The Ringer-Verse - The Death of Disc-Based Gaming and 'Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced' Reactions, With Sean Fennessey | Button Mash

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Ben brings on Sean Fennessey, host of The Big Picture and champion of physical media, to discuss Sony's announcement that it's ending production of physical discs for new PlayStation games in 2028. They get into what led to this point; the ramifications for consumers, developers, and publishers; and how the decline of physical media affects cinephiles and gamers alike. Then Matt James joins Ben to analyze Microsoft's Xbox layoff news; review the new 'Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag' remake, 'Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced'; and pick their all-time top five pirate games. Intro (0:00)Sony's big announcement (4:42) 'Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced' review (58:56) Outro (1:57:30) Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Sean Fennessey and Matt JamesProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And welcome into The Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor at The Ringer and Blackbeard of Budmash. Welcoming you back to the Ringer's own video game show to discuss one big industry topic and one big game, a new parentheses old game. And I'll be bringing on two guests to do it. First, the big news in gaming, in online circles at least, is the death of disc-based gaming. Okay, it's not dead yet, but it's certainly circling the drawing the drive. drain it has entered hospice. And the very company that helped usher in the era of disk-based games three decades ago with

the original PlayStation, and that in 2013 dealt a big blow to the Xbox One by showing off how easy it was to share games on PS4 by just handing someone a game disc in a box is now the one that's poised to pull the plug. On July 1st, Sony announced on the PlayStation blog, and I quote, as consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games

that already released or will be releasing prior to January 2028 in disc format. This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs, this transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today. Most may be, but far from all, and the subset of that community that does not prefer to play all games that way has certainly spoken up about it over the past week.

There has been a big backlash, protests, petitions, relentless flaming of all of Sony's posts, but so far Sony has held firm. This obviously has major implications for the next generation of consoles, for the way that people purchase and play games, for the industry writ large, this was foreseeable, but still in the moment, somewhat surprising. And now we will wait to see what Microsoft will do,

what Nintendo, which has gone to game key cards lately, will do whether we've seen the last console to ship with a disk drive. Obviously, the state of affairs is nothing new for PC players, but the PC is a more open platform than consoles, which affects things from a preservation standpoint. And so to talk about all of this, I will be calling up the ringer's own Sean Fennacy. Why talk to a movie guy about a gaming development?

Well, Sean is a huge proponent of physical media, so he too has been dismayed by this news. And there are a lot of parallels, a lot of overlap between movies and video games when it comes to physical media. Also, some significant differences. We will explore all of that and break down the implications for you. After that, Matt James will be here. He and I will react briefly to the Xbox layoffs and studio spin-offs news. But don't worry, this won't be all doom and gloom,

because Matt and I will also be discussing this week's biggest release, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, the remake of the beloved Assassin's Creed for Black Flag. And in honor of Sean and the big picture, we'll be borrowing a big pick bit and giving you our all-time top five pirate games. Now to tee up Sean, he and I will invoke gaming god and movie buff Hadeo Kajima, creator and director of Death Stranding and Metal Gear, who reacted to the news about PlayStation discs last week at a film festival in Italy.

He is unsurprisingly sad about it. He says he's been buying a lot of Blu-rays and CDs. And he also said that the following, according to one translation, the situation is different for games compared to movies, that is, as they are downloaded to the hard drive. That means the game data remains on your own hardware. However, if things shift to streaming in the future, that won't be the case anymore. With streaming subscription services like Netflix or Amazon, there is a server somewhere, and you essentially just have the right to turn the tap.

And when you do, the data flows out. That's how movies work on these platforms, right? you don't download the data, you access it directly through a subscription. And the consequence of that is that you don't actually possess the data yourself. There are companies that own these servers and let you turn the tap for a monthly fee. However, with nations, politics, and various ways of thinking, one naturally has to consider the possibility that if there is a change, the data inside will stop being distributed. And if that happens, you won't be able to watch or play the movies and games you like.

That is what is frightening. So what is happening to video games in 2028? might also happen to movies. I'd like everyone to keep that in mind. And we will as we talk to Sean Fennacy. All right, let's get Physical with Fennacy. Sean probably needs no introduction, but this is his button mash debut,

so I will remind you that he is the host of the Big Picture, the author of the Projections Substack Newsletter, and the Lord of Letterboxed as well, as one of the foremost defenders of physical media, which means he's probably been both vindicated and dismayed, and dismayed by recent developments. Sean, you are more of a movie guy than a gamer, but nonetheless, my condolences on the impending death

of disc-based games. Yeah, likewise, back at you. Thank you for having me. I hate that we're meeting under these circumstances, Ben. This is, well, I don't know. I mean, how much doom saying should we really be doing today? You'll have to give me some context around this news and maybe even help me understand

what are the material ways at which it's going to impact my life as a collector and physical media enthusiast. Yes, I thought this would be a good kind of cultural exchange, a little transmedia conversation because cinephiles and gamers

are sort of fellow travelers when it comes to physical media and the decline thereof. So a bit of background because the forces of physical media have suffered a series of blows. It's sort of a triple whammy. First, Rockstar announced

that Grand Theft Auto 6, the most anticipated game of the year, the decades, the century, the millennium, would not ship on a disc. If you want to buy a physical copy, you get a code in a box. And that's not just at launch to prevent leaks, but for the foreseeable future. Then Sony announced that more than 500 movies and TV shows distributed by Studio Canal will be removed from the PlayStation store, not the first time this has happened. So if you bought Rambo First Blood or Bridget Jones's diary. I'm not sure what the crossover for those movie audiences is, but you no longer own them. Sorry, they're gone. We're about to be. And third, the coup de grace. Sony announced that it's phasing

out physical game discs in 2028. So obviously the days have been numbered. Digital has been ascendant, but this does feel like the final nail in the coffin, the coffin being lowered into the ground. And this will have, I think, some sweeping effects for the industry. And maybe for movie people, too, even if you're not a gamer, because a lot of physical media watchers watch on game consoles, right? I mean, that's many people's primary Blu-ray slash DVD device at this point. Do we have any data as to how many people that is? I'm curious because, you know, in my realm of collectorhood, you know, not a lot of people are watching on their PlayStation. I think once you kind of get into the boutique

Blu-ray era of collecting. Yeah. You're more likely to be acquiring at least a standard issue, 4K player, or if not, you're kind of elevated $800,000 piece of hardware. But I do know just from,

you know, I was just doing a substack chat with subscribers and this came up in the chat and people were asking me. And I know that a lot of people who were just getting started collecting Blu-ray or just thinking about how they want to consume movies, that this is the default because they have a console at home.

So do you know statistically how many people are actually watching this way? I'm part of that cohort. So there are many millions like me, I think. I don't know exactly, but we know just how many millions of PlayStation owners there are. And people, of course, who have prior generations of consoles still hanging around and serving as sort of their media center device. So I think that's probably a sizable number of people. So it is a blow to your cause, I would say, even if the true believers like you are going with some sort of dedicated device.

I think for the common person, maybe you get a gaming device, although those are getting increasingly expensive and unaffordable. So that's also an issue. But what do you make of the fact that, okay, if we just want to say, look at the revealed preference of consumers, If physical media were valued, then people would be buying it and studios would be selling it, right? And if you look at the video game industry, something like 80 to 90 percent of downloads now or game sales are downloads are digital only, at least for PlayStation and Xbox, Nintendo's maybe a little more physical forward. So what is your rejoinder to that, that, hey, the market has spoken people. seemingly don't care about this. I think it's important to have a lot of nuance in this conversation

because the way that I usually frame it is this sort of emotional thunderdome about your ability to control your relationship to media and not have it dictated to you or gate kept by a larger corporation. But I think this is a slightly more complex issue because there are certain components about it in terms of gaming that I don't totally understand. For example,

When it comes to film, what a lot of people who are very focused on physical media are thinking about is the way in which they're seeing the movies or television shows and the quality of the transfer and the audio experience. There is something about the compression that comes with streaming digital video that is extremely frustrating for people who want to see films the way they're intended to be seen, at least as best as possible at home. Yes, if you're a video file, it might tell you that you're watching 4K, but it's not the true pristine 4K that you're getting in the physical pressing often. Exactly. And so maybe we should just start purely with that for the video game experience. Is there any delineation experientially between the digital download version of a game and the hard box disc that you're putting into your console? No. And that's a pretty important difference.

So you can't say that there's a better way to play, really. Obviously, if you're a collector and you want that box on your shelf or maybe you want some art or a manual or something that comes in there, then that might be important to you. But as far as the actual gameplay experience, no, it's a file you're downloading or maybe installing off a CD, but it's the same file either way. Okay, so that's an important distinction. I'm not sure that it necessarily justifies this decision creatively or structurally. but if nothing is really changing,

then that's notable. Secondarily, one of the great things about physical media right now is the unearthing of here-to-for lost materials that the idea of rediscovering and restoring work that is a part of the film history canon is one of my favorite things about this hobby right now, that there are a lot of movies that are issued

on a weekly basis by this whole. raft of boutique companies who are helping you discover something new. And that goes for people like me who've seen thousands and thousands of movies. And I've devoted a huge chunk of my personal and professional life to thinking about and watching films both mainstream and hidden. And so this strand of media consumption has a kind of additive historical component to it that I think is really crucial. Now, like, is there anything to that?

To my mind, it actually makes me feel like digital is more valuable for gaming because consoles evolve and they're upgraded and updated, but the gameplay maybe can't support previous iterations of a game. But correct me if I'm wrong there. Yeah, there's a big preservation issue. And I think that's one of my biggest concerns about this is that games, as they get old, they become increasingly unplayable because you get new hardware, and it doesn't support the past hardware,

and sometimes there's backward compatibility, and it will support it to some extent. But you almost have to have that physical disk, or else when the company says, okay, we're shutting off the servers now, then you maybe no longer have access to that game. And you may or may not be able to purchase it somewhere. Sony also just turned off or announced that it's shutting down the online store

for PS3 and Vita, so that generation of games will be, a lot less accessible now, unless you still have an old PlayStation 3 lying around with your old discs. So that's a big issue because it's really a heavy lift to try to get old games to be compatible with new hardware. And unless you're lugging around your old consoles, which I am, I have like a console graveyard, some of which is at my mom's house and she keeps asking me to bring it to my house, which I will delay as long as possible. But unless you have that, then you might just not be able to play those games.

You might not be able to even buy them. And in some cases, if you buy them, you might not be able to continue to play them, especially if there's an online component, and maybe there's a multiplayer, or it requires an online connection. And then they say, okay, time has passed, not that many people are playing anymore.

