The Ringer-Verse - RPG Blowout: The Massive Worlds of 'Starfield' and 'Baldur's Gate 3'

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Ben and Jess are here to explore brave new worlds with two of the year's biggest games! They dive spoiler-free into the highly anticipated Bethesda Game 'Starfield' and travel through deep space (11:12). Later, they look at the role-playing sensation that is 'Baldur's Gate 3' as it becomes a critical hit (52:16). Hosts: Ben Lindbergh and Jessica Clemons Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need WeatherTech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. And welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus podcast feed for all things fandom, including, of course, video game fandom, which is where we come in because you're listening to Buttonmash. I'm Ben Lindberg, a senior editor for The Ringer, and I'm joined by my co-host and constant podcast companion. I like talking to not just because she'll let me store random crap in her inventory, so I won't be way down during my trek across the stars. Jessica Clemens, hello, Jessica. Yes, it's my purse. I just carry everything for you. I'm everyone's mom. Hi, so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, you don't have to thank me. Thanks for having me. We're equals in this endeavor. But that does make me think. A purse would be equally capable, I think, of containing the vast amounts of stuff that I lug around in Starfield with no discernible place to put it other than my ships hold or my suit or something. Where does this? it all go. That's the eternal question of video games. Is it not? Where is the inventory? Where are we lugging all that crap? I don't know. It's just a metaphysical place. And also, why do I have like seven different outfits that I'm carrying around?

I can't wait to get into these games because I'm going to explain how that makes no sense and how they don't make it that easy. Maybe I'm wrong, but in Baldur's Gate, I was like, it's really hard to try selling your items and we'll get into it. In Starfield, there's

There's no room for wardrobe changes. I cannot make fashion statements. Those spacesuits are too heavy. Even if I store them and give them to people, they're weighing me down. My CO2 is creeping up. Got to keep it lean and mean, which I guess is also what we have to do on this episode, which theoretically should be about an eight-hour podcast if we were going to do justice to our two topics today.

Because the video game apocalypse and or Nirvana is here. This is the week that people have circled. for months, right? Because Starfield is out. Starfield is finally out, and Baldersgate 3 is out for PlayStation, right? So the RPG moment of the year that we've all been anticipating or dreading,

everyone can get their hands on these games for now, except Xbox players who want to play Baldur's Gate. They'll have to wait a little longer. But we basically want to do half and half here. We've kind of divided and conquered. You've spent a lot of time. time on Balders Gate. I've spent a lot of time on Starfield. We're going to compare and contrast. We're going to talk to each other about these games and some of the conversations surrounding

these games because there's a lot to get into. And we probably won't get into all of it today because, again, these are gigantic games. So we've already bantered a bit about Baldersgate in past episodes and we will probably have to return to both of these down the line. But for now, consider these, at least the Starfield portion of the episode, will be sort of an introductory scene setting conversation. It's a work in progress, right? We won't spoil anything

for people, because a lot of people are just getting into these games this week. But we have a lot of thoughts, I think. We've had a lot of experiences, so no time to waste here. Just to set the scene a little bit, let people know where we are. How much

of your life have you devoted to Baldur's Gate 3? How many hours roughly what you say. Where are you in this game? I would probably say, and it's funny because you have to save so much, or at least I save at a speed that is insane. So it tells you the time stamp every single time. And I think mine was at 40. It was at 40 something, which isn't that much. I genuine, and I got to act too. So I was like, I think I spent, and to be fair, I spent, once I realized what I When I first started talking about Boulder's gay, I was like, explore everything. But when you have a podcast that you're eventually going to be doing on the same topic, I was like,

oh, don't explore everything. So I spent a lot, I spent a majority of my time in the first act trying to get all my companions, do everything, do every side quest, and actually follow through with my companion side quest. And then I was like, no, I don't have time. And then when I got to act two, I got pretty far into act two without spending, like, half the time I spent in Act 1. Right. So.

Yeah. That's always the challenge, the dilemma. I mean, I know this is inside baseball hashtag podcaster problems. But when you're trying to figure out, do I want to see as much of this game as I can as fast as possible? Or do I want to play it like the listeners, like most people are actually going to play this game so that my experience will be reflective of their experience? That's what I was trying to do. And it was so hard to do because even if you go, every house you go into, there's a quest. Every dungeon you go into there's a quest.

Every time you're like, oh, there's a part of this map I haven't explored. You're going to run into four more quests. And I'm a person that gets so annoyed by seeing all of my journals and quests that aren't finished. And I'm like, I need to clean this up. I need to clean this up. So I start actually doing the quest that lead to more quests. It's been a tough year for completists or completionists when it comes to cleaning up your inventory or your just queue of things to do.

Because as we've discussed, there have just been some endless, games that will just spam quests at you forever for as long as you're willing to devote that time to them. So we got Starfield a little bit early, but not a lot early. So we didn't get a huge head start. I have tried to make up for that by devoting most of my time to it since we got our hands on it. And I've played a lot. I've probably sunk a similar amount of time into it. I have beaten the game technically, which doesn't mean much when you're talking about Starfield. First of all, whenever I say I beat a game, it makes me feel like I'm 12 years old. Like it sounds so adversarial, you know?

Like most games, I don't know if they exist to be beaten in the way that games used to. It's more of a collaborative. It's a guided tour. We're experiencing the game, not necessarily just trying to dominate it into submission, unless it's Eldon Ring or something, right? I mean, it's a little bit less like just completing a challenge and more just immersing yourself in the experience. But I have completed the main quest line once, which is not saying that much because there are people who have already completed it several times. And it's kind of built to be, quote unquote, beaten several times, which we will get into.

But that's where I am. I've seen the main quest line. I've also done a whole bunch of other stuff. So I've gotten a pretty good grounding and spacing in Starfield. And I think I'm qualified to discuss it with the caveat that you could play both of these games for hundreds of hours and not see everything. So we reserve the right to reevaluate as we go. I was going to ask you about your save scumming policy. But you just disclosed it, I guess.

For those who don't know, we use some gaming lingo. And sometimes people say, could you define those terms for those of us who are just trying to follow along? saves companies basically when you're just constantly saving as you go quick saving every time you do something or before you do something else because something that could be contingent on the outcome of what's about to happen. You want to save it before that happens so that if things go awry or not the way that you want, you can just go back and do it over again and you can eventually end up with an outcome you're happy with. And that's been a big thing with Baldur's case. Yeah, I was like, let me tell you, that is the entirety of Baldur's game. That is completely all. And I will never shame you for doing that, people, listening.

I will never shame you for doing that. I told my brother I did that, and he was like, that's not how you play the game. And I was like, no, that is how you play the game. Because if I didn't want to play the game, I would just go play D&D. I would just go play actual tabletop with my friends where they won't allow me to re-roll. But instead, I like this looseness that Baldur's Gate has to, like, D&D where it's needed. I'm like, let us save and also let us re-roll. I'm like, let's do those two things because it'll get too hard or too daunting and we're not all in the same class.

Not as necessary or tempting with Starfield, but I've still done a fair amount of that myself, both because I'm afraid of bugs or I just don't know what's going to happen next. Ben, can you take, is there a feature on Starfield where you can like hide the bugs? Disable bugs. Yeah, I don't think that's a feature. That would be a feature. No, that'd be a big advantage. That would not be a bug. That would be a feature. You've been waiting for Starfield for so long, and now you're like, the bugs. No, the bugs, I got to say, the bugs actually haven't been that bad.

I will endorse the game on that side of things, at least when we get to it. So just a quick programming teases for everyone here, so you know what's coming up on the feed over the next week. So on the ringerverse proper feed, of course, we will have the Asoka Episode 5 instant reaction coming from the Midnight Boys next Wednesday. the mood has improved, discernibly, I would say, after episode four, my mood as well. It was definitely improvement. I'm actually going to be seeing episode five in theaters. Jessica, I'm extremely excited for this. You know, they're screening Asoka Episode 5 in some theaters. So I'm actually going to go see a Star Wars thing in a theater. Imagine that. How long has it been? It's been a very long time. Rise of Skywalker, which is not my fondest Star Wars memory, but I'm excited for episode five. So that That's going to be fun. And then next Friday, you all will be covering Harley Quinn season four on Mint Edition. Next week on House of R, there's going to be a Star Wars droid draft on Tuesday.

