Triple Click - Skyrim Turns Ten

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

 Dovahkiin!!! Skyrim is now officially ten years old, because we are all ancient and slowly turning into dust. Jason, Kirk, and Maddy celebrate the big day by revisiting one of the most influential games of all time. They talk about how Skyrim feels to play today, all of the games it has influenced, and what makes it such a special experience.One More Thing: Kirk:  Death Stranding Ziplines/infrastructure/‘breaking’ a gameMaddy: Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Jason: Your HonorLinks:Jason’s 2011 Wired Skyrim Preview: https://www.wired.com/2011/10/skyrim-hands-on/Maddy’s 2011 Phoenix Skyrim Review: https://web.archive.org/web/20160211194214/https://thephoenix.com/Boston/recroom/130611-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

They say Ulfric Stormcloak murdered the High King with his podcast, shouted him apart. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim, a medieval fantasy game set in a massive world full of secrets and hilarious ways to break everything. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shrier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton and hello. Hello.

It's us. Hello, my friends. Every week. It's still the same us. Every week, I know. And yet every week it's better. The show just keeps getting better. And every week is the best it's ever been.

I think that's true. Sorry about last week. It was garbage compared to this week. This week's just going to be so much better. That's what they do. Every single year when a new Madden game comes out, that's what they say. Sorry about last year. It's terrible.

Garbage put this one. Yeah, we just keep patching it. Yeah. We are better than Madden. Am I allowed to say that? I don't know. That's just my opinion. It's not factual.

Anyway, Madden Myers over here. Another thing that's factual is that if you just can't get enough of us and how good we are every single week, you could get extra us, extra triple click. Even more. For a small fee, you could get even more terrific. You could become a member of our very fine podcast network, Maximum Fun, by going to maximum fund. By going to maximum fund.org slash join.

Did I remember that right? I just suddenly panicked that I was wrong. Okay, how many times we said this URL and yet maximum fun.org slash join? And you could become a member and get a bonus episode every single month. This past month we talked about Outer Wilds and the echoes of the I-DLC, which is incredible and frustrating. And definitely something you should play before we spill the beans about it for you on our bonus cap. But there are lots of other beans casts for things that you probably have played. There are so many other beans casts.

so many others that we've done. And so yeah, people should, people should become members. But we are going to talk about a video game today that is 10 years old. We sure are. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to Skyrim. So yeah, we're going to talk about Skyrim because Skyrim turns 10, as Maddie noted. I wrote a little intro for us. I'm going to read it now. Here we go. The marketing materials would tell you that Skyrim is a game about living an alternate life in a fantasy world, saving villages and fighting dragons like a hero of old. But everyone who's played it knows it's actually a game about crouching behind a shopkeeper and robbing them blind while they just stand there.

The Hesda Game Studios' seminal first-person role-playing game came out 10 years ago today on 11-11-11. The decade since then it has received three downloadable expansions, 16 million user-created mods. That's an approximate number. Oh, it's not exact? Precisely 16 million? Okay. Precisely 16 million.

All zeros at the end there. One far in the future announced sequel and thanks in part to a spruced up 2016 special edition. It has been re-released on every game console under the sun, including virtual reality. Now it is 11, 1121, and all these years later, Skyrim's legacy looms over the world of video games

like High Rothgar on the throat of the world. We've all played it a lot over the years. We have just been replaying some of it, and now we're going to talk about it. Skyrim. Skyrim. Skyrim. Oh, man.

It's funny you say sequel, like, at some point in the future because there's just an interview this week with Todd Howard where he essentially was like oh yeah you can expect that in five years at least from now I'm just girl six. I mean that's some point in the future maybe in time for the 15th anniversary of Skyrim

we will get a sequel. Maybe maybe so yeah this game we've all been playing it this week in preparation for this episode though does anyone really need to play anymore SkyRam actually no maybe the answer to that is yes because I had a good time playing it Kind of honestly.

I enjoyed it. Yeah, noticing new things about it. Yeah, there's always something new. I think before we get into our impressions of the game, having just recently been playing it, I'm just sort of curious about the two of your histories with this series. So, Jason, maybe start by just filling listeners in on your history with Skyrim. Yeah, well, so I played some oblivion on the 360 back in the day when it came out, but I didn't really get into the series until Skyrim.

And so I actually, I played it at a preview event. I was working for wired.com and I went to a Bethesda preview event back when Bethesda would invite me to preview events for Skyron. Well, you're wired. So it was fine. And also you had. Well, it was. But even, yeah, even at Kitaku, they were fine until the incident. Until the noodle incident.

Until the noodle incident. Yeah. So it was October of 2011 and they were like, hey, come into our office, like the 47 PR office in Manhattan and play three hours of Skyrim. And that was the first time that I had had a video game preview where it was just like, you can play three hours straight of like basically a final build of the game. And it was crazy. You could just wander in any direction. And like I looked around me and it was a different rows of desks and people were playing the preview build.

And they could just, they were just doing all sorts of different things. Like we were all doing pretty much different things. I wound up following the intro quest because that's what it kind of wanted you to do. And I knew I would get my ass kicked if I wandered around too much. But I remember my mind was just blown. I was just like, wow, this is unlike anything I've played before in terms of like how it just scratches that itch of exploration and makes you want to just wander and go and find things and see things and whack things with a sword. In fact, you wrote that you were pumped to spend hundreds more hours immersed in Skyroom's ridiculously detailed world. I love you and I did.

Is collect better loot, max out my skills and slay that freaking dragon. I can't wait. Yeah, because I remember in that three hour previous session now, you're referring. refreshing my memory here. Remember I kept dying against that first dragon. Yeah, at the end, you're like, the dragon killed me. And it ends actually very humorously and unsatisfying. Unsatisfying. Because of the nature of the preview, I couldn't like take my time and explore or whatever. So I went, I kind of bum rushed through the whole thing. Right. And you still haven't killed the dragon to this day, right? You're still stuck on that one. Never killed a dragon. Still stuck on that dragon. It's really really tough. Just that first dragon. Hundreds of hours later. And then I went up getting a review copy and reviewing

game, which I remember was just nothing but sitting in front of a TV for like many, many hours. Like we've gone on it. Just playing Skyrim and loved it to death. Certainly I didn't realize, I didn't know at the time until later. Like I didn't, I don't think anyone really knew how much of a cultural phenomenon it would become and that it would just like enter the cultural consciousness the way it had, but we can get to that. But I remember just raving about it in my review and just being like this is one of the best games I've ever played. Like this is just like unparalleled because it was and still kind of is 10 years later, but we'll get to that.

