The Ringer-Verse - The Shocking EA Sale and ‘Ghost of Yotei’ Reactions | Button Mash

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Ben, Matt James, and Justin Charity break down the bombshell news about Electronic Arts being sold for $55 billion, Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass price hike, and the showdown between ‘Battlefield’ and ‘Call of Duty.’ Then Ben, Matt, and Daniel Chin share their spoiler-free reviews of the new spiritual sequel to ‘Ghost of Tsushima,’ the PlayStation 5 exclusive ‘Ghost of Yotei.’ EA is being acquired (01:43) Microsoft Xbox Game Pass price increase (14:04) 'Call of Duty' vs. 'Battlefield' (28:29) 'Ghost of Yotei' reactions (35:58) Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Matt James, Justin Charity, and Daniel Chin Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those weather tech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need WeatherTech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. Hello, and welcome into the Ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor for The Ringer, buttonmash host, and Ghost of Gaming Podcasts, which in my case refers to my complexion, joining me at the top of this pod, as is often the case. Matt James, deputy art director for The Ringer is here. Hello, Matt.

Hey, Ben. You're looking less white today, actually. Don't ghost yourself that hard. The lighting must be deceptive. I know it's October, but, you know, it's not as if I've gotten any sun lately or that if I had, it would have affected my paleness whatsoever. But he made it sound like you're an dolez-type situation. You're looking less white today. Not sounding any less white, of course. But we are also joined today by Justin Charity, who is a senior staff writer for The Ringer and has been away for a bit and hasn't been.

with us for a while. We have missed you. Welcome back, Charity. Yeah, I had a kid, so I'm like extra senior. They should put more senior. More, you sprinkle more senior than ever. Yeah. Well, it took a massive acquisition to bring you back to this podcast. You yourself are a massive acquisition for buttmash or reacquisition in this case. Daniel Chin will also be with us in just a bit to talk about the latest acclaimed game of 2025 Ghost of Yote, which came out on PS5 last week. But before, or we talk Yote, let's get down to business, the business of gaming. And if you're not as

interested in industry news as you are in actual game discussion, feel free to check this timestamp and skip ahead. But what we're about to talk about will have a big bearing on the games themselves. And we're going to talk about three topics that I think are tightly intertwined. And we will start with the big news in the gaming industry, which you wrote about for the ringer.com charity on Friday. What a great website. site, and that is the purchase of electronic arts, the venerable institution of gaming, dating back to the early 80s. You know it as the institution of sports games and the Sims and Apex Legends and BioWare and

Battlefield, which we will talk about in just a second. But this is the second biggest acquisition that we've ever seen in the video game world. $55 billion deal here. brokered by Jared Kushner, of all people, son-in-law of the president, and with a lot of that cash put up by the public investment fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, which already owned a 10% or so stake in EA. There was also some private equity involvement here. So there are a lot of potential ramifications from this deal, but this was a bombshell. This was big news. And it's really kind of fascinating to consider the motivation.

of both the buyers and the sellers in this deal. Charity, what do you make of it? Why did Saudi Arabia want to, for all intents and purposes, by EA? Well, okay, first of all, let's backtrack a bit. So your intro of electronic arts there a minute ago, with the rosiness of it, you're used to the word venerable. Do you work for EA? I didn't say beloved.

I could have said venerable hated, round three despised, resented for filling games with micro transactions institution of gaming. No, you're right. This was the fact that an axis of evil essentially is buying EA is kind of in keeping with the company's reputation these days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, what was your question, though, is why would the Saudis and also Jared Kushner buy EA? Right? And it's, I mean, I feel like the answers to that are pretty complex, right? Like, it's a, The part of it is because it's so perfectly fits with the, let's call it, the soft power project of Saudi Arabia, which also has its tentacles into wrestling and golf and F1. You know what I mean? It's this sort of sports and culture play that Saudi's made, that China has made over the years. I mean, the U.S. does this too, right?

And the other part of it, right, is that gaming is big business, right? If you're making a sort of soft power, sort of cultural splash, right? You're trying to find a way to pivot from being what's seen, I think, is an old-fashioned oil-based economy in an era of a lot of pivots away from oil-based economies in terms of, like, consumption, right? Like the Saudi outlook is sports and entertainment and culture and turning Riyadh into a giant mall and having comedy festivals, which is a whole other series of podcast episodes. We won't even get into that that much. I don't think on this. But yeah. Yeah.

I wonder how that manifests, though, that sort of sports washing, culture washing aspect of things. Maybe this is like sports video game washing. but if you have, say, a huge comedy festival where everyone is performing because the paychecks must have been unimaginably big. But that kind of thing or esports tournaments being held there. And yeah, there's been a whole lot of Saudi oil money just splashing around in the video game space and lots of other acquisitions. But how does that sort of soft power manifest itself, I wonder, with EA games?

Yeah, I was going to, well, first of all, keep in mind, the Saudis had, I believe, a 9.9% stake in EA previously. In terms of answering your question, right? Because there's a whole Bloomberg business week Vox story that is not, I'm sure, what most of the people listening to this podcast care about, right? It's the cultural thing you're talking about, which is, okay, the Saudis are going to own EA. How is that going to manifest in the content of the games in any potential censorship issues?

And I guess I try to look at when I was writing about it for the site, right? my mind kept going back toward like China's interactions with the video game space, or at least international interactions. Like I think back to, you remember when devotion was out and Red Candle Games had snuck this joke about Xi Jinping. It was like, it was the classic sort of Winnie the Pooh characterization of Xi Jinping that's, that's banned in China. And once this surfaced, I think I didn't even see it when I played devotion, but it was

Somewhere in the game, it was like buried in the game somewhere was this critique of Xi Jinping, right? And I forget where red candles based. I think Taipei, right? It might be Taipei. But that game got brigaded and taken offline. Like there was a solid, I want to say, year and a half where you could not play devotion, right? Because there was just this huge, you know, geopolitical. It turned this indie kind of obscure horror game into this geopolitical flashpoint.

And I think people worry about that kind of thing playing out with the Saudis. Like, if you looked at any of that stuff this past week, right, about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, you know, they reported like the terms that the comedians had to agree to to perform in Riyadh. And it was stuff about like, you can't criticize the Saudi people in culture. You can't make jokes about the royal family. People worry about that stuff. People worry about it's one thing to say, okay, if you fly to Riyadh and do a comedy festival that's in large part sponsored by the state, you can't do X, Y, and Z. But what happens when the state, not just companies based in Saudi Arabia, the state, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, right, is suddenly has its hands in the production of these large games.

I think people mostly worry about censorship issues, first of foremost. Yeah, and Ubisoft, for instance, has a relationship with the Saudi-backed Savvy Games group, and there's a DLC for Assassin's Creed Mirage coming out next month that they've been kind of cagey about how that's funded, but it's been reported and alleged that that is essentially Saudi funded in whole or in part, and it takes place in ancient Saudi Arabia. Now, maybe that's not actual propaganda, who knows, but that's something that you need to worry about, given sort of the sanding down of the human rights abuses and killing of journalists, et cetera. And Matt, I mean, even apart from that aspect of things, the mechanics of this deal with it being this big leveraged buyout, so there's $20 billion in debt. And so even if Saudi Arabia is not in the short term putting its thumb on the scale to, say, have less LTPQ messaging.

in the Sims or something along those lines. This is a sort of deal that in the past often leads to disaster, just because servicing the debt costs so much money. And of course, there are fears about layoffs. And, you know, I don't know if EA sports games could be any more micro-transaction filled than they already are. Like, 75% of EA's gaming revenue, I think, comes from live service stuff, just getting people to continue to pay for the games that they've already paid for or that they're playing.

but maybe you worry about Bioware. I mean, people are worried about bioware as it is, but like, you know, maybe things like that that don't really further the bottom line. Maybe they get sold off.