We're going to save some expenses, or there's a security issue or something. We're shutting down the servers, sorry. And now there has been kind of a grassroots movement to try to do something about that. There's a movement in California called the Stop Killing Games movement. It's kind of global, but they've gotten some success with changing language when you buy a game. So if there is an online component that could be fleeting, then they can't really say they're selling it to you because, in effect, they're sort of indefinitely renting it to you, right?

And they could remove that access at any time. So there was just a little bit of a legal setback for that movement, but they're trying to ensure that. that game makers are required to maintain those games for the foreseeable future, so that they can't just flip the switch and say, you bought this thing, but now you can't play it anymore. But yeah, preservation is a huge issue for gaming. It's interesting because in film history, there's this real push-pull dynamic between what, for lack of a better phrase,

we'll call new content and historical preservation, where the film business is constantly pushing out. new movies every week and they become the vanguard of discussion on a weekly basis. But the film history is deeply iterative and it is constantly responding to what came before it. Through the first roughly 30 years of Hollywood filmmaking, there was not a strong system in place for preserving what was being made. In fact, most of the prints of the first 15 years of silent cinema in America are no longer X. And I think 80 to 90 percent of those films can no longer be watched because they're just gone.

Those prints are just gone. And some of that is because of the materials that were used to create those films and show those films. And some of that is just because of a lack of care. But over time, sort of the opposite has happened where there has become this kind of groundswell of individuals and organizations that are very dedicated to this.

Martin Scorsese runs one of these film foundations. And part of the work that they do effectively as a nonprofit is is they just restore old movies and put them in front of people and issue them in cinemas and then hopefully in physical media. But the real kind of hinge point, I think, to this conversation in the film world

is licensing. Because what has happened is these great boutique companies of which some people will be familiar, your criterion collections or maybe Arrow Video, there are a handful of companies doing amazing work, like Vinegar Syndrome, for example, who are actively licensing films not just from small independent studios

or rediscovering forgotten exploitation movies or genre movies, but they're literally licensing from Warner Brothers and from Paramount and from Sony, the big major studios. And they're getting their films for a period of time and they're helping to restore them. They're creating new extra special features

on those discs. And they're exposing the world to, you know, some grindhouse crime movie from 1975 and making them feel to the consumer as though they're not just important but essential. And I tell you what, I mean, it's made the hobby really fun. Now, at the base of all of this, it still is about the movie.

It still is about watching the movie and seeing the movie in the best way possible. It's not about the packaging. It's not about the price point. It's not about the bells and whistles extra features. It is about can I watch the movie and can I watch it in the format that I want to watch it in?

So given all of that, in gaming, I assume there's no licensing capability here. I assume there's no way to kind of boutiqueify the game experience. Yeah, there are some boutique physical copy manufacturers that will put out, say, collector's editions or premium editions, and you get a bunch of goodies along with the game. I think what might be an issue here, though, is that there might be no disc drives on future gaming systems. in fact, that seems quite likely. And so you can make the fanciest disc-based version of a game to satisfy the diehard, but that diehard will not be able to play that on the latest hardware,

because we've already seen that where maybe you have to pay a premium to get a disc drive included. You can get a digital-only version of the console. It seems quite likely that given that Sony is phasing out support for physical disks, the PlayStation 6 will not ship with a disk drive, and probably Microsoft's next system, Project Helix, might not as well. And there might be add-ons, you know, maybe the Sean Fenthesies of the world can pay a couple hundred bucks to get some sort of additional drive there, but it won't be a mass adoption sort of thing. And so I don't know if that'll support the business model of a boutique company that is churning out collector's additions when

the market for that is just going to be shrinking and shrinking. And then there are other knock-on effects when it comes to, say, reselling, right? So it used to be that you could go to GameStop or EP games or whatever and pick up a used secondhand copy of a game. And now those companies are out of business or dwindling their shadows of their former selves. They're selling 80% funco pops on the shelves and making weird attempts to take over eBay. And so this seems like the death knell for that sort of secondary market too. And that, that's potentially quite bad. Even if you are a digital downloader,

if you want those digital downloads to be affordable, then that's going to be an issue for you because now Sony and the publishers can sort of set their own price because they control the whole pipeline, really. And they can't get undercut because they're shipping physical copies to Walmart and Walmart decides to put those games on sale. Or someone says, I'll just pick up a used copy at GameStop or something. That's not really going to be a thing if it's just used.

download from the PlayStation store, and that's that. So they can sort of set the price and control the distribution, and long term, one would have to think that that's not going to lead to reductions in price. Yeah. Well, good luck. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, it does seem catastrophic because, like, let's try to play this out.

If there's no opportunity for preservation over time, then what happens is, is that the context and history of the art form is erased. And if it's erased, then not only will it make it more challenging to iterate on it, but it will make this enterprise seem, I would say, purely not just forward-looking, but financially focused, that it is only about what comes next and anticipatory creativity as opposed to something that is rooted. And, you know, look, I know this is a part of the, mission of your show is sort of like understanding and making,

making an attempt to clarify that gaming belongs in the conversation with other art forms in a material way because there's something deeper creatively going on here experientially going on here than maybe it gets credit for. And this is a step towards, I think, potentially stripping it of that. Now, maybe that seems pretentious or haughty and, you know, a guy who's surrounded by Blu-ray discs in his garage, you know, attempting to explain away his own bad habits.

But I don't think so. I do think that connectivity creatively over time is not only crucial to understanding and enjoying an art form, but to be giving it the place in culture that it deserves. And this does seem destructive. Now, on the other hand, I could just be a guy in my 40s who doesn't understand that you can do this still

and you can just do all of this digitally, that there's no reason why this can't be maintained in a digital environment. I don't know, you tell me. And there are efforts in legal gray areas, emulators, things you can find in unspecified places online that I will not mention in case Nintendo's lawyers are mentioning, right? It's sort of the same thing people say about physical media

with torrents or whatever. It's like, well, you know, I question how altruistic that is in many cases when people are like, this is all about preserving the media? Is it solely about that or is it about you not wanting to pay for a streaming service? It can be a bit of both, maybe. But yeah, there are some sort of homebrew efforts to preserve things, and there are a lot of foundations that do great work preserving video games in the history of video games.

And even internally, PlayStation, Sony has a team that tries to at least keep its own assets straight so things don't just get kind of lost over time. but it's really tough. And I feel bad about this because I'm kind of part of the problem where I support your cause. And I think that it's good for the industry and for gamers and consumers for physical media to be present. And yet I'm kind of a hypocrite because I am mostly a digital downloader. So it's sort of discs for the but not for me sort of situation. And part of that is because I do this show, and so companies sent us codes to review games, and we download them.

And that's how I get a lot of games these days. But even if that were not the case, just the convenience of being able to download a file and start playing immediately, that's pretty persuasive. And so I am sort of Tim Robinson in the hot dog suit, you know, like wondering how we got here. And yet my own behavior is part of that larger trend. And, you know, I guess part of it is that I'm not that big a rewatcher or replayer in general. I don't know. I was raised to be a big library guy as opposed to just having stacks upon stacks of books. And so I do feel like, you know, I use this and I have the experience and I cherish that.

And then whether I actually have the physical relic of that or not is sometimes literally immaterial to me. but also it does create some problems, I think, in terms of the wider industry. Also, this is happening at a time when these companies are raising the prices for these systems every other week at this point because of the memory shortage, because of AI and data centers, etc. And so you might say, well, isn't this the worst possible time than to make everything based on your storage space? Because if you have to download games, you need storage for that. and storage is getting increasingly unattainable and expensive. So that's another big issue.

Although in recent years, sometimes you buy a disc, and then that disk just sort of prompts you to download it onto the hard drive. So it's kind of a fig leaf. It's not actually on there. It's just for show, really, and companies have done that more and more. So that issue is probably a little less acute. But it is tough because every time I want to play a new game, I have to delete an old one.

And that space is finite. And you have to just, they have us over a barrel, just multiple barrels right now. Yeah, I mean, you find me at a time in which my habit is as out of control as it's ever been, that I am entering completest phase when it comes to certain components of my movie collection. And it's very dangerous and storage is a notable word because I have physical storage to be concerned about. I do not have a garage. Yeah, yeah.

And if one does not have a garage like this, then this becomes a very challenging hobby, whether it be for gaming or for movies or really anything else. If you just collect funco pops, you've got to put them somewhere. And I think we're increasingly leaning into a leaner lifestyle across the board where people don't want to have

these kind of physical representations. But these do spark joy for you. So you can't find with that. I mean, for me, yeah. I mean, maybe we can talk about that a little bit sort of like, what do you get out of it? because I'll foreground that by saying, I'm not opposed to digital or streaming at all.

I use streaming services every day. I think they're an incredible convenience and have tremendous value. And for people who can't afford physical media, for people who don't have movie theaters nearby their home, for people who live in a small apartment and don't have space to acquire video games and can just do a digital download,

I think that's all very reasonable. This is a real kind of high-class problem to be worried about not being able to retain your collections over time. So I'm very well aware of that. I think a lot of it on the movie side, as I said, is oriented around the quality of the experience. And then this complicated idea of long-term ownership where you mentioned that those 500 movies

that are being removed from the PlayStation store, I heard about that quite a bit from people on social media last week. I definitely have assumed this sort of avatar role of person, because I have been warning people about this very problem for five or six years. I'm like, they will take this from you. Yes. You're the profit of physical media, and now your words are coming true. And I told you, like, your physical foot soldiers have been out in force because, you know,

it may be a minority of people who care about this, but it's a very vocal minority, and they are all on Twitter and following you. Yeah, which is nice. I'm glad that we all stand together. I think that socially there's this expectation that if you are raised in a digital-only environment, not like us, who are raised in a physical world. old in the 1980s and 90s, that it's stunning when something that has been a digital only experience is taken from you. But that's going to continue to happen for a variety of reasons and we can talk

about them. Some of that is that storage-based concern that you have. Some of that is particularly consolidation and corporate ownership changeover, where the interests of the company that owns the licensing distribution or creative platform just changes its strategy over time. And they decide this isn't something that means anything to us. So even though our, users have spent money to acquire the license to stream this thing, we're not interested in that anymore. I think it's going to be worthwhile to look at the long-term arc of Netflix and Amazon and now HBO Paramount's sort of digital offerings and what our expectations should be around what they've been offering to us. So it's a very naughty concept. Again, I'm not as well

versed in it on the gaming side, but I'll just reiterate, like these things, that you have in a digital format, you do not own. You do not own. I do, however, own arrows, Jallo Essentials, which features the following films,

the Possess the Fifth Chord and the Pajama Girl case. And I will own this, barring disc rod. Yep. Until I die. Yeah, it's true. Even the discs are not forever.

Nothing is forever. Nothing is forever. We're all mortal to dust. We will return. But, and it's true, it's not, you know, if you have a game that you purchased on your hard drive, it's not disappearing. They're not going to reach out and delete it from your hard drive, but you might have deleted it to make space for something else. And you might not be able to read, download it at some point, or you may lose that system more readily than you might lose a box. And people can still buy boxes.

