Triple Click - Triple Play: Baldur's Gate 3

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Maddy, Kirk, and Jason put on their Gauntlets of Ogre Power and jump into Baldur's Gate 3, one of the hottest (and best) games of the year. They talk about this incredible new adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, look in awe at the game's tremendous scope, and just generally rave about their time with it all.One More Thing:Kirk: “Country Music’s Race Problem” - Into It with Sam Sanders feat. Tressie McMillan CottomMaddy: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdyJason: Silicon ValleyLINKS:Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin 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

A true soul like you has been chosen by the absolute, but you don't have to choose it back. You've got plenty of other romance options. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we go deep into Baldur's Gate 3. How did each of our very different characters handle the disagreement between the druids, teaflings, and goblins? Have we made any choices we regret? I'm Maddie Myers.

I'm Jason Shrier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton and hello. Hello. It's us again. We're back. Yep, here we are. We're back. How are you guys?

We're ready to go. The party is reunited. We're ready for battle. There are only three of us, even though Baldr's Gate allows us to have four people in the party. That's true. We're playing on hard mode. It doesn't matter. We've chosen to strike out with three.

Well, one of our party members rolled a one and passed away. So it's just the three of us now. Wow, Kirk's bringing back the foley of the dice roll there. That sounded really good that time. I got my D20 here. and I'm just going to be rolling this thing all episode. I feel like we can have some stat rolls maybe when we talk about the game we're talking about. But before that, Maddie, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about our show?

Before we even get all crunchy and get into the stat rolls of it, let's talk about all the other things we've got coming down the pike, which let's say you already know the drill. You already know because you're a maximum fun listener and subscriber, and you already know that we release monthly bonus episodes. I won't even explain how to do it, but hypothetically you would go to maximum fund.org slash join, but like you already know that

and you know that we are going to do a bonus episode about the legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. That is our monthly bonus episode. I'm so excited to talk about it. I've played so much Zelda, significantly more Zelda than any other game I played this year and it's getting a little sad. But one of these days I'm going to beat Gannadorf

And then I'm going to talk to you to about Zelda. Before that, though, for the main feed for everybody, we're going to talk about StarCraft 2 next week. But why did I say that? Because first, I do actually need to say Maximum Fun Doric slash Join again. Because I try to say the URL twice. Like just in case people didn't hear it, which I know everyone does every week.

Like everyone knows we're on Maximum Fun. They know it's a co-op. They know it's like a worker-owned co-op and that they love Max Fun shows and they love Triple Click and they love supporting us. But what if I said the URL too quickly? I'd say a second time. Maximum fun, daughter slash join. Pay five bucks a month, get a monthly bonus episode.

But what are we talking about this week, Kirk? Well, we're talking about Baldersgate 3. Yay. Amazing new game that just came out, or at least I think it's amazing, that we have been building up to for two episodes now. And ordinarily, I would write some sort of big preamble with all of this information on the series, on the history of the Balders Gate franchise

and how it incorporated D&D. But you know what? We did that last week. That was what last week's episode was all about. So I'll just say that it is a new role-playing game that's not on PC. It's coming to PlayStation 5 a little bit later. We have all been playing it.

We started playing a little bit early with codes provided by Larian, though the review window for this game was very short, which is one reason that you won't see that many authoritative reviews yet, probably even as you're listening to this, but we've played varying amounts, and we're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about pretty much a lot of Act 1, I think. Jason is well past that I know.

I'm near the end of Act 1. We won't go too far past maybe the first two-thirds. I'll say just the Goblin Camp, the Druid Circle, the general environment there for anyone playing the game. We're going to talk about quests, different outcomes, things that can happen, party members. But that's it because, you know, we know a lot of people haven't played much farther than that, and we haven't either. So I want to know what the two of you were thinking of this game. We're going to roll initiative. So I'm going to roll first.

I rolled a seven. Jason's initiative roll. Oh, Jason rolled a 13. Wow. Maddie also rolled a 13. But Maddie has didn't run the episode last week. So she gets a plus one because, you know, she's just been, she's been given a plus one. So Maddie actually gets a 14.

So, Maddie, you get to go first. Great. How much have you played? What are you thinking of Baldersgate 3? I feel like as of maybe an hour ago, I finally started to understand the combat in this game. But we'll get to that. I have played my steam clock says 10 hours, but I feel like that's a lie. And I've played 20. I feel like the steam clock is not accurate on this game. The steam clock is almost always high, I think. But go ahead. Well, not the steam clock. Sorry, the in-game Baldersgate clock where it tells me my save file.

I feel like that is not true because it doesn't count all the times that I have replayed a conversation or interaction in order to get a different outcome or loaded a previous save. And then it saves over that and it tells me how long that save is. Who's to say how long I've played Baldur's Gate 3? I don't know. I'm excited to talk about all the different choices that I made in the Goblin Camp when I finally got there. What are you thinking of it? I'm digging it. I am still really overwhelmed by it in some ways that I would.

would guess the two of you are not, mostly just because this is my first Larian game, and there's a lot about it that's fiddly. I talked about this last week just from playing the first two to three hours and even 10 hours in, I'm still learning a lot about the game. But I've finally played enough that I dig the story and I feel like I'm getting to know the characters and I'm designing my like She-Holk-ass calf-work character that I'm playing as, and I feel like I know her, and I like that feeling. I just met a devil guy named Raphael who tried to get me to make a deal with him. Very sexy devil guy. A very sexy devil guy, but I don't trust him. I like how, for some reason I don't. I like how many characters and choices the game throws at me. That sounds like a vague statement,

but really it is just the way that this game operates. It feels like things are constantly being thrown at your face and you just have to try to keep up. It's like real life. It's very chaotic. I don't know. I'm enjoying it. I think I'm a little scared of it sometimes because I worry that I'm going to screw up my entire game and like accidentally kill an entire village of people if I let them down. But that's how this video game works. It's like D&D. You can lose your entire character. And yeah, I don't know. I want to hear from you too. I feel like you two know a lot more about layering games than I do. And I'm just like on a rocky cliff side like trying to hurdle my way up being like, I don't know. I guess I'm not going to make a deal of the devil, but I still got a worm in my head. I don't know what's going on. I just got here, and I don't know any of these guys. That's my vibe when I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3. That's kind of a good way to play.