What about you guys? Yeah, what about you, Mandy? So I was absolutely not the kind of person who played Skyrim in 2011. I didn't play any previous Skyrims. Any previous of the Skyrim. See, any previous Elder Scrolls is what I should. Any previous Elders Scrolls? Yeah.

I didn't see that's that's pathetic but yeah for real I didn't play any of the other ones and I I didn't play this kind of game at all I was strictly like competitive shooters fighting games like this was it for me and I worked at the Boston Phoenix and I would end up in situations fairly often where nobody was reviewing a really big game and I was like we got to have somebody review this like this one really matters and I'll do it if no one else is going to write this and I think this was one of those situations, because I can't think why else I would have done it. And I wrote a review, which I guess we can link where I'm basically like, this is not my shit. However, it's incredible. And here are the things about it that are incredible if it is your shit, which is, you know,

it's all you can really do as a reviewer is be like, this is what's excellent about it. And I remember being astounded by the dragons and just the fact that you could go anywhere. I remember climbing mountains by myself and just being like, wow, this looks great. And, It feels incredible to go anywhere and do anything, but I also just, it's so repetitive. And this kind of grindy RPG, I don't know, it's still not really my thing, but I've been enjoying the heck out of replaying it. But we can talk about that in a minute, like our nostalgic version of it. But in 2011, I was more like, this isn't my thing, but I respect it.

And then as it's become such a cultural phenomenon, I wouldn't say I reevaluated my take. I agreed with my past review when I read it today. But I also didn't expect it to be as big of a deal as it has been in the years since then. But your gaming taste. Haven't your gaming taste evolved since 2011? Well, yeah, that's true too. Like, I think I'm more, I'm more patient with weird RPG mechanics, but there are so many things about Skyrim that are just weird and are still weird and uncomfortable.

and like the way everyone talks and everyone's faces. I mean, it's the things that are janky about it then are still kind of janky now. Unless you install 600 mods, then it's perfect and it's the greatest game ever made, and it's fixed, and everything about it is great. What about you, Kirk? When was the first time you played it? I played it. Presumably upon release.

Upon release at Kotaku, I was a member of the staff. That was my first year at Kotaku, and I did not review it. And I was actually, I remember thinking, wow, I'm glad I didn't review this, because this is really long, and I can just kind of play it. I played a fair amount of it on Xbox 360, and I remember switching to PC, and that was one of the first times I really noticed 60 frames per second. And I was like, oh, this is a lot better on PC.

Like, it wasn't like, I guess I knew that the frame rates were a thing, but I just hadn't really thought about it before, or at least that's my memory of that. So I played a lot of it. I think I have like 197 hours on Steam in the original version, and then I played subsequent versions as well. I played a, you know, I always kind of play a little bit when it comes. I played some on Switch.

I played some in VR, which maybe I'll talk about later, and it's pretty crazy. It's actually really cool. I'm curious about how that goes. It's funny. It's just the whole game in VR. But I, you know, I had played, so I had played Arena, the Elder Scrolls Arena in like 1998 or something. That was the first game in this world that came out.

That was this open world game. And it was this huge world where you would walk around. I mean, it was like ludicrously big and very low fidelity, but really, really big. And that was the thing it had going for it. And ever since then, I kind of kept my eye on the series. I think I was like in the mall at electronics boutique or whatever and just found the arena box and was looking at it and it's like, you know, thousands of dungeons, like this huge world. And I remember playing it and being like, well, is it really like that?

And then, you know, it's actually pretty repetitive because that's the only way they could make a game that big and that, you know, that long ago. Wasn't it also procedurally generated a lot of that? the dungeons? I don't know if Arena was. I know that Daggerfall was very procedurally generated. I mean, I think that yes. Like, I think that at some point there's procedural generation.

I don't think, like, the world wasn't being procedurally generated for you as you played. But I think that maybe in Daggerfall, that was the case and I didn't play that one. So then anyways, moving on, I definitely played Morowind like in the early 2000s. That's a very cool game. That was kind of the Elder Scrolls game for me that was like

the first moments of like, wow, this open, like, emergent world just running this simulation can still be something that reacts to me, and it was very exciting. I played Oblivion when I got back into gaming in 2007, so I've kind of been there for this series throughout, and then, yeah, played the heck out of Skyrim when it came out. It took a little while for me to click with me

because the setting wasn't my favorite, the whole kind of Norse thing. I don't know, like I just wasn't that jazzed on that. I think I just really liked Moro Wind, and I'll always kind of associate this series with that. setting. But yeah, I mean, I've played a lot of it over the years and really like it and also just find it totally befuddling in some ways, especially going back to it now. Like, it's really from an interface point of view or a usability point of view, just really remarkable how bad some of it is. And also the modding scene is pretty cool. I've definitely gotten into modding

this game. I remodded my game. I downloaded Vortex. So now like the Nexus Mod manager is called Vortex. Everything has changed. I'm like the old guy coming back. to my hometown and everything has a different name. So I had to like reinstall SkyUI and all those mods, the static mesh improvement mod. And I did it. I made it all work. The Thomas, the Tank Engine mod.

You replaced the bag and. Yeah, I never did the crazy ones, just the like quality of life ones. But it's, uh, it's still Skyrim. So wait a minute. When you say the UI, you're just befuddled by how bad it is, what specifically are you talking about? Well, if you've ever installed, have either of you ever used SkyUI, this is an incredible, indispensable PC mod for this game that overhauls the whole inventory system.

No, I haven't done any ceremony. Well, the inventory system is just totally crazy. Like the hot keying system, the fact that you have two hotkeys available throughout the game, the fact that there's a shortcuts menu, but it's like very hard to navigate. The whole way that you select things and interact with things, that it's all kind of tied to the triggers, this really feels like, I mean, it is. It feels like an RPG from the era of RPGs where they're like, okay, I guess, consoles are all there is now.

So we're not going to make anything with PC in mind. We're not going to worry about complex systems. And no one had quite cracked the radial-like complexity of menus that have now just become the norm. If you play a role-playing game now on a console, you have access to all this cool stuff. You can get to all, like, play a Far Cry game. You can access all these different weapons and you can change the ammo that's in them. The radials make this so easy. Like, designers have really figured this stuff out, U.