If it's the box you care about, I think people will continue to sell boxes that you just open and get a download code, which is sort of sad, frankly. but if you just want something to display on your shelf so that you can broadcast something about your character to house guests, then you can still do that. One other significant difference, I think, between movies and video games, though you tell me, is that this really extracts a cost for the movie industry when you move away from physical media because it used to be the case that you had a second bite at the apple, revenue-wise, right? You have a big movie that comes out in theaters, you make your box office, and then it comes to VHS and DVD and Blu-ray and LaserDisc or whatever else,

and you get an extra round revenue from that, which for hit films was significant. And you're still getting some of that now if you license your movie to a streaming service, but it's not as lucrative for a successful film, right? And it's tough to translate how many millions of hours this thing got on a streaming service. What is that worth in terms of subscribers or people renewing? And so that's a little tougher to monetize, whereas with video games, I think there's a little less risk of that because gaming, at least since the arcade days, has been more of a solitary activity, something you do at home behind closed doors, safe from the sun and the judgmental eyes of society hunkered in your basement. And so this has always been, or at least for decades, has been something you do at home.

And so it's not as if you're losing sort of a second round, right, where there's a communal, we make something off the box office, that we make bank, and then we get a second dip. That's not quite happening here. So I think there's a little less downside for the publishers, for gaming writ large, for the people who make these things and release these things, this is sort of all upside because now they don't need to manufacture and distribute physical disks, which saves them some money. For people who make the games, you know, they don't need to sort of pre-certify for the disc-based version of the game a few weeks before the game becomes available. So they had to sort

of rush it to make sure they could ship something playable and then maybe you patch it when the game comes out. So there's a little less complication there and maybe a little less friction. And so I don't know that this endangers the overall revenue of the industry. I think it's maybe more of an issue for consumers. Whereas in the movie industry, it seems like something that has maybe endangered the whole movie-making model to an extent. I think that's a strong way of framing it. You've got to consider that physical media for the film industry is roughly only 40 years old. And, you know, the advent of VHS and Beta Max tapes in the 80s and then the advent of DVD in the late 90s and Blu-ray and 4K in the 2000s and

2010s. And it does feel like we're at a bit of a stopping point technologically around 4K. discs, which I think is a good thing. This has been true for more than 10 years, that the, you know, the DVD market fell out. There's a very famous Matt Damon viral moment on an episode of Hot Ones in which he talks about the downstream effect of losing DVD revenue and what that meant. But that was the overestimation and overreliance of the film industry on a market that was not long-term sustainable. When you had people, you know, in line at Target pulling Mr. Popper's penguins off of a rack for 999 and thinking, well, I should just own this, which was an impulse that was, it was not common to that point for most people. And the means of production had gotten so

cheap that it was easy to crank those discs out over time. People don't see a necessity for that. And so it has increasingly become a collector's market, which is interesting because, okay, I'll give you an example of something that's happened with a release, just as we're speaking. in 2022, a film called Barbarian was released. Zach Craigor, who was actually adapting a video game later this year, Resident Evil. And it was a relatively modestly sized horror movie somewhat quietly released by 20th century Fox in the fall. And I saw it in an early screening, and me and many other people who saw it early had a very, very excited reaction to it. This is the arrival of a new, exciting filmmaking voice.

and someone who has a real knack for this genre and storytelling and we're excited about him. Three years later, he releases weapons. It becomes one of the signature movies of 2025, Oscar-winning film, so on and so forth. When Zach Regger was on, the Big Picture, to talk about it, I asked him about the release, the physical release of Barbarian. And he said, I don't know what to tell you, man.

I tried. I begged the studio to release the movie, and they will not release it, and I don't know what's going on. Three months later, there was a rumor that there would be a criteria, collection edition of the movie, which would have meant that Criterion would have licensed the movie from Fox. That rumor was quickly extinguished. There was no news. And then all of a sudden, a week ago, they announced that there would be a 4K Steelbook edition of Barbarian being released in August after four years of people like me. Just saying, this is something we really won.

You guys put out hundreds and thousands of movies we don't care about. But there's This is a movie people actually want that has a real genuine cult fan base. And it went up for pre-order this morning. It's $39.99, which is very expensive. Yep. I didn't think twice. I'm sure you didn't. I ordered it immediately.

Yeah. And I genuinely think that this environment is a ask for what you want environment. And so when you're talking about the fans of physical media who are mad at Sony for this decision, you have to tell people what you want. You are actually the consumer here. It's your money. It's the thing that you are interested in. And if you don't tell people what you want, if you don't, it's not about complaining or throwing a fit. It's about communicating specifically what your desires are, somebody who's invested in this space. And for me as a movie fan, I want to be able to own Barbarian in the highest possible quality. I don't want to have to wait

for it to be licensed to Netflix for a six-month window and then disappear and move back to Hulu. And then when it moves away from Hulu, like, oh, maybe HBO grabs onto it for six months because of the precarious nature of movie licensing, I want to be able to say, this is a movie that's part of my collection and it's something that matters to me, and I want to be able to pop it in whenever I want. I want to be able to show it to my daughter in eight years when she starts getting into horror movies. I want to be able to have a Halloween party where the movie is playing in the background. Yeah. So I say that story, which is slightly self-aggrandizing just to say, just tell these companies.

These are just companies. They're not your boss. they're not in charge of the future of the thing that you make. If you tell them you don't want it this way. And if people don't actually want it this way, then it can change. Now, if that 90% that is primarily focused on digital downloads, yourself included, and feels that that is the most efficient and clear-headed way to experience games, that's great. Go with God. You know, gaming is a much more active hobby.

It's not like movie watching, where you get to decide what you want, and you can pick a number of different formats in which to experience. at a number of different time intervals. Gaming is like the release of something matters, and it is kind of community participatory in a unique way. And so there are real delineations between these two things, even though they share this bridge technology of a disk, which is so unusual.

I can't think of another format where you're using the same thing for different experiences. Well, thank you for complimenting gamers by calling us active for too long. We have been dismissed as sedentary. You heard it here first. I think I meant intellectually active. We'll take it.

And I do think there are some upsides. I'm not out here declaring that this is the end of the industry or anything. First of all, on the PC side, things have worked like this for quite some time. You use Steam, which is almost the monopoly at this point, and you get your code and you download your game. And very few people are going to a store and getting a big box, which was probably bad for the environment anyway. This is how PC gaming has worked, and so PC gamers are probably thinking, what is up with these console people?

They're still attached to the nostalgia of blowing in a cartridge back in the 90s or something, which supposedly didn't work and actually was deleterious to that effort, though. It always worked for me. Selective memory, maybe. And you can say, look, if you're someone who doesn't care that much about physical media and gaming and you're downloading anyway, maybe this is a bit of a price break for you on those next systems if they don't have to show. ship with a disk drive. Well, meanwhile, the RAM is costing us a fortune, but at least we could cut costs there for most people who aren't going to be utilizing that anyway. It's just long term, I worry, are they going to be jacking up the prices because they will have really no competition, nothing undercutting the prices that they set. And there are various, you know, maybe you could have

some sort of software where you could digitize, you know, you take a physical copy and you can turn that into a digital copy and then that'll be available in future generations. That's something that Microsoft and Xbox have been talking about. They've been pretty good about backward compatibility. So there could be a solution here. Another thing, though, is that this is a way for people to sell us something again. And we're talking on this episode about a remake of an Assassin's Creed game that's less than 15 years old. And part of this is that gaming has advanced graphically, technologically, more so than movies in the last, you know, 15, 20 years, just because it's a less mature medium. But part of it is, if you can't really buy the original version of the game anymore,

then they can sell you a new one. They can sell you a remake, a remaster. This is not unique to gaming. This is true in movies. This is true in music. You know, buy pet sounds for the seventh time in this special edition with all the bonus tracks and everything. But that has been something that these companies have really doubled down on. And so maybe by restricting access to old versions of games, they make it easier to sell us new versions of those games, which is good because we could still play the games in some form, but it's not quite the same from a preservation standpoint.

And also, it's going to cost us as much as a brand new game would cost us. So even when I try to look for the bright side, there are still some downsides here. Yeah, I mean, that just seems crazy to me, though, because imagine, you know, not being able to see David Lynch's Dune, because Deney Villeneuve's Dune is coming. You know, the idea of kind of shuddering the past

in an effort to foreground the future, just, I don't know, intellectually, I know gaming is different. It's not a one-to-one comparison, and we're going to great pains to clarify that in this conversation, which I appreciate. But to me, like, the lineage of a game feels kind of important.

So the idea of shuttling that into a place where you can no longer access it just doesn't seem like a win for fans of the art form overall. Maybe that's naive. I don't know. I'm certainly somebody that's a little bit too addicted to movie history. So I don't have a lot of distance from this feeling. But it does feel important to me. I think it is.

Yeah, just having some historical literacy just to know, what has already been made. How can you make something new and original if you might just be going over the same territory because you weren't able to play this previous touchstone of the genre? So that's an issue. And, you know, I think the biggest impact of all of this probably is that you did express an intention at one point to become more of a gamer because our media are mixing. Now the movie people have finally figured out how to make half decent adaptations of video games. And so to be on board, to have that historic literacy yourself, you did at one point suggest that you would be dedicating yourself to perhaps Eldon Ring, among others. How's that effort going?

And how does the shift to digital media affect that? That was a bold proclamation, wasn't it? It was. It's not where you start, you know? That's not the trading wheels, really. I also had thousands of people raised to tell me what a moron I am for claiming that I should try to play Eldon Ring. I mean, I made that proclamation because one of my favorite director is Alex Garland, who loves that game, is adapting the game into a film.

And so that was the only reason why I started talking about that. And Death Stranding as well, which is also going to be adapted. And, you know, obviously, the creator of Death Stranding is a real moviehead. Yeah, yeah. I'm open to the idea of getting back into gaming. And I definitely want to participate some. I just want to get a feel for it. The same way that, like, I'm kind of skimming the Odyssey right now.

which sounds like a stupid thing to say, but I read The Odyssey when I was 17. And I know the Odyssey pretty well. I've watched many kind of film adaptations and reinterpretations of it. But just to get back into the text and feel it and see what it is that is being adapted for the film, I don't need to have a mastery of the core text. But I want to know what it is that is being iterated upon the same way I think that movie history is important. And so, you know, my intention is not to beat Eldon Ring.

Like I probably couldn't do that if I started right now and tried until I was 80 years old. I haven't game in 20 years. So I'm very conscious of my likely failings in that respect. But the biggest challenge for me and the biggest challenge that I don't understand for you as a person with a young child is like, where do you find the time? And this is coming from me, Ben. Like it is such a time-laden hobby interest. I know. You can watch 10 movies in the time it takes me to play a not very long game.