Actually, it may or may not be Star Wars specific. I was not provided with that information. There's going to be a droid draft on Tuesday. Look forward to it one way or another. And then, of course, there will be the Asoka Deep dive on episode five on Friday. And I'm guessing that there will be a lot to dive. into, and of course you can catch me on those deep dives, spreading some lore as well as doing my midweek recaps at the ringer.com. What a great website. So this episode is brought to you by

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Trading derivatives involve significant risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Manage your activity with our consumer protection tools. We're going to try to maybe divide this episode half and half, but maybe we'll sort of focus on Starfield at first just because it's the new hotness and everyone's talking about it. Not that people have stopped talking about Balls or Skate at all either. I thought maybe we could start with a little bit of compare and contrast here, just to set the stage, what do these games have in common? Why are they both dominating discussion right now? And where do they differ?

Because they differ pretty significantly in some ways. So the first commonality, I guess, is that both are just gigantic games, right? Which they're not alone. That was the case with Diablo and the case with Tears of the Kingdom and so many games this year. But they're enormous, and we have scraped the surface. We have dipped our toe into these games, despite playing them for longer than we would play most games in their entirety. I guess there's a little bit of difference in how their enormity is distributed in that the actual main quest line in Starfield is not that long. I finished it already, whereas it expects you to play that over and over again and also just dive into all the supplementary stuff.

Whereas Baldur's Gate, you're not really intended to replay it from scratch in the same sort of way. There's no new game plus mode, at least not as of yet, right? So you can take your time with it, but it's not necessarily something that you're meant to do over and over again, right? You can sort of take the scenic route instead of rushing right to the end. Okay. So completionist playthrus of these things, they might take you hundreds of hours, but they might be a little, different distribution of hours. Both have been in development for a long time, of course.

It takes a long time to make gigantic games. Both are RPGs, role-playing games, but different kinds of RPGs. Both are based to some degree on tabletop games. Obviously, Baldersgate is very directly based on D&D, and that's a core part of the experience. But Starfield is at least inspired by a table top game called Traveler, that came out a few years after the original Dungeons and Dragons. So that's part of the DNA here.

And both are just omnipresent right now. Everyone is talking about them. Everyone is talking about their review scores. Everyone is talking about the best way to play them. You cannot get away from these two games right now. Not that you would want to, right? But then the differences. Obviously, sci-fi versus fantasy is a big one, right?

And we talked about this before. you are not feeling fantasy fatigue yet. And I was kind of happy to get a fantasy reprieve or at least a change of pace with Starfield, which is set in the 24th century and is very much a sort of Star Trek, interstellar, the expanse, kind of not super distant future, but not near future, but set in this galaxy, right? But sci-fi, not fantasy. I found that that was a welcome change, at least.

but you're not tired of the fantasy yet. You're like bring on more fantasy. I love it. I don't know how. And when you said it out loud the last time we were talking about the on the podcast, I was like, I should be. Like we,

I should be. I think a lot of us should be. A lot of us should be like, we got enough fantasy. But I haven't. I haven't. I'm literally like keep pushing it my way. I don't know why I devour it so much.

Maybe because I want to be an elf. And I'm trying to play as well. I'm trying to play as well. I can't do that in Starfield. I can't be. an elephant star. No, I guess not. You could be an elfin looking person probably, but it's not quite the same thing. Some of the big differences here. So one, you have exclusive versus non-exclusive. And that's shaping a lot of the conversation here, right, in that there's just a whole lot riding on Starfield, just the

success of this game and the reception to this game. The stakes are about as high as they get with a video game. Now, not so much for us because we're multi-platform people, right? We're not console fan people, you know? We don't have a horse in this race. Like, we've got all the horses. So we're just, we're happy to ride whatever console it comes out on. But because of all the circumstances surrounding Starfield's release, right, it's the first original IP by Bethesda in 25 years, right?

So it's just been nothing but fallout and Elder Scrolls. for decades at this point. And this is something new, at least in some respects, at least conceptually, at least in terms of setting. And Bethesda's been wanting to make a sci-fi game going back to the 90s and Starfield itself. I mean, the title of the game was trademarked 10 years ago. They've been working on this thing for a while. And also, Bethesda's recent track record, you had Fallout 76 and the Elder Scrolls Blades didn't go so great.

I know Fallout has gotten better post-launch, but was really, mishandled at launch. And then, of course, you had Microsoft spending $7.5 billion to acquire the parent company of Bethesda's NMex Media, partly specifically to ensure that Starfield would be an Xbox game instead of a PlayStation game. It's also playable on PC, of course. And this is coming out in the wake of Microsoft just having a drought. I think that is a kind way to put it when it comes to at least AAA console first-party exclusives, right? Which was coming. compounded by the Bethesda published Redfall flopping in May. And so there's just a lot writing on Starfield being the centerpiece of a Microsoft first-party resurgence.

Again, it doesn't matter so much to us, but that has clearly shaped, I think, the conversation, right? Like, you have a lot of people who are invested in Starfield doing well or not doing well, whereas the Baldersgate fandom feels less partisan to me. everyone's rooting for it or just doesn't care about it, but not necessarily rooting against it. They're not rooting against it at all. That's, it's scary. I haven't, and this is, this is Jessica saying this. This is Jessica, no one else.

I have not seen a lot of extremely positive reviews for Starfield so far. And to be fair, not a lot of people can play it right now. But like, is that, is that, is that bad right now? Is that bad for Microsoft? Yeah, I think the initial reaction, it's been something less than full-throated celebration, I guess you could say, which also comes down to another difference

between these two games in that Baldur's Gate, I think, sort of snuck up on people, right? Like, it has the pedigree of, oh, it's Baldur's Gate, but it's not made by the original maker of Baldersgate BioWare, and it's been decades since the last real Balders Gate game. I think people were cautiously optimistic. Okay, I like the old Balders Gate games. It'd be great if there could be another great Balders Gate game. But I don't think people were counting on that. It's sort of surprised people that this would turn out to be same metacritic rating as Tears of the Kingdom, possible game of the year, favorite or contender, right? That kind of came out of nowhere. Like it was on my radar, but I didn't expect it to be that great. Whereas anything less than that for Starfield, was going to be a bit of a disappointment in some quarters, which is not necessarily fair,

but it felt like Starfield had to be that to fully live up to expectations, which were just sky high. I feel that. And I also, well, that was, I think for me personally, I was like, I think that's the one, I'm not, I wasn't expecting a lot. I wasn't expecting, I was not expecting what I got. I felt like I got a perfect present with what I got. But comparing it to the other, like, RPGs that I was playing digitally,

I was like, um, I think it's going to be better. I was like, I think it's going to be better than those. And so my expectations were always kind of low, but it was still like higher than what I used to play. So I was just like, it's going to be fun. But this is also personally speaking. I know the internet was like, yeah, Baldur's Gate's coming. I'm really excited for Starfield.

And we kept talking to everyone and everyone was like more excited for Starfield than Baldur's gate. And it just feels like from what I'm reading online, it kind of switched. Now that people are playing it, they're like, Ballard's gate's really fun. Starfield's fine. Yeah, and it's, you know, the pedigree of Bethesda and the name. I mean, Larian Studios is accomplished in its fields, but not necessarily as huge a name or as impressive a track record, right? And so that surprised people.