Maybe they get shut down. Maybe people lose their jobs. We don't really know what this will mean for the various franchises that EA operates. No, we don't. But I think it's in the gaming industry, when a company is bought, typically the line is like,

and we're not going to do layoffs. And then within months, it's, guess what, we're doing layoffs. And I think, you know, when you buy something that you don't have enough money to buy, you typically will be looking to cut costs. And so I think that this is one of the most clear-cut examples of, like, there's just no way that they don't do layoffs here, right? I mean, 20 billion in the hole at the jump is no small amount, and I don't think they're going to fill that $20 billion hole with Dragon Age profits,

it seems. And, yeah, I mean, like, FC, EAFC is obviously a big deal internationally. that is one of the games year after year that is probably in the most homes in the entire world. So that is no small amount of influence. So I don't think obviously anyone needs to worry about EAFC going anywhere.

But obviously all of the other things that EA does that don't necessarily print money I think are in great peril right now. And that sucks. More reason. to fear Mass Effect 5 than there already was. Yeah, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And it's also coming amid this larger wave of mergers and acquisitions and consolidation in the gaming industry as the profits have sort of stagnated after the post-pandemic boom. And particularly in North America, that has hit a lot of developers hard. And so if you're an EA stockholder or you have equity in EA, congrats, I guess, because it seems like you've got a good price here. given all of those headwinds that are against the company. But yes, it does make you worry.

I think you're right, though. Before we worried about if there's going to be weird alien sex stuff in Mass Effect 5, we have to worry about it's not coming out at all. Yeah. If that game is happening at all. That's a good way to put that. Yes. That too.

You better not take the alien sex stuff out of Mass Effect because really, why else would we be playing? I also know that some of the reporting was talking about the, the potential controversial pivot to AI. Because I know earlier this year, I found like an SEC filing where electronic arts had mentioned some reluctance about, you know, basically like weighing some of the reputational and ethical risks of, like,

how thoroughly AI is integrated into, like, game development, right, into games publishing. And, um, new ownership probably does,

mean, right, like a new approach to some of those questions that I think the video game industry right now is walking on eggshells around, especially when it comes to engaging with player bases about it, because AI still remains controversial, even though it does have this widespread adoption. Yeah. And they've even said that that's one way that they're going to make this work financially is by just untold savings based on AI enabled development, which is pretty pie in the sky at this point and also makes you worry about layoffs. So there are acquisitions like where you might say, oh, they'll be free from public pressure and they won't have to just make the shareholders happy. And so they'll be able to pursue projects that aren't guaranteed lucrative money banks,

basically. But that doesn't seem like what's happening here just based on the mechanics of the deal and the people involved. So we're all still sort of waiting to see what will happen. And that, I think, is a good segue into our next topic, because if this is the second biggest gaming, acquisition in history, then the biggest, of course, was Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard. And one of the fears there was, uh-oh, game pass prices are going to go up. And they said, no, don't worry, we're not going to do that, or layoffs too. And that happened as well. And now we're really seeing the Game Pass price hikes happen. So this has been big backlash against Microsoft, which has already been weathering plenty because of how it seems to be driving the Xbox brand into the

ground. But there was last week a 50% price increase announcement for GamePass Ultimate subscriptions. That's from 1999 to 2999. And there were other changes and different brandings and different tiers and reorganizations. This is coming on the heels of a 2024 price increase. This is coming on the heels of multiple price raises for Xbox hardware. So there's a real revolt right now among hardcore Xbox people, because that's who this is hitting the hardest. So, Matt, is Microsoft just cannibalizing its business? Is this the insidification of GamePass?

Is GamePass still a good deal? Is it still a good deal? Is a question I hear a lot? And I think it's kind of irrelevant as a question because it doesn't matter if it's a good deal because it is widely perceived to not be a good deal and to be a cash grab from a company who is just flailing in the wind right now,

it seems like Xbox, the vibes now are down horrendous. It is like, we're at a place where the vibes around Xbox are worse than when Sega imploded in the Dreamcast days and got out of console wars entirely. And the big difference here, obviously, is that Microsoft is not a mere console manufacturer. So they're not just going to vanish off of the landscape, obviously. They still make Windows where all of the PC gaming that people are so enthused about is happening, where they potentially are pivoting to after this next generation.

But certainly, the price hike of Game Pass is going to, I think, historically, be kind of remembered as the moment where Xbox's fate as a console gaming juggernaut was kind of cemented as not a way forward in the console landscape. And I've been a big GamePath supporter for as long as it's been going. I've played tons of games on there, big games. I love the sort of indie-services. spotlights that have happened through GamePass where I would just see what's come out, and I would discover little gems that I didn't even know were coming out that were on Game Pass

that were really worthwhile. There's a period where the curation on there was really excellent. And I'm really sad to see it doubled in price. Now, am I going to cancel Game Pass right now? No, but that's because I'm looking at the calendar and Ninja Guide and Outer World. two are coming out this month. Now, when November rolls around, am I going to cancel Game Pass? Well, I'm going to look at what they're releasing. Because $30 a month,

if there isn't at least one absolute banger in there every single month that I would be buying anyway, it's not something I'm going to keep doing. Because the biggest draw, the biggest thing about Game Pass that was appealing is not the new Fortnite V-Bucks

that they've shoehorned into Ultimate to try and say, hey, we're giving you more! It's not like the ancient Ubisoft games that everyone has already played before that are now in GamePass. It is day one game releases.

That has always been the most important thing. Now, I like to use the cloud gaming on my other devices that I have, but day one games is what the allure of game pass is. And to put that behind a $30 a month tier is going to kick out pretty much everyone but the diehards. Right. Right. There's no, there's no family right now that like, oh, my kids like games and they're going to pay $360 for a service where

they're not entirely even fully grasping all of their releases every month. It's just like, that's just an to know. Yeah, and you are the diehard. You are the power user. So, for you, this could still make game. When I am looking at the release calendar, exactly, when I'm looking at it being like, should I cancel game pass? It's like, should I cancel? I'm the whale.

I'm the big nerd. I'm like, should I cancel? Like, what are you doing? They have you on the hook. It's true. If you're questioning things, that's a bad sign. Because, yeah, the two renamed tiers, premium and essential, don't include day one game releases.

There's also a carve out for call. of duty, as we will discuss in a second. And I think on some level, GamePass was underpriced significantly for a long time. It was a really good deal. And they resisted raising prices for a long time. So maybe they're thinking, hey, you had it good for a long time. What are you complaining about? If you just let your subscription sort of ride and let it auto upgrade as they have raised the prices and changed the tiers, it would be a 76% increase, I think, in less than 18 months. So that's a lot. So even if you're telling people, well, you were making good money for a while on us here,

and that was our large yes. And now we're actually coming to call in our favor, essentially. That's still going to cause a lot of people to go away. Now, I bet that in the short term, at least, this probably makes sense for them. I'm sure they've crunched the numbers and they've found that enough people will just let it auto upgrade, or they think that they would buy, say, five full-priced games in a year. And so this is still saving them money. that even if their audience shrinks,

as I think it will inevitably, they'll still just make more revenue. And maybe that seems to be what their strategy is right now. It's like, let's put everything multi-platform because PlayStation players will buy our Microsoft games too. And that's all well and good. And some of those have been bestsellers, but also why would you buy an Xbox at this point?

And people are doubting that there will be additional Xboxes, even though Microsoft keeps coming out and saying, no, we're not out of the hardware business, but why would we be in the Xbox? hardware business if we can get all their games on other platforms and if GamePass is not that great a deal. You know, there's been a bit of a stagnation in the audience for the subscription service. There was the question of like, is this Netflix for gaming? Will this just take over everything? And on PC, especially, it hasn't really grown by leaps and bounds, you know, because people

are used to the ecosystem that they're in. They're used to owning their games. And so it hasn't caught on quite the way that it has with console players. And so how much can you, extract money from your core audience before you sort of salt the earth and hurt the Xbox brand and turn away people who might otherwise have considered joining Game Pass. That's where we are. Can I interject questions here? Because I will say, and, you know, Matt is the bullish one on Game Pass. I feel like I've watched the narrative of Game Pass play out for a long time.