So that's exactly it. I mean, this is sort of how I feel about television at this stage of my life, too. I'm like, do I really want to throw in those 10 hours in that direction instead of in the direction of multiple different experiences with a movie? It is tough. It's tough to adopt or even maintain this hobby in adulthood. But we don't gatekeep here at Budmash. So you are always welcome both in the hobby and on the show.

And I'm glad that you're out there holding the line, fighting the good fight. I want you on that wall, that wall of teetering 4K copies that you have just purchased. You don't want to walk into the criterion closet and know that there's just air inside those disks or a download code. Yeah, I don't want to just be surrounded by QR codes. What's more exasperating than that? Yeah. Okay.

Well, I'm with you spiritually and philosophically. And I think this is not the end of gaming or anything, but I think it, We'll definitely have some downsides. And you have been prescient when it comes to this. You've been sounding the alarm. Everyone should have listened, you know? I mean, maybe 80 or 90% of people are making the wrong decision. It would not be the first time that democracy has misfired.

So, you know, what do you mean? What happened? I'll save that for JMO. But thank you very much, Sean. This was a joy. Thank you, Ben. This was great. Thank you for this platform.

Of course. Well, Sean and I just discussed how the demise of physical media might push more people toward piracy. Another thing that will definitely push people to sail the high seas is Ubisoft's brand new remake of 2013 classic Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag, which is called Assassin's Creed Black Flag, Resinked. Joining me to discuss it. And the video game Pirates Pantheon is Ringer Deputy Art Director Matt Jackdaw James Matt Yohoho. I didn't know that a jackdaw was a bird, but now I do. Now you do. While we're here, shanty!

That's your cutest. That's my cutest, start singing. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I like the Whiskey Johnny one. That's the one. A lot of shanties in this game. I know. I imagine that they're mostly in the public domain,

so we could probably sing some shanties here without incurring any legal complications. But I won't make you sing shanties, you landlubber. Let's quickly cover. some news that will not cause us to break out in Lusty Song. Microsoft, which has already overseen multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, both at Microsoft proper and in the Xbox Division, is now laying off about 20% of its remaining Xbox workforce. Roughly 3,200 people, 600 this past Monday, another 1,600 over the next year. Always fun to have that hanging over your head at your workplace. consoles don't come with reset buttons as they did during the heyday of physical media,

but Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has described this downsizing and restructuring as a reset for Xbox. And a lot of the cuts are coming to the platform team, which covers hardware, software services, GamePass, etc. But they will also affect a ton of game studios. Obsidian Entertainment, for instance, is reportedly losing a quarter of its head count. The silver lining, I suppose, is that no studios are being closed, at least not now. So Ninja Theory, makers of Hellblade, and Playground Games, makers of state of decay, are being sold to undisclosed buyers. Double fine of Psychonauts fame and South of Midnight Maker Compulsion Games are going back to being independent.

And Xbox will also attempt to sell arcane of dishonored and Deathloop. and in theory, an upcoming Marvel's Blade game. Now, we previewed this because people preview layoffs now on our most recent episode a couple of weeks ago. And at the time, I said, we weren't going to talk about Xbox every episode because it seems like we do these days. But before we get to a happier topic, Assassin's Creed,

now that we know the specifics and have seen the latest of many Microsoft memos, I figured we could address this briefly. Any thoughts on the form that these layoffs are taking? Well, they're absolutely massive in number. For starters, that's the headline. You know, they've laid off 1,600 people, and even crappier part of it is that there's another 1,600 layoffs supposedly to come within the next year.

That's great for morale, right? Yeah. Just knowing that you might not be here the next round of layoffs, which are coming at, who knows when? Yeah. should be real easy for everyone at Xbox to get sleep and invest in the brand. It's just a horrible position to be in. Keep cranking out those games that you may or may not be here to see the release of. And also, your studio may or may not be here when games are released. That's what

we're seeing with it. Yeah, regardless of how good they are or not, you know? Yeah, or even State of Decay and Senoa coming soon. And that doesn't preclude the possibilities that studios will be spun off. Yeah, I mean, it's a silver lining, I suppose, that studios weren't shut down. You know, double-fined back to being independent is a whole lot better than being shut down. But man, that is a real thin silver lining, I would say, in the context of this massive number of layoffs. I think that all of the goodwill that Xbox has been building in the past few months since Sasha Sharma's takeover had. has now completely evaporated.

For sure. Yeah, it's interesting sequencing because often you rip the Band-Aid off, you do the thing that everyone will hate, and then you try to follow that with some good news. And the way that they went about this, and maybe it was just because they were sort of assessing where they stood and what they had to do,

but they did these small kind of cosmetic, pandering to the diehard's moves, and some significant moves, like reducing the price of game pass, etc. but then whatever momentum Xbox had built up, kind of killed by this, though it's very much a time will tell proof is in the pudding sort of situation. Because supposedly the overall investment in gaming isn't changing. It's just being reshaped. So they are now focusing on core franchises. It's going to be all about Minecraft and gears and Fallout and Halo where three weeks away from campaign evolved. And the question that everyone has is, will this actually help you do that if your goal is to speed up production, which Xbox had done. Again, Xbox Gaming Division had some momentum last year, a lot of releases. Finally, it seemed like the big Activision Blizzard acquisition was paying dividends. And then this. And so will it help if you lay off 20% of your people? They're not all directly involved in game development, of course. But, you know, it's like, okay, you cut head count. maybe you cut overhead, maybe that helps your profit margin, but ultimately it's going to be about

can you make hits and can you keep cranking them out? And so will this refocusing help, or will it only hinder that they have slashed their actual list of employees? Yeah, and in the same breath they stated that they want to reach a billion players a day, which is a little like, that sounds like a child saying like a big number, like a big number, right? Yes. There are 8 billion people on Earth-ish, and a lot of those people aren't players and aren't gamers and aren't in a position to be.

So it's good to have goals, but... You should have just said a gazillion, you know? Yeah, might as well. We want to reach a gazillion players a day. And then everyone would have been like, okay, I get what you're saying. Yeah, unless they're planning to fudge things and, okay, this encompasses Microsoft and PC gaming and all the other divisions of the company or something, you know, some sort of meta math where it's like Facebook and Instagram and whatever else and you're just lumping it

all together. But Xbox specifically reaching a billion people a day, it's at 500 million, half a billion a month right now. So to go from half a billion to a billion, half a billion in a month to a billion a day, that is ambitious to the point of being over-exuprent and unrealistic. Yeah, and the previous Xbox higher-ups, if you recall, had been reported to be seeking a 30% profit margin within the company. That seemed unreasonable at the time. Instead, they ended up with 3%. This number of a billion per day just seems somehow even more realistic, especially with a smaller workforce now. Yeah, and maybe that's just something you say to placate the market and investors, though.

Yeah, shareholders. The stock was down, so I don't know that that actually helped. But I am curious to see if they can refocusing. That's something we've seen a lot of companies that did big expansions and then have since divested and pulled back and layoffs and Embracer, even Ubisoft, for that matter. A lot of those companies have restructured to focus on core properties or they've kind of put them together, maybe some studios that have some synergies to use a corporate buzzword and could kind of cooperate. that maybe makes some sense, but also Xbox has done a lot of damage to these brands and this IP, whether by not tending to it,

not making games quickly enough, or those games not being great, like Halo, Gears, etc., those are sort of depreciated assets in terms of cachet or just how big those names are in gaming. And so will the new Gears prequel change that? Will the Halo remake change that? I mean, maybe that'll help, but there's a lot of work to do there.

There certainly is. And man, the bad vibes are fully back at Xbox. I just, I don't know how you could have a job at Xbox and feel like you are safe and that your team is happy. I just can't imagine it. Imagine being like someone who works at In Exile, which is the Xbox Game Studios developer that's working on the upcoming game club. Work Revolution, which looks great and is supposed to come out next year. But man, you have to wonder, like, as good a job as we can possibly do on this, there's no guarantee that we won't just have layoffs as soon as the game is out the door.

Like, you know, it's just a terrible, terrible place to be for any creative. Yeah. And part of the past strategy was to bet big on Game Pass and let's just acquire tons of studios so that we always have inventory. There's always something coming out every month. And for someone like you, that's been a pretty cost-effective proposition. But it turns out that there aren't that many people who play as prolifically as you do. And so as I was saying last time, there's been sort of a stagnation in the user base of GamePass. Microsoft's riding high on some of the early growth was projecting 77 million subscribers and sky is the limit. And actually what happened is that the number

went down. And they've stopped reporting this publicly. But as of 2024, they had 34 million subscribers. Just recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that it's actually gone down to 30 million. So not only has there not been growth, there has actually been a dwindling in the user base, which had something to do with the price increase, of course, which has now been rolled back a bit. But also, I think there's just a ceiling to that service and to game streaming, which maybe is not the worst thing in the world when it comes to the decline of physical media and actually owning your stuff. But the whole projection for the Netflix of games hasn't really panned out. And thus, the strategy of let's just fire a shotgun, we'll just acquire all these studios, they'll just

keep churning things out. We'll go get double fine. And we'll have them make these kind of weird, almost indie-ish projects like Keeper or Kiln, which were interesting experiments, but just never really had the bones to be big hits. And now Xbox is in the big hits business and just sort of sees the indie landscape as well. Indy's just going to do its indie thing. And maybe we will publish, but we don't actually need to own those studios. So I sort of understand the strategy, which is diametrically opposed to the previous strategy, but it's just extreme whiplash with the change in leadership. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, how can you have Game Pass grow when no one can afford to get into your hardware

because the prices are just astronomical to get in. So if anyone falls off, there's no one coming in to replace that. Yep, pretty bleak. And sometimes we maybe fixate overly on the layoffs because we tend not to hear about the hires. And sometimes you hear about a mass layoff and then you realize, wait, the head count

had actually increased over the past however many years, but just higher by higher, unless someone spins up a new studio or something, usually there isn't a press release for, hey, we just hired some people, whereas laying off hundreds or thousands of people, that's going to be big news. But even accounting for kind of the quiet hires, this is still a really significant cut. And, you know, market conditions have changed, obviously, and you do need to react to those, but there was clearly some poor planning that has cost Xbox, and now a bunch of people are paying the price for it. And it's the rank and

file as often who pay that price. And, you know, Microsoft hands aren't clean when it comes to those market conditions, too, because not necessarily at Xbox proper, but Microsoft is obviously quadrupling down on various AI initiatives. So there is sort of, you know, I already invoked the Tim Robinson hot dog meme once on this episode, but it is kind of, you know, Xbox like, oh, the price hikes. We can't keep up. And meanwhile, Microsoft is gobbling up RAM. and spinning up data centers. So, you know, the call is kind of coming from inside the house there. All right.