It's like, wow, this game is amazing. This is not just living up to the past, but is also surpassing the past in some pretty important ways. Whereas Starfield's, it's breaking new ground. And so it has to innovate and it has to establish. a whole universe as opposed to follow up on one that's sort of pre-supplied. But the hype was perhaps unrealistic, perhaps out of control. And Microsoft played a part in that. And Bethesda played in part of that. They were drumming up. It's almost the no man sky hype cycle again. Maybe not that quite that level of hype or disappointment. But sort of that same, look, this is a game where you're supposed to be

able to go anywhere, right? This is a thousand planets and it's going to be unbelievable. It just had a lot to live up to. And look, in my mind, we'll get to this a second. I don't think it has fallen far short of my personal expectations. But, yeah, the critical consensus has been positive, warm, less than effusive so far. I don't think it's crazy, but as soon as you were like, I finished the main quest, I was like, wait, what do you mean you finish the main quest? Is it that, I know that you're playing it also to talk about it on our podcast and on The Ringer, but is it that, is it genuinely that quick to beat?

The main quest is that fast? You could probably finish it in 20 hours or so. No way. Yeah, if you sort of, I mean, not speed run it. I think people have literally speed run it in like three hours because speed runners are amazing. But a normal person who is, you know, you could stay up and probably beat. it in a day if you didn't sleep. It's that compact. But again, it's designed to be played over and over again. And of course, you could completely ignore it and just strike off on your own. A couple other differences here. We mentioned both RPGs, but very different kinds of RPGs, right?

So you have your D&D dice roll style RPG with Balders Gate. And Starfield is very much an action RPG. I mean, it's extremely RPG-ish. It's underpinnings. But It's an action game. It's a shooter in a very real way, right? And then also, I think one is much sexier than another than the other, or at least much more sex-filled and sex-positive and sex-embracing than the other. Is Starfield not sex-positive? Starfields is, it's not a sexy game, at least not in my experience. Look, maybe it's me, you know, but I've got no game in this game.

I was trying to, but, like, I completed my... main quests play-through the first time. It was, you know, people talk about like a pacifist play-through, like, they didn't kill anyone. Mine was like a celibate play-through. Oh, my God. I got no action whatsoever in this game. Like, even relative to Mass Effect or something, very, very PG, like, there is sex, but there are no sex scenes, you know? It's like fade to black and then talk about how great it was, right? And maybe you get like a performance boost after it, as opposed to Baldur's Gate, which is like, let's lean into the graphic. Now.

Take off that shirt. Let me see that alien body. Yeah. You can fuck bears. You are encouraged to. They encourage you to do whatever the hell you want. Freedom is free in Baltimore's Gate 3. As soon as I came in the room and I was talking to Steve about Starfield, I was like,

we were talking about how sexy it is. Can you have sex? And he was like, no, you can't. You can't. You can just go dig into other planets. Yeah, it's not just the companions didn't care for what I was bringing to the table. I was flirting every time it gave me a flirt prompt. I'm like, maybe was I like over-eager?

Was I down bad or something? They were like, he's trying too hard. I don't know. Maybe it's me. I genuinely thought I was like, you know, maybe you're busy in space. Steve countered that with you're free in space. There is literally all the time in the world in space to do these things. Yeah, as with so many games, you know, there's like an existential threat.

But also, if you just want to just screw around for a while, you can do that. Threats, stress. How do we relieve it in space with each other? Be a space trucker or whatever. Or, yeah, have some cutscene where you can't see the sex. I didn't even get the cutscene. I feel cheated. Wow.

No, they really. So spurned. They did not. It was you, Ben. Apparently. Yeah. I, like, Googled. I was like, is there sex at this game?

Because I thought, I had read that there was sex. I'm like, I'm not having it. Any other people apparently are having some. So, congrats on the sex. Not being asked to prom in high school. I know. If an NPC, everybody else got a sex cut scene? Maybe I just like, I loaded them down with too much gear that I didn't want to carry.

And so they're like, I can't have sex with you now because I can't move. Maybe that was the problem. That's also all I've been doing at Baldur's Day is giving my companion. I'm like, okay, look, you're going to hold the armor. You're holding all the clothes. You handle all the magic spells from me. The real goal of Starfield is to accumulate as much crap as possible without, like, rendering it impossible for you to move. It's just, can I store 20,000 potatoes in my ship's hold?

Yes, you can, apparently. I've been seeing so many people just shoving potatoes. Yes. Potatoes sandwiches, like every Bethesda game, you can pick up everything and anything for no apparent reason. But when it's just sitting there, it's hard. to resist the temptation. And I'm going to... I did read, by the way,

that apparently the amount of sex in Balders Gate was more than was actually intended by the developers. Like, there was a bug that made the NPCs to DTF. Or I guess that's in the eye of the holder, but more DTF than was intended. Like, it was supposed to take a little more courting and seduction to get them to get with you. And I don't know if that's a bug or a feature,

but technically it was a bug but maybe it's a good thing I don't know I would welcome a bug that would make it so that any NPC would want to have sex with me in Sarkfield that's maybe what it would take for me apparently I'm sorry wasn't there a moment when Twitch was speed running sex in Baldosgate 3 where like how quickly can you have sex with an NPC in Baldsgate 3

and it's like down to like two minutes that's wild from the start of the game to sex I can beat it it takes a lot less time I believe in you yeah It takes a lot less time to initiate the sex than to have the sex in many cases. Again, not speaking from experience.

Literally, they said get in the bed. That's insane. Do you know how much I had to do? Do you know how many times I restarted my, I changed the character? I changed my character. I just straight up, I was looking up, I was becoming like a heathen. I was looking up how to romance your characters. That seems weird to have to be like, Google, how do I bang Lazelle?

Like it was. And then they had. have, they have like, there's a Reddit, a subreddit that has like, these are what the words you say back to the people. They're going to give you, after that you ask this, they're going to give you three options. Choose this one. Choose the second one. Choose the fourth. And then it finally happened.

Yeah. I'm so desperate. I'm going to turn into like one of these pickup artists who's like reading the game. It's like, how do I have sex in Starfield? It's like what? I'll do it. How do I demonstrate value here so that this NPC will want to sleep with me? And also the one I was flirting with the most diet.

So I was like, oh, well, I guess that kind of cut off my avenue here. But I don't think I can use that as an excuse. It's not like we were having tons of sex prior to that, sad demise. The characters can't come back. I probably shouldn't. I probably shouldn't divulge that. There's a way in which they could kind of technically come back. All right.

So big picture. I'm having a good time with Starfield. I like this game. I also think that it is fair to be slightly underwhelmed if your expectations were primed for this to be best game ever territory, because at least thus far, it's not there for me, right? And again, I don't think Microsoft or Bethesda necessarily did themselves any favors by just drumming up interest to levels where if this wasn't going to be the greatest. Like, what, three months ago, there was a Microsoft exec who said that Starfield is one of the most important. RPGs ever made, right? So if you're saying that month's pre-release, when no one has even touched it yet, that's where you're setting the bar. So anything short of one of the most

important RPGs ever made, which is an unfair bar. But if that's where the company itself is setting that, then it's going to be hard to hit that bar. Unless it is, Sal Dares the Kingdom. I mean, yeah, you do have to sell the game, obviously. There's a fine line between getting people hyped and then getting people so hyped that there's a backlash, if it's anything short of incredible, right? Looking at you, Tom Cruise. I was going to say, it's literally the Flash. It's the Flash and Tom Cruise. And Stephen King. It is. It's a little bit like the Flash, right. You know, you screen the superhero movies for the superhero fans, and they say it's great. And then everyone else sees it. It's like, I'm not as easily impressed. Maybe this is not. Yeah. So I think it's

a very good game and an impressive game in many ways. ways. And just blanket statement here before I nitpick Starfield, and I don't know if you have any nitpicks about Balders Gate, but like both of these games coming out now, I don't want to say they reaffirm my faith in video games because it's not like my faith in video games was shaken, but it does reaffirm like video games are amazing, man. They're so great. Just not on an individual basis always, but the medium itself, I guess you would expect us to be enthusiastic about video games as an art form, as a medium, as the host of a video game podcast. But, like, more so than anything else, we have wide-ranging interests.