Jason, you have played quite a bit more, I gather. Yes. How much have you played in? And what are you thinking? Oh, man. Okay, so, yeah, I'm up to the titular city of Baldur's Gate, which is pretty far in the game. Wow, that's very fun. My steam counter, I just looked at my steam counter, and it says 52.

hours, but I think about 10 hours of that was early access. So really, it's closer to 40 on this current playthrough. Yeah, I'm just, I'm also kind of overwhelmed by the game in a very good way. It's a very, it's mind-boggling. It boggles the mind that this game was created and then it exists. I think the best way to describe it is really that they just kind of have achieved what they were going for in that it is the perfect recreation or the best recreation of Dungeons and Dragons that I've ever seen from a video game in the sense that it feels like you are in conversation with the Dungeon Master who is reacting to all of your choices and giving you just as many options as you might have in a D&D game. I mean, anyone who's played D&D,

you kind of, if you haven't played D&D, you almost think of it as like this world of infinite possibility where you can just be like, I'm going to go and jump off a cliff. and then fly into a gang of bug bears or whatever. Like you can just kind of make things up on the fly, and that's a little bit part of it. But really, what you're doing is you're kind of in conversation with the DM, and you really want to go along with what they have prepared for you. So in practice, when you're actually playing,

you really only have a few options at any given moment. And that's what this game recreates. Like, it legitimately feels like you're sitting down and playing Dungeons and Dragons with these incredibly talented, like, well-resourced developers who have spent six. years making a campaign for you. And that itself is just like such a tremendous achievement. I don't even know what to make of it. I guess another good way to sum up my thoughts on this game is that I'm deliberately not doing everything I see, not doing every possible quest, not doing everything that

you can do in any given map, because I know that pretty soon after finishing the game, I'm going to play it a second time and I don't want to burn out and not, not, I want to have stuff to see on my second play-through when I can go through different possibilities and see what happens if I side with the goblins instead of the druids and all that other stuff. And the fact that I'm already planning for my second play-through is a pretty good sign for this game, I think. Yeah, I love it. Nice. I agree. I feel pretty much the same way. So I've played my game clock says 26 hours. It's probably more like 30. I'm still in act one. I'm doing everything in act one. So I'm really like I completed every single side quest. I've filled out the whole map. There's so much. There are so many hidden areas.

There's so many little side quests items you find that kick off whole quests, a cursed book that you'll find in some hidden basement that has a whole side quests associated with it. A really cool mirror that you can talk to that you have to kind of trick into opening up. I don't know. That's just one little area that I discovered and I totally could have missed. So there's so much in this game and it feels similar to Divinity Original Sin 2 in that way, where in that game as well, I really tried to do everything in part because the leveling curve is so tough in that game. It gets so hard so quickly that doing everything is the best way to kind of level up and keep your level appropriate. That hasn't felt quite as crucial in this game, though it has been very hard. At least some of the

optional bosses that I've fought have been really hard. But mostly, I just, I want to do everything. And it's interesting. I mean, I'm doing everything. and yet I still don't feel that I'm seeing everything because, like you mentioned, Jason, almost every single thing that you do has a variety of paths through it and can be tackled in a number of different ways and usually has one or two major different ways that you can approach it. So you mentioned the goblin camp. There's this camp of goblins who are attacking a druid circle where a group of teaflings are kind of hiding.

There's a whole conflict in the druid circle. The main druid who's taken over for Halzin, a future party member who's gone missing and been captured by the goblins. She wants to cast a spell that'll purge the whole druid grove and all the teethlings will be kicked out and they'll be unprotected and killed by the goblins. The goblins meanwhile want to kill everybody in the camp. And you can

actually side with either side and you can totally play it out differently. You even get a different party member based on how you play this quest because there's a drow hanging out with the goblins that I killed her and then looked in her inventory. She had like all the inventory items of a

player character. Personal clothing. Yeah. Yeah, and like camp supplies bag. You could even romance her, I believe. Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's a totally just a character that is now dead in my game. And I think you wouldn't get Halzin, the druid, if you side with her. He's her prisoner, so it's kind of one or the other.

But there's all kinds of stuff like that built into this game where no matter what you do, even if you follow every quest, you're constantly making decisions and just having to kind of go with it to the point that it really quickly gets you to just let go and stop worrying about optimizing and just go with the story and kind of see what happens. So, yeah, I'll be very interested in how I feel about replaying this game when I finish it, just because there's so much of it. It's such a rich meal of a video game, but I am like over the moon about it. I mean, I really haven't played.

I've never played a role-playing game like this. And for a long time, I said Divinity Original Sin 2 was the best version of this kind of game I'd ever played. It was the closest approximation of tabletop gaming. It was so many things I love in a game. this is just that perfected. I mean, perfected is the wrong word. That's overly dramatic.

This is that taken to a whole new level with a new level of cinematic interaction, a new level of voice acting, and a really cool license in D&D, like a really cool world that I'm also finding just a really enchanting experience. So I'm over the moon about this game. It's incredible.

That's an important part of it that I think it's worth noting here, which is that as impressive is what Larian has accomplished here. They have a big advantage. and that they have this, like, well-honed system of characters and spells and classes and stuff. I mean, one of the kind of, I guess, I don't know if it's a flaw, but one of the quirks of Divinity Original Sin, too, is that there were certain abilities that were super powerful,

and if you, like, got one of those, you would pretty much stick to them in the whole game. I remember using chicken claw a lot because it was so beneficial and so overpowered. This was the spell that transformed any enemy into a chicken. It was great. And it was really powerful. down. You had to get their armor down first, but yes. And it was super powerful. It was very cheesable though. And I think that one of the reasons that I had in my head, like, oh, man, I'm totally going to

replay this soon as opposed to divinity where I was like, I'd love to replay this, maybe one day, is that in this, it feels like any party formation, any character class can be viable. And to Larian's credit, and they deserve all the credit in the world, not only for this game, but also for they have actually changed some of the systems in D&D to translate them to a computer game. and so it's not a one-to-one kind of port of D&D rules, so to speak, but they do have this huge advantage of like D&D rule sets and characters and classes. And so like it's really marvelous. I mean, you can play this game.

And I've experimented with a bunch of different like formations and classes and stuff. And it's totally viable to play in a lot of different ways, which is super cool. And on top of that, you also don't have to stick to what you picked from the beginning and you don't have to deal with like choice paralysis because you, You can respect your main character at any time, and you can respect all of your commandments at any time, even when it doesn't make, like, lower sense. It still lets you do it. Like, Dale, the wizard, whose whole storyline is him being a wizard.

