Sneak King was that honestly better. Either like a heavy action fighting game like that's just a beat him up or a tactical RPG. Something that you could use like a X-com. tactics for using the team avatar to just go on adventures and stuff, like, figuring out

scenarios. That was great. And then whatever happened to Nino Kuni and Studio Jibli's involvement in video games? Yeah, good question. I feel like that also is like money on the table. Like, I had my own misgivings about Nino Kuni 2, but I still think Nino Kuni 1 is like an incredibly great game. Yeah. And endures to this day for me, the idea. The idea, that IP from Studio Ghibli, let alone just like creative involvement from that studio, hasn't been as prevailing in video games as I thought, kind of feels insane. Yeah, I guess it's just that there's such an influence, such an obvious influence, even if there's no direct involvement.

And I don't mean in the AI slop sort of way. Sure, sure. Just in the sense that everything is sort of inspired by that from Zelda on down. So maybe there's just enough of that DNA in video games that we wouldn't even notice the difference, but I'd be into that. But yeah, did it get that official logo on the top of a video game? I feel like that's quality. I feel like that's something wonderful.

Yeah. Okay. A few that were on my mind. So there are some that have just Lane Fallow for a while, and it's sort of surprising how long it's been. I didn't even realize. Like, just this week, the title for the next Bond game was announced. I am so excited for this.

I'm into this because it's made by Io Interactive, best known for the Hitman series. and a hitman take on Bonds, that sounds fun. Perfect. Also, there hasn't been a James Bond game, really, since 007 Legends in 2012. I mean, that's a long time ago for a franchise that has at least one Stone Cold Classic and some other pretty good games. And like The Simpsons, still airing, still on TV. You may not have noticed or watched it in decades, but there hasn't been a Simpsons game,

really, since The Simpsons game in 2007. And shout out to 2003's hit and run, one of the great games of my youth, which I wish. Genuinely hilarious. Amazing game. Wish it would be better able to be played in a modern form. I know some fan remade it. That was a good teaser. Okay, here's what I have, though.

And this is not necessarily in terms of, I think this would be a good game. It's more just pointing out that the ratio of, like, making money from movies and books to video games is, way out of whack here. Okay. The Hunger Games. Oh. Games is in the title. And yet there is no Hunger Games game.

And I don't know that there should be. I think this is another case. Generally, generally killing kids frowned upon, even in fictional digital form. And so I imagine that's a big part of the resistance. Whatever. That and also just like,

you know, the message of those books is not like, killing is good and fun. And so it would kind of go against the spirit of those novels and maybe wouldn't get the green light. There's got to be some way that you could capitalize on the popularity of the Hunger Games, the movies and the books. I mean, there's so much source material there. There's a world. There's popularity.

There's a lot of love for it. I got to think that there's some way you could make it work, but probably not actually the Hunger Games, the game where you just play the Hunger Games. That seems like it might backfire. But another in that mold, kind of the Y-A vein that occurred to me, Twilight. There's no Twilight game. Oh, I don't know what the Twilight game would be exactly. Probably, yeah, visual novel. Yeah, but there's nothing.

How about Maze Runner, too? The Maze Runner series, right? Oh, man. We're just talking to the Y-A universe. Geez, we've got so many things to talk about here. Yeah. Let's make a one tree hill game. Ooh, Felicity.

Yeah. Season one. Another that occurred to me is Fast and Furious, which there have been Fast and Furious games and in the not that distant past, but there hasn't really been a good one, I don't think. Like what comes to mind when you think of Fast and Furious video games? And that, again, like Mission Impossible, it just seems like it shouldn't be that hard. It's already very video gamey. and why wouldn't you want that kind of driver style,

reckless the Yakuza missions, the Xbox game that I loved and only I loved and remember. Some game like that where you're just doing racing and or stunt work in vehicles, that's basically what the Fast and Furious games have been. It would have to be a Grand Theft Auto game. I guess it couldn't be as good as a Grand Theft Auto game. So I think that's why they're not doing it. And the daisy chain that my brain just went to was, I could have sworn that they did make a game about that. And I think there was also a movie about it.

Oh, my God, I'm talking about Need for Speed. Yes. Starring Aaron Paul. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it's been a while. Like, I'm not a big racing game guy, but I am a big driving game guy, even though I don't drive in real life.

So we need more non-racing driving games. That's my pitch. And here's another one, Superman. The time is ripe. And I know. Oh, boy. I know. I know.

But there's got to be. This is like my white whale when it comes to superhero games, which is where we started this pod. Someone's got to be able to make a good Superman game with modern technology. And no one has really tried. I disagree. See, I understand the obstacles. And look, Superman returns 2006, I guess, was really the last one.