U.S. designers. Skyrim, you just have a list of favorites. It's crazy. It's like a list with. And there's like no way of organizing and it looks so bad. It's like so hard to scan it quickly. And given how much micromanagement and like crazy crafting and dealing with just like overencumbered states and like dropping stuff and picking stuff back up, I mean, it's wild that I spent so many hours playing this game given that I had to navigate these menus. So I think part of the whole point of Skyrim and one of the reasons that it's lasted as long as it has and how it's so much appeal is because is that like there's so much.

clunky about it that you just have trained yourself to look past because of what kind of game it is, right? Because no other game is providing the world that it provides and the density that it provides and the richness that it provides. And you're kind of like, you kind of accept like the bugs and the clunky AI and the weird user interface stuff because you're just like, wow, no other game is this ambitious and trying to do all these things. So it's kind of like, all right, I'll just deal with it. And then I guess some people don't accepted and they just mod it all to make it better. But I guess the point that I'm making is that I am generally so blown away by so many other

things about Skyrim that I don't really care as much about the fact that like combat is just mashing the trigger over and over again. Of course. Or that like half a dungeons are just the same zombie enemies, like drogger enemies over and over again. Or all the fetch quests or like three soldiers are coming with you everywhere you go or you have to kill three soldiers or you have to talk to a guy who will be like, can you get me a rock? And you're like, all right.

Like that's, that's skyrim for you. Sure. But that's, but no, the fetch quests I think are part of the appeal because the thing that I enjoy, as opposed to the negative thing that you look past, the thing that I enjoy is getting sent out on an errand or just deciding, hey, I'm going to walk to this city. And then on the way, there are just five other things you find that are just totally fascinating. Like you find a town where someone is comes up. to you and has something interesting to say, or you, like, you find a lover's quarrel, or you find

some bizarre quest where you're, like, getting drunk and suddenly you wake up and you're on this, like, God mission, all sorts of just crazy stuff in this game. And there's no way to see all of it. It's, like, it's the type of thing where you're just constantly discovering new stuff. And that to me is just, like, so unparalleled in games, except for maybe there are a couple others that have done it just as well. Maybe Breath of the Wild, you could say, does it just as well. But like for me, when I'm looking for that experience in a game, there's just been nothing else like it. Yeah, I agree with you because I do feel like the appeal is it's so big that you feel as though there could always be a secret hidden in it. And that was how people would talk about it.

It would be like, oh, I discovered this weird quest and like this guy asked me to do something. And this is how it played out. And you're like, wow, I've never even been there. I've never even heard of that person. And like, that could just go on and on. And like, one of my friends found a quest or somehow ended up in this underground room that was just full of shoes, like as though people had all left their shoes behind. And he wrote this really haunting story for the Phoenix about just these shoes that he found and how the game never explained how they got there or what happened to the people who were wearing them or why. And it was just that promise of like anywhere you go, there's going to be a story or like you find a corpse and you look at what their belongings

were and you discover some mystery about them by looking into them. Like that part of it makes it feel like a real world. And that I don't feel like something as tightly put together as a Breath of the Wild or like an Assassin's Creed in the modern era. Like all of that feels very designed. And that's a compliment. But the jankiness of Skyrim makes you feel like there's more hidden in it. Or like, oh, somebody snuck this weird thing into a corner of this messy room that is Skyron. Right. Yeah. I think that there is. So yeah, to double back to the user interface for a second. I think that's something that this game does really amazingly is navigation, because there's a compass. And this is something that Bethesda Game Studios have

been doing for a long time that then caught on and more games were doing it without having a mini map in the corner and instead just showing you which direction you're pointing and then showing objects of interest. And the world is designed so well to make you always be able to see something interesting somewhere. You know, you can kind of look and be like, well, that kind of looks like something up there. Oh, there's like some fire over there. There's a cave right there. and the game trains you very early on to just think, well, I'll just go over there and see what it is. And that experience of like finding a little thing like you described, Maddie, you never know what it's going to be, but it's probably going to be delightful. And the flip side of that for me is there is this sense of mystery to the world because it's also simulated, right?

Everything, every object has its own physics. Everything is running on a little simulation engine, which is unusual. I mean, at the time and now, like a lot of games, like, it's a big difference between this and The Witcher 3, which is a lot of people said was kind of the next Skyrim. It's so different because the Witcher 3 doesn't have that, like, physics-based simulation that's running. And it doesn't make it feel as real of a world. It feels a little bit more artificial. The Witcher 3, that is. Where in Skyrim, because it's all being simulated and running, anytime the game notices me and something happens because of me or even like that magic moment when a courier runs up,

and your attention goes over to them, and they're like, hey, I'm looking for this person. And, like, they kind of do a quest thump on you. It feels like you've kind of been pointed at from on high, which is a really cool feeling. And this game, they literally do that at the beginning. Like, there's the part where they yell from the mountain and the whole world shakes, and it's because of something you did. And I think that's a really special feeling that this game regularly conjures that not many other games do. Yeah.

So, wait, which classes did you guys pick? We skipped over that, and I want to know what you guys feel. Dying to know also. Jason, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, so in the, like on my previous, I think I've only really played through it once the first time I played it. And I was mostly like sword and shield kind of traditional warrior type dude. And now I'm playing as a woman dark elf mage, which has been super fun because casting magic in this game is incredibly fun. Especially once you get gear. If you get gear that like lowers the amount of mana that you spend to cast spells, you can just

rip through enemies. It's really fun. I should do that. I feel like I should do that too. It's fun. I never have been a magic user. Me either. You can equip two spells at once. You can either do like sword and spell and do kind of a sword, spell, spell sort type build. Or you can cast two spells at once and fire on both at once and just rip enemies apart. It's so fun. I'm using like fireball in one hand and like lightning in the other and just like combining them to just own enemies. Two food groups of magic. Yeah, that's awesome. I have always played as like sort of a tank character or like a big heavy axe character. You know, like I described this in Dark Souls, how I, I'm a two-hanging axe everywhere I go. So I'm playing as a female orc. The first time I played, I don't think I played as an orc. I probably just picked a Nord. I weirdly don't remember, although I'm sure I played as a female character because I always did that then and I still do now when I can. And I think I just, I think I was just a human, which is. weird. Why wasn't I willing to be a cat or something? I

feel like I wasn't even willing to go along with the promise Skyrim was giving me in 2011. But this time I'm in orc and that's fun. That's so funny that you play a warrior and Jason, you're playing a mage. Because I always play as a thief. I always play as a sneaking character. So between the three of us, we have like the three fantasy

archetypes down. We got a good DNZ I feel like we, didn't we like do this in Destiny? Didn't we already have this conversation when we played Destiny 2? I think maybe we did. But Destiny doesn't really have classes. Oh, but no, you were a Titan and Jason, you're a Warlock, and I was a hunter. That's true.