You can turn him into, like, a barbarian if you want. Yeah, or you can, like, make a Starian who's, like, a bitchy vampire into a healer and, like, ruin his entire life if you want to. Just torture him endlessly. He bites enemies and then heals them, so you can keep biting them. Yeah, I think that's a really cool thing about this. game that's kind of secondary to how great of a just video game it is, is the Dungeons and Dragons aspect of it. Dungeons and Dragons has really been having a moment for a little while, kind of

going all the way back to Stranger Things. Like when season one of Stranger Things came out, and there was so much D&D tie-in. I mean, Mindflare are a major character in this game. They're really important illithids or really important part of the story. And the mind flare is like one of the big bads of Stranger Things. They're constantly talking about D&D rules and things in that, in that show. And I remember at the time when that show came out, D&D kind of surged in popularity. And now, of course, critical role is like the most popular thing on the whole internet and all these live play podcasts. And also the pandemic caused a lot of people to get really into tabletop games. And the pandemic caused a lot of people to get into it. And I mean, I know that I've been in a

tabletop group for the last year and a half where we've been playing D&D. I'm sure I'm not the only one. So D&D has become really popular. And that's a big part of this game, I think. Like, this game has been really big, at least on Steam, which I guess that makes sense on Steam. It's like a very crunchy PC role-playing game of the kind that we don't get that much anymore. But that D&D part of it is really cool. And I love that this game is, in addition to just being a fun role-playing game, this kind of toolbox of an approximated version of D&D that anyone can just buy and play around. And like you said, Jason, I love that it lets you just respect your characters, screw around with different abilities. You can see all the spells.

It's also organized and visual. D&D can still feel really overwhelming, especially if you want to play a spellcaster because spells and spell slots and preparing and rest and all that stuff, it's a lot to keep track of when it's like a character sheet on a piece of paper. Or even in something like I use D&D Beyond, which is an app that a lot of people use very popular now that sort of organizes things for you.

But even so, like, there's a lot to keep track of. And the game does a lot for you and just lets you really easily mix and match and just sort of see what's what. I think this game will make it a lot easier for people, to transition into playing pen and paper d and d and d. Or I guess tablet and finger dand, which is what most people play now, if they want to. And I think that's a really cool secondary thing about this game. Well, what's super cool is that it combines the kind of the high role-playing elements of d&D

that make it work so well when you're playing with your friends with the kind of the grok-nard, super crunchy mechanic stuff that like if you play d&D with your friends, you're probably not keeping close track of how many gold everyone has and how many like different items they have. Like, you're probably trying to streamline that stuff to make it so sessions aren't taking 10 hours. Right. And be like one fight in this game in a tabletop session would take like 16 hours. Right. Exactly. That's a lot simpler, a lot more streamlined in the game. And the fact that it also has this, uh, that that element of it and that you're like really thinking in a way that you wouldn't necessarily be doing. You're planning out your strategy, figuring out, okay, this guy has

this many hit points left. So I have to heal him before I can attack this person. Okay, I have advantage here. A lot of that stuff, I think most D&D players, maybe some are a little bit crunchier than others, but I think your average casual D&D player is not spending a ton of time on that. So it's really cool to see that as part of this game as well, because it really, it exercises both the choice, strategic, ex-comy part of your brain, and also the I'm going to roleplay and smooch on my characters part of your brain, the BioWare part of your brain. And that, I mean, that I think is one big reason that it's become such a huge success. It's like it's got what BioWare fans love and it's got what, like,

like hardcore Pillars of Eternity, Fallout New Vegas fans love too. It's got the best of both worlds. I wish it was a little better at teaching you how to use those systems. Like again, I do feel like 10 hours in, I'm now finally understanding, like, positioning my characters. I can throw vials at people.

I can, you know, use various tools in order to climb up to places that I didn't know I could get to in the game. Like there's some sort of tiers of the kingdom-esque things you can do like stacking a bunch of crates on top of each other, like throwing barrels at people. Like, this kind of like, Tears of the Kingdom meets Marvel's Midnight Suns in terms of how much immersive sim is here plus the XCOM of it all.

But boy, the game doesn't tell you that. Like, you really just have to click on everything and see what it does. And now that I've hit that level where I feel like I understand what I can do, I'm enjoying the combat a lot more. And I did choose a very combat-heavy character by choosing a barbarian. And I was like, man, I may have made a mistake. Like a few hours in, I was thinking of Kirk being like, playing as a bar is the best. Because you get to just charm everybody.

And I could just charm everybody and then kill them to be able. Well, I mean, I know there are some people who are playing as a bard who's so charismatic that they can talk their way out of any battle. It's certainly possible. But regardless, I am punching and kicking my way out of every battle. So I made the decision that it was like, okay, Maddie, you got to get freaking tactical here. And I finally feel like I'm there. But it does, I just, it's like one of my few complaints about the game is that it doesn't really on-ramp you very much. You just have to try things and click on everything and be like, what does this do?

What does this do? And most of the time, I'll just end up doing way better in a battle when I die, not because I've like, you know, gotten better dice rolls, but because I'm like, well, now I know the position of every single enemy in the map where they're going to stream in from what kinds of environmental attacks they're probably going to use. So if I re-roll this whole fight, I can probably cream them because I now know everything that could happen in this area, which is also something that I'm like, I've played tabletop games. That's not necessarily as much a part of the tactics there as it is in a video game. Yeah, I think that this game can be a very harsh teacher. I've definitely lost a lot of fights and had to do them over. And then I kick the crap out of them because I, like you said, I know where everyone is coming from.

I kind of know how to prepare. I had an incredible encounter where I basically, I was in a sort of darker, harder, later area of Act 1 and fought this huge monster that was kind of out of my league, but I beat it. And right as I was beating it at the end of the fight, some other NPC, like a monster, wandered into the zone that I was in and saw that I was fighting and started alerting its friends. And then suddenly all these huge other monsters came in. And I was stuck in a basically second wave fight without any chance to rest or recover my abilities. So I had a save at this point where I just killed this big monster. And I was like, I don't want to give up this kill, but I don't know how to escape from this fight because I could not win the fight. And I wound up trying to engineer an escape for probably 45 minutes, just trying to like pass around scrolls.