We read. We watch things. I'm constantly impressed by other art and other types of stories, but I don't think anything impresses me as much as video games, which both of these games for their shortcomings would have blown my mind years ago, right? Like, just in our lifespans, because video games, it's a more nascent medium. where you can see from year to year and generation to generation the changes, the way that video games have pushed forward with technology and the types of storytelling that are available

now. The fact that these games exist are amazing. Like the fact that we can model a thousand planets. Now, should you model a thousand planets? Is that the optimal number of planets? Is there enough to do on those planets? Those are valid questions. But the fact that we could even have like a galaxy simulator or the fact that you can have a

game like Baldersgate where you can do almost anything and make any decision and the game will adjust to that. It's freaking incredible. You know, like video games, they're all at least minor miracles that they exist at all. And these massive games that take a decade to make, those are miraculous, too, in my mind, you know, sort of like secular miracles. Like, I cannot believe human beings came together to create and engineer these worlds. I like what you're saying is before we nip-pict. picket. But also it is true. I genuinely agree, and I'm also saying this, I was just like a blanket statement. The podcast, I will nitpick games because we're nitpicking games. We're talking about the games. But I'm genuinely like this year for video games have been the most, not only because I work

talking about it, but these are games that I'm very much enjoying. Like, I was so happy to see Street Fighterer come back. And then I got, and now I'm getting Mortal Kombat. And then we're in Spider-Man too. And then I got Diablo. And I'm like, this is so jam-packed of games this year. I'm having so much fun and they're all so beautiful and I'm so happy. I've been waiting. I've been waiting for a street fighter to come back for a minute and now Mortal Kombat and I'm just like, you know what? I'm having a good time. I'm like, I'm having a good time. I love where I'm at right now. Yeah, we talked about that at the beginning of last episode and we'll probably return to this theme as good games keep coming out. I feel bad because all of the oxygen in the room is being

consumed by Starfield and Baldur's Gate now. And there are other really good games coming out in the meantime, like Armored Core 6 comes out and Sea of Stars come out. And if these came out in dead spells, we would probably be talking about them instead. And we would certainly be playing them. And a lot of people are and are enjoying them. But the fact that those are relegated to like, I'll get to them at some point, you know, like add them to the queue. Just like they're on top of the pile of shame. There's just not enough time to keep up with how many amazing games there are this year. Doesn't help that some of the amazing games are extremely long, which, you know, we can complain about at times when it feels like the length is padded,

but when a game is good enough, it can justify the length. And I think Starfield certainly has justified the amount of time I've devoted to it thus far. Now, I think the common take has been, this is another Bethesda game, right? Like, superficially, it's different. It's a new coat of paint. It's in space now. But the bones of this game are the bones of every Bethesda game going back decades at this point. And that is not unfair.

You know, like Todd Howard of Bethesda himself, I think, said that this is Skyrim in space. So if you're saying it's Skyrim and Space, it's followed in space. That is very true in a lot of ways. Like the basic structure of the game and the fact that it prioritizes the player and everything's about you and it's revolving around you and everyone's going to give you quests. And it's about empowering the player and all of the little aspects of Bethesda games that people are used to, whether it's some of the jankiness or the facial animations or the fact that you can. can pick up every item and that there are limitations on that. Like, yes, a lot of that has the underpinnings of Bethesda games. And so if you love Bethesda games, you'll probably love this game, too, unless it's just

one too many and it's not enough innovation for you. And if you haven't been into Bethesda games before, I don't know that this will convince you to enjoy that model. Like, are you a big Bethesda fan and or hater? Because I'm kind of coming to this as someone who's in the middle, really. I wouldn't describe myself as a Bethesda diehard or someone who hates Bethesda. I'm like, okay, sometimes I've had good times with their games, but I'm not a Bethesda Stan. I don't, it doesn't really, it never really hit me until I heard, which I'm not forcing them to say, Steve's, Steve's rant this morning about it.

And that's when I was like, oh, I didn't really, it hasn't hit me, but I also haven't really got to touch Starfield. So I'm going to wait. I don't know. I love fallout. so I don't know if I'm allowed to be like I hate maybe once I start actually playing Starfield then I'll be able to be like

oh yeah I don't really care about this but I like Skyrim and I loved Fallout so I don't see why I would personally be like I hate this but I understand people being like yeah if you played Skyrim or if you played fallouts like that in space and I'm like is that what you wanted right? I'm like is that what you wanted though

for a lot of people that's exactly what they wanted they're like yeah I spent hundreds of hours playing those games I will spend hundreds of hours playing this game too. That's what Steve wanted. Uh-huh. Yet it's not enough for you, Steve? I would say that a lot of the great things that make Bethesda games great are things that inherently prompt exploration and experimentation. All of the Fallout games since Bethesda took that series over prompted that.

Skyrim obviously had that oblivion, etc. I personally found that Starfield's backdrop of space, while seemingly infinite in exploration, is actually quite narrow and quite linear in the ways that it prompts you to explore. There aren't that many things, obviously because there are a lot of things that demand of the game itself to explore around. You can't just walk around the surface of a planet for hours and hours and hours. You can. There will be nothing. Right. You can fly for hours and hours and hours.

there's that one viral clip of that one Twitch streamer that just flew for seven hours to get to Pluto by themselves and they did, they did do that. Sort of. Sort of, but ultimately to what end? Yeah, exactly. Do you think it would, so then would you have like, if they just didn't choose space,

if there was a different thing they could have chose that was in space? I feel like space was the next, it had to be. Well, I liken it to, if we want to talk about, like, the idea of Skyrim being in space, you can't put Skyrim in space because the sheer density of the map of Skyrim, while seemingly small, had a lot of rich things in it

within the span of everything. Everybody just wanted to walk. Like, Little Uzi-Virte, I just want to walk. I just want to walk around and explore and stumble upon something that would surprise me. Every time that I tried to stumble

upon something in Starfield, it seemed to just be there and not really welcome me. That's very valid. I'm writing something in a similar vein for the ringer, So I agree with you there. I think in some ways, it improves upon the typical Bethesda model.

So first of all, it's better looking. It's a great looking game, right? And that's just time and technology and resources. But it does look really impressive, I think. Also, it plays pretty well, I think, in my experience, I don't know about you, Steve. But despite all of the condemnation about Bethesda's buggy and janky, it actually hasn't been for me. Despite the scope and the scale, the game has. has crashed twice for me, which is maybe our standards are too low because we expect every game

to be broken now. I mean, I've never mind copper better in a game before. So great. God damn. The game is fairly stable for me. And other than, okay, yeah, there's like some clipping issues where someone sticks a gun through a door or an NPC gets stuck on a ladder or something. But I have found that to be a lot less common and a lot less obtrusive than it historically has been for Bethesda, despite the fact that this is at least in some ways a bigger game. So kudos to them on not shipping a game in a completely broken state. I also think that, yes, you're right, that in some ways the scope is sort of restrictive. The actual gameplay on a minute-by-minute basis, like I had major misgivings about, okay, Bethesda's making a real shooter here. I know that

latter-day fallout games are kind of shooters. There's shooting action. But the combat that in Bethesda games is generally not the draw, right? And I would say that my experience, I'm pretty impressed with this game just as a first-person shooter. At least I've been playing it as a first-person shooter. You can play third-person too. But I'm not saying it's going to make you forget Destiny or Halo, but I'm pretty impressed with just the kinetic feel of the gunplay and just the range of guns, the array of guns and the difference of guns and the way that that feels. So the combat exceeded my expectations. So that's all good. But what Steve is saying, and I think this is not entirely Starfield's fault. It's not a hard and fast rule, but as a general rule, the bigger,

the game world or the game space, the blander or emptier, it's bound to be, right? I mean, there's almost no way around that because you can't have that sort of handcrafted, densely populated field. if it's enormous, right? And if you're compensating for the fact that not everything is placed on the map by someone by doing procedural generation, so it's sort of using an algorithm to play stuff and compensating for that in various ways. But even if you have a huge budget and you spend a decade making your game, you're not going to make a thousand planets that feel like a game that devotes all its resources