And I've always kind of sat here going, I don't get this. I think for a while people talked about Microsoft as if it had tapped the fountain of youth, right, in Game Pass, in sort of saying, well, okay, it's losing whatever war of exclusives you want to talk about with Sony, but game streaming. That in some form or fashion is probably the future. It is the lifeline to the Xbox brand, even if the console sales, even if the brand strength is weakening. And I'm just not sure I ever really understood. Help me understand what, like, if I'm looking back 10 years from now and trying to make sense of the games streaming arc,

right, of this particular anime that we call Microsoft versus everybody, like, I just don't know what the, before the vibes turned, right, as you, as you mentioned, Matt, before the vibes turned against Microsoft. What was the plan here exactly? Help me understand it? Well, I think, you know, there's two things we're talking about, right? We're talking about day one releases and we're talking about cloud game streaming, right? And I think that, you know, the day one releases is pretty easy to talk about.

That's obvious stuff. Like, do I want to play this game? I can play it for free. And I've played games for free on, well, not for free, is it? But I've played games on Game Pass every single month since I adopted the service. I think they've had great offerings. The cloud gaming thing is a bit more of a complex issue to talk about. And as you can see from Sony releasing the portal, even companies that work have some faith in cloud game streaming, it seems.

For me, the reason that I use cloud game streaming is I have a bunch of retro emulator handhelds, and I have a handheld PC, and I can play a game on my Xbox Series X through GamePass. I can put it down. I can pick up whatever handheld I'm playing on, as long as I'm going to. As long as I have Wi-Fi, I can open up that game on the cloud, continue my save file seamlessly, and play it in handheld mode. Now, obviously, you're not going to do that with a competitive online shooter. But, you know, there's plenty of games where you don't need to have super precise reaction time.

And the cloud streaming through GamePass, although I hear it's not as good as G-Force now, which I haven't yet tried, it is definitely good enough on. my Wi-Fi at least, where I live in America in Los Angeles, to play all of these games handheld and just pick up your save file where it left off. And there are a lot of practical applications to this, right? Like, Switch is a big hit a lot of the time because, you know, you're playing whatever game on your TV and let's say your partner is like, hey, let's watch a movie. And you're like, yeah, sure. So you put the movie on the big screen and you take Switch out of the dock and play that handheld, right?

And it's a similar thing for me where I can pick up and cloud stream on my handheld without taking up the living room TV. So I think that cloud streaming also has other obviously great applications where they're trying to convince you

everything is an Xbox as Xbox itself becomes less of an Xbox. But you can have a tablet, you can have a phone where you can stream games to it. And once you figure out that input device that you strap onto your phone or tablet,

because you probably don't want to be using the touchscreen on it, there are all these options of controllers now that you can snap onto your phone, snap onto your tablet, or you can connect a controller via Bluetooth to these things and game on them there. There's a lot of really intriguing options with getting cloud streaming that I think, you know, most people haven't really tapped into because it's not like readily apparent. You got to kind of be a nerd. You kind of got to be in the thick of it and and just say, okay, no, let's just watch a movie. And I'll just not play my Xbox like a normal person. Real quick. We can, we can, we get, because my, my question is not about, like, I get the practical. I guess what I mean is like the financial argument. That's all

I'm asking about really is like, I don't get it as like the future of the, like the, in terms of The brand future of the Xbox brand is what I mean. Okay. In terms of a financial bet, I think is more so where I've always been kind of bearish on. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I don't fully get it either. I do understand that like their idea of, hey, you don't even have to buy an ever increasingly priced Xbox to get into the Xbox ecosystem. Right.

You have an iPad. You have a phone. Um, you can have game pass on those things without even owning an Xbox. Xbox. But at this point, the brand is so murky that I don't feel a marketing push from them to get people who don't have an Xbox into the ecosystem. I think most people would be shocked to hear that you could even remotely entertain the idea of having an Xbox GamePass account without having an Xbox, right? Yeah. And they've said that GamePass is profitable, which maybe makes these price increases rankle more. And of course, there's a

whole economy where some games are economically viable because they get a payment to be on Game Pass, essentially. But then what does that do to game development if you're dependent on that as opposed to going direct to consumer? And there's the question of whether offering big games day and date, basically when they come out to your streaming subscribers, is viable. And Sony has said no, essentially, and they've resisted doing that with PlayStation Plus. So you can't get Ghost of Yote right now if you're a PlayStation Plus subscriber for free. but GamePass has tried to make that work. And maybe this is kind of a concession that they're saying,

well, actually, that doesn't make so much sense, at least with our big blockbusters, including Call of Duty, which brings us to the last thing that I wanted to talk about here, because these two huge acquisitions are kind of coming to a head. There's sort of a proxy war being waged here via two online shooters, which are going head to head this fall, Battlefield, which is owned by Electronic Arts, and Call of Duty, which is owned by Activision Blizzard and by extension Microsoft.

So Battlefield 6, which had a huge open beta in August, comes out Friday. And that brand has been a bit tarnished by the last installment Battlefield 2042, not being well received at first. Blackop 7, the next Call of Duty installment, is coming out next month, but is holding an open beta this week. And Battlefield really seems to be trying to take down Call of Duty this year. It's coming for the King. and Call of Duty is playing defense. Meanwhile, the Game Pass price hikes may have stemmed, at least in part, from the revenue

that Microsoft reportedly lost by putting Blackop 6 last year on GamePass. So you could just get Game Pass and you could play Black Op 6 instead of buying Blackop 6. And while that led to some signups for Game Pass, reportedly Microsoft lost hundreds of millions of dollars on that proposition because, you know, that was, that's the, big cash cow, Call of Duty. And so now they're essentially saying, well, you can't necessarily get Call of Duty within a year, even in the tiers where you can still get games within a year of their release. Call of Duty is maybe an exception to that. And also some other discounts that Call of Duty players would get by signing up for Game Pass. They no longer get that. So this is two sort of

separate things. One is that Can Battlefield, which had this huge uptick in players for the open beta and really seems to be trying to target what people don't like about Call of Duty, even some of the messaging, the ad campaigns, kind of trolling Call of Duty by having celebrities and then just having them disappear kind of a classic Call of Duty marketing campaign. So they are gunning for Call of Duty. And these are like two different types of shooters. So they're not necessarily, it's not mutually exclusive. You could be both a player of Battlefield and of Call of Duty and they could be kind of complimentary because Call of Duty, you know, is smaller maps, fewer players. Battlefield is just a giant chaotic free-for-all with tons of vehicles and everything and is more kind of down to earth

than Call of Duty historically, which is another thing they're playing up. Matt, do you think that Battlefield could actually unseat Call of Duty here because Battlefield is big, but Call of Duty is the biggest by far? In this instance? Yes. I think that Battlefield has the buzz right now. the beta period for Battlefield I know some people who are in that Call of Duty sphere who are constantly playing the online shooters, especially Call of Duty and those people when I talk to them

they tell me that their whole crew is ready for Battlefield. It's going to be Battlefield when it comes out and the only question is are people going to put down Battlefield when Call of Duty comes? comes out to play that, or are they just going to be so into battlefield that they're going to stick to that? So I think a big part of this is going to be Battlefield trying to hold attention for the next couple months. If they have a lot of stuff prepared to keep engagement up, I think that this could be a big threat to call of duty.