I mean, which is the closest thing. We literally did the same thing again. It's fine. So a nice thing about Skyrim that was actually, I don't remember the particulars of Morawind or Oblivion, it's predecessors. But it was a little different is that you can make kind of cross-class builds a lot more easily because you can just sort of level up whatever you want according to the bizarre, but also kind of compelling like astral chart leveling system, which is bananas.

Which I still don't understand. I didn't then and I don't now. No, it's not great, but it also, for some reason, is iconic. So I always level up stealth and bows and also, but then also just like melee. So I just become this sort of all-purpose killing machine that, man, I mean, my whatever 100 X-hour game character is just ridiculous. Like, I got into crafting, because there's all these ways to break leveling in this game because you level up by doing the thing that you're doing. So you can like craft, I remember crafting like hundreds of. of crappy iron daggers.

Because if you do that, your crafting ability just keeps leveling up, and you can just buy the ability to craft, like, ridiculous gear. So I had this, like, Dadrick armor where I was, like, impervious to anything. And I had a sword that, like, absorbed health from my enemies.

So I was, like, healing in combat while doing damage. And then I had also a bow and the stealth ability that gave me, like, whatever, 6x damage on killing. So it was just, like, that's always been the character that I play.

And every time I start a new character, which has been many times in all these different platforms. I'm like, maybe I'll play magic this time. And I start out with like a fireball and I'm like, nah, man, I got to sneak with my bow. You guys want to hear, you guys want to hear something fun, a fun fact. Always. Skyrim's leveling system is actually inspired by or taken from Final Fantasy 2 on the NES, the kind of black sheep of the Final Fantasy games.

Because that game was the first game ever, as far as I know, where like you would build up your hit points by getting hit. You would build up your strength by hitting monsters. You would build up like that's how the leveling system worked, exactly like Skyrims. Which I think is a good thing that that has been left aside by games. Like I don't think that that's actually a very good way to level up. Even though it makes a sort of logical sense in

some sense. It's like I'm not going to get more health by being shot but I am going to get better at shooting by like practicing with a gun, right? Or whatever. Like it's some of it makes sense but there are times it's just so easy to break. Like how you can just crouch and sneak next to someone's sleeping and then just go make lunch and like you'll get points and stuff like it's a there's there's so many ways to break it which I think is actually another thing if we're trying to get at

the sort of long lasting appeal of skyrim that is probably one other thing that's appealing about this game right is that it's so easy to break it's so like there are so many cool weird sort of cul-de-sacs and avenues you can go down with this game just because it's so open-ended yeah well okay so that that brings to a point that I wanted to bring up and I'm curious to hear both of your takes on this. But the thing I remember most about Skyrim is that when I started Kataku like two months after it came out, and I remember Skyrim was one of the biggest sources of traffic for Kataku for like all of 2012. Oh my God. There was a running joke. He was like just put Skyrim in the headline. Just put Skyrim in the headline and you'll get a ton of traffic. And I think that's one of the

reason, one of the reasons that it kind of permeated the cultural consciousness was sort of, It was sort of like Minecraft had just done a couple of years earlier, where it was just a very shareable game. It was like social media was like starting to take off. People were just sharing, constantly sharing like video clips of their bugs in Skyrim and YouTube videos of like the quests they found. And because it was so massive, in addition to just like wanting to watch videos of the bugs because they're hilarious, you also wanted to go and like look for secrets and like watch videos of like people finding things you hadn't found yet. or people telling you where to find, like, all the unidentified gems, those, whatever that name is for the crown thing. I forget what it's called exactly. But like other secret things and like collectible things that you could find throughout the world.

And so that felt like it was really one of the first games that truly went viral. And I think that's how like many millions of people picked it up. Like it started with a really strong base and then just grew more and more popular as more people started talking about it. Yeah. I think so, too. I also feel like the palette for modding. I mean, we really can't overestimate the extent to which that was a huge part of it and how socially acceptable modding had become. Like, I mean, I guess the Half-Life Counter Strike era had already introduced that. It's not like people didn't already have entire games that were made out out of a mod of an existing game. That was already a thing. But the Skyrim era was like that, but for people who liked medieval fantasy and also joking around. within the world of medieval fantasy and that potential for humor and goofiness and anachronisms and all of that just it's like made for viral online content and sharing stuff in a way that really worked for the early 2010s and led to the period of time that

we're in now where people still tell jokes about Skyron. It's a funny game even aside from the glitches. It's a funny game like intentionally funny in addition to being unintentionally funny. So I think that those two things are very true. Modding certainly, and I think it's cool that you both have played Half-Life now because there is a similarity between those two games, and it makes sense that you mentioned it, Maddie, because they're both very simulation-based games.

They both have these physics systems that are just running on their own, and then the game is taking place within them, and that leads to sort of smallness and jankiness in some ways, but it also opens things up to modification in a way that other games maybe don't, and this game really was open to mods. But also, I mean, I think that this, even beyond social media and memeableness, like, Game of Thrones premiered in 2011. Like, it premiered just months before this game came out. And I think that that is a big part of it.

Like, I think there were just a lot of normal Xbox 360 owning people who, like, watched an ad on TV and the ad shows you in first person fighting a dragon. And they were like, well, I want to play that game. Like, that looks like what video games were always supposed to be when I was a kid. And they just bought it and, like, played it on Xbox. And, like, you know, were the reason that it sold however many bejillion copies. Yeah, that's a good point. Very game and thronesy. I mean, I remember a lot of people I knew where I had nothing in common with them otherwise,

but Skyrim was the game they were playing. Like, so many conversations that I had with just normies in my day to day or, like, people I just could never find a conversation topic with. And, oh, you're playing Skyrim? Okay, great. We can talk about becoming a werewolf for an hour. And, like, it's going to be fine. Like, this is the thing we can bond over.

And also, it wasn't even a fun party activity, but the number of times that I watched somebody play the first three hours of Skyrim, like, in replaying it, I was like, I'm so familiar with this, it's crazy. Like, yes, I played more of the game, but I feel as though the first three hours of Skyrim are just burned into my brain for all time because I saw people be like, oh, let's try a new character. Like, you just get up to the dragon and you're like, all right, whatever. We're like, let's go try being a cat this time or something. And like, I'm going to try being magic. And, like, you just see the same exact things. And you start repeating the lines along with everybody. And it's just, I mean, it's not good or bad.

It's just like a neutral experience, like summer camp or something that everybody was going through at the same time in that era. Can I share my take on the beginning? Please. The guy who gets executed is just got the worst luck. If that guy had just like, remember? Remember how he, so what he does, I think I wrote a Kataku article about this, is he's like getting all shirdy with the guards, and he's like, oh, whatever, just get it over with and kill me. And he like runs forward, and then they're like, okay, and they kill him.