to one planet or a handful of planets, right? So that's true, not just of Starfield, but of so many games. I mean, when No Man Sky shipped, that was the big complaint, right? This was so hyped and there's nothing to do in this game, right? And in that game, obviously, they've fixed it and they've added so much content post-release that it's completely changed the perception about that game. And that's less of a story-driven game to begin with. But if it's that or if it's like Star Citizen, which is just a debacle and still is an

out and may never be out. And might actually just be a money laundering scheme. Might just be a scam, right? Or, you know, you have games like Eve Online and Elite Dangerous that are like massively multiplayer games, right? So then the onus isn't only on the developer to populate this world with stuff to do. It's kind of a player-driven thing, right? But when it's all on the developer, if it's a single-player game, Starfield almost feels like

if this were multiplayer, maybe this world would feel more alive than it does, right? right? But Steve, you're right. It's kind of cordoned off. Like, yes, you can go to these thousand planets. But A, some of them are barren and lifeless, which is by design. I mean, they've said, well, that's how the universe is, which is very true. It would be weird if every planet were lushly populated. But that said, okay, there's a realism benefit, but it's still not much fun to go to just a barren, lifeless world where there's nothing to do. Right. And then even on the ones where there is something to do, it's sort of separated into squares, basically, like you land in a region, and then you can run around that region. And unless you're landing in a city, like something that's hand-designed and filled with dialogue and quest lines and activities, there are going to just be some generic activities or bases that are randomly populated. And that can be fun for a while, but for me at least, just doesn't have a really long shelf life. You know, and just kind of running around scanning stuff and surveying.

That, to me, doesn't hold a whole lot of appeal either. And so you can sort of exhaust that possibility, and then you can take off and land again in a different part of the planet. Maybe the geography will be a little bit different, but there's still only so much to do, right? So that's like, is that Bethesda's fault for not implementing this type of game better? Is it just a flaw in the plan just to set out to have a thousand planet? it's in the first place, is that better to have that sort of scale if it means then compromising on the nature of where you are and what you're doing at any given time? I think that's possible. If I may, I think that the biggest thing that I kind of gripe about

with this game is probably its lack of identity, it's lack of actual need to know what it is, because unlike No Man Sky in the beginning where that game seemingly promised its audience the world and didn't actually say like that game before that game came out we still didn't know what it did until it actually came out with this we were pretty well teed up with what we were expected to do and even then the narrowness in which we can have those expectations for what a game can do it already seems to be ironclad in what it's going to be from now on whereas you said that the No Man Sky developers took it upon

themselves to be like, okay, what can we take from this idea and give people what they want? Bethesda seems to be fairly happy with what they've made and seems to almost rely on its diehard fan base to improve it in the ways that they see fit

by ways of even patching in support for different graphics cards on PC devices. And, you know, if you want to improve the inventory, there'll be a mod for that somewhere down the line. You can find it. Yeah.

It doesn't seem to be taking even that responsibility on itself. And I find that very frustrating when its pedigree is riddled with that. Well, do you think it was going to take more time to, like, figure it blow that stuff out? It's hard. It's also, like, hearing this is like, it sucks because it took so long for it to come out. But then also so many different games, including Boulder's Gate came out where it's, like, it's so intricate. And then this comes out and we're, like, comparing. like, it's not as intricate.

And that infamous quote from game developers being like, we shouldn't expect Bald was Great Gate 3 to be the standard, which is so incredibly condescending from their own work. Where like, you know what game developers? If you wanted to, you would because when you take that kind of time, regardless of the type of scale or game that you want to make, I feel like that's going to be indicative of the product that people come out with. And it's going to be received thusly.

Yeah, that's true in some respects. And that obviously if you're a smaller developer. Of course. You can't be held to AAA standards. Right. Regardless of it's a side-scrolling action game

or a big, massive role-playing game. But for someone like Starfield, I was like, you could. Yeah, you could. I could take this game being 50% smaller

if there was 200% more things to do. Do you think they were stressing more for the 130 hours than they were for the, sorry, Ben, I'm yelling over you. But, and you know this. Go ahead. You know this.

Do you think they, I don't think they're forfeiting one for the other, but they did give us 130 hours of content. And then we're still like, well, what about these things? We could have been like exploring more of this if we opened the world up to this. I understand that you're in space. Maybe they're trying to be logical about like, well, in space, it's not like that. There's a million planets.

There's a million places to go. And a lot of them are just empty. Yeah. We're getting greedy a little bit because there's a lot to do in this game. And again, maybe it's the expectations. You know, they said it was like an unrivaled exploration game, I think, is how they sold it. and I guess arguably, debatably, in some ways it is. But in other ways, as Steve was saying, you don't get that sort of emergent sense of discovery and exploration that often, because the scale is so vast that in a way, counterintuitively, it then forces you to take shortcuts, right?

Because it's too big to just stumble on stuff organically, right? I mean, let's say you could walk around the planet uninterrupted. would you want to? Would you want to devote your entire life to doing that? Is there any way that that planet would be populated with enough stuff to make that fun? Probably not. And so if you have a smaller game geographically speaking that is stuffed with stuffed like something like Tears of the Kingdom. And again, we're talking best in class, Nintendo, most experienced, highly acclaimed developer taking all of the time in the world to make the perfectly crafted game also a high standard for anyone else to live up to. But in that game, it's a big map for sure,

but it's not a Starfield huge map, at least potentially, but it feels more rich, I think, just because you're constantly seeing something that you can go to, which is one of my major quibbles with Starfield, which is that even compared to much smaller scale games, where it's like in Zelda, you know, you can see that mountain over there and you can go climb the mountain, kind of a cliched idea, but it's still cool when you can do it. In Starfield, that's not necessarily the case because you can't take off and land. And Todd Howard of Bethesda has said, not that many players actually care about that. It wouldn't justify the work that would go into it. And I'm sure that it would be a huge hassle to be able to program taking off from anywhere,

going into space, coming back down, landing wherever. The way that you can in no man's sky, or even Star Citizen, I guess, in the form that it exists, or that supposedly you'll be able to in Ubisoft's upcoming Star Wars game. Or that you can do in Outer Wilds, or that sense of wonder and discovery. That to me feels like a big absence. I miss that because, again, I'm getting into the cockpit and the bridge of my ship, and it's like, all right, the wonder of discovery, and I can see the whole universe. And then it's just like press Y to take off or press X to board or leave, right?

And it's just, you know, you get a cutscene and it's just not the same. And when you land, you get a cutscene. And when you're in space, you're sort of like in an instance of space. It's not like you can go from that region to some other region. And again, like realism-wise, am I expecting to be able to fly between planets? Do I want to spend days doing that? You know, you can kind of do that in no man's sky. After the initial thrill of doing that, like, oh, this is cool. But is it actually fun? not. I appreciate that you can fast travel, but I feel like I'm fast traveling so much. I'm spending so much time in menus, and the menus are sometimes convoluted. And to Steve's point, yeah, modders are already off to the races. And maybe it's a crutch that Bethesda relies on knowing that modders will come along and improve the PC UI experience, at least. But I do feel like, paradoxically, the bigger you make the map and the world, in some ways, the smaller it feels. And that's not just true of Starfield, but many games in this mold. It's like Mass Effect Andromeda, right? I think they set out to be like, let's make a thousand planets. And then

they were like, actually, this is hard and it's not that fun. And we'll end up with a handful of planets. And it still won't be that great. But conceptually speaking, it's really a big lift. And I think they managed it about as well as they could. But it does feel like it's lacking in some ways. Now I know. Now I know that I'm going to hate it. No, I'm joking. I'm not going to. Definitely not saying that. And I would say it's worth checking out and worth playing. And I've already sunk lots of hours into it, and I will keep playing it. I don't know that it will have the hold on me that Bethesda wants it to have. From even everything I've heard from everybody, especially you, I don't think it's ever going to turn us away from the company.

Like, I don't, it's not, to be fair, it has to be something crazy for me to be like, you know what, this company has been dangling this carrot in front of me for too long. But this, no, this seems perfectly fine. I genuinely feel still like it's going to be kind of daunting for me. Like, I'm going to be like, there's too much and too little. I think there's a lot of times when I'm playing games that are like this freeing, I'm constantly like, oh, I should do everything outside the box. And then eventually I'm going to be like, wait, maybe I don't need to do everything outside the box. Maybe I don't have to collect all these potatoes.