And also you have to keep in mind that Battlefield has, yeah, like you said, Battlefield has made like an emphasis on being like a more down-to-earth, grounded, right? Like the no-Nickey Minaj skins in Battlefield discourse of like whenever you make a game for this kind of an audience, this kind of like hyper-masculine kind of game that is targeting. that kind of sphere. You want to be the game where you can say like, oh, you're playing the other one? The other one's for kids. It's for babies, right?

And I think that's kind of what Battlefield is going for here. And I think it's going to work really well. What do you think, Charity? Yeah, it does seem like it will in the short term, at least. And Blizzard's ex-CEO came out and said that Battlefield will bootstomp

Call of Duty this year. but the real win here is that Call of Duty won't be lazy anymore, and we'll all get better FPS games for it. So that seems to be the thing. Some of this is messaging and marketing, just, oh, we actually refuse to do some skin partnerships and, you know, changes to matchmaking that some Call of Duty players have been asking for for a long time. So it does seem like competition is good, right?

If you kind of light a fire under Call of Duty and it gets a bit better and less complacent, then that can only be good for gamers, right? Right? And, you know, that's one of the concerns with the larger consolidation in the industry. And what happens if Xbox does go away and PlayStation doesn't have direct competition, then will that be bad for us, the players, at some point? So it's an interesting industry story, especially because these are just such huge windfall franchises for these two giant conglomerates now. But Call of Duty is so much bigger than Battlefields that I imagine that it will weather this storm, but maybe loses some market share in the short. term. I'm just hung up, Ben, when you were talking about backtracking on Call of Duty on Game Pass. I could not help but think of the obvious parallels to Red Lobster getting rid of endless shrimp. Yes. That seems like the worthwhile thing to talk about. So they got to hire the black guy that Red Lobster got to fix it. You know what I mean? They hired that guy. That guy was like, Yeah, they shouldn't have done endless shrimp that obviously didn't make the math didn't math on endless shrimp.

Like if you give people endless shrimp, you're going to go bankrupt. So they hired me to fix that. So they got to talk to him. Yeah. That's all I got. That's a good note. You know, Lena Khan, the ex-chair of the FTC, who opposed Microsoft's acquisition of Activision, was trying to do a little victory lap on Twitter the other day and have said essentially that, you know, they said they wouldn't increase game prices and

here they are and sort of, and I told you so. So these effects, you know, there's more that goes into that, of course, but this was not tough to predict that it would happen at some point. Games getting expensive, in some ways getting worse, but competition can only help. And it can only help, of course, to have Justin Charity in the mix on ButtMesh. Justin, you haven't yet played Ghost of Yote, so we will let you go. now to hot swap. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Well, maybe we'll talk about that on a game of the year, pod, and we'll see where you stand. But we'll do a podcast hot swap here, I'm sure you do, and bring in Daniel Charity. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet means everything for your business. And even this podcast, that's why I trust Spectrum Business.

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visit the website for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to by Borishead. What if we told you the taste of deep fried turkey is now available at your local deli? Well, Borishead just did that. Bursting with flavor, perfectly seasoned with that indulgent taste that usually means pointing your whole day around it,

presenting the friar's turkey breast only from Borershead. Backyard tradition now available behind the counter. Visit your local deli today. Discover the craftsmanship behind every bite, Boershead, committed to craft since 1905. Okay, charity out. Chin in Ringer staff writer. Daniel Chin is here to talk with us about Ghost of Yote.

Welcome, Daniel. Thank you. Good to be back here. Good to have you. And I know you were very excited for this game, as we all were, I think, as fans of its predecessor. So this is, of course, Ghost of Yote. which is developed by Sucker Punch, published by Sony,

the sequel, spiritual sequel, sequel of sorts to 2020s Ghost of Sushima. And it is sort of an anthology story. It's another ghost game. It is set in Japan, but it's set hundreds of years later, featuring a new protagonist, Atsu, with a new adventure, but will be very recognizable to players who have played the first game. definitely has some conventions in common. And I want to get into this in a sort of spoiler-free way. We know people are just jumping in. So we won't give away any big twists or story elements other than

just talking about the premise, which is that this is a revenge story. Atsu is a young woman whose family has been murdered in the past, and she sets out to get revenge on the Yote 6, who were the perpetrators of those killings and their ringleader, Lord Saito. She has acquired a certain set of skills, and she is now going from head to head, masked head to head to head to hunt down the people who she believes orphaned her and make them pay a price. So let's talk about the game itself. Daniel, since I believe the original was one of your favorite games, am I overselling it here? How hyped were you and has that hype been met?

I was very excited because you're right, that was one of my favorite games. I was actually very close to drafting it in our recent video game draft here. And it was actually one of my regrets. But yeah, I really grew up loving samurai movies, especially those of like Akira Kurosawa. And when the original game came out to be able to dive into such a cinematic, video game where the gameplay is just it's so good and it's like they do such a good job of really

paying homage to a lot of a lot of the classics. When this game was coming out to just build on that first game I was very much excited and I think it made all of the improvements that I would have liked to see even just going down to the gameplay

like being able to use like an assortment of weapons like it's it's they they did a job of making just the right fine-tuning improvements that I was hoping for as a gamer. Are you enough of a Curacao ahead to be playing in Akira-Kurosawa mode

or Takashi-Mike mode or Watanabe mode? Speaking of cinematic, we're really leading into that just as much as the first game, if not more so. You can play it in black and white. You can play it with extra four. You can play it with lo-fi beats. I have not done any of that except for a second

just to experiment. When I was getting ready to write my piece, for the site, I definitely wanted to test them out a little bit. And I think they're all fun. They're like filters that you can put on and off. But as somebody that does not speak Japanese, for example, I think the first time I play this game through, I'm doing it in English because of all the voice actors

and mocap performances are all done like in English performances. It's a fun change of pace. But I feel like they also don't subtitle all of the Japanese. Like if usually most of the time, I've noticed at least, like, if people are just like talking shit about you, if you're like walking by, like, oh, there's so many Ronan these days kind of thing. Like, they're doing those lines in Japanese and not subtitling them so you're not missing much. But I wanted to be fully immersed in like the experience that they originally intended for it. But I think it's just a nice, nice to have that option and to pay homage to more filmmakers this time around.

Like I love cowboy Bebop. I love samurai Champleu. so to have Shinichiro, Watanabe, be involved in any small part of this, whether it's just listening to Lo-Fi beats as you walk around. It's a fun thing to do. Yeah. Matt, you're also a big fan of Ghososushima. So what do you think of open-world samurai gameplay just in general?

Do you think that this is more of the same? Would you describe Yote that way? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think, you know, this has been a year of a lot of sequels, right? We're playing Yote now, 80s 2, Silk Song. Female protagonists who are out for revenge. There's still a lot of that lately. And I think that there is a bit of criticism going around about this game that is not different enough from Tsushima.

And I think in some ways that's very valid. But I also kind of have to say, like, there's an element. element of if it ain't broke, don't fix it in this equation. Do I think it feels like the same game overall? No, this feels like a very different journey. Now, does it feel the same in a lot of ways that the game plays in a lot of the systems? Yeah, it feels very similar when I'm chasing a fox to a fox altar. That hasn't changed in the 200. years apparently between. Those foxes are super smart.

Man. Yeah, but I think that there's enough here that's different. I think the story is really fantastic. It's one of the best stories in games this year, even if it is a bit of a cliche in the broad sense of the revenge tale. I think the details and the voice acting in English is incredible. And I think that, you know, In the last game, you had a bunch of different stances for your weapon.

And in this game, you have a bunch of different weapons. And, you know, there's enough that's different here. And there's a good enough story that it is 100% worth getting into this. Now, if the story weren't very compelling in this, I think you'd have a game that is too close to its predecessor. but I think that it's worth it. It's absolutely worth it. I've had a tremendous time playing this game.