Well, it is just a succession of negative news seemingly in gaming these days. And we go from the decline of physical media to layoffs to price hikes. But let's go to a bit of a lighter note in a happier topic. And let's talk about a remake of a beloved game. Assassin's Creed for Black Flag came. out 13 years ago now, and we have a brand new version, which is out for pretty much all platforms, not Switch, but PlayStation, Xbox, Windows. And let's just dive into it and also dive into a conveniently placed cart full of hay, because, hey, it's Assassin's Creed, and it's been the

pirate life for us lately. Had you played the original Black Flag, or is this your first experience? I had not. I have to admit that I have been over the years fairly disinterested in Assassin's Creed games. You know, we talk about open world fatigue and that kind of whole thing. In my eyes, kind of sprung out of the success of the Assassin's Creed genre. Yeah. That franchise being so successful, putting out so many entries, making so much money, I think it kind of, you know, set a tone. and there were a lot of imitators for the kind of formula that Ubisoft had with Assassin's Creed. So I have had

actually a surprisingly limited experience with Assassin's Creed games and this one I have never even touched although I took a quick polling of some of my friends who do love the Assassin's Creed series and have played a number of them and without

kind of baiting them into any particular answer, every single one of them had Black Flag as their favorite Assassin's Creed of all time. Yep. Mm-hmm. That is not an uncommon position. I think, you know, by Metacritic critics rating, it narrowly trails only Assassin's Creed 2 and its direct sequel Brotherhood. By Metacritic user rating, it's second behind AC2.

But, yeah, if you just kind of pull people or just in terms of its legacy, which I think has only we've grown and improved in the year since its release, people will often cite Blackflab as peak Assassin's Creed. And it's kind of funny because it is maybe the least Assassin's Creed-like game. And maybe that's why, which I guess doesn't speak that highly of Assassin's Creed. The game that is least like Assassin's Creed is everyone's favorite. But there is something to that because it just has the most distinct identity. Obviously, there are a ton of Assassin's Creed elements that are common to all or most games in the franchise, and Black Flag is no exception there.

But because they just started churning out Assassin's Creed games so quickly. And when it arrived in 2007 with the original, it was great. It was revolutionary. It felt fresh. I mean, it was a classic case of the second game building on the first game's foundations and being even better. but even the first one, it just felt like, oh, this is something new. There's a ton of potential here, and obviously Ubisoft saw that potential. And very quickly, it went from, ooh, this is special.

An Assassin's Creed release to, oh, another Assassin's Creed. So you had the first one in 2007. The sequel comes out in 2009. Then the sequel to that, 2010, 2011, it became an annual release. It became Madden. It became FIFA. It became Call of Duty. sometimes even multiple Assassin's Creed games in the same year.

And fatigue did set in, even though I liked the series a lot, and even though it's not like the games got terrible or anything, obviously there was some repetition and some highs and lows. But I really felt that fatigue to the point where if it just felt like another Assassin's Creed game, much as I like Assassin's Creed games, I felt no urgency to check that out. Whereas Black Flag felt like its own entity. And that's true stylistically.

It's true mechanically. It's true narratively. And I think the original holds up perfectly fine. But also I'm kind of glad that this remake comes out so that people who didn't check it out the first time around can. And I think this is the best way to play as well. So I guess some of the improvements and changes will be lost on someone who's playing it for the first time.

But overall, what was your experience? Did it match the consensus and your friends survey? Yeah, I absolutely loved this game. I have finished it. I spent about 50 hours with it. Still have plenty that I could go back to anytime I want to hit the open Cs again. I think that this game is really satisfying. I can see why it was.

was such a favorite of people for so long. The freedom to explore in Assassin's Creed games, I think maybe is not as overwhelming when you have the mechanic of the ship. Yes. And sailing through islands, it just adds a fresh layer on top of all of that exploration. And you know what?

It looks absolutely stunning. I played on a base PS5. Yeah, me too. In performance mode at 60 frames per second. And I just thought it looked fantastic. And all of the ocean stuff, the time you spent on the water, the way that during a storm feels like your ship is climbing mountains. And you lose visibility in those storms. And it's just gorgeous when the skies are clear and your crew is built in out a shanty and you're on the way to a diving bell to go find some treasure.

There are a bunch of games that I have very fond memories of that I'm sure we'll talk about a bit later in this episode that it reminded me of that it gave me that sailing freedom feeling. Yeah, I would recommend this to pretty much anyone, even if you have that open world fatigue if you're at all into pirates. If you're into Assassin's Creed and haven't played this one. Yeah, there's not a lot of people I wouldn't recommend this too. I think it's very palatable. Yeah, it's so good. And I think you're onto something there. I had thought of that too, because ultimately there was map bloat.

And it wasn't just that the maps got bigger in Assassin's Creed games or Ubisoft games in general. But they were just so studded with icons and things to do. And it just became overwhelming and kind of like a chore. And something about breaking up the world, this map is enormous. I mean, it takes hours to sail across it. But because it's all sort of separated, and you have these distinct ecosystems and you're going to different countries

and different islands and different continents and they look a little bit different, and you have to travel from one place to another. And of course, you can fast travel, and sometimes I do just because the spaces are so vast, but often I find myself not fast traveling just because, as you said, I want to immerse myself in the feeling of being in this world.

and there's just no better feeling than like, you know, the sunsets and nightfalls and the jackdaws, lanterns are glowing, and you hear the sound of the waves, and you hear the sound of your crew. And it's just so mesmerizing and it's so lifelike and realistic looking that I just want to spend time here. And it is an enormous amount of content, even more so than in the original. and I can talk about some of the additions, but it never actually felt overwhelming. It just felt like a series of possibilities. Like, ooh, what can I do next? Yeah, I got to a certain point in the story,

and I just kind of put the main quest line on pause and spent, I don't know, a good 20 hours, just trying to upgrade my ship as much as possible. Yeah. Just getting stronger and stronger and unlocking new weapons and new colors for my. sales and there's just there's a lot there's a lot to to improve upon as as a captain in this in this game and it is very satisfying to do so yeah yeah and a lot of the improvements are cosmetic it's like about getting

legendary outfits or sales or figureheads or something but in this game i actually kind of care about that usually i couldn't care less you will never get me to spend a dime on a game for a cosmetic upgrade But in this game, because I just so inhabited the character and the ship in the world, I actually do kind of care about Edward Kenway's appearance and what the jackpot looks like. But there is also a satisfying sense of progression, especially with the ship, because you're just constantly upgrading and tricking out its capabilities. And then those actually manifest in the game feeling different because, wow, suddenly I can take on a man of war and I can hold my own here.

And this is kind of exhilarating that I can do that. I'm the master of the seas suddenly. And that's reflected to some extent from a visual perspective, too. Another thing I like about this game is that money is fairly scarce, you know? I mean, you can definitely earn a lot. It's good to, like, get that passive income going, you know, make the money work for you. Like, as you get deeper into the game, you can acquire a fleet, and you can send your ships on missions, and you can build out your base, and you can get,

tribute protection money basically that just endlessly refills your coffers. And that helps a little bit. But for dozens of hours in this game, I was still sort of scrounging and like, boy, I wish I could afford that next upgrade. Whereas in a lot of games, like they just give you so much money. I mean, sort of like the Forza Horizon model where it's like, okay, that's a lot of cool cars, but like I have so much money in so many cars and you're just lavishing all of these resources on me.

Here it actually feels like you're fighting for it, and you have to be a pirate, and you have to capture ships, and that actually pays dividends. And not just money. The resources that you need occasionally for upgrades, like steel or wood or whatever metal or wood, you kind of have to do some pirating,

at least early on in the game, in order to get those resources that you need for critical upgrades. Now, of course, by the end of the game, you are flush with every material, you need and have tons of money. But the majority of the time, as you said, things are scarce. And that

really sort of forces you to strategize with your upgrade path for not only your ship, but also your little base island where all your friends live. Yeah, I honestly, even if this game had

almost no story, I would still be quite involved in playing it, I think. but instead it has a lot of story. Yes, it does. You start looking at your percentage completion on the main quest, and it's like, wait, that mission was 1%. Oh, okay, this is going to be a long game,

not to mention all the side quests. But it is a really satisfying arc. I mean, I don't know if we need to worry about spoilers with a 13-year-old game because this is a fairly faithful remake in terms of the core story and missions and everything. It's definitely a remake, not a remaster. It's built from the ground up. Supposed, there was no code reused.

But it's very faithful in terms of the actual mission and the game structure. But there's a really satisfying arc. Edward as a protagonist as sort of an anti-hero who evolves and matures over the course of the game. It has a really epic feel to it because it takes place over the course of years. And you're doing time jumps of, you know, several months at a time and things change. And meanwhile, there are flashbacks. There's some additional scenes that weren't in the original to give some background context to Edwards' relationship with Caroline, whom he is pining for from afar and trying to win back

by becoming a pirate king, basically, even though she never wanted him to become a pirate king. But a lot of that, that evolution of Edward, it's just a really satisfying story. And it plays out over many, many hours. and I just, I feel like I've lived with this guy. Yeah, I think I have more of a love for the characters in this game than the story. I thought the story is passable with a slightly positive connotation, I guess. There's a lot that feels kind of glossed over to me in the narrative of this game. But I do really like the characters.

I think they're interesting. I think they're, you know, the voice acting is fairly capable. throughout most of the game. Yes, some great acting performances here. Yeah, and I think that, you know, having your main protagonist to be kind of a questionable dude adds a lot of dynamism to the game, you know? Far too many video games who are the knight in shining armor

or the flawless savior, and it is nice to spend a good amount of time with a more complex character than that. Yeah, or a blank slate. Edwards definitely a well- drawn character, a strongly drawn character. And yeah, there is a little bit of discord and stuff that's partly a product of some of the additions, I think, because one of the additions is that Edward is much more nimble now. There's much more modern Assassin's Creed parkour in this game.

And they don't really explain why or how he has that capability. At the very beginning of the game, he adopts the identity of an assassin. He just kind of comes across. And that's one big reason why this feels like maybe the least Assassin's Creed like game, that at least for most of the game, the Assassins versus Templar stuff is really sort of sideline. And I know that there are a lot of people who kind of wish that this weren't an Assassin's Creed game at all, that they didn't even have to have the window dressing of assassins and Templars and precursors and ancient races and stuff that it could just be a pure pirate game.