I had like a hasty escape scroll, a couple of Misty Step, which is a teleport scroll. I wound up realizing I had a potion of invisibility. And actually, my tip to anybody who's struggling with a fight, especially if you've kind of gotten used to it, if you do hit a fight that's tough. And there are a couple of bosses, especially optional bosses. There's a hag fight and a giant spider in Act 1 that are both really, really tough. You can kind of really get into your items, and that'll usually help you out. That's the thing I always forget to do is where I'm like, wait a minute. Okay, Asterion should poison his blade.

Like, I have all this poison I'm not using. Yeah, put some poison on there. All of these different arrows that I'm not using. So anyways, that was an amazing kind of problem solving sequence, but I only got to it through trial and error just over and over and over again. So yeah, this game can be a pretty harsh teacher and agree that it doesn't on ramp you well, especially like I am pretty conversant in Larian games. Jason, I know you are too because we both played so much of their last gamer games. And I don't know, like I'm not sure what a better tutorial would look like because it would need to be so complex to, show you all the different interlocking ways that a party can work and the combat can work,

that it almost has to just rely on you learning yourself as you kind of get your butt kicked a couple of times. I do think that there will be a lot of really good class tutorials on YouTube, especially once people have really played the whole game and they understand all the abilities. So that'll be something that'll kind of shore it up. But that's certainly, like I definitely get you on that. You have to experiment a lot and you have to hope that bugs don't catch up with you while you're doing it. You can also, you can quick save in between combat rounds. Like during any combat round, you can quick save, which also helps. It does, because then you can, like, go back a turn and be like, oh, I didn't realize that was going to have that outcome.

Like, not even just from a save scumming perspective and, like, trying to get a better outcome. But just like, oh, I didn't realize if I threw that, then, like, six more guys were going to show up. But now I know they're back there and I can play an according. Or if you misclick, it's very easy to misclick. I sometimes will get players from NPCs because I accidentally stole something. thing, oh, it's so stressful. You'll get like a disapproving look from it. And I'm like, I was just trying to talk to you and I accidentally stole your stuff.

That happens in real life all the time. It does. It just happened. Yeah, I accidentally stole my daughter's dinner while I was just trying this doctor. And you're just trying a doctor. And they just have it in your pocket. Yeah, I mean, in Larian's style, yeah, they're those tough bosses in Act I, there are also, there are a couple difficulty spikes later on as well, including one.

I'll be very vague here. but a bug. So there's an NPC who is important, who was joining me in a specific fight, and it was a really tough fight. And at the beginning of the fight, like, you're allowed to, like, you can convince the NPC to join your party, which

makes them controllable for that fight. Like, they become a temporary convenient just for that fight. And if you do that, then you can control their movements and stuff. But a bug, like, prevented that from happening for me. And so the MPC just went in on their own, and the NPC was very stupid and just kept running into combat.

And so they died. And once an NPC dies, they're dead for good. You can't revive them. And then I wouldn't get them for the rest of the event. Like, their story wouldn't continue for the rest of the campaign. So I had to lower the difficulty to like easy mode just to get through this fight without getting this NPC killed, which is annoying. So there's some stuff like that.

I mean, this game is full of bugs, as you might expect from a game is complex. It doesn't auto save enough given how crashy it is. because it does crash sometimes. The auto save is not friendly. So I play in the controller, which feels amazing, by the way. Oh, yeah. And I've gotten to the habit of just like you press, you hold R2 and then you press square on the dual shock and it saves.

And I do that like every five seconds. So if you do, if you get into the habit of quicksaving a lot, the crashes aren't so bad. It's like how I used to save my papers back in the day when I had a really old computer. I got to just get back into that habit. Exactly. Yeah. Just excessively pressing control. L.S. all the time. You're dealing with an unstable platform. Like it's

1999. Yeah. That was always the first tip I gave to my score writing class when I taught that. I was the software Cibilius. I would be like, Command S. Like, that's the first thing. Forget about any of the notes. Just hit Command S every 30 seconds because this thing likes to crash. Yeah, it feels, it's just so 90s.

It's like the most 90s aspect of the game is how many times you're proverbially hitting Command S. It's pretty hilarious, honestly. So let's talk a little bit about the storytelling and the characters because I think that is a really amazing thing about this game and as a Larian fan and someone who played Divinity Original Sin, that's the biggest advancement in this game. Like the Dungeons and Dragons part is really cool.

The new world is really cool. But the way that conversations play out, the character designs and the character animations, just how beautiful all of these extremely hot people are. They look so good. It's a really cool part of the game and a big, it really adds a lot compared to divinity, which had great character designs, but you never. Sani went up close. It was always kind of from a distance. And so

this just adds that bio-aware conversational element to each interaction. And yeah, it's really adding to the game for me. And a big part of that is how well-written, especially the party member NPCs are. There are some great characters here. Carlock, this demon lady

that you meet. I think, Maddie, you maybe haven't met her yet. I haven't yet. I love Halston, though. I just got him. He's the best. I love his barebo. He's cool. She is amazing. She is like the going to be the fan favorite character, I think. Super, super cool character. This like red demon with a mechanical fiery heart that needs like tune-ups.

She has that thing that great NPCs have where she loves everything. She's so psyched because she escaped from hell. And she's like, man, this is great. Like I got to be free. I get to do whatever I want. You're really cool. Everything seems awesome. Like she's the only character I've ever met in a video game where you select her in combat.

And she goes, fuck yeah. I think that's her bark that she says. That's great. I love that. So she's amazing. And I actually want to talk a little bit about Astyan, who is the vampire you mentioned earlier, Maddie. He's great too.

A hilarious moment very early in the game where you get this pale elf, elf who are like maybe half elf anyways. This guy was kind of like pointy years and fangs and very pale skin and his hair. He looks like Spike from Buffy. He looks exactly like Spike from Buffy. If Spike was an elf, yes. 15 minutes later, he's like, I have a confession. I'm a vampire.

And I'm like, dude, I know you're a vampire. You're the most obvious vampire. That's a dialogue option. It's like, yeah. It's like, you don't think. Yeah, you get to say, I knew that, dude. Which is also great. Is it like oftentimes you get to select the thing that you were wanting to say?

That you were actually thinking. Yeah. Right. It's incredible. Yeah, there are a couple of good examples of that as you go on. So that moment when he reveals himself to you, it's very funny for a number of reasons. And also, like, it's just a really good example of how this game, how good the writers of this game are. at crafting these little situations for you to make your way through.