And it's like, if you just hadn't done that, if you just gone with the normal timing of things, the dragon would have shown up. I guess maybe it wouldn't have because you're the dragon born. I do think that the mainstream success of this game is remarkable because it's so, I mean, it's, I guess Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. Like this was a period of time in which like pretty nerdy shit was becoming mainstream in a way that, you know, it hadn't been maybe 10 years before that. Well, so, okay, so, well, sorry, finish your thought. And then I have a thought on that. Oh, I just think it's interesting that this game allows for like being a huge nerd because of the like the depth of the lore, how really kind of thought out all of the stuff with just like the other nations and the politics. And it's like pretty lore nerdy stuff.

But you can just play this game and run around and like hit dragons with an axe and not really worried too much about that stuff and just treat it as a kind of goofy side show. So it kind of has it both ways. Like it appeals to many kinds of players as a result. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, so I actually think that what Skyrim does that's pretty brilliant is that it makes it possible to play through the entire game without understanding any of the lower or caring about any of the lower or it's like the crunchiness of it is very optional, which is like similar to what has made other. things appealing. I mean, you can watch Lord of the Rings without caring that much about the lower. You can watch Game of Thrones. I mean, you'd kind of have to like really keep track of all the

characters. But, a little less with Game of Thrones. Yeah. And, but you don't really have to know, like the Targaryen dynasty to appreciate the Game of Thrones. But with Skyrim especially, I mean, you look at its predecessors, like Baldur's Gate, for example, and a lot of those games, a lot of the PC RPGs of like the 2000s in the 1990s are reading massive walls of text all the time. Like, what you have to do and that's what you enjoy about it presumably. As opposed to Skyroom where like skipping text is really easy. You don't really have to have a lot of conversations. Every conversation takes place in one sentence dialogue lines. So it's very, very like brevity is is very much there and it's very brisk and quick and the pacing is good in general. And yeah, I mean, it's just not the type of thing.

Like you can enjoy it just as much if you're going around reading every single book you find on every bookshelf. Or if you just like want to go and steal horses and kill civilians. Which you can do a notable thing about this game is I had all these books in my inventory when I started my game. As I was like, oh yeah, there's just all these bucks. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty crunchy. Man, it's such a dense game. But it's a dense game, but it's also a game where you can like go around robbing people and sticking buckets on their heads and stuff. Yeah, but you can also.

build a house and do the whole Sims player thing. And that is a whole other aspect of playing the game that was also huge. Which was DLC, we should know. That was an expansion. Yeah, it was a DLC. Well, yes. But I just remember that being such a massive part of the game's appeal as well to like a diverse subsection of players where it's like, oh, you don't really give a shit about fighting dragons and like sword and sorcery fantasy stuff. Doesn't matter.

You can just date people in this game. game and have them move into your house and have little soap opera dramas with them or like adopt kids and like get them outfits and like the goofiness of the simulation of Skyrim is also just hilarious in the way that the Sims is hilarious and that also appealed to tons and tons of people. I mean, just the fact that this game truly had everything, it like became such a four quadrant game in that way because it was like literally any kind of video game you might like. there's some version of that in Skyroom that you can enjoy. Yeah, even if you don't, even if you don't love the snow, you can go to like the city with all the waterfalls in it.

Yeah. Or you could go to, if you are into the snow, you could go camp out and become a member of the Mage College. Or you could go to like frigging Minas Tirith solitude and like live on there. It's got such a variety despite the fact that it's in the kind of bleak Norse area that Kirk you might not be a huge fan of. It does have a lot of variety. Well, and I think that was something that I found as I played the game more, was like, oh, okay, like, there's actually, this is just another Elder Scrolls game. Like, it's got this Norse backdrop, and that's maybe the least interesting thing about it is, like, the political machinations of the storm cloaks versus the empire. And it's kind of like, whatever, who cares?

And even the dragon storyline is sort of not that interesting. It's okay. But, like, the dragons aren't actually as cool, of course, as they were promised to be in the trailer. Oh, can I ask you guys? I think you both played the dragon fight. Was the dragon always talking? in that first fight when you kill it? Yeah, I think so.

At the end, yeah. He's like, blah, blah, blah. When I killed him, he's like, no. I was like, is the dragon talking with the fuck? He calls you Dovakin. Yeah, he calls you, he always called you Dovakin, I think. I think I never noticed it before. When you first heard it.

I was just like, am I high? Like, is the dragon actually talking? Well, the problem, I mean, one of the things about Skyrim is that like if 40 people are talking at once, like if it's, uh, what's her name and the soldiers are all awesome. I kept thinking it was a guard being like, he's bigger than I've ever seen or whatever, you know, the things that they say all the thing. Yeah, no, the dragon's talk in this game. It's very silly. It is just, it's all part of it.

There's a lot of just fun dialogue. I mean, obviously, I mean, like I said, this was one of the first games really to go viral in social media. And Arrow to the knee became the joke that. But I was actually going to say, no, no, no, I was just bringing that up in the context of like, this is a hilarious game in so many ways. And like how hilarious that line is as we all agree and it's still funny now and we all say it every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I had a moment that was hilarious where like I just happened to walk by this bandit camp and like this bandit comes up to me and it's like, oh, you're going to regret coming by here or something like that or like you came to the wrong place and I just turned around and like immediately zaping. And it's just so unintentionally hilarious.

Yeah. I had a moment where I like walked up to a woman who I guess was like fighting something that I used. didn't see. And she was like already annoyed at me for not helping her. Like I didn't even see what she was doing. And she was like, yeah, thanks a lot, wanderer. Whatever. And I was like, I don't even know who you are. Like, what is happening? And there, that also lends a certain realism, like the humor of that is like, oh, all these NPCs are walking around with their own lives and like I can either intervene or not. Yeah, they think about you. It's fun. Yeah. Well, to your point, to your point earlier, Maddie, this is such a perfect dinner table game. Like I've had so many conversations about like everyone just sharing their Skyrim stories. And that, that to me is really

what has made it last so long and reach however many 30 million players or whatever. Who are still playing it now. I still meet people who are like Skyrim is the only game I play. Like I just only play Skyrim. There was someone on my Steam friend list who was just playing it. I mean, I guess maybe because of the anniversary, but there was someone playing it last night. I was like, I'm going to play some Skyrim. Whoa, there's somebody playing it right now that I know. Well, they're releasing a new version. Yeah. Yeah. Thursday. So today. this comes out will be the anniversary edition version.