But the Assassin's Creed trappings of it aren't really that. heavy-handed. And because of that, you know, Edward's just, he's a pirate. He's a privateer-turned-pirate, and suddenly he is an accomplished assassin who can climb anything. I mean, not only does he have incredible lung capacity, but he is more monkey than man. Like the handling of Edward in this game, he is so agile. He's almost weightless, you know? It sounds like I'm describing a car, but he has incredible cornering and turning. Like, you know, he just can't climb anything in that classic Assassin's Creed fashion. And they just made a conscious decision not really to explain why he can do all of those things,

which, you know, maybe it doesn't hang together, but also I didn't particularly care because it's fun to climb stuff and sprint across rooftops. It is, it is. Although I will say I did have, you know, occasional frustrations with that sort of parkour system. where you're just kind of trapped on a ledge and you want him to get off and you're slamming the release button and he's not going anywhere.

No, don't jump off that. I just climbed all the way up here. Don't go around that corner. There are definitely moments of frustration with the parkour. Although generally it does feel satisfying. A lot of these islands are not the densest city centers, but they do a good job of sort of weaving

in the natural. terrain and trees and branches and stuff to keep you parkhoring along. I will say I also found positives and negatives about the combat system, which I would like to get into. How did you feel about the combat in this game? So that, much like the parkour, is kind of reinvented for this. And I will say, you know, that's often, it's both the bug and feature of the franchise where the characters are so agile.

It feels like magic when you're just sort of free running. and you never have to stop. And if you're in a town and you can just, oh, there's a rope and I can make that leap. And maybe it's improbable that I could actually cross that chasm. But nonetheless, again, Edwards is amazingly athletic. And so when it's working, then it feels so seamless and wonderful. But I think the downside of that, because it's kind of built for just, I'm going to be running continuously, when you have to make more fine-tuned moves than it does kind of fail you at times.

But I think this game has improved in that respect. And it has added some new functionality. You know, you can kind of jump behind you while you're hanging off something. Little things like that are added. Even like crouching, you know, you couldn't freely crouch in the original, as I recall. And so just the whole stealth mechanic and just creeping around through the tall grasses is really built around crouching. And the same goes for the combat, again, both for better or worse. Because the whole gimmick here really, in addition to, I wouldn't even call it a grass,

graphical facelift. That's underselling it. It's glorious. It's beautiful. The water is spellbinding. But they took the bones of the original game and kind of put modern Assassin's Creed over it, which sounds like it might be a bad thing because people are kind of over Assassin's Creed these days. I like shadows, to be clear. But, you know, when you're kind of trying to meld the eras, you might think that would be a bit awkward. And I think mostly it works and actually improves the original and there's quality of life stuff that you would miss if you went back now and played the clunkier original version.

But the combat, I see what you're saying. A lot of it is based on parries and quick combos so that you break someone's defenses and then you do it, take down basically. There's a lot of sword combat. I do find that once you get the blow dart, it's kind of O.P., you know, It's just like I can constantly put people to sleep.

And then you have your pistols too. So there is kind of a fun range component too. One thing I appreciate is that there is a little more flexibility in this game. Whereas in the original, if you had missions where you were, say, tailing someone, if they spotted you, then that was mission over and you'd have to restart. Whereas now, if they spot you, you can just fight them. And you can just chase them. You can just take out everyone.

And I always appreciate that when there's not just like a fail state in a stealth mission. I think players are increasingly intolerant of that as we saw in say Star Wars. Yeah. It's like, you know, it's better if you have a dedicated stealth system and it's not super awkward. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But even if you have decent stealth, like, you know, as someone who's not adept at stealth gameplay

and tends to be run and gun, I'll make a show. I'll try to sneak around. But some of these bases and forts, they're just teeming with guards. Like, there's just no way. And so, I mean, there is a way. Here's the way. There is. You want to know the way?

You find tall grass. Yeah. Do you do a little whistle so that one guy comes over? One after another. You assassinate him in the tall grass. And that he comes to check out the corpse. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you've got 20 dead dudes in like a 10 square foot radius of tall grass.

And the next 19 dudes don't think. Huh. Maybe I shouldn't. Just check. out where all these corpses are piled up. No, got to check it out. It's your duty. So what were your issues with the combat?

Well, I think that the combat system, it feels quite good for the majority of your playtime, but I think given the length of this game, in the last maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 hours,

you can kind of feel some creaking in the combat system. I think the game kind of outlasts the fun and depth of the combat system by just a little bit. So we mentioned that basically if you do a perfect parry, you can then do an automatic takedown of the guy who's just hit you as well as, depending on which weapon you have equipped several other people in succession, all based on one parry. You have up to four takedowns for that perfect parry.

So that's obviously very powerful. Now, as a pirate, you're going to want to tend to swing your sword at people, whether you use the light or heavy attack to do so. But I've found that it's kind of a better strategy to just constantly wait for perfect parries. Because if you're attacking people, you can't really cancel out of an attack animation to execute a parry. So what will often happen is you know, you'll be swinging your sword a lot and you'll get a hit. And then you'll swing your sword some more

and dodge out and try to use your other things. But, you know, eventually in the middle of an attack animation, you're going to get a hit by somebody. And you just kind of end up defaulting to like, let me not, let me just wait for this guy to attack me. And then you do the perfect parry, and then you kill four people. And so there's just kind of unsatisfying push-pull

between being aggressive as an attacker and waiting for that perfect parry system that by the end of the game felt a bit much, especially given how often you are in combat. You know, when you're in your missions, you're in combat. When you're on the seas boarding other ships, you're in combat for a lot of this game. And like I said, it just kind of by the end of it,

you can really see kind of like the holes. Although it does moment to moment feel, quite satisfying. The animations and stuff are great in combat. But yeah, that's sort of my take on the combat. Do you feel the same way? Yeah, I'm with you. I think it's sort of a victim of its own success, the game, and that there is a repetitiveness that sets in. And maybe that's because I was marathoning the game to prepare for this podcast and anything the luster will wear off after you're sitting in front of your screen for that many hours. But because I want to spend so much, But continue.

Perhaps not relatable for you. But, you know, like when you want to spend that much time with a game, then the 50th time you do something, some of the charm will wear off. So the first time you're capturing a ship on the open seas, it's intoxicating, right? Because you spot the ship from far away. You check it out in your spyglass. You bear down on it. You put your sails out. Then you, you know, incapacitate it.

You pull alongside. you just swing over and you're firing the deck gun at the guys. It's all perfectly seamless and it's so impressive. And it was particularly impressive in 2013. But even now, it is kind of amazing that you can just do all that. And that's one of the other improvements in this remake is that there really aren't many loading times as you're just traveling around the world. Like, you know, if you're going off the ship onto a town or you're moving about a bigger town, there's no loading whatsoever. So, you know, there are cutscenes and such.

Or if you're fast traveling, there's a bit of loading time. So it's kind of like, you know, it used to be in old Assassin's Creed games. You'd be in that sort of animus, you know, nether world where you could run around and stuff. And meanwhile, like, they're showing you tips you can cycle through on the screen. And often, if you're playing a remake on PS5 with a SSD, there's like no loading time. And so you're just, oh, I wanted to see that tip. And now it's gone because I'm back in the game. That's not actually a bad thing.

But it does remind me of how things used to be different when we actually had to wait for games to load a lot longer. But yeah, I think you know, you're going to be doing certain kinds of moves and missions over and over again over the course of this very long game. And some of the thrill wears off. And there's not a ton of depth to the combat, though. There's pretty decent variety in enemy types, ships and guards and soldiers. And even more so than in the original, they've, they've, added some enemy types. I thought they could have used even a little bit more, to be honest.

Yeah. But the different enemy types do, I think that the goal feels like they wanted you to use your sort of side weapons, right? Your blow dart, your whatever that thing is, your scorpion spear, they get over here, spear. Right. The rope thing, yeah. And I think they do, they succeed in making you sort of use those tools with the enemy variety.

Yeah. There were some encounters where I just barely, survived and my health bar was depleted and I was using every tool at my disposal and, you know, I failed at stealth and they're ringing the bell and all the guards are coming and I'm blow darting this guy and I'm shooting that guy and I'm sorting that guy and roping that guy. And it's when it works, it feels great. It's kind of almost like, you know, the, the 007 game that we talked about recently. It's like can be kind of clunky combat wise, but when it's really working and all those tools are at your disposal and you figure out how to use them, that's a great

feeling. And you know, speaking of syncing, I love that feeling in a game, especially a mechanically complex, very video gamey game where there are all sorts of systems and menus and inputs and everything. That moment when it clicks, you know what I mean? And you don't feel like you're still figuring out the controls and you're checking the menu, but it's like, I'm in complete command of how to navigate this world. And when that epiphany happens in Black Flag, it's just so satisfying. It really is. Because there's so many ways to interact with this world and so many activities and side quests and you just, you feel like Edward Kenway all of a sudden. And it takes a few hours, but when it clicks, so satisfying. Yeah. And I thought the ship combat really clicked because

you know, I think a lot of the melee combat systems in this game are going to feel pretty familiar to people who play video games, obviously. But I thought that the ship, the way the ships have different weapons, depending on which side of the ship you're sort of leaning over, right? If you're looking behind you, you can drop explosive barrels. If you're looking to the side, that's where you can get your big guns off. And if things are far enough at range, you can try to attack them with mortars, which take a little bit of time to deploy. So you have to kind of forecast where the ship is going to be. I just thought that, the ship combat was an interesting dynamic that we don't see quite as often.

And I found myself really invested in beefing up my ship so that I could kind of engage with that more. I would recommend everyone to spend all of your money and materials immediately in upgrading the defense of your hull. Yes. Yeah. And then get that broadside action go. going because that's where you're going to do a lot of your damage. Those front and back cannons didn't use a lot, to be honest. Yeah, those explosive barrels.

Come on. Yeah. I felt that too. Like, it's, you know, it's not a full simulation-style pirate ship combat experience. Yeah, and it shouldn't be. It does have an arcadey feel in a very positive way. It's not Kerbal space program meets pirate combat or something. But there's enough depth to it that it doesn't feel super simplistic.

and there's just a little bit of strategy and execution to it. It varies, too, depending on the weather conditions, the visibility and the choppiness of the waters. It's a whole other level to it as well. Yeah, and that weather, it is much more dynamic. Not only is the visual fidelity cranked up from the original, but the fact that you're just encountering rogue waves and swells and lightning and rain, and it affects which sales you can use. And that really has ramped up in this remake. And, you know, there's still some

amount of jank. It is an Assassin's Creed game after all. And we were playing pre-release, partly even pre-day-one patch, partly post-day-one patch. And so I encountered some issues. There was one time where I had a crash and another time where I fell through the level geometry and ended up in this weird netherworld for a while until I eventually swam my way out of it. And I kept having this issue with a certain kind of loot, a kind of box where you bang on the side to open it. And somehow half the time I did that, nothing happened or Edward missed. Or sometimes when you're boarding a ship, the guys on the ships are firing in the wrong direction as you're boarding. And some of that is, I think, known issues and will be patched out.