Because I constantly find myself challenged by the decisions that I have to make just because I'm not really sure what the right way to go is. I just met this guy. He's very charming. I want him to be in my party. He's a good rogue. But the first real interaction you have with him is in camp. So to explain to people, you long rest in Dungeons and Dragons.

That's a longstanding thing. That's how you kind of recover a lot of your abilities and your spell slots. In this game, when you long rest, you basically warp to a camp. that exists in a sort of pocket universe. It exists somewhere in the area you are. So if you're underground, you're camping in a cave. If you're up in a field, you're just camping in the woods somewhere. It's cool.

It always sort of reflects where you are. And you go to camp, and that's where you do all of your kind of character conversations, like you would in a bioward game, you know, aboard the Normandy or whatever. Like, that's kind of where romance happens and other story stuff plays out. And the first time that you sleep with a stare at in, you see him creeping around at night. And it's not really clear what's going on. you're like, wait a minute, why is that guy creeping around? And then the next time you long rest, you wake up and he's about to try to drink your blood.

And you wind up in this conversation with him where he's like, come on, just a little bit, it's cool. I won't turn him to a vampire. But I just have been like drinking the blood of pigs and stuff. Actually, when you're out in the world, you find an exanguinated pig. And he's like, what? I don't know what that's about anyways. Let's keep going. So it's like built up a lot.

And then he wants to suck some of your blood. And you have to make this decision. So I'm curious, the two of you, what did you do when this? happens, Jason. Well, okay, so first of all, to your earlier point about the transition from Dos 2, DeVinandirals and 2 to this with like all the cinematics and stuff. So yeah, so Das 2 is is isometric. I spoke to you, Sven Vinkie, who's the director of this game and the CEO of Larian Studios, the company behind it. He told me that on Dos 2, they had 140 people. For Baldur's Gate 3, they swelled to 450 people. And the main reason for that is because they had to build an entire

Cinematics team with people who were in charge of lighting and people who were QA testing for the cinematic. So they wound up turning into an entirely different company to make this game into the cinematic experience that it is now where it's got cutscenes and shots of people's faces and stuff. It's pretty wild. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a huge evolution for what they're doing. So, okay, the vampire, though. So I let Astaire get just a little taste, a little taste of blood. Nice. I think if you let him keep going, he kills you. But I got a little taste and then wish him away.

And now every time I talk to him at camp, I have the option that's like, you can keep feeding on me tonight if you want. And so, which I think is going to be like a romance thing if I choose to pursue it. But what happens if you do that is you get a debuff and he gets a perk and the perk is happy and he's just happy. And then you can use his bite ability in combat as well. it also creates the same buff that he's, like, happy when he sucks people's life. It gives him a kind of plus one on every set.

Yeah, it's pretty good. It's a pretty good buff. Maddie, how about you? Yeah, Asterian does not care for me. I'm constantly pissing him off. And so, I mean, I said no, but he's, it's not going well between us. I mean, he's still my party member, but he's pretty mad at me basically all the time. I think I'm too much of a good person for him.

And I'm also unwittingly wooing Shadowheart. He seems very into me. I mean, this is like something very funny that everyone I've talked to playing the game has run into. Like, my co-worker Mike Mahardi said recently in a meeting that he can't get Astarian to leave him alone. And we all were like, oh my God, dude, what? Like, how does this happen to you? That's funny. Shadowheart opened right up to me.

And it's funny because her character is, she is a worshipper of Sharr who has had her memory erased. She's like a dark, she wants to be a dark just to see her. So she's this sort of dark magic user, like dark breeze. potentially. She's very, yeah, like the hot goth in your group. And she, it's funny because she, like, immediately trusted my character and started reviewing her backstory, which, like, my barred character is very charming. But also, she just, she seems like someone who's just been dying for someone to talk to. For sure. I found over the course of this first act that really, everyone in camp is up for it. There's a party sequence a little bit later. Well, you're charismatic,

so that's probably part of it for you. But go on. I don't know, because I haven't done any charisma checks against them or anything. There's just a party sequence where everybody's having a good time at night, one night, and you can basically ask anyone to go off with you. And I'm assuming at least this stage in the game that they can. So there's kind of like, I think, and then there are these multi-stage romances that I think you can start and stop. Everyone kind of notices what's going on with you and other party members. It seems like a really fun little part of the sort of social sim that they're writing. You can definitely strike out, Kirk. I just need to tell you this. Like, I have a different coworker who is trying to make it with Astairean and she just can't get it laid down.

So, Kirk, I really think your charisma is playing a role in a way that you may not know. That's all I want to say there. That's don't play a role unless you're doing a check. So if he's not doing a check, then it's just the option, the specific options. I think they give you the option to start all of these relationships, but I think they don't necessarily all go well. Fair enough. All right. It's a much healthier way of approaching sex and sexual relationships in a game than the biower approach,

which is like you spend the entire game like leveling up your romance and then you're rewarded with sex and it's this transactional thing. So in fairness, something that BioWare improved in Dragon Age Inquisitions. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Relationships early on it with characters in that game. I say the BioWare, I guess I should, I guess it's a little unfair to say the Biower approach. The typical video game approach is that like even the first, even Baldrude's Gate 2, which was one of the first games I can remember to have a romance portion. It's like you build up and then eventually it culminates in all.

my god, SCX. That was something, I think David Gader, the lead writer of the Dragon Age series. I feel like he's, like, explicitly talked about that

and was like, in Inquisition, we wanted to start to solve that. So that had been being solved, but they've definitely, it's really cool the way they're handling it here. Yeah, and I haven't done a ton of romance stuff,

except at the very beginning when Laisal came to me and was like, right now we're doing this. Wow, Lizell. She just took charge, and that was the way it went. But other than that, yeah,

I haven't really explored much of the romance. stuff, but from what I've read people talking about it and seen online, it seems like a pretty, a pretty cool way of approaching it. It is. I also just think it's funny to have coworkers who are like trying to romance a character and they can't figure out how. Like it's pretty rare for that to happen in games. Like I'm sure people will crack it and they'll like tell you exactly what you're doing wrong and they'll be guides and it'll be a solved problem. But for now, we're still on that fun stage where the game just feels really chaotic in the way that real human relationships do where you're like, I don't even know, Shadow Hearts mad at me.