I will remember this story long after I've forgotten Ghosts of Sushima's story, which to be honest, half happened already by the time Yota came out. They both have that incredible contrast of these beautiful, serene, environments and this absolutely brutalist violence that I can't, I haven't found that balance in any other game series. And I mean, just the awareness to have like a lo-fi beats mode in the game is like, what other action games are you having like chill beats in? Like you clearly understand that there's a vibe.

in this action game that you're not going to hit in Assassin's Creed or Rise of the Ronin or like there's something special that isn't in those things that is absolutely here and it works more potently than ever and the quality of life improvements make it even easier to enjoy than before. Yes, it is a lot easier to pick up plants than it was in the original ghost game. I know they patch that or fix that eventually,

but there is just a lot less hassle to that sort of thing. Did you guys play Assassin's Creed Shadows, either of you? Nope. Yeah, I feel like that's probably... Yeah, that's probably a good thing. And it's not the fault of Ghost of Yote that it came out the same year as Assassin's Creed Shadows, but there are some serious commonalities in these stories

to the point where I was getting very powerful deja vu when I started this game, because the setup is almost the same. I mean, it's almost shocking the initial cutscene, just like the fire and the burning and the family being killed, and you're setting out to hunt down these mass killers. It's the same setup, essentially. And I did feel a little bit of just revenge fatigue.

I think this is a really good revenge story. I think it's done really well. I really gravitate toward the character of Atsu. It's well written. But I have seen a lot of this lately, which is not so much... That is your fault for playing Assassin's Creed Shadows. Knowing that Yote was going to come out. It's true, but I did it for content.

And also I like that game. But, you know, there are different games. Assassin's Creed has more of an emphasis on stealth. And I actually like that there's probably less of an emphasis on stealth in Yote and, you know, different sort of systems and everything. And, you know, it's not like the games are exactly the same. It's just purely that premise. But I did think that one way in which Gose of Ushima's stood out was really that that setting and that time period felt under explored at the time. And you can't say that anymore, right?

After Kosciima and then after, you know, not even like much different in time. That game is different in time. Rise of the Ronin is hundreds of years later. But even this specific time period, 1600-ish, you do get Assassin's Creed Shadows, you get this game. you get Shogun, you get Blue Eye Samurai, you know, yet another revenge game, right? And all of these things are good. I like them all. But the fourth or fifth time, it does land a little bit differently.

And, you know, games are in development for years and years and years. So it's not really anyone's fault. I'm not digging it for that lack of originality. But I did feel that, that it just felt a little less fresh because of these other things that have come along. And I guess you could say the same about the open. World's model just in general, which I think this is a really good one, but it doesn't do that much new for better or worse. Yeah, I've definitely been seeing the same criticism out there around

this game, and I think it is a very fair one, but I think to the game's credit, they do a really good job of just executing it really well. Like, it might not surprise you in terms of the full arc of it, but along the way, there's a lot of really nice twists and turns in terms of the story itself, but also just the character development that they did, I thought was really good. There are a lot of really fun and compelling characters that have you wanting to see the next part of the story, even if it's, all right, now we're going to, who's the next person on the list that we have to go after? Yeah, right.

And this year has largely been defined by indie games, and we've been talking about Claire Obscure Expedition 33 and Blueprints and just recently, Hollow Night Silk Song, and Hades 2. And a lot of these, some of these are sequels in a similar vein. This game is different in that from the second, from the gecko, it's just like the AAAest of AAA games. Like it just feels like a AAA open world game with everything that comes with that. And you can kind of lump in a lot of the Sony published first party open world games there, the Spider-Man games, the Horizon games. I guess you could even stick days gone in there.

There's just, these are different settings, different developers, but there is sort of a similarity to it. It's like the Ubisoft Open World model, but better, I guess, just like, but better. Yeah, but better, just extra polish, maybe more immersive, a little less onerous map littered with icons, a little kind of coming across things more organically than you do in Assassin's Creed, at least with the default settings on. So maybe some of the same criticisms apply or the same saminess if you've played a lot of those games and you just feel like, all right, I know what I'm getting here. It's like from the second I picked up Yote, it's not even just from playing its direct predecessor, but playing all of these games, it felt very familiar. And that was comforting in a way. It was like familiar, but familiar because it reminds me of a lot of other really good games that I also enjoyed. And I will probably enjoy this one too.

but I just didn't feel the same sense of excitement, I guess, about, oh, what's going to be around the next corner or what will blow my mind because it's something brand new. This is just like something we've seen before done about as well as it could be done, which is not an indictment of it. It's just more predictable, less surprising. You know what you're going to get. And I have a lot of open world fatigue with games.

And you can definitely feel that this is a game, made with the understanding that there would be a lot of eyes on it. There'd be, you know, the hardcore players are going to play it and the casuals are going to play it. And there are rounded edges in this thing to make sure that everyone can get on the ride and enjoy it. But like, you know, within that very familiar framework of an open world game, right? Like, all of the side quests that you stumble on are at like a Witcher 3 level of

quality of like this is developing in a really interesting and unexpected way. This is, I'm so glad I stumbled into this. Like, I could have missed this if I wasn't, you know, if I was mainlining the story. It's all, everything in there feels worthwhile. And I also want to mention, like, you know, talking about fatigue with maybe this, this era between all of their recent game set in, you know, within a few hundred years of this. I also thought that Yote brought a really interesting, like, historical element into this by choosing to highlight the Ainu people in this game.

And this takes place in very northern Japan. And there are already people living on the land. The indigenous people to this region are the Ainu. And this is a real group of people. that lived in northern Japan and until very recently have been kind of ostracized and ignored by the Japanese government. And they have these deep roots in the land and their cultures are fascinating. And it's an entire thing that I knew nothing about before I started playing this game. And when I actually, you know, experienced the Ainu people in this game, it led me to go online and research this.

some more. And I was stunned at, like, the care and the accuracy put into this, these people who have been forgotten to time in some ways. Their language is believed to be extinct now in the past few decades. It's really fascinating. And you're not getting that in Rise of the Ronan. That's not something you're seeing in Assassin's Creed shadows, right? Like, there's a respect and love in this game for the world that it lives in in so many ways. And it's just one more example of how this game has depth to it that goes way deeper than the broad strokes that are meant for the casual gamer coming in to be like,

oh, yeah, I can climb this mountain. I'll jump from there to there. And some of us gamers are kind of maybe a little tired of that traversal mechanic of climbing up walls, right? But there's still so much here for everyone. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

No, that's a great point, though, because I have the same exact experience, Matt, when I was playing in terms of learning more about the Ainu. And just seeing the amount of effort they took to actually pay attention to this because it is something that, as Matt was mentioning, the Japanese government has tried to look away from this and look away from the Ainu people and that part of this history because it's an ugly history. history. So for this game to be trying to shine a light on it in the way that they helped, even just with a lot of the history and the depth that they did, the detail that they

explored for the first game with Goose Shima, I know that they have like, I remember seeing that big, some of the game developers became like ambassadors of tourism for the Tsushima island after that, you know, so they really take the time to actually explore the reasons that they're trying to set this in to make a real piece of historical fiction in a way that to Matt's point, they're just doing a better job of it than other games that are maybe in the same era. Yeah, as the Assassin's Creed defender on this episode somehow, I don't know how I ended up in that role, but I'll put in a word for that franchise too, and it's efforts at least to let that kind of authenticity to the settings too.

You know, they've done the discovery tour modes that are kind of like educational tools, like learn about ancient Egypt or whatever. You know, they've had consultants and, you know, people who helped with, say, the portrayal of the Mohawk people in Assassin's Creed 3, that sort of thing. So I don't know if that's a weak point of the franchise, but yes, I agree that that's done really well here. And another thing you wrote about in your review for the site, Daniel, is that some of the, well, one of the major weak points of the first game,

game was just the repetition and how so many of the side quests, the optional stuff, it was very overly familiar, you know, and it didn't have that kind of handcrafted. Someone actually wrote this as opposed to being almost like procedurally generated cookie cutter fetch quests or whatever, right? And that's not entirely gone here. There's definitely a lot of repetition and exploring the same things over and over. And the foxes who I guess they should be smart because clever is a fun. That's just maybe a saying for a reason.