But, you know, some amount of jankiness you kind of have to become accustomed to. And there are some systems that I didn't really use that much. And I didn't find myself upgrading my weapons or changing my weapons that much. There is like a equipable trinket system that's, no, I didn't either. Yeah, there's a bit more to the trinket system than there was originally. And they've stripped out some stuff from the original. And they are not, at least as of now, remaking the celebrated DLC, which stars Adde. your quartermaster, and it's called Freedom Cry,

and so you can't get that in new remade version, at least as of now. But I think most of the changes they made, and most of the additions they made are worthwhile. And we talked about the graphics and just the interactivity. Another thing is just like you can dive just about anywhere, and you can swim underwater, and it's beautiful. The water effects are great,

but also the freedom of it. You can just kind of jump, off your ship wherever, like you don't even necessarily need to dock. And if you do that in the middle of nowhere, there's not going to be much to see. But it's still pretty impressive that you have that freedom, which we're hoping to see with the sky ship in Final Fantasy 7, right? The final chapter of that remake, that kind of go anywhere, do anything, especially with a game like this, the promise of the open world. That's really liberating. The other thing they've stripped out is the modern setting of the original. And this.

is a reflection of the evolution of the franchise, where in the beginning, for the first several installments, there was always a modern component, and you would be in the animus machine at Abstergo, and you would be sort of, you know, playing in the present as the Templar versus assassin stuff played out, and then you'd be going into the animus and reliving events in some historical period. And more and more, that has been almost entirely removed. And there are fans of that stuff who lament the loss of that. But I think most people are pretty pleased because the selling point of Assassin's Creed is the actual past settings and gameplay. And so the modern sort of sterile settings, the sci-fi aspect, which increasingly just kind of ran off the rails in terms of the lore, which is just wild.

I mean, it's close to Kingdom Hearts level at the stage. So stripping some of that out. And there are vestiges of it. There's certainly some animus. content here and there are rifts that are newly added that you can encounter where you play through sort of alternate history what if scenarios about Edwards life and and that's kind of cool. But yeah, if you loved the modern day aspects of Black Flag, you're going to be sad because that stuff is gone essentially. But I don't think that many people will miss it. Yeah, I mean,

as someone with limited experience of the Assassins Creed series, all of that, that, you know, Templar assassin stuff, all of the genetic memory stuff, all of that kind of futuristic in-between world stuff, it just felt really distracting to me in this game. And I don't think that there's a level of assumption of familiarity

with all of the Templar assassin stuff. And as someone who hadn't really engaged in that in well over a decade, I did find myself a little bit like, there's some three-hour YouTube videos. You could watch if you want to catch up. You're actually in the future, right? And you're like going through your genetic memories of people.

And there's still a Templar assassin war throughout. It just felt very distracting, given the fact that you have a really good pirate game here. And all of the Assassins' Creed stuff that it's framed upon It just feels very unnecessary to me. And those rifts that they added, I didn't particularly find them too satisfying. They sort of put you in a surrealist state

as you explore a memory and a potential alternate history. And, you know, I'm all for surrealism in games. I tend to like that kind of stuff, but I felt like those levels were designed in a way where like, I just kind of couldn't wait to get back to the high seas. I wanted to finish this rift, get the hell out of there. Often I didn't know where I was supposed to go. It's very linear forward progression kind of thing

that is a little bit antithetical to like the strengths of this game. Yeah, and that's all optional, so you can't ignore it if you want to. But the other stuff, it's just like... You get a lot of money from those, so... You do. Yeah, there's a ton of new material here. And so whatever has been removed has been dwarfed by new additions here. And it's not just the graphical upgrades and the interactivity and everything that we've discussed to this point,

but actual missions and chapters and just much more side content. Which are good. I played through all of the side missions in this game. I think it's safe to say that I enjoyed most of the side missions more than the main story, especially by the end. So if that content is all new, I think there's a lot of. a lot of good stuff in there. Yeah, it's not all new. There was plenty of side stuff before, but in addition to new settings, there are just a bunch of new locations and new islands.

So as you're sailing about this world, it just feels a bit more populated than it used to, and there are more secrets and stuff to collect there, and more dialogue as you're sailing around. And also just, yeah, entire quest lines. You can recruit three officers who ride around with you on the jackdaw and they have their own storylines and they also confer various abilities on you that's all new so and that's the stuff those are the side missions i really enjoyed like yeah recruiting that that crew member and getting to know their backstory and it leading to like a new weapon or ability yeah that was all very satisfying and it's integrated organically enough that you probably wouldn't know that that wasn't in the original if you if you didn't know and then there's a new end game

chapter with a bunch of missions. And there's some side quests featuring some of the major characters like Bonnet and Blackbeard. And some of that stuff is pretty worthwhile also. So, you know, there's like a art collecting side quest. There's just, there's a lot to do here. And pretty much wherever you are in this world, you will not be at a loss for things to do and things to find and ways to upgrade and interact with this world.

So I always wonder, well, did this need to be remade? And in this case, I think the original was a great game, and it wasn't so long ago that it doesn't hold up. But what they have done here to add a modern veneer to the bones of a great game, I think has improved it and to make it more available to a new audience. That can only be a good thing if you're willing to pay full price for it, but it's a full-priced game experience. It definitely is.

I don't begrudge them that. And also, you know, I wonder sometimes about how long will we see this emphasis on remakes and remasters. Is this like at the peak right now or will it tail off at a certain point? Because this was originally a PS3 era game, PS3 360. and the leap from PS3-360 to PS5 series XS is significant

but obviously not as big as going from say PS2 to probably even PS4 or something like in some respects loading times, etc, there are major differences but just in terms of the pure graphics obviously going from 8 bit

to whatever 64-bit or 2D to 3D or SD to HD there's never going to be a leap that big again. And the gameplay systems as well. Yeah. You know, haven't changed as much between like PS3 and PS5 as like you're saying, PS2 to PS4.

Yeah. And so I wonder, you know, looking at a game like this, which is 13 years old, are we already sort of scraping the barrel in terms of what will be remade? Will we see this forever? Will PS5 games? Okay. That is quite possible, yeah. Because as long as people will buy it, then people will keep making it.

It's going to be a big hit this game. And Ubisoft is going to be like, whoa, we forgot what it's like to make a ton of money. And then they're going to do many more remakes. And this was the worst kept secret in gaming that they were remaking Black Flag. It was kind of kept under wraps for a couple of years, but everyone knew it was happening. And they have already said that they're remaking other unspecified Assassin's Creed games. So, yeah, we will see more of this. But I wonder if that will continue.

Will we see as many PS4 remakes for PS6 or will we see PS5 remakes for PS7? Or like, when will the leaps not be big enough to justify that and get people to buy it again? And maybe if it's just about lack of backward compatibility, lack of physical media, just being able to buy those games, that's one thing. But in terms of the proposition of. Yeah. We have to keep doing re-releases and remasters. But the proposition for consumers of you played this game not that long ago, do you want to replay it again?

And here are all the upgrades that will justify that. I think in this case, there's enough to justify that, even if you did play it before. But I do wonder at what point will the generational leap not be significant enough that people will keep signing up before rehashing experiences that they like before? Maybe it'll happen forever. It's a good question. I think their pathway through this is emulating what Capcom's done with Resident Evil,

sort of alternating between remakes and that, you know, refreshing the energy in a series by people being like, oh, yeah, right, we love this genre. And when you put a new one out, they're like, oh, okay, I'll try a new one, I guess. You know, RE4 was so good. I'll try. Yeah. You know, but like you said, you know, these games, you know, Black Flag's not quite as old as like, you know, say, remaking Resident Evil 2 in the modern era, right? Right.

But, yeah, as long as people keep buying these, they, Ubisoft is going to, you'll get a Valhalla remake soon enough. Sure. I don't know that I will be enlisting for that experience. No, in my polling of my Assassin's Creed friends, Valhalla did not particularly do that well. At a certain point, the game's just got too big. Yeah, there's really something to be said for the manageable chunks of small islands and towns, but many of them festooning this gigantic map. So it does make me sort of pine for a time when Ubisoft not necessarily had the assembly line,

which just made it feel wrote, oh, another year, another Assassin's Creed game, but when Ubisoft did have the capacity to make brand new games like this, whereas now it's been reduced to the point that, the release schedule is so slow that this is sort of the centerpiece of Ubisoft's year. Just a remake of an old game. And it's a great old game and it's a great remake. And absolutely Nash, not pass on this one. Yes, indeed.

Even for an Assassin's Creed hater, such as myself. Yeah, this is the Assassin's Creed game for an Assassin's Creed's. Hater or apathetic person. Apathetic. I've been apathetic. Yeah. Can Ubisoft ever get to the point where, it can keep making new brilliant games post restructuring and layoffs and all sorts of

dysfunction, right? And, you know, this game originally was primarily developed by Ubisoft Montreal. And this remake was mostly led by Ubisoft Singapore with cooperation from other studios. And the original writer, Darby McDevitt, was involved in this game and wrote new missions for it and everything. So it does feel very true to itself. but also like its own distinct entity. But yeah, Ubisoft is kind of bottoming out, or at least it told investors in terms of projected profits and revenue, and we'll see whether it can save itself after that.

Maybe this is a start. Maybe it will be kind of like a Capcom-esque resurgence, but that's asking a lot. All right. So before we finish, before we walk the plank on this podcast, I thought it's been some time since we did a genre top five, so we could bring that back as a big pick tribute and talk about our favorite pirate games. And, you know, this has been a big part of Assassin's Creed, at least ship combat,

because the genesis of Black Flag the original was they took the ship segments from Assassin's Creed 3 and said, hey, what if we just made that a full dedicated game and we really built that out? And they did, and it was great. And there are elements of naval combat in a whole bunch of Assassin's Creed games, rogue and origins and others, but this is the one where it came to full fruition. So I think there's a clear Mount Rushmore, maybe a top four for Pirates games, though the fifth, well, I got a little creative maybe.

So I figure we could just each throw out a name and maybe there will be a lot of alignment in our picks here. But, I mean, first of all, Black Flag is on this list. Yes. It may very well be at the top of this list. I have it at number two, personally. Okay. Yeah.

So this is a case of like, this is cream of the crop. This is class of the genre. Whether you're talking about the original or the remake, Black Flag just completely nails the pirate experience. So really, we're talking about the other four of the top five. What do you have five, I guess? I also have sort of compacted a series, a series into one entry. Yeah. Okay.

What's your The same series for us? My fifth pick is C of Theves. Okay. Yeah. Huge Xbox success, Sea of Theves. That's just, you know, I tend to not play a lot of multiplayer online games. I think you know that.