I don't know what I did. Like, I don't understand. And like, that's just how people are describing their parties right now, which is very fun. One really interesting net result of Larian choosing not to give review codes until like four days before the game came out is that there are very few comprehensive guides on the internet, which is what a lot of gaming sites use those early codes to create. And so as I've been playing, I'm ahead of most people who are playing this game because

I had a four-day head start and I played a bunch of it for work last week, like during the work day. And so I find myself like Googling stuff from the game and there's like no Google results about it. Because nobody on the internet at all has gotten to this particular scene or quest. And it's really interesting. Or sometimes I'll find guides that are like either speculating or like entirely wrong. So to your point, Maddie, I think the lack of those comprehensive guides for the romance are really a lot of other things. I think that adds to a certain mystique about the game as well. That probably wasn't exactly intended from Larian.

Maybe it was. It might have been. But regardless, I think it does really, it adds an interesting element to playing the game in that sometimes, like, people will make these big discoveries and, like, have to talk about them on the internet. No one else will know about them. Or like, people will just kind of like be mind melding together to try to figure out how stuff works on Reddit and discords and such.

Yeah, I think that's really cool. I'm reminded of when Eldon Ring came out, and specifically when we were playing Eldon Ring a little bit early for review. That's that same feeling where there are no guides and you just have to kind of play the game because that's your best source of information is right in front of you. It's whatever the game is telling you and you just have to kind of read the stuff on the screen and figure it out. And sometimes that means reloading things. Sometimes it means experimenting. I do all kinds of, right, I wouldn't call it saves coming. I just save my game and then just try something just to kind of see how the game will react to it or what might happen and then reload and try something else and sort of go through a given situation a bunch of times because I'm just trying to learn because I can't just Google, you know, secret statue puzzle like what is there is this worth figuring out?

Because no one knows. There's kind of a branch at the end of the first act. I'll be a little vague here, but you can go a couple of different directions to try to get to the next area. and I'm not totally clear still on whether I can go up one and then go up the other one. Like I think I can. I'm kind of exploring them both. I don't really know where Act 2 begins. It's kind of an exciting feeling to not be able to just look and find a totally detailed, like down to every grain of sand map on the internet of a game,

especially a game is this complicated and a game that will eventually be mapped to that level of detail. It's a really cool time to be playing it. Yeah, it's interesting. It definitely adds a lot. layer of there's kind of this tension of like do I play this on launch or do I wait a couple months till more the bugs have been fixed and so one pro to playing it on launch is that sense of mystery one con is that it's got a lot more bugs than it will in in a few months yeah totally agree so I want to hear Maddie I don't know if you know you know you said you got Halston I want to hear did you guys so

did you guys just defend the druid grove did you kill the goblin leaders in the camp or did you have to do the big defense like what was your outcome your respective outcomes for that? Oh, interesting. So do you have to defend the druid camp? Well, just tell me what happened to you, and then I'll answer that question. Okay, because you know all of that. Well, and I'm curious what happened in your game, too. Me too. I killed the, I assassinated the three goblin leaders. Okay. Two of whom I was able to take out without anybody knowing. And then one, I didn't. And actually, to mention another gameplay thing that I think is really cool and just want to shout out really quickly,

the ability to toggle into turn-based mode in this game is really, really cool. And is actually a new mechanical idea compared to Divinity Original Sin 2. You couldn't do that in that game. And it's a huge change. So it allows for stealth sequences that I bet some people listening won't have even thought to try, where you can go into turn-based mode and break Astaire or your rogue off from the group. And you can really sneak around without having to worry about the real-time movements of patrols or even the reactions.

You can get a stealth kill and then really carefully, almost like that game, Invisible Ink, if anyone played that. Like a turn-based stealth game. You can really sneak your way around and do a lot of really cool setup and damage and it makes an infiltration like that where you're trying to assassinate people in a building work pretty well.

It's not as tightly designed as an actual stealth turn-based game, but it really felt like that for me for a while. So that was what I did. I killed the goblin leaders, and then eventually all the goblins turned hostile on me, and I wound up walking out back into that main entryway of their kind of camp, there's like 40 dudes.

And I had actually charmed a trio of ogres earlier. One of them is really smart. There's this one smart ogre and two other ogres who were very kind of dumb. And the smart ogre, I passed a charisma check with him and convinced him to be on call for me because I could get him a bunch of food, like a bunch of goblins to kill and eat. So I had his horn. So all of the, I walk out into this main camp and all the goblins turn on me. And I blow the horn and these three ogres run in and they just start wrecking stuff

from the other side of the battlefield, and that really helped that fight. So that was kind of how that played out. And at the very end, I convinced the ogres to let me summon them one more time. I'm probably going to have to fight them at some point. So anyway, and then you... There's a lot, but there's always a lot with this case. Okay, and then you went back to the grove and everything was... I did, and everyone was very happy.

Maddie, what about you? How did you solve the conflict? I mean, it's not that different except that I was, you know, using a hammer instead of a very sneaky nail in the form of my half work, which is to say, I had... at first attempted to assassinate people, but it just never quite went the way that I wanted to. So eventually I just, I got Halson, like after failing various assassination attempts because I just don't care enough about stealth. And I was like, ah, this is never going to work. What am I going to do? And then I just sort of tripped and fell into getting Holson without kind of knowing who I was getting. I found him. And then he became Holson. And I was like, oh, wow, that bears a guy. And now he's my

friend. That's great. I needed somebody in here. And then we basically fought our way out, which I just did by systematically room by room killing every single goblin. So you just cleared out. Yeah, I just had to freaking do the thing and like use my skills and use my brain and use all my items and like loot every single goblin corpse, redo all my stuff in between and be like, okay, what did I pick up? Did I get anything good and like be really methodical about killing a bajillion goblins room by room, which was pretty fun by the end, actually.

I felt like I really learned a lot about the combat over the course of my goblin genocide that I committed today. So, yeah, I saved the point. There are a lot of different outcomes that can happen here. And so I'll tell you what happened to me. I freed the goblin prisoner from the Tieflings, Saza. And then I met up with her in front of the goblin fortress. And I convinced her to let me inside and made everyone friendly as a result of that. And then she took me to Minthara. I spoke to Minthara.

I told Minthara that I would betray the druids and the Tieflings and let her army in when they came to invade. And then they all went off and they went to go invade. Because Saza the Goblin told Minthara where the druid enclave was. So then I went back to the druids and then you can kind of set up your defenses on the wall, that big wall. Yeah, yeah. And you can, they have some barrels of oil that you can throw out the ground. so you can like set some fire traps and stuff. They have a bunch of dudes with archers and stuff.