And then the golden birds. And you're going to be doing a lot of the same activities over and over. But there is much more of a bespoke, like really effortful attempts to make the optional stuff meaningful. And it also really helps you with your upgrading your character and the skill tree and all of that. You're not going to be able to upgrade in combat all that often if you're not actually exploring and doing some of that side stuff. So it's rewarding on a narrative level, but all that. also gameplay-wise. And they change it up, too.

Like, even if you're like, okay, well, there's another bamboo thing here. All right, I guess I'm going to walk up to this thing and cut this bamboo down. And you're like, all of a sudden, like, there's a bear. There's a bear attack. Like people are running away from the bamboo thing.

And you're like, why are people running away from me? And then there's a bear that, like, attack. Like, even the things that are like set to be kind of like repetitive, they find ways for, there to be some interesting, even if it's just a little twist on this hot spring, right? Maybe there's like a little thing you can do at this hot spring that you don't do at the others. Like, they're really focused on trying to make sure like, okay, first of all, let's not have too many of these things.

We don't need to chase foxes for five hours in this game, right? Like, they've paired a lot of it back, and when they do do it, they put a twist on a lot of things that come out of nowhere. So I think they've done a good job of removing that bloat and keeping it interesting. They seem to have taken a lot of the feedback in mind here. Yeah, that's very true. There was one bamboo strike that I did at one point where they have you drink a couple of bottles of sake before it, so you're like doing a drug. There are a lot of fun little twists on that. But I think in general, too, they just have so many more options. Like one way to get rid of the repetitiveness is just to have so many activities to do. But even like, I think one,

of the highlights of Gosu Shima was like having the very scenic duels where you would fight around the, fight the like five wandering swordsmen across the map. And this one you have the bounty hunting. And I love the bounty hunter missions, I think, is like one of the highlights of this game for me. Yeah, great little stories. Great, great little stories. There's always a backstory attached to the person that you're going after. It might not always end in a duel, but most of the time they end in a very scenic duel. So they do a good job, I think, of just making things. still fresh as you keep playing these games. And everyone in this world wants to scrap.

Just everyone wants to throw down at all times. It's just like, you know, you're wanted. Well, there is a monk character in this one who does not want to throw down categorically. Not literally everyone. But almost everyone, you know, you're just running across a field, riding across a field, and you stop to say, oh, what's going on here? And you will end up in a duel inevitably. Yeah.

You can sometimes pay people off, but why would you want to? because the fighting is fun. And by default, at least, it's not prohibitively hard, which is also a nice bit of a break after Silk Song, especially. So we should talk about the combat, because that's the highlight here. Like, the combat is the best part of this game and the thing that sets it apart from a lot of these other open world games that we're talking about because it's just so much fun and it's mechanically complex.

And, you know, there are a lot of layers to it. And at first, it's pretty simplistic. It's just like you have your rapid attack, you have your heavy attack, you have a block which blocks everything if you just hold it at first. But then it gets more complicated. And you have your color-coded parrying. And we've talked about how we're at peak parrying in video games. Everything's about parrying. This game is no exception.

And you do have to really be locked in to, okay, this is an unblockable attack. This is one I can block this. I can stagger this. I can interrupt this. And the nice change, one of the nice changes from the first ghost game, is that whereas before you had stances and you had to alternate among the stances, now you alternate among weapons. And each of the weapons is really fun and just enables you to deal death in a completely different way. Like it feels distinct. And also there's tactics and strategy to it.

And it's not just sort of, okay, how do I remember like I should use this stance against that guy? it's much more intuitive, I think, to remember, okay, this guy's using, you know, dual katanas or whatever. So I should use my yari or, you know, whatever it is, right? Like there's a certain weapon that gives you an advantage over other weapons. And you can remember those matchups and you're just switching on the fly, which is really easy to do as well. So you're never really scrambling for, oh, I meant to press this button. It just, it flows really well. So Daniel, was this as much of a highlight for you as it was for me?

Definitely. Because I did like the detail of having the different stances in the first game, but you effectively can use just one stance and just use that one against your enemies. And it is a little bit harder to remember which stance to go to. But this, there just feels like there's so much novelty in each of the weapons that you're doing. And there's something so satisfying about using each of them too, like using like the Odachi to take down one of the big brutes. But also just like the fact that this weapon is, it is slower to move around. So you just naturally are not going to be wanting to do that against a faster opponent. So I think it's just a very natural shift And it's one that keeps it very engaging as you progress to you the story as well And as you learn from the different Senses from the different masters of each weapon Yeah, and I think that the skill trees for each weapon Are the right size It's not a massive like overwhelming skill tree where like I got five weapons and all these And different like tactics for each of them and the button presses that do

it's all very digestible, and the upgrades on each weapon that you can get add a nice detail to what you're doing, but without ever feeling overwhelming, which I think is a real achievement to be able to pivot between five weapons and feel like you have a good grasp of what all of them do,

and there isn't one that you just haven't touched in 12 hours, and now you have to use it, and, like, they've done a real, good job of balancing the weapons system in this game. And I think that combat is really satisfying. I don't think that this is the hardest game from a combat standpoint. There is one optional boss battle towards the end of this game that you can do that is far in away the hardest thing in this game. But anyone who just came from playing Silk Song will have no problem.

dying 20 times and beating it eventually. But for the most part, until the very end of the game, all the combat is challenging enough to be fun and feels very satisfying. And like you were talking about, Ben, the different colors that pop up for the different parry things, right?

There's a yellow one. When the yellow one comes up, it means that an enemy is about to try to disarm you. And if you don't hold your strong button, down and then release it in time for that attack to get off, they will knock whatever weapon you're using out of your hands. It will fly away. You can go and pick it back up,

or you can switch to a different, perhaps less advantageous weapon in that time to fight against him. But if you do counter that yellow strike, then you disarm them, and you have the ability to, like, pick up their own weapon and throw it at them and kill them with, like, it's amazing how much depth there is without feeling overwhelming. And I think it's like a very memorably fun combat system, if not a little bit familiar.

I love that they completely warn you every time they're going to do the disarming, though. It's like, oh, you won't be ready for this? Now I am. Thank you. Thank you for that. It is very video gamey in that respect. And the whole like yellow paint debate here, it's white paint, but why is every cliff that I can climb so clearly delineated? Or why do they telegraph all of their attacks before they do it? Yeah, I like when you're about to, like, assassinate someone in stealth, and as you walk up, they'll just say something so, like,

they'll be like, I sure I'm going to find her. Just some sort of like, well, in the future, I'm going to do that. And you're just like, nope, no, you're not. They know what they're doing. The enemy AI, just, you know, when you disappear behind something and they forget that you're there and it must have been the wind. The stealth is kind of, like, dumb in this game. It is.

In a way that I think. is good. Yeah. Like, you know, Ben, we played through Metal Gear 3 Delta a few weeks back, right? And we were playing through the stealth of Metal Gear. And, you know, that's a stealth system where, like, people can find you and people will notice things that you're doing. And in this game, if you don't, like, walk and stay in someone's, like, you're.

direct line of sight, they're not going to find you. They're just not going to find. You're running at full speed behind someone. They're not going to hear your footsteps. It's admittedly kind of a dumb stealth system. And I am so happy that it is that stupid. Me too. Because people don't typically enjoy

really in-depth stealth gaming unless that is what the entire game is about. To have a stealth mechanic in a game and make it hyper-realistic kind of makes that laborious compared to the other gameplay element. So I'm really happy that it's stupid and fun. It doesn't fit the character

either because Atsu is just no-holds barge. She will hack and slash and run and gun. She's not in this for honor or whatever. Obviously there's some evolution in her character, but no, she will dispatch people however she can and she can just go, just run into

fights at least. That's the way that I tend to play also, so it's more forgiving for me. So these elements that are very video gamey, well, they're very video gamey for a reason. They're in a lot of video games because they're fun, and it's just easy to pick up on them. And, you know, I also like that as someone who's not that naturally inclined towards stealth, the game does enable you to stealth through things, but it kind of pushes you more toward just, hey, why not just do a duel right now, you know? Like you're, yeah, you could assassinate this guy and sneak over there and assassinate that guy. But also, if you just press L1, you'll just do a duel and you'll have a face off.