Yeah. And there are certain things that happen even outside the main quest line. And one thing I will say, I think it's a common, point of detraction about Bethesda games that the main quest line isn't that compelling, right? That it's just sort of there to introduce you to the game, but it's not really the meat

of the game. You just kind of want to sample that and then do all the other stuff. I think this is probably the best Methesda main quest. It's pretty good. I would be fairly satisfied if there weren't as much extra stuff and if I were

just playing this for the main quest line. It grabbed me. I think it's a pretty good story without giving away too much. You know, you're part of this explorers club basically called Constellation that's trying to figure out what the story is behind all of these artifacts that have these strange effects and you go around the galaxy and trying to collect them and figure out the mystery and you have your companions with you along the way. And I think that stuff is actually pretty strong by Bethesda standards. So yeah, I think they've improved in some respects. It's just like the biggest knock on the game, I guess, is that it's not innovative enough that it just

feels like it's in the Bethesda mold. Maybe that's the transition to Baldur's Gate because I feel like, and you've devoted way more time to this game than I have, so we're sort of switching places here when it comes to who's speaking from personal experience. But it seems like one difference is Starfield is meant to be a Go Anywhere game.

Maybe it falls short of that goal in some respects, but Baldur's Gate feels like more of a do-anything game. Like, it's not... as huge, it's still pretty huge, but you can just shape it to your liking. You can design your own adventure in a way that with Starfield, like, yeah, you can choose your factions and you can, like, one of the coolest things I did was I just jumped into a random system that I hadn't been to yet. I didn't have a quest or anything, but I was just like, let's check it out. Let's see what's here. Often, the answer is nothing, and then you just leave. But in this case, there was like a

derelict abandoned ship in space, and I landed, I docked on it, and like, the crew was not there, and you piece together what happened to this crew, and it got sort of scary, and I pieced out of there, because, as we said, I'm a coward when it comes to video games, but it was like I just stumbled on a little alien type, just a side detour, side quest here in this game, and that was really cool, because, again, it was designed by, someone, you know, like there was a consciousness and an intelligence behind that that there isn't in procedural generation. But with Baldur's Gate, it does feel like just the freedom of not necessarily going anywhere, but what you do when you're there. Like, tell me about what that's

like to play. Yeah. And that's a good way of putting it, because every time I say that there's too much, like, there's a lot to do, I don't really mean like go. I mean to just do. And especially because after certain times I don't know if it's about how long the rest is or if you just ignore something long enough some parts of the map just go and you can't go back to it because they're a part of some other quest line

that you had to get to at a certain time or do it at a certain time and they just disappear so you don't get to go. Also between acts you're kind of going to different locations on the map and they're like hey letting you know you're about to enter a different place and I'm like oh I didn't even explore that much

of the first place so it's not that big it's just a lot of things to do. Every person you run into is like, help me. And you're like, damn it, depending on who you are. I wanted to stay as true as I could to my character,

not to Jessica. I will be playing this game again as Jessica. And it will be, I will not have sex with anyone because they will hate me. But I was, I chose,

instead of choosing, making a character, I chose to choose one of their pre-made characters. So I played a shadow heart. I think a lot of, lot of people are playing as their own characters, but I was like, I'm going to try choosing their pre-made characters and see how differently this is handled. And a lot of the times,

they are either, they are, the NPCs are around the same God or worship the same God as me, or there's just some part of them that has to tie in with me. And I don't know if it was because of Shadow Heart. I don't know if it's because I personally chose a pre-made character, but every character I ran into was like, you, you! And I was like, damn it, okay, I have to do this because I'm a good person. So, lots of things to do. Lots of places to go,

but not as much as there is to do. Yeah, right. So with the saves coming approach, were you tempted to just say, let the dice fall where they may? And I know that there's a setting where you can have it be more favorable, right?

The way that a real life dungeon master would kind of, you know, take it easy on you at times. Oh, 100%. But because the game can compensate for anything that happens, it sounds like, right? Like, you can, you know, kill the quest giver or, like, start a fire or whatever.

You can attack every time. You can always attack anybody you want. But what's the fun? And, I mean, there are some people that like pillaging. But I'm genuinely like, there's no fun in doing that. So I'm going to explore everything I possibly could. And I did do the save. I did the save and load back if I didn't like the response I got

or I just didn't want to get into a fight or the fight didn't go in the way I wanted. I did that a lot. And again, I will not shame you guys for doing the same thing like my brother did to me. I saved after, like, I was trying so hard to sleep with my companions

and to sleep with everybody. Or just to, like, get the right answer. I didn't want people to hate me. I wanted to make a character that was cherished by, like, everybody. So if I accidentally said something that, like, a guard didn't like, I was like, well,

a little bad to say. And I like kept, oh, my finger to keyboards of saving and then restarting the game from the last save is remarkable. But yeah, I was going crazy saving those things just so I could do that. But I think that is a bonus to playing Baldur's Gate that I really liked was the looseness in playing it. I let people re-roll, let them save and load back up at where they want. Because there's a lot of people playing this game that are just hearing about it from word of mouth. I think a lot of people on my social media feeds are genuinely like, I didn't know what Baldur's Gate is, but I saw this white-haired vampire, and I also would like to try to sleep with him. And then they'll start playing, and they're like, I don't know what I'm doing.

And I think that's the one con. They kind of throw you into the game, assuming you kind of know, you've played a video game before, or a video game like Diablo, or like something that has a huge inventory, a huge menu, where you have to build your stuff. And they're kind of just like, oh, here's everything. they dump it on you at the beginning. They're like, press J to do this, press I to do this, press Q to do that. And you're like, okay, I should have wrote this down in a notebook because I do not remember any of it.

And I think that was like the only con I had for the game was I was like, for anyone new joining, it's going to seem so daunting and intimidating with how much information is being thrown down your throat. But it's worth it once you get on the other side. Even building your character is like a five-hour ordeal if you make it. People that don't know how to build character.

and like D&D are like, this is a million things. What do you mean I can be like a dark urge? What do you mean? I can be a class. I can be this. I can be that. I can be this. And I'm like, yeah, that's a lot of work if you've never played games like this before.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say Starfield, to its credit, I think the on-ramp is fairly gentle. The learning curve isn't so steep if you're intimidated. I think given its scale and the number of options and places and everything, I think it does a decent job of holding your hand to the point that it may even seem a little slow to get going, right? I mean, the people have said, like, the game doesn't really get going until you finish the main quest line or until you spend 100 hours in it or whatever. That seems like an exaggeration to me.

Like, first of all, if you need to be like, you need to play this for 100 hours so it gets good. I mean, you know, if that were true, I would say, no, thank you. I just, I do not have that much time. It's like when someone says, oh, the third season of this show is great. You know, you just got to get through the first couple. No, I'm not going to skip the first two seasons. That's wild. I'm not going to say a show is good about to skip it.

And also, I don't want to watch multiple bad ones to get to the good one. But at least with TV, like, that would be faster than playing a game for 100 hours. But I'm here to tell you that that is overblown, I think. Like, I was having a fair amount of fun from the Kekko, so that's okay. I think the critique of Starfield is that it's well-made in a lot of ways, like, It's well executed the vision that Bethesda had, which is maybe kind of flawed and questionable in some ways, but I think they more or less made the game they set out to make. But it's not innovative, really. It's hard for me to think, like, oh, this is an era-defining game. Like, it might be in the sense that there's just so much hype. And obviously, it's going to sell a lot and people are going to be playing it for a long time. But I don't know that people will be looking at this game. And again, it's too soon to say, right? It's week one. And it's hard to assess a game's legacy immediately, especially now when we get DLC and patches and games can evolve in unpredictable ways. But it's hard for me to see a legacy for this game where people are saying a Starfield style game or we have to now reach this bar that Starfield set.