I tend to be single player focused. But Sea of Thieves is a great game that's only gotten better in the years since its release. Yeah. That is unmistakably a pirate game. You are a pirate. You have a ship. You are getting treasure and yeah, all of those pirate fantasies are lived out in Sea of Thieves. It's a very fun game, especially if you can wrangle up a crude to play.

And that's a game that got a glow up. It sort of had a slow start, and it had high expectations, and it's rare, and could there be a rare resurgence? And it's turned out to have really long legs, and they've continued to support it. and it's flourished, and there's just much more to do than there was initially. And, yeah, the cooperative kind of PVE aspect to that game. It's, yeah, that was actually my number four. So I think that's on the pantheon, the Mount Rushmore for me. It has attained that status.

So I guess I could give you a five. Now, we didn't really discuss specifics here. And so how do you define pirate game? Yeah, I think you're picking what I picked for four. Well, it depends. So, I mean, if you can get experimental with this, and we're not talking about the actual age of piracy and, you know, real history, so to speak, is that allowed? Can we go for sort of out-of-the-box pirates? My thinking was, are you on a ship?

Is it a pirate ship? Are you exploring the world freely? or otherwise sinking into well-established pirate tropes. But at the crux of mine was that kind of like you are on a pirate ship and have free reign of the world to explore. And that sense of freedom that Black Flag does so well an adventure. That was my guiding sort of light, I guess. And I love ship-based games, whether it's sci-fi and a spaceship,

just a mobile home base where you collect a crew. that's just the best. So, okay, well, I'm going to go, I want to name a couple that maybe meet the definition or could possibly be a stretch. If they count, then they would definitely be in my five.

But I'm also going to give you a more traditional pirate game as a fifth, if that's what you're looking for. So if we can count fantasy piracy and RPGs, then you know I will name Skies of Arcadia. Skies of Arcadia.

Guys of Arcadia, my number four. I count. Okay. If skies counts. The only way it doesn't count is because they're in the sky, not the water. That's as far as I'm concerned. And it's not actual historical pirates. It's not black beard.

But it's swashbuckling. You are in a space, in an airship, but it's very pirate-coded. You know, the ship combat is very much like pirate combat. So, yeah, by that definition, I think it can. and it's one of my favorite games of all time. So if Skies of Arcadia counts, absolutely put it in here. The other one that was kind of on the border for me of,

does this count as a Pirates game? And is also an RPG is Pillars of Eternity 2, Deadfire, which is, you know, D&D kind of fantasy setting, but also pretty piratical. It's like, how do you calibrate the pirate content? It's more fantasy with pirate trappings than it is a pirate game purely, but it's pretty piraty. So if you can count fantasy RPGs in non-real-life settings,

then I think I would squeeze skies and Pillars of Eternity, too, on there. Well, I did not get around to Pillars of Eternity, too, but I absolutely will allow Skies of Arcadia. Okay. Well, then maybe we can make that my five, But my backup, I mean, he's got an eye patch. I know. He's got the sword.

He's got it all. Yeah, vice. Yeah. Incredible game. But if that weren't going to count, I would count a game that nobody really remembers. But if you know, you know, which is Pirates, the Legend of Black Cat, which I'm pretty sure I have mentioned in passing on the show. It was a 2002 action adventure game for PS2 and Xbox. And it felt like a proto black flag a little bit.

It had pretty impressive at the time, seamless navigation where you could go from your ship to land without loading or anything, and that was pretty mind-blowing back then. And it was sort of a standard action adventure exploration game with a pirate veneer to it. But it was a really good game and a really meaty game, and it had cool ship combat, which was even more simplistic than black flags,

but the water effects looked cool, and it had a pretty interesting protagonist and revenge quest. And I just really loved that game at the time. And I don't know how well it holds up, and it hasn't been. I'm not holding my breath for a Pirates, The Legend of Black Cat remake, but I feel very fond and nostalgic about that game.

So I think for the time, it was pretty impressive. Yeah, I'm looking at screenshots now. And, yeah, it might be a you had to be there kind of thing. I was there. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I mean, it was a product of its time. It had very much a... It looks like a very much like a PS2 game.

Yes, and there was some low-cut bodices and some boob jiggle. You know, it was 2002. But female protagonists, at least, ahead of its time in that respect. So equal opportunity representation for pirates, which is true of black flag as well. All right. So give me your... three then? My three is the series that we were alluding to.

Yeah. And it's probably your three as well. It is. It is. The Monkey Island series. Yes. Curse of the Monkey Island, return to monkey island.

There's a lot of Monkey Island games. They're all great. Some are a little better than others. But, you know, this is the adventure game genre that Rethmaid, rest in peace, that dominated the 90s. for a certain type of gamer, which we both were. And Guy Brushed Threepwood, the protagonists in this game, in these series of games, really memorable.

And the humor in these games, you know, it's hard to make funny video games. And Monkey Island games always seem to deliver on that. And, you know, piracy is a nice framework for a lot. of the humor in these games. Just such fond memories for this series. Yeah. Yeah, you could make a top five Pirates game just out of Monkey Island, the series.

Absolutely. So if you narrow it down to one, yeah, I guess I'd go with the OG, the curse of Monkey Island, the original, but can't really go wrong with any of those games. No. So I guess for my, honestly, I think I'd put Black Flagg or re-sinct

number one. So number two. Well, we've done the same thing then, I think. Well, I think one that has to be on here. The game that we're talking about here. Sid Meyers, Pirates. Oh, okay. I've went a different

way with this. You're snubbing Sid Meier? How dare you? Sid Mears Pirates is my number six, which I did really enjoy back in the day. And of all the games on this list that aren't Black Flag or Sea of Thieves, like Sid Meyers' Pirates is unmistakably a pirate came in every sense of piracy. Yeah, Sid Meyers Pirates, exclamation point. Yeah, I mean, the original in the 80s, I was barely

born when that came out. I didn't play it at the time, but there have been many remakes and re-releases and there was a remake in the 2000s, which sort of spruced it up and three-deified it. And that is a true pirate game. That is just simeaties. the pirate experience with great depth and was pretty groundbreaking and trailblazing when it came to Pirates. I mean, that was, it sort of set the standard for many years and in many minds probably still does. So I think you have to hand it to Sid Mears Pirates just in terms of influence and legacy. Yeah, absolutely. It had for me. Yeah. All right. Well, I have a different, I have a number one that you don't have on your list at all. Are you going to go? Yeah. No, you don't dare. I do. Number one, it's a legend of Zelda Wind Waker. Oh, okay.

All right. I was, boy, I was out here waiting for you to drop like a dragon pirate yakuza in Hawaii, number one. No, that is my number seven. Great game. Yeah. I have elected to view Wind Waker as a pirate game. Borderline, but. Hey, Tetra and her pirate crew are in that game.

It's true. You are sailing on a bike. about visiting islands, navigating, dealing with discovery on a grand scale. Yeah, it has pirates in it, but it absolutely nails the feel of what makes a good pirate game. And throughout my time playing Black Flag, resinked, I couldn't help but think about my Winwaker experience. and the things that the parallels between those two games, and the fact that both of them kind of succeed based on that sense of freedom and adventure that you have

while sailing around, discovering new islands, uncovering new things. So, yeah, Winwicker is my number one. I'm sure we both have some honorable mentions. Yeah, I'll allow Winwaker on your list. I don't think it quite qualifies for me, but we can have different top fives. If I counted it, it would be there,

because it's one of my favorite games. But yeah, that falls just to the side of, is it a pirate game or is it a Zelda game that has some pirate aspects to it? But I see what you're saying. Yeah. So honorable mentions, there are a bunch of games, some of which I haven't played.

But, you know, there was pirate Valheim from this year, Windrose, right? Windrose has been a very popular Steam sensation, sort of pirate game meets survival gameplay. Yeah. There's Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, the video game. Sure. Sure. That was actually, you know, that was a pretty good Lego game.

Yeah. Most Lego games are pretty good Lego games. That's true. That's fair. There's Risen 2, Dark Waters, which I haven't played, but people have some fondness for that, or others like Shadow Gambit, the cursed crew or cursed crew. I've not played. Tropico 2, I have not played.

Sea Dogs, Caribbean Legend. There are some other franchises that are sort of long running. Sorry, skull and bones, but can't sneak you on here. First quadruple-A game, but not one of the best pirate games, even though they were like, hey, people love this pirate stuff from Black Flag. What if we just made that a game? Well, it would take forever to come out and also no one would like it. Yeah, obviously I have a jacuzza, like a truckkin in Hawaii.

What is he actually? Like a dragon. Pirate yakuza in Hawaii. Obviously. Because those words make so much sense. Xbox ally, X. Right. Yeah.

That's a real fun pirate game. You played that. You like that. And then my other shout out is Shantay and the Pirates Curse, which is that. Which is, you know, it has pirates in it. It's about pirates. It's not that it doesn't evoke the most sense of piracy of all these games on the list, but it is a good pirate game.

that people might not have played. Or maybe you have. You agree that it's great. And I don't know if the genre seems underserved. It's not a burgeoning genre. And I had, well, I didn't have trouble filling out a top five if we stretched a little bit. But I know that there seems to be a lot of appetite for pirate games. Maybe it's tough to do well because you need to nail all aspects of it.

Like, it's kind of complicated. You need the ship combat and you need the land stuff. That alone. It needs to be seamless, you know? Fairly seamless. And you need all sorts of systems and the naval combat has to be good. And you need trading and merchant stuff and bases. And so it's kind of a tall order.

It is. And maybe that's why. So I don't know if we're seeing a pirate resurgence here with the Black Flag remake and Windrose or whether we ever will. You know, it's not like shooters or something. Not that we see that in any classic 3D first person shooters these days either. But yeah. Maybe it's sort of niche and narrow, but there are some greats here, and I'm always happy to play a Pirates game or watch a Pirates show or whatever it is, always here for more pirates. We're not quite as inundated as, you know, like the zombie genre.

Yeah, no. It's not like Souls likes or something, you know. But who knows? Maybe when people get their hands on Black Flag Recinct, I don't know if anyone will think and have the temerity to think that they can top it. it will be tough. But for me, at least, it sets the new standard, and it set a great standard back in 2013, too. So do check it out if you haven't already. And maybe even if you have. Yeah. So thank you, Matt, for sailing this pirate podcast with me. My pleasure. It was a really enjoyable experience playing the game and talking about it. I agree. Thank you also to Devin Ronaldo for producing this episode and to our Juno Ramgo-Powal for helping us run this ringerverse pirate ship. You can contact buttonmash at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com. I'll be back later this week, double button mash with an episode on the games of the first half of the year and second half hopes and hype. So stay tuned for that. And until then, Shanti!