Right, right. Yeah, I think there's a really interesting sort of frision between the intentional humor and the unintentional humor. Playing it, I'm struck by, like, so many of the line deliveries. I mean, they sound like Hansen-France, yeah, which is I know maybe a dated reference that our younger listeners won't get. But it's like, it sounds like someone doing a joke Arnold Schwarzenegger character. Every single one, and they all sound identical. And they all sound identical. And it's so funny.

And like, I don't know if that was meant to be funny. There's a part where the guy gets, he gets really mad at the other guy. He's like, you're only talking about, like, our most deeply held beliefs. And, like, it's just the way he's, I was like, what? Like, who gave that line read and was it meant to be this funny? Or even the Fusraudad, this dragon ability that you get that is just, like, ludicrously funny at every turn because it sends people flying. Like, they didn't give you, like, a fireball or whatever.

They gave you a thing that sends physics objects flying through the air. And you're always accidentally hitting the button when you're, like in a store or whatever and then like blowing the whole place up. And it's like it's like they wanted you to be having these unintended ridiculous shenanigans, even though I can never quite tell and I actually find that very beguiling. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. And Fuster does in and of itself a really silly thing to say. And yet I also remember like going to conventions at the time and people would just shout it along with the cake is a lie and like, why, why did we allow for that as a society? I don't know. But it was just that. I mean, why? Why? Why? Why?

We love for gamers in general. Great point. Let's put it into it. You know, happy, happy birthday, Skyrim. It's all over for you. This is it. Kirk, gamers really were the first mistake. In fact, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve encountered a gamer and God kicked them out because they gave the gamer.

God banned them. That was the first, that was the first ban. The ban hammer. Yeah, God took out the bandhammer. God brought the banhammer, the holy banhammer, as it is referred to in the texts. Can we talk? I know we're running out of time, but we have to talk about Skyrim's legacy because Skyrim went on to just inspire every single game of the last decade.

Like, suddenly, after Skyrim, every single game was an open world. And that persists to this day. Like, the open world phenomenon started in Skyrim. Before that, there were games. There were certainly games where, like, you could go. You could explore a big map and stuff. But it wasn't... I mean, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, you can't trace it all to Skyrim.

But yes, it did... It further cemented the popularity of that style of game. Skyrim was what made everything in open world in more of, well, okay, fine. I mean, yes, there were a lot of GTA clones. There were a lot of games that were like you could go in any direction. But Skyrim was really the game that made every single genre of game go open world because it showed that you couldn't, you didn't just have to be this like crime simulator GTA style of game to do that sort of thing.

I don't know. Maybe it's, it's me just correlating instead of causating here. But it felt like everyone, like Skyrim would. Guns was the whole pitch. Yeah. Everybody was just trying, especially RPGs. Yeah. RPG suddenly had to be open world.

Yeah, I feel like Breath of the Wild is the obvious example here, but I also think that the modern day Assassin's Creed games, like, it's not as though Assassin's Creed didn't have some simulation aspects and some role-playing game aspects. That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about the to-do list of it all and like finding quests that you feel as though maybe not everyone discovered. Like that feels very Skyrimi, which is a compliment. I mean, that's what's fun.

and also deeply overwhelming to me every time I play one of those and also is a feeling that has returned to me as I've been playing Skyrim and being like, oh my God, it's so big. There's so much to do. I'm so stressed out. I need to stop.

I kind of like, I guess I see Skyrim as on one of two open world sort of tracks. And I think of Assassin's Creed is generally on the other one, which is it's kind of the Grand Theft Auto and the Bethesda Game Studios tracks where the Grand Theft Auto one is where it's much more

organized. There's kind of a world where there are quest givers, they're on the map, you know, the way Grand Theft Auto looks. And the big leap that Assassin's Creed made to Assassin's Creed 2 was like very much becoming a Grand Theft Auto game. And then the series sort of started going in a more open-ended direction where you could maybe explore and find things. But even then, they put everything on the map. And it's really kind of meant to just be a world that you move around in going from point to point on a preset map where the Bethesda Game thing has always been sort of, well, who knows what's over there? Like, who knows what's down there?

Like, this is all very mysterious. And it's also, to come back to the simulation thing, it's way more simulated. And so there's just a feeling that this game is just kind of running along on its own, because it is. And then as you explore it, there's way more of that kind of what's over here, what's over there. And I mean, Bethes's other games, like Fallout, the Fallout series, and especially in New Vegas, they scratch that itch for me in a way that Assassin's Creed doesn't. And then what was remarkable to me about Breath of the Wild was that it really did.

feel like Skyrim in that way specifically. It was like this big simulation and there's all this physics and like everything is kind of running on all these little systems and then you just walk around and it's like well what's that over there? I don't know. Let's go find out and then you find a whole crazy hidden like snow challenge in the mountains that no one maybe would have found if they hadn't gone over there. Although the one thing Skyrim does over Breath of the Wild I think is rewarding you with cool stuff like Breath of the Wild that's the one thing Breath of Wild lacks is like getting cool gear. You can get some weapons. that break after a little while

and some of them are cool and stuff, but you're rarely getting some sweet piece of magical armor that breaks the game because, like we said before, like Maddie, you were pointing out, Breath of the Wild is, like, so polished and design that it can't allow for,

like, game-breaking stuff or, like, other, like, a wand that has, like, random magical powers, like, the way that Skyrim has. That is true. You break the game in Breath of the Wild in kind of different ways, right? Like, you figure out a weird way

to manipulate something, but it isn't like, which I find so appealing. Like in Skyrim, like crafting bananas armor, just spending hours leveling up to be able to craft. Like, I actually find that very engrossing. This is a different kind of gameplay,

but I do like that it allows that. Something I really would love to see from the Elder Scroll 6 when the 40 years that actually comes out is more inspiration from, is inspiration from Divinity Original Sin 2 and more stuff that lets you break the simulation in cool ways.

I think that's the kind of next iteration for this type of game. I think all games should take more inspiration from Divinity Original Sin 2. That's true. All right, well, Skyrim, happy birthday to you. You did it.

You turned 10. You're the biggest game ever, maybe, or one of them. And I had a really good time playing it. I was playing earlier today. I was like, I kind of want to keep playing Skyrim. This is... Yeah, I might still play it.

I might keep playing it. Collecting some herbs. I have so many other things I have to play. But I was like, this is still a good game. So that's remarkable on its own. You're just clicking on an herb, and then it goes in your pocket. And then you click on like 60 more herbs.