And the stench of Superman 64 still hangs over. We got to lay that to rest. It's time. It's been decades. It's time to put that behind us. We have the technology. We can now simulate open world Superman. I know it's hard for the same reason that it's hard to tell a Superman story in any medium

because you can go anywhere and do anything and you need conflict in order to create drama and how do you create conflict with this invulnerable Superman? How do you make it challenging? But they figured it out. I think James Gunn might just figure it out. And so how do you make a challenge for a video game protagonist who has God mode turned on, essentially? Like, how do you make that fun? And then how do you not impose arbitrary artificial constraints on Superman?

Like, why could he not just fly around the world many times and turn it backwards and rewind time? Like, why wouldn't he be able to do that in a video game? Yeah. Hear me out. Hear me out. The game structure is black and white. It's a God game. Uh-huh.

You solve little tiny problems. It's basically SimCity management. You send Superman two different disasters. And then based on the response that the public outcry is, whether he did a good job or a bad job, you've got to mediate and like kind of like divert resources to a different state. So it's SimCity and then you have Superman. Yeah. Solving problems. Yeah.

I'll try it. I don't know. Hey, is it better than 64? It's got to be better than 64. That's the lowest bar you could possibly set. Yes. Man, I just watched an entire play-through of Superman 64. They did it on Giant Bombs Blight Club.

Yeah. And however bad you think that game is, it's so much worse. I had it. I had it as a child. I played it as a child. Super Ben-64 remake now with actual draw distances. So that you can see something in front of you. I'm just saying someone is going to crack this eventually.

All right. So let's say that you, you're, you're, trying to make a Superman game, right? So let's take, let's have as a starting point, one of the most successful recent superhero franchise Spider-Man, right? Right. Let's play Superman within Spider-Man, right? Yeah. Let's say you have to get from one side of the city to the next.

Yeah. Solve crime, et cetera. One of the great joys of Spider-Man is that web-slinging and traversing the city is so much fun. Without that, you would just have like a pretty good action game, right? Superman is just going to fly straight to things, right? And then he's going to get there. And he's too powerful for almost anything.

Why wouldn't you just use laser beams out of your eyes to, like, shoot everything? I just don't see a scenario in which anything about a Superman game is fun. Details, details. Look, I'm a big picture man. Here's another detail. We got some high IP here. Superman? No.

How does Superman fly faster is my question. What does he do to just like, like go a little faster? Yeah. How's that? Flying is fun, though. I like flying. I think you could make a Clark Kent game better than you could make a Superman game. Okay.

Maybe that's the way in. I don't know. Or it's just, look, they figure out ways to tell stories about Superman and have him debilitated for various reasons and have his powers compromised. So I don't know. Maybe he goes away from the Sunday. yellow rays and he's on some other planet or maybe, I don't know, there's kryptonite involved. But there's got to be kryptonite. Like there's always some way.

Maybe it's the Superman Doomsday arc. Doomsday managed to kind of kill him briefly a little bit. So, you know, there's just got to be an equally invulnerable enemy. I'm just saying, I'm putting it out there. Other people can solve this problem. I'm just issuing the challenge. That's all I'm doing here. I will say at least now we have the technical.

ability to do a superman game. Yeah. It is striking, though, just how much better certain properties fair in video games than others. Like Star Trek versus Star Wars, I love them both deeply. There have been many Star Trek games, but like how many Star Wars games would you take before the best Star Trek game? What is the best Star Trek? That's the question. Like, depending on what it is, what can the best Star Trek game be?

Voyager, Elite Force, the shooter, or like Bridge Commander or Bridge Crew. Yeah, it's just, Bridge Crew. Bridge Crew is fun. Yeah. It doesn't lend itself to video games as well as Star Wars. I think it could. But it could. You'd think it could.

Even that, there have been many Star Trek games, but I just don't feel like the classic. Just like how far down the list of Star Wars games. Yeah, it might have to be that. And there have been some that were kind of like that. but it just, they never quite nailed it. I don't think they have gotten the most out of that universe. You know, perhaps if there's ever a Star Trek resurgence of significance, we'll someday get that because it should be a pretty adaptable series in the modern gaming landscape,

you know, like having a crew going on missions to different planets. Like, it's all very doable as a video game series, whether you're following directly specific characters, or if you're just doing an offshoot within, you know, the Star Trek universe. It should be totally doable. Give me the Strange New World's game. Give me and Jomey the lower decks game.

Play it. We have a lot of love for Star Trek these days, some Star Trek at least. All right. You can submit your nominations. Tell us what we missed. Tell us what is just sitting out there waiting to be adapted. Contact us at RingaverseGaming at gmail.com. Thank you to Devin Rilnotto for producing this episode

and to our Juneer Ramca Pal for green lighting it. Stay tuned for our upcoming coverage on The Midnight Boys and House of R and our switch to break down on Buttmash along with Summer Game Fest news. Guys, it's been a pleasure potting with you and also playing with you. Oh, no, connection issues. Connection issues. Here comes the Wall of Flame.