And then when Minthara and her army arrive, you blow this war horn and all of your characters get blessed and prepare. And then they all arrive and then Minthara communicates with you. And she's like, you said you were going to betray them and open the gate for us. So open the gate. And you can either do that inside with the goblins or you can be like, nah. And so I was like, nah. And then we have this stand, this like, this defense of the Druidon Club.

and then you have to be careful because you don't want your boy Zevlor to die because he's an important character. But still, you can fight off the goblins. And that is what I was talking about last week when I talked about the ogre throwing the barrels that then turned into goblins. That's like their siege weapon on top of that rampart is they throw barrels with goblins inside at you. That's a really fun. That's a really fun fight because these dudes, they have these goblin sapper dudes who like have explosives on their back and are suicidal. and run into the door to blow it open. And once they get it open, they can sit going in.

Like the two towers, the one guy who blows up the wall at Helms Deep. Exactly. This is, it's very, it's very like, this is the siege of Helms Deep. We are defending it on the ramparts, shooting our arrows, firing all our viral throwing, shooting fire at the oil to set off explosions and stuff. So a very fun fight. Clearly we all wanted to save the Teafling refugees, though, no? I mean, we kind of glossed over that.

At least on this playthrough, right? Because there is, I mean, there's so many other things, right, that could go so many other ways. I think we mentioned it on an earlier episode that there's a dark urge that you can give your character where they have this dark, like, serial killer inside of them. This is why I plan on replaying it so I can be the dark urge. And the T-Flings, I mean, the T-Flings keep coming back. All these characters could potentially keep coming back. So, like, later in the game, I found the corpse of Sazat, the goblin prisoner, who I let escape. and I was like, oh, could I have made her survive and then like run into her later.

Then much later in the game, you keep running into, like throughout the game, you keep running into some of these same characters. Like there is so many different branches of like consequences for your decisions in Act 1 coming back later. It is incredibly cool and just, again, makes me feel like I have to play this game 10 times to know, to understand it. One other thing to mention, I know we're running out of time, but one other thing to mention in the course of playing through this, something that I've been amazed by is between, detect thoughts and speak with dead, there are so many other conversations that I'm not even seen. And animals. And animals. I have a ritual number.

I just drink an animals talking potion at the beginning of every day because there's so many animals to talk to. I love that they've made that easier for every character to get since there was a perk. Whatever. It's the best, though. It is the best. But what's so cool is I never think to talk to corpses, but you can talk to so many corpses if you use that spell. There is a quest where you can like find. a hidden thing by talking to this woman who died in a fire, to find the ring that was her dowry

for her, I mean, there's so much stuff like that where there are these whole conversations that were recorded and there's little cutscenes for them that I bet most people won't see. That was actually how I found out that Halson was a bear, was I used to detect thoughts on the goblin guards when I was still, when they were still all friendly because I turned my way in. And he's like, oh man, that guy turned into a bear. And now we're just keeping him. So I was like, ah, okay, Halson's the bear. I just got to go find the bear.

So there's a ton of stuff like that too. A pro tip is that if you have that necklace of Speak to Dead equipped, or if you have Speak to Dead equipped and a character, you will see like a glowing green, like a glowing green effect on corpses that you can talk to. So it's not like you have to go around randomly talking to every corpse to me to see if they have something to say. Like the game I'll tell you. This was, I forgot what it's called, the soul something. There was an ability in Divinity Original Sin 2 that was very similar. There was even a mod, they were at least later where you could just have it be active all the time. So you could see all the, you know, you wouldn't miss anything.

of those conversations. But there's something cool about being able to miss them too. Yeah. Well, and then also to your point about detect thoughts, if you don't have that ability, you might be able to, like, tell what they're thinking in another way. I just passed, last night, I just passed an insight check that let me read someone's body language to figure out what they were, what they were trying to say. So there's other ways.

And that's, I mean, that plays into what I was talking about earlier, where it's just so well balanced in terms of characters. Like, you don't really, I've never felt like, oh, man, I'm missing out by not playing X character or not having Y ability because it feels like the game has so many different permutations in just about every interaction you'll have that you're always able to find something cool to do. It's really, that's the most impressive part about this. It's unbelievable. Clearly we're going on and on, but I just want to say really quick that like those conversation options are still available even if you play as like a half fork barbarian as I am because I can usually intimidate

people into telling me things or to getting past various obstacles. And a lot of those dialogue options are just hilarious because I get to just say crazy things to people. And they're like, oh, no, I'm so scared right now. And I'm like, you don't know, she's a total softie. And she's going to help you at the end of all this. It's like, I don't know, it's the best. It's very fun. Yeah, it's a really, really impressive piece of work.

I'm amazed by it and can't wait to keep playing it. And I'm sure that we'll talk about it more on the show. So those are some, I guess those are our early thoughts. But there's clearly so big. A few early thoughts. Yeah. There's so much more to say. But yeah, let's take a break for now and come back for one more thing.

You there. Have you considered listening to the Beef and Dairy Network, an award-winning comedy show in the form of a newsletter podcast for the beef and dairy industries? Well, maybe you should. And why don't you try our most recent episode, Episode 99, which features American man Paul F. Tompkins playing Queen Elizabeth II's former personal beef sommelier. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and I, laying on the floor of her bedroom,

just helplessly laughing till tears run down our faces as corgis are jumping on us over us, licking us. That is a day that I will treasure forever until I am executed. Find the show at maximum fun.org. I hope there's beef in heaven.

Hey there, beautiful people. I'm Jared Hill. And I'm Treville Anderson and we want to know, have you ever had mixed feelings about the things that you love? Ooh, maybe about the things that you hate. Then Fantai is the show for you.