It's nothing like it. Nothing like it. Yeah, got to get those herbs. All right, let's take a break, and then we'll be back for one more thing. Hi, it's me, Dave Hill, from before. Here to tell you about my brand new show on Maximum Fun, the Dave Hill Good Time Hour, which combines my old Maximum Fun show,

Dave Hill's podcasting incident with my old radio show, the goddamn Dave Hill show, and a one new futuristic program from the future. If you like delightful conversation with incredible guests, technical difficulties, and actual phone calls from real-life listeners. You've just hit a street called easy. I'm also joined by my incredible co-host, the boy criminal Chris Gersbeck. Say hi, Chris.

Hey, Dave, it's really great. That's enough, Chris. And New Jersey Chicken Rancher, Des. Say hi, Des. Hey, Dave. Dave Hill Good Time Hour. Brand new episodes every Friday on Maxim Fun. Plus, the show's not even an hour.

It's 90 minutes. Take that, stupid rules. We nailed it. Mr. Ripple, man, what are you doing? I'm just taking one last look at my coworkers. Every journey comes to an end. Remember, PLEC, the space will be with you, always. Sorry, who are you again?

There's Master Kiara on there. Oh, right, right, right, sorry. Just calling in. Friendships will be tested. Do you have to do it. You have to shoot, PLEC. Okay. You shot him.

Destinies will be fulfilled. I've become a complete bird. I'm flying! I'm flying! On April 28th, the saga starts concluding. Guys, we don't have a choice. We have to put on a show. We can do it in no barn. We've got the costumes.

We've got a stage. We can do it, you guys. Mission to Zix, the final season, on maximum fun And we're back for one more thing Jason Schreier, what's your one more thing? Are you guys Breaking Bad fans Are both of you into Breaking Bad?

Yes. Where I watched the show. Kirk, you, where Maddie, you were not. I'm mixed on the show. I mean, I think it was very, very good when it was good, and then it also had some low points, but I liked it. And I like Better Call Saul.

So there's a show called Your Honor on Showtime that I just finished watching. So far it's one season. They're coming out with another one at some point. It stars Brian Cranston. Brian Cranston, stop me if you've heard this one before, is a good guy who is forced to make really bad decisions and over the course of the series

just gets progressively more evil in different ways and subverts, subverts justice to his own means. The premise of the show, Your Honor, it came out last year, I believe, is when it started. It was during the pandemic, and they have a couple of coronavirus references in it. The premise is Brian Cranston plays a judge whose son hits and kills a guy,

guy and then runs away from it like in a moment he like punches him yeah like with a car oh sorry with his car with his car it's way funny it's like a hit and run it's like a hit and run it's like he just like punches him so hard he drives into this bike kills a guy runs away and he gets home and brian grantson's character is like you got to turn yourself in until they realize that the person who was killed is the son of this infamous mob boss um in new orleans and brian grants's character realizes that if he turns him, if the kid turns himself in, he's going to be killed by this mob.

This sounds like a TV show premise to me, Jason. It sure is a TV show premise. So for the next 10 episode, for the whole series, essentially, Brian Cranston's a sudden new job is to use his position as a judge to make sure that his son is protected. And like, he does some pretty effed up S to make that happen. Thank you for not swearing. that's yeah well we're a family friendly friendly show over here so essentially it is it is like breaking bad 2.0 it's like a new except it's not as good as breaking bad so i will say that like people are getting really excited being like oh my god more breaking bad it is not nearly as good as um the creation of vince villigan and crew and you should go watch better call saul if you want something that's really more breaking bad but this show is fun to watch i mean i enjoyed it uh i wouldn't say it was great television or anything but having just watched through all of it um it's just watch through all of it um it's just

just great to see Brian Granson on screen. Like, that's really the reason to watch is just seeing him doing more of his just insanely good acting and, and plumbing the depths of depravity in the way that he does. He's good at being stressed out. He plays stressed out very well. Yeah. He's good at everything. I mean, having watched Malcolm in the middle, he's good at like, he's pretty stressed out on that show too. He is. Yeah, different, more of a comedy bench there. He's good at both drama and comedy stressed out. He can play stressed out in both directions. He has all the frequencies of stressed out. really does. He's got the entire spectrum of stress.

So yeah, your honor, showtime. Worth checking out if you got nothing else to watch, but like don't drop everything and watch it or anything. Yeah, drop everything and watch billions, but not this show, whatever he says. Oh yeah, I finished billions on, I don't know if I told me. I can't believe you didn't put that on the list, but it's fine. We'll talk about it some other time.

Yeah, next week. Next week. Maddie, what's your one more thing? Mine is also something that I watched. It is the 1984, Eddie Murphy Triumph, Beverly Hills. which I had never seen before this weekend. What made you decide to watch us? Okay, so people have probably noticed that when I'm playing too many games that we're already talking about on the show, I will pick a movie.

It's because Dean and I usually watch at least one movie every single week. And that means we watch a lot of different stuff because we always have to have a movie a week. And I just keep my lists updated on my streaming services. And this one's on HBO Max. if people want to watch Beverly Hills Cop, which I recommend, and it was on my list. And she was like, why is Beverly Hills Cop on here? I saw this movie a lot as a teenager. I don't know why this is here. And I was like, oh, I've never seen it. And she was like pressing play instantly because it's the greatest movie ever. And this movie, okay, I have been very upfront about the fact that

I don't care for cops on this show as an institution, not as individuals, but as an institution. Beverly Hills Cop is a cop movie. It is presenting cops as heroic. So that's That's tough for me. However, it is also a hilarious fish-out-of-water story in which Eddie Murphy plays a Detroit cop who is trying to solve a murder in Beverly Hills, where cops are not only racist, but by the book and ridiculously ludicrously square. And every white person in this movie is made a buffoon of by Eddie Murphy in so many charming and wonderful ways that you just can't not enjoy it. And it is an intensely political movie. It's unafraid to be.

It talks about racism in the police force openly. That is the central problem, which Eddie Murphy faces at every turn. It is both hilarious and poignant. And I love Axel F, the song. And everyone who has ever seen this movie before should watch it again. And also, if you have never seen it, you should watch it because I laughed out loud and enjoyed myself a lot. It's great. Beverly Hills top.

Also one of the best theme songs. Yes, Axelette. Amazing song. Girl Fultramire, the great. Oh, that's the name of it. It's so good. It's so good. Yeah, that movie, so I, when I was a kid, I watched Beverly Hills Cop too a lot.