I don't know that it raises the bar in that many important ways. It's an impressive package overall, but I don't know that it changes the game. it is kind of a Bethesda game executed on a different sort of scale in a different setting. But Baldr's Gate feels to me or my sense of people who played it is that it actually does feel like

this is a step forward or a leap forward for the genre. This is what I've been waiting for when it comes to an RPG. This is the purest port of the tabletop experience to the video game experience. Is that true?

And if so, does that make you feel like every game's got to be Baldur's Gate now or I'm going to be disappointed by the amount of choice provided or actually maybe it's too much choice and maybe sometimes I want the game to tell me what has to happen and lead me by the hand instead of saying I will follow you wherever you go. That's a hard question.

I'm like I love having a lot. I love having a lot. It gives me like after this podcast I'm going to continue. I'm in Act 2. I'm at the bottom of Act 2. There's three acts, all different from each other. The first one is like, you're in the forest. Second, you're in a really dark underground place.

And I'm just like, this is so much fun. I love all of this. I'm not asking every company to be, make the same CRPGs. I'm not asking them to make the same things. I think there's stuff in Boulder's Gate that you could focus on more. Like, I don't know. There's so much to do and so much to explore that I, in the menu and building your characters and all those things.

And I'm kind of like, okay, what if we got more like, I don't know, tactical with it? What if we tried putting a telescope or not telescope, a microscope over one portion of it and made like another CRPG out of that and explored that more? Maybe I don't, it's hard because I'm like, I'm not asking for every company to make CRPGs like Boulder's Gate, but it is nice having Boulder's Gate because it doesn't feel like the other games. it feels completely different and I like that but I don't I'm not begging for you to be the same

right yeah I mean variety is the spice of life right we want a whole different kind of game I mean we want even within a genre you might want a old school style RPG you might want a retro pixel art 2D type RPG you might want turn based you want like we want variety

so if if the lesson that every game maker takes from Baldur's Gate or from any other landmark game is just let's copy that. First of all, they're not going to copy it as well as the original executed it in many cases, but also, then you just got a bunch of copycat games too, and then it's going to get old. And it's funny, like, there was a period where I think linear became a bad word. It was like everything has to be open world and open ended, and we've got to give the player choice. And that was exciting for a while. And technology allowed that to be possible in a way that it wasn't previously.

And now there are times when I'm like, okay, I love that. I love the freedom. But also, sometimes it's nice to have a linear, well-crafted experience where it's just like, I'm going to set out to tell this type of story, and I know what the player's going to do.

And maybe it'll feel confining at times, but also maybe it'll feel like, hey, this was actually designed for me to have the most fun possible at all times. So I'm okay with not every game having that kind of choice, but that is what different. It differentiates it, at least in my mind, without having spent the time with it that you have. Like, Baldersgate feels like a leap forward, like a innovation, like a landmark game in a way that I can't say I'm getting that sense from Starfield so far.

No, 100%. But what you said, I'm like, I think that's spoke. That's what I'm asking for is I think, and this is personal. I know a lot of people are like I'd rather have a very, very open world like Boulder's Gate to do, or just the freedom to do anything I want. And I'm like, I also love that. But then I also am missing so much of the game because I don't know where that freedom lies. I guess I don't know how to what extent.

And that's also based on the fact of like, I've played a bunch of different games. And they did have walls. I was in a box. This, I'm still in a box, but there's a lot of holes in the box that I can get out of. And I don't know which one to choose from. There is so much parts of the game.

I'm playing it and I play it so long. And I'm watching other people play. And I'm like, how did you get an owl bear? And I'm like, how did you do this? And I'm like, there's so much that I've missed, the first time I played it, I lost two, I didn't get the companions. I missed two times to meet companions. And I'm genuinely like, I would love someone to make another CRPG, even if it was, it doesn't even have to be like fantasy. Put me in a weirder world. Put me in a

normal world. No, I don't know. Yeah. But like, do that and then even make it clear, a little bit clear of like what I can and can't or what I can do. I'm a person that is literally like, give me less to do. Less work, I guess. I don't know. I understand why people want this, though, but I genuinely am like, I missed a lot of the game. Just because I didn't know. Part of the joy of video games, right? Though, like, with a lot of these gigantic games, I feel like I'm playing it wrong.

Yeah. The entire time I'm playing it. Yes. Right? It's like, am I playing this right? Which isn't to say that there is one right way to play. But I will just leave entire aspects of the game so unexplored. Now, sometimes that's crafting, right?

Which I'm just not interested in crafting. You can put crafting in any game you want. I'm probably going to mostly ignore it. Well, Tears of the Kingdom, I kind of had to and enjoyed it more or less. Like, Breath of the Wild, I did zero cooking, for instance. Like, you know, I'm anti-crafting in general, though that varies. Like, my level of animosity varies by game. And if it's done well, if it's like a core part of the experience, if you're talking about

ultra-hand and Tears of the Kingdom, okay, that's cool. But if it's just like, I'm going to put crafting in here because, again, every game has crafting. And that's a box that we have to check now. I'm not into it. But there are so many mechanics and side activities and just like things that I have not upgraded or explored at all in Starfield or so many games like this that I have a constant sense of uncertainty. Just like, am I doing this wrong? That's a great note. As long as I'm having fun, I guess that's okay.

but it does make me self-conscious or like worried at times that it's just like maybe I need someone to tell me how to play this better. That's a great note. And I'm going to keep that note in my head at all times because I'm genuinely, in Baldur's Gate, I kept feeling like I wasn't playing it right. And I was always going back to like YouTube or TikTok to see other people playing it and seeing,

I was like, am I on the right track? I was like, am I doing the right quest? And I was like one part, like I kept sending companions. I just, you get a million companions, you don't have enough room on the team, people stay at camp.

And then they'll force their storyline still on you while the person's at camp. And I was like, wait, am I supposed to be playing with this guy? I already got two. Like, I don't need another one.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With these games that are so big, I've realized you just got to go with the flow. Like, you've got to tamp down that impulse that we both have to do everything

and clean, up your to-do list, right? You just, you can't, you know? Like, you have to embrace the clutter and the complexity of it. And as long as you're having fun, it's okay. And I don't feel like you should feel a pressure to play a different way. But with me, it's more like an uncertainty of, could I be having more fun if I were doing this differently? I don't know. And I guess I feel bad for the developers who, you know, someone sank like months of their lives into programming this thing that I'm never going to see when I play this. Now, if millions of people are playing, someone will see it, right?

But not me. So I feel bad for whoever probably crunched and slept at their desk to get that done, hopefully not. But often that turns out to be the case. Also, I think what you were saying about just not knowing if you're seeing what you're supposed to see, that is part of the joy of video games that you can kind of compare notes the way that we are and that players who play the same game do, it's like, did you go here? Did you do that?

Did you talk to that person? Whereas if you're talking about anything else that is scripted and not interactive, if you read a book or you watch a show or a movie or you listen to an album or whatever it is, everyone has a different experience because they're bringing a different background to it and they're warming to certain things and not others

and they're interpreting it in different ways. But the text itself is the same. It's like, did you see that scene? And yeah, everyone saw that scene unless we were looking at our phone or falling asleep or something, right? Whereas in games, it's like, you did what? How do you even? Why do you get that? Which can be kind of cool, right?

It's like talking about real life. Everyone has their own individualized, personalized experience, which I think can be a selling point. But it also does make you feel like you're missing out. You know, you have you have FOMO, right? Because you didn't get to see that thing that happened. Absolutely. I only had Fummo and Baldur's Gate when people got to sleep with other people, which I guess that two-minute video that Steve found, it was Liselle, which is, I don't know about other people, is the hardest person for me. But I think it's because I'm playing as Shadow Heart. And Shadow Heart has this relic that the Githyankis want, the Githyankis want. And Lizelle's like, I can't find this relic. Where is it? And I'm like, I don't know. And I'm like clearly lying to her about it. So I think she just doesn't trust me. And you can see sometimes they're like how they like you. she is in the red. She straight up hates me.