And then it becomes kind of this game of chicken, this timing mechanism. And you slash it the right time or you get faked out by someone who makes like a false start on the samurai. And it's just, it's really fun. And also, I like that you can you can advance in sort of a silly way too where, yes, you can fight sort of straight up. But you can also just run around and like snipe people. with your bow and arrow if you want. Or you can pick up dropped weapons, which I do all the time,

because you can basically one-shot people with thrown weapons. You don't even have to aim. No, they highlight the character. And you can change all this in the settings, of course, if you want to make it trickier. But no, if someone drops the sword or drops a spear or whatever, you can pick that up and just fling it and at least take down a standard enemy with one shot.

And that is also very fun and kind of forgiving and easy. And it's like what you were talking about, Matt, where sort of the edges are sanded down. It's like this is made for a very broad audience. And there's like there's a game under the hood here that I think is maybe less like that. There's more friction or it's more like some sort of simulation game because there are a lot of things where, you know, you can cook and you can set up a campsite and you can start fires by, you know, blowing the sparks and rubbing stones together in that sort of thing. Or after you do that the first time, you can just press one button to skip off that, you know, or you can, like, cook the salmon by using your motion controls to, like,

flip it over and turn, and, or you cannot, you know, you can just bypass all of that. So it also comes into play with the fast travel, which is the fastest travel imaginable, basically. It's, it almost shocked me how quickly you can access that because you just get fast travel right away. It's not like you need to unlock something or that you have to purchase fast travel tokens or anything. You've been in a place. You can immediately just go back there, warp there from anywhere on the map instantly. And there's next and all loading time also. So a lot of these things, like that can be a double-edged sword, so to speak. Maybe you miss out on some of the exploration and the traversal and everything. But it is much more forgiving in those ways if you want it to be. And you can kind of

customize it. If you want to play it more, you know, doing the nitty gritty and the fine details, you can do that. But I find myself skipping steps and cutting corners because I just want to get to the next fight or the next plot point. I think that they did a good job at the fast travel. I don't think that it detracts from the game in a way where like you're not doing exploration, or at least for me, it didn't. I think it just helped, you know, balance it out a little. Like I still was inclined to, if I had a bit of the map that wasn't uncovered yet, I still had the motivation to like go look in that fog of war clouded area of the map. And more often than not, I would find something really interesting in that unexplored space.

And I think it just cuts the fat out of traveling between places you've already been. You know, just taking that out isn't a problem because there's still so much exploration. that you're doing, that it would almost be too much time spent on traversal without that. And in every aspect of this game's design, they have thought about removing those points of fatigue that you have in an open world game sitting, right? Like, there's a menu in this game where you can just look at all of like the side character vendors, right? and just immediately fast travel to most of them. And even before you fast travel to them, you can see what upgrades they have

and if it's worth it, or if you're looking at your sword or one of your weapons, and you're like, I want to upgrade this item that I have, who does that, where are they? It's all right there. You don't have to run around to different towns and manually traverse there and be like, oh, I guess it wasn't here,

and I was wasted time. It's so respectful of your time. And I think that it's really important to sidestep open world fatigue. And I don't think any game's ever done a better job of doing that than Yote. Yeah. I think generally speaking, they just do a really good job with this game, especially, of letting you customize your experience, however you want, just going back to even just having a few modes that might not be as good as the main thing,

but you still have that option. and it keeps it fresh and engaging as you keep going through the world. Because I think one of the things that I've just loved most about both of these games is the scenery is just so stunning. The graphics and they do such a good job of you feeling so immersed in nature.

And the colors are just popping with all the flowers everywhere. So it's just rewarding to just go through the different regions on your horse. It's so beautiful. I took more photos in this game than on my last vacation. in real life.

It is so incredibly beautiful and varied. And it's one of the best-looking environments in games ever. I'm playing on a base PS5 without the benefit of being able to turn on ray tracing and play on 60 frames a second for the pro. Even without that, I set it to performance mode to get those 60 frames. because that's important to me. If you don't necessarily always mind playing at 30 frames per second, I did find it to be like a rather playable 30 frames for second game.

I actually played on graphics mode. I'm always playing on performance mode, and it looks great on performance mode, too. It's not like there's a night and day difference. I mean, there is a night and day difference. There's a night and day cycle in this game. But yeah, it runs just fine, I thought, on graphics mode, too, perfectly playable. And yeah, it's beautiful. There is a great photo mode to take advantage of that.

And also you can see so far around you at all times somehow, which was great. Like not even when you're on the top of a mountain. There are just great sight lines and visibility here and great draw distances so you can see way in the distance and you can use your spyglass, kind of like a Breath of the Wild Tears of the Kingdom thing where you can see stuff that's far away and then go there. But, you know, you can see it from far away. And the other nice thing is that even though it's an open world, it is sort of segmented in an interesting way. So, and there's great diversity in the biomes of this area.

So, you know, you can go when you're hunting down one member of the Yote 6, it's sort of fire themed. And then you're going to more of like an ice snow area. And it's all beautiful. But it's different. It's kind of like the DLC for the first game, Iki Island, where you're in like a self-contained space within the larger. open world. So it is still open world. You can still warp whenever you want. But where you want. Yeah, right. But you feel like you're in a distinct place, you know, a subset of Ezo, which is modern day Hokkaido. So that helped keep it from being too big and too unimaginable. Like you get that in Horizon games too where, you know, there's a range. There's a diversity in the landscape. But it's it's just not segmented the way that this is. And maybe that doesn't sound like such a good thing. But I found it to make it. much more manageable.

Yeah, especially when you're trying to, you know, kind of find all of the collectibles and upgrades and stuff, like breaking it down into smaller regions versus having one giant world where it's like, oh, you got 12 more of these. It would be like, oh, geez, whereas it's like, oh, you have two more of these in this region. You're like, oh, I can do that. Yeah. And, you know, I did find myself using the fast travel often, whereas in Spider-Man, for instance, I didn't, just because it was so much fun to.

swing around. It's not quite as much fun to ride the horse. Now, you do come across things that you might not otherwise, even if most of those things are people who want to kill you and then end up getting killed. But the other nice thing about this is that, and this is something the first ghost game did too, is just the more minimal heads-up display, the HUD. It's a little less obtrusive. It enables you to enjoy the natural splendor a little bit more. There's no mini-map. There's still a big map. And I did find myself going. to it at times, but because you can always just swipe up to get the wind that tells you where to go. And that's not only pretty, but it's sort of thematically appropriate because Atsu is like,

you know, everyone thinks she's an unreal, right? She's a ghost. She's like an avenging demon, essentially. And there is kind of this question of like, is there some supernatural aspect to this perhaps? Or, you know, is this a departed relative who's guiding her way on the wind? So it sort of fits with the theme of the game, but it's also just a little more subtle. It's still telling you where to go, but not with a direct line that's superimposed on the mini map, and then you're just like following that line. You're still kind of following the environmental cues a little bit. And you can like talk to people in the world and they'll tell you where to go. And then, you know, you don't necessarily have to open up the map constantly

to chart your course. Yeah, it's a really elegant way of doing things in this series. and it is still an open world game with all these objectives to get to and everything. And you have very easy to track quests in your menu. You can very easily look at all of your open quests and fast travel to where they are and stuff. And I've been wanting to get around to play Hell as Us, which came out a few weeks ago during the busiest slate of game releases ever. But hell is us is a game that I've been wanting to play because there are all of these quests in this game.