And we were talking before the show and I could talk forever about Beverly Hills Cop and Eddie Murphy. This was such an interesting period in Eddie Murphy's career because it's right when he was blowing out. Yes. This is his first solo movie. Like he was in 48 hours, which was like a double two-hander. Well, not a two-hander, but you know what I mean. Yeah. And a trading place.

role. And Beverly Hills Cop was like... This was before coming to America? Yeah, I think so. And then this was like the movie that made him a film star. Not to say he wasn't already a comic star, but like Beverly Hills Cop was like the beginning of years of Eddie Murphy being like the most bankable comedian ever in anything. And all of his stuff in this time period is like incredible. And I've seen a lot of it, just not this stuff. And it's funny. So I saw Beverly Hills Cop too so many times. But I've never, I've only seen Beverly Hills Cop. Cop won like once or twice. They're very, very different movies. If you watch the sequel, I'll be

curious what you think, because it's like way more of just the spoiler plate action movie, where the first one has definitely got a lot more going on, sort of like it was right after trading places, which is also like kind of this like class commentary movie. It was just an interesting time for him. This makes me want to rewatch Beverly Hills Cup and I agree about the theme music. You should. It's a joy. It's just a delight. Eddie Murphy Man in the 80s. He was unstoppable. All right. Well, my one more thing is a very specific thing about death stranding, which I'm still playing. I want to talk about the zip lines in this game because no one told me about the zip lines.

And the zip line, this is just zip line simulator 2021 to me now. I am obsessed with the zip lines in this game. And it's just got me thinking about this kind of thing, like how there will be one thing in a game that actually kind of maybe breaks the game that I become so fixated on and start doing over and over again and it just becomes the whole game to me. And I don't think I'm alone in this. With anyone listening to this who played Death Stranding probably got us into zip lines as I did. So I'm just going to describe them really quick and explain how they work.

So this game, Death Stranding, it's a PlayStation game. I'm playing the third version of it. It's now on PS5. And you're this guy, San Porter Bridges, and you walk across long landscapes, carrying lots and lots of packages to deliver them. And that's really the bulk of the game. There's terrible combat and mediocre stealth, but that's kind of whatever. And ghosts.

There's stealth against the ghosts. You shoot your own blood into ghosts. You know, some stuff happens. There's magical realism, but like it doesn't make sense and you don't have to worry about it. You're just an Amazon delivery guy. Right. And yet, it is an extremely engrossing game. I'm finding it just like really calming and fun to play, especially now that I've found the ziplines.

So you unlock more abilities as you go. You get like robot legs and make you stronger. It gets easier and easier to carry stuff pretty quickly. But then about, I don't know, maybe 10, 12 hours into the game, they introduced the zip lines. system. What a Zipline is, is you build these things, you just get a sort of build anything kit that you can carry around with. You can carry a whole bunch of these. So you can build all these structures out in the world. And that's a big part of the game is like other people's structures appear in your world when you connect that region to the ghost internet. Anyways.

And then those things appear. So you like can put stuff in your world that'll turn up in other people's games and sometimes just people's stuff appears in your game and it makes your life a lot easier. And I never cared about building anything for this whole first part of the game. I'm kind of in this whole big main area. Didn't care. Why would I build a bridge? Whatever. I'm just going to walk there.

I'll just get a motorcycle and drive there. Now, though, the ziplines change everything. So you build this thing that looks kind of like a football, what's it called, Jason, that you kick the uprights. It looks like football uprights. The goalposts? The goalposts. So you build this thing, and it's these big goalposts, and you walk up to it, and you press a button, and it, like, bends down and picks you up.

And then you're up, like, 10 feet above the air hanging on this, like, electrified wire with all your baggage and everything you're carrying, you're just hanging in the air. And then you can just any other zip line that's in sight that you've built, you know, up to like 300 meters away, you just select that and you press a button. And then it's just like, boom, and you just go flying through the air on this wire.

Sam, the guy you're playing as Norman Reed is, he'll just be like, woo, he's flying through the air. And you just like fly through the air across this area that had previously been very onerous and difficult to walk across. And you can build these things. So you unlock these right at the same time as you reach the mountain zone, which is like really like mountains. And this SkyRum actually has really got me thinking about it because so much of SkyRum is like the game of kind of mantling up to a place you're not supposed to get. Like just pressing forward and hitting jump at the like rock until you finally find a purchase.

Like that's this whole thing. And Death Stranding kind of makes a whole video game out of that. And then I spend so much time climbing up to the highest point and then building a zip line because you like look. down and you can see all the ziplines you've built and your zipline network is like stretching across the mountains and it honestly starts to feel like lighting the torches of Gondor in the Lord of the Rings like like I start to hear the you know ba-bba-bba-b-ba-ba-da-da and I'm like yes like see my zip line network and I'm like you know zooming around and I'm just doing deliveries everywhere I've found it so satisfying and I don't care about the story I almost don't want to keep playing

the game because I'm just going to get into the whenever the next act and like there's murk everywhere and I'm not in the mountains anymore. I just want to like build ziplines and like connect every single delivery point with zip lines and then do all the deliveries. So that's what death stranding has become for me but I'm finding it a very calming and a satisfying thing to do for a few hours every few days. So zip lines. It sounds like someone should make just like a road trip across America like delivery game with all the cool equipment and tools and stuff like with none of the other kushima nonsense. Just like the version of it that's Soothcore, as Kirk said last week about unpacking,

like the version that's truly just delivering stuff. And there's not the ghosts. There's not any of the stressful parts. It's just deliveries. Oops, all deliveries. That would be cool. Though the overcoming of the stress is like this is very feels like subnotica to me, another game I played this year, where like I do really like games where it's an difficult,

challenging world where you then build infrastructure to the point where the world is like completely easy to move through. that is a very satisfying kind of game to me, and that's really what Death Stranding is. Ultimately, it's just also got like, you know, 10-minute cutscenes about the ghost internet, and, like, you know, Guillermo del Toro is walking around with, like, stishes across his head, like being weird and creepy and being voiced by some guy who isn't him. So it's also got that. You just kind of have to put up with that for the sweet zipline action.

So anyways, Death Stranding. It's a good game. Death Stranding. Death Stranding. It is. That's certainly true. All right, well, this has been Triple Click. Thank you all for listening. Yeah, happy birthday to Skyrim. I can't believe I'm going to go, like, spend another 40 hours playing Skyrim,

but I feel like I totally am. I'm at least going to spend another hour or two. It's good. It's good. What if I like Skyrim now? I don't know. That's never going to happen. Yeah, what if you like Skyrim now?

It's been 10 years. You're allowed to like things you didn't. There's really nothing quite like just finding something in the corner of the map and you're like, wow, this is a cool, cool little story here. That's true. Well, I will see the two of you next week. See you next week. Bye.

Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun podcast network. And if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us

by becoming a member at Maximumfund. or join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artist-owned, audience supported.