And I need her because she's a great fighter on my team. So we just keep hating each other openly. I don't know how that guy did it. But I need you to send me that video. Maybe instead of having sex with her, I can have her to be my friend. I have FOMO about every sexual interaction in Starfield because, again, I had none.

Although I don't know that I'm missing that much. Yeah, I don't think you are because it's a cut scene anyways. Well, to be fair, I'm trying to actually be in relationships with mine. I'm not, it's not a hookup, it's not a little bed roll. It's, I'm trying to have a marriage go on, which, and that's the thing is, which I've heard in Boulder's Gate, and please come for me if this is not true because I would love it not to be true. I heard later in the acts, you're eventually, if you're hooking up with your partners or companions, they're going to be one or two or all of them, will be like, so what are we? And you have to like definitively. Who are we?

This is too close to real life now. Yeah, I was like, oh, this is not the game I was trying to play. Yeah, right. Yeah, because that's the thing. It's like with video games, when I was a kid, I always dreamed about a game like Starfield. It's like, I can go to a thousand planets. Like, how amazing would that be, right?

You think that that's what you want, that you just want it to be bigger and bigger and in some ways more like real life in that it affords so many opportunities. And then you get into the game and you're like, actually, real life is kind of boring and frustrating sometimes. That's why I'm playing video games instead because I want to have that feeling of yeah, I want to have this feeling of empowerment. I don't just want to run

around this nondescript environment doing chores. I can do that at home every day, right? So you say that and then when I caught myself, anytime I'm playing like an MMO, I'm like, okay, I'm going to fish for like two hours and get the best fish I can find. Yes. Yeah. Sometimes video game chores

are better than real life chores. I love video game chores. I, but I hate Sims. I love video game I like building out my own things, but for some reason, I can't play Sims. But, like, as soon as I play any, like, playing with a team, especially like Diablo, I was like, okay, I got to go buy all these things. I got to get everything in order. Everything has to be ready for me to go every time.

All right. So our takeaways, I guess, these are both rich, interactive experiences. The hype is justified in some ways and not in other ways when it comes to Starfield, at least in the sense that Starfield, feels a little less like it's breaking new ground, despite the amount of new ground that there is in territory that there is in this game. It's hard to pinpoint certain mechanics or gameplay types that everyone will say, oh, Starfield really raised the bar here. We've all got to do the Starfield. You know, the way that you played Breath of the Wild and then you played some other game

where you can't climb every wall and you're like, what the hell? Why can't I climb this wall? In Breath of the Wild, I could climb this wall. This suddenly feels restrictive in a way that I accepted before. And now someone breached that wall. And so now I'm conscious of it, right? Starfield just doesn't quite have that same feeling to me. But it seems like Baldersgate does, which is not to say that every game now has to do what Baldersgate did, but it makes an important contribution to the medium, right? So if we're going to take that Microsoft type quote about one of the most important RPGs ever made, thus far, I think Baldersgate has the stronger claim to that title than Starfield does.

But look, it's not a direct competition unless it's a competition for your time, which at this point it is. Last thing I wanted to ask you, are you a new game plus person in general? Yes. Why it takes me so long to think about? I see, like, I'm not so much.

Like, I'm happy to have it. There's no downside to having a new game plus. And again, defining gamer, lingo for the non-hardcore gamers in the audience. New Game Plus is basically, you beat the game and then you can start it over, but it's different in some way. You can carry over attributes or items or skills that you got on your first playthrough, right? So you're powered up or you can further upgrade your abilities and then you go through the game again.

So if you wanted to replay it, it's a slightly new or more empowering way to replay it. I'm trying to think of the times I've done it. Mm-hmm. That's the thing. I haven't done it that much. Well, first off, I don't finish a lot of games. I play them and then I don't make it to the end that much. That's why I'm trying to think.

Like, Boulder's Gate, I restarted because I was like, let me play as a different character. And so I wanted to, I just created a separate. Yeah, it's a plus. New game plus is a plus. I guess, like, if you're in the market for that, I'm usually not, though. I finish a lot of games, but I don't generally replay them.

And I definitely don't start immediately. It's like, I've got to get right back in there and start over. No, I haven't. A lot of people do that. I was like, I'm trying to think of the game. I would do that. Right. I mean, maybe years.

No, right. If you want to do that, I'm happy to have the option provided. It's no skin off my teeth, but it's also not really a selling point for me personally. Again, like, if you're investing in one game and you want that game to last a really long time, and you love that game and you want to see every in and out a nook and cranny, great. It's nice to have that. I ask because StarFee. has a new game plus mode and it's very prominent.

It's almost designed to be replayed for narrative reasons that I won't get into for fear of spoilers. But I bring this up just because there have been a lot of people saying you should essentially run right through the main quest line and then start the new game plus. And then you can do all the extra stuff basically on your second playthrough. So without giving anything away, your second playthrough, you sort of. of start the main quest line over again. It's different in some ways, and there are some powers you can upgrade and everything. But basically, you carry over your abilities that you've unlocked on the skill tree. There's no level cap, by the way, in this game, as there is in Baldur's Gate. You can just max out everything. You can carry over that and things that you've unlocked, like skill-wise and

experience-wise, but pretty much everything else is reset. So your ship, your possessions, your relationships with the NPCs, you're basically starting from scratch there. And so I sort of did this. I heard a lot of people saying, yeah, just sort of speed through it. Then you'll be more powered up, and then you can do all the extra stuff on your second playthrough. I actually don't really recommend that. There's no wrong way to play.

And a lot of people are having fun doing it that way. But when I got to my second playthrough, I spent a little time doing that. And then I was like, I miss my first playthrough. I'm actually going to go back. So I just, I reloaded my original playthrough like before I beat it before the credits rolled. And I started to do all the extra stuff in that first playthrough instead of starting over. Because it just felt to me like, gosh, I have all these side quests that I wanted to get to and all these relationships. And I'm like working my way up to bigger and better ships and everything.

And I just don't want that reset and wiped out. So I think it's equally valid and in my mind even better to just, see the riches that this galaxy has to offer on your first playthrough, hold off on finishing it. And then once you've done that to your heart's content, then you can go on to the main playthrough, and it'll have been a little longer since you did that, and you can feel like you saw everything already.

So that, in my mind, is the better way to play Starfield, based on my experience. But again, no wrong way to play these games, which is part of the joy of playing them, is that you get to chart your own course in Starfield. very literally in a lot of menus where you will be charting courses and sometimes confused about what button to press and where you're actually going. Well, we should probably wrap up. We could talk about these two games for several more hours, I think.

We have not plumbed their depths here, and we have not plumbed their depths as players either. So this is a check-in. This is where we are so far, and we've each specialized in one of these games. maybe we'll do a swap, right? Maybe now that Baldersgate is out on console, maybe I will dive into it. And now that Starfield is out and you've played a lot of Baldur's Gate, maybe you can get into Starfield.

Maybe at some point down the road, we can switch and compare notes or just talk about how our journeys went because there's so much to get into. But please, everyone write in, let us know how your journeys in these games are going. You can reach us via email at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com. And we'll probably keep checking in with these games, although there's so much coming out in the next few months

that I don't know whether we'll be able to devote entire episodes to them because just looking ahead, we got Mortal Kombat coming later this month in a matter of weeks. Oh, Spider-Man's next month. Oh, October is just absolutely stacked. The rest of September is pretty stacked too. so we will do our best to handle this rush. It's a good problem to have, as they say.

So stay tuned on the Ring of Versan House of Our Feeds for continuing coverage of Asoka and a droid draft and Harley Quinn on Mint Edition. Thank you to Steve Allman for producing and also chiming in with his hater take on Starfield. It was fair. It was fair, Steve. I don't think you went too far. I think what you said was valid and mirrored

of my experience. I'm just a sunny guy. What can I say? I'm looking on the bright side of Starfield. And thank you to Arjuna Ram Gapal for setting this whole thing up and juggling the schedule, all the shows we got going these days, all the different areas of fandom that we cover. Thank you for joining us on this journey and we will talk to you a little later this month.