Fantai is the power. for all those complex and complicado conversations about the gray areas in our lives. You might have conflicting feelings about Kamala Harris or copaganda or interracial friending. That's all right, because we do too, and we get into it every single Thursday. Catch this layworthy audio at maximum fun.org. That's maximum fun.org slash fan tie. That's F-A-N-T-I. Come get all this good, good. Or this great, great. And we're back for one more thing. I'll go first because mine is just a quick recommendation. It's an episode of the podcast Intuit, hosted by Sam Sanders, called Country Music's Race Problem. And it's a discussion with Tressy McMillam Cottom,

who is a really smart writer and thinker. I've heard her on a ton of different shows. She's like one of the smartest people out there, just a really interesting lady to listen to talk about anything. But she has a lot of really interesting thoughts on country music in Nashville. And they have a conversation about some people out there have probably seen like headlines about Jason Aldeen's song that try that in a small town song or the fact that this other singer Luke Combs has this hit with Tracy Chapman's fast car. There's sort of a lot of discussion out there right now about country music, which is an overwhelmingly white kind of music and what that means and what that says and its place in America and in Red America. And I haven't seen or heard a better conversation about it than this episode of this podcast. So I'll just recommend it if anyone is interested in that or has like seen articles about that or wants to know more. I thought it was like just a really thoughtful and nuanced and interesting conversation.

So that's country music's race problem, an episode of the podcast into it. And we'll link to that podcast in the show notes. All right, Maddie, what is your one more thing? So mine is a book I've been reading. I'm almost done because it is gripping. It's called I'm glad my mom died. And it's by a former child star, child television star named Jeanette McCurdy. She played Sam on Icarly, which is a show.

I didn't watch but was sort of in my periphery. I was like familiar with the child stars of it as many people my age am. I knew who Jeanette McCurdy was. And then when I saw this book title, I mean, it's extremely memorable. It's just like a bizarre thing that no one says. And then I had sort of heard that the book was, about her mom being abusive in a variety of ways that are really harrowing. But it's also written in this biting sardonic way.

Like Jeanette McCurdy played this very deadpan, like sort of tomboyish character on that show. And she's got this deadpan intensity, like sort of Daria-esque way of writing and speaking that just kind of makes the harrowing tale go down in a way that I wouldn't say is easy to listen to, but makes it palatable in some way. But yeah, I mean, content warning for sexual abuse on the part of her mom, anorexia, all kinds of other really just shocking stuff. But it's like a thriller.

Like I couldn't put it down, as it were, because I was like, well, let me give this a try. I don't really know what to expect with this memoir. I like memoirs. But it's just really beautifully written and powerful and like kind of funny in a weird way. and I really recommend it if you like that kind of thing. I think about child stars pretty much every time I'm watching anything.

I'm sure we all do. Like, anytime there's a child in anything, I think about this type of thing. And reading this book has made me think about it even more and just how much kids go through when they're on these shows and also how often their parents are involved in an inappropriate way. So I think if that's something that you're interested in it at all, or just if you're a parent and you're like, what's a great list of things never to do to my kid?

You could read, I'm glad my mom died by Jeanette McCurdy. It's wild stuff. I was at a friend's house and she had this book just out and I read just the foreword, just the sort of first chapter. And it was really good. Jeanette McCurdy is a great writer. She's amazing. It made me want to read the whole book.

I was like, wow, you're a great writer. I recommend it. Really engaging, engaging writing. So yeah, I'll read it at some point for sure. Yeah. Jason, what is your one more thing? So my one more thing is a TV show called Silicon Valley on HBO, which my wife and I have been kind of putting on as a before bed kind of lounge around type show while we're lying in bed watching TV. And it's interesting.

It's interesting watching that show today. That show first started in 2014. And my wife and I have been watching, I think we just got past the second or third season or something. So that was like 2014, 2015, 2016. Wow. And it's fascinating to watch that. shown now because of how different, I think, our cultural kind of perception of Silicon Valley is in 2023 than it was back then. Because back then, Silicon Valley, I would say, was a little bit more

lionized. It was certainly, there was certainly some stupid aspects to it. And the show satirizes a lot of the sillier aspects. Like, look at these weirdos. And they're like going on their, their Google buses being shepherded to their massive campuses and talking about VCs and VCs throwing around money and all this other stuff that was kind of like the tropes back then. But there's a lack of the kind of malice that I think we all see in some of these tech titans these days. And it's really fascinating to see

in contrast to, I don't know, what's happened to Twitter over the last year. And to Elon Musk has revealed himself to be among other people another kind of, or Facebook a couple years ago. Yeah, Zuckerberg, yeah. Yeah, Zuckerberg and his kind of transformation and the public perception over the last few years. And, yeah, it's really interesting.

It's a fun show. It's very fun to watch. It's lighthearted. It's got some good jokes, got some good performances from people like Martin Starr as Gilfoyle, the Satanist, and Kumail Najiani as Dinesh, this, this... Yeah, this was kind of his breakout show. Yeah, I think so. He appeared on the scene as this kind of hapless program

who is unlucky in love, shall we say. And yeah, it's really, it's a good show. It's like fun to watch, but it's really interesting, especially now, to see how Silicon Valley was satirized, even as recently as nine years ago and how, I don't know if it feels off today, because it still feels true. It still feels like good satire,

but it definitely feels like if that were show, if that show were made today, it would be handled a little bit differently. There would be a little bit less of this, like, ha, ha, fun, incompetence. like look at these weirdos and a little bit more of like oh these are scary evil people who are potentially ruining the world yeah that's interesting that you're watching the seasons that i've watched of that show when it was just sort of a light comedy and i grew pretty exhausted by it

by season two or three because they're kind of frustrating characters the main guy Thomas midditch's character is like a psychopath like eventually i was like i just can't this guy is just he becomes really he especially like by season three or so or so or or four. And also they just have to keep failing so they can keep being underdogs. And it gets very frustrating. There's a lot of, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of the whole, it's very reminiscent of the show Entourage back in the day where it was like, is Vinny going to be able to make a movie? No, he's not. Yes, he is. And that was the same storyline every time. This is the same sort of thing. And it's a Mike Judge show, so a much more like directly satirical. But yeah, but I, I did stop watching.

And I wonder, I mean, the show aired through 2019. And I wonder what it would, what, how it will change. Because basically, it was on the air through the 2016 election. And that was kind of when the worm turned on how we started to view Silicon Valley and social media in particular. Right. So if I keep watching, I'll let you know. Because yeah, we're still in the early seasons. And the early seasons still have that kind of like, oh, look at tech, it's tech crunch disrupt. Right. It's the Obama era. Everyone's on Facebook. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. But even then, like, starting 2014, like, there's the Gamergate of it all. Like, I feel like that show starting then is like the beginning of the end almost.

Like, that's kind of, not that they would have had that in the first season, but like, that was when people started to be like, wait, is social media a place where people can gather and become radicalized? And, like