There's no quest markers. You just have to pay attention, listen to what people say. This guy will maybe talk about this thing he lost, and then you'll find it and have to remember where you have to go to give it back to him. And just more of like a real-life kind of experience of paying attention to what's happening and acting on that.

whereas, you know, this is guilty, definitely, of that open world quest item marker thing. But, yeah, that wind just, like, somehow helps it feel so less, so much less artificial than having just, like, a waypoint, like, dropped onto the map. It feels, it's amazing how much that feels freeing within an open world game.

I feel like it's a very, simple, but it's already become a very iconic touchstone of this series. It was cool to see which things they just decided to completely keep the same. Yeah, that was never in doubt that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was such a good idea and execution the first time

around. It just makes a lot of sense. There were like little things, like just to nitpick a little bit. Like, like placing the little squares on the map has driven me crazy. Yeah, yeah. It's so easy, but I'm just like, why am I doing this? I just bought this piece of the map from you. Just put it on.

form maker, right, and then you're supposed to look at where it fits onto the map and place it there. It's like placing a jigsaw piece into the puzzle without only seeing the shape of it, without seeing what's on the puzzle piece. If you take long enough, then they just tell you, it goes here, dummy. Yeah. Right. Do you have any other nitpicks? I feel like there are little things like that where I appreciated them making the changes,

but even like when it came to like the paintings as opposed to like the haikus, I feel like it's just like it's so easy because you're just tracing along. And it's it's a fun use of like just the environment again. I do appreciate the fact that a lot of the, a lot of the game is just having you appreciate the scenery and giving you reasons to explore. But I think those things like just generally the puzzles, a lot especially when you get to like Teshia Ridge with like the Nine Tails,

there's a lot of little puzzle things that you do that are very, very simple. There's like puzzle boxes and stuff where it's a fun change of pace, but I found myself getting the fatigue of that very quickly. Yeah, they're limited in depth, I think. And again, that taps back into our discussion of like, you know, rounding the edges on this thing for a super broad audience, right? Like, you can't risk people getting stuck on these puzzles if it's like that one of four games they play this year, right?

Right. Yeah. And it's sometimes a shame like these games are at war with themselves. Sometimes you just know that behind the scenes there were people pushing for, no, let's make this a little harder, let's hide this, and people will like the challenge. And then other people are saying, no, we need this game to sell a zillion copies. It costs so much money and so many people worked on it.

And we want it to be super accessible. And this was an issue with Assassin's Creed shadows, too, where by default, it just tells you where to go. And, you know, the whole thing is you're trying to hunt down these targets and assassinate them. And there's just like a blue dot by default that tells you where they are, basically, as if there's a GPS tracker or something on them. And Stephen Totillo at GameFile wrote about this. Like, it's really hard to disable that blue dot.

But if you do, then it transforms the game into this entirely new thing where you're picking up on these organic cues and you're eavesdropping on people in town who will give you a hint. about where to go. And there's just a different game buried under there, but that's not the game that by default you're playing. You really have to customize it. And it's, you know, I never know what to do, especially because often, I mean, we're not playing this the way that a typical person is playing it. Often we're trying to marathon it so that we can talk about it on a podcast by a certain time. And so that leads to a less leisurely play through, perhaps, and makes me more reliance on those aides. Whereas if I had all the time in the world, I might say, no,

Let me take my time. I'll take the scenic route and see what this world has to offer. But however you play this game, it is a great game. We'll return to it, I think, at the end of the year. When we talk about the games of the year, it's certainly in the conversation. I think for me, at first blush, there's just so much competition this year. And there's so many games that did something completely different and unanticipated and broke the mold, whether they were originals or sequels. And there's just a little bit too much of an element of, you know, this is the sort of sequel that

refines some of the flaws of the first one and makes it better and improves the polish but doesn't fundamentally deliver a different experience or explode the genre in some way. And that's perfectly fine. And this game will give you many hours of entertainment. But, you know, and I think this is represented and reflected in the strong but not overwhelmingly raving review scores. This is just like about as good an example of this kind of game as can be, but it is still identifiably this kind of game with everything that comes with that.

I'm going to enjoy at the end of the year listening to people, like someone who's like riding hard for Hades 2, talking game of the year with someone who's all about Ghost of Yote, and they're just going to, all of their arguments will essentially be like the same of like, yeah, it's the same, but they like, you know, they changed things to make it new, but they did it at the right balance. And it's like, it's just been a lot of sequels this year have just been, you know, better iterations of their predecessor.

And I think when we get to that game of the year discussion, we're looking around and we're saying how many of these are sequels versus original games? And maybe I'm tipping my hand here as to where I'm. currently thinking. Yes. Steve, who is producing is currently, he's like the kid in the meme with the veins popping out on his forehead.

I didn't mention the game, Steve. Calm down. I just alluded to it, okay? We all know you're talking about Claire obscure, and we will talk about it more. But no, even some of the sequels, though, felt a little bit more transformative of the original formula

than Ghost of Yote does to me. But, again, it's a really good game. It's just going to give you what you want and what you expect. but not that much that you weren't expecting, basically, for better or worse. And I think we should mention also there is a multiplayer mode coming as there was for the first game, the Legends co-op multiplayer mode. There will be a free update for everyone who bought the base game in 2026 where you get some Ghost of Yote

Legends action with two-player story missions and four-player survival matches. So if you're into this for multiplayer, which I don't think is the main draw of this franchise, but that's just an extra an add-on that's coming along. All right. Well, I'm glad we could talk about yet another good game. Not that there was any shortage of them this year or on this podcast. But thanks so much to my Yote 2 here. Appreciate it.

Matt and Daniel, good to talk to you as always. Great to be here. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me back on. All right. And stay tuned to our various feeds for more upcoming podcasts. We will have some peacemaker coverage coming at the end. of the week from the Midnight Boys, PiuPew.

And Buttmash will be back at the end of next week. And yet again, we will have more to cover. Perhaps we will talk about a new game called Keeper that I'm excited for. But also, I am playing or replaying, but really playing for the first time, The Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask. Nice. About time. Everyone's been asking me, when are you going to play Majora's Mask?

I'm waiting for spooky season. Exactly. The moon is very spooky. appropriate. Not that there's really a lull in big new games because October's pretty packed too, but I'm rectifying a wrong here because I never finished Majora's Mask. I was scared of it at the time because the masks were creepy, but now having played Ghost of Yote, I'm enured against the masks. And also, I was... And Silent Hill F, you just got to say so... Yeah, I'm so much... It's time for Major's Mask right after Silent Hill F for sure.

I was. So Majors Mask is turning 25. I am 25 years older as well and much more mature and capable of playing a somewhat scary Zelda game. And also it was the three-day cycle that really just made me stop playing that game and give up on it at the time. But now I'm buckling down and I'm going to rectify that oversight finally. So that and more coming up on Batmash. You can contact us here at ringerversegaming at gmail.com. We'll be talking about plenty more big games coming.

as well. Thanks to Steve Allman for producing this episode and refraining from chining in with further hate for Claire Obscure. Thanks to Arjuna Ramgapal for doing his usual excellent senior production management of the Ringiverse at large. We will be back with more button mash next week. What's the difference between butter and butter made from real California dairy? It's the real California farm families behind it. Real people. Real care. Real intention. Why? Because real matters. So whether you're pouring milk, melting of cheese, or just grabbing one more spoonful of yogurt, keep it real. Look for the seal. Real California milk by Real California Farm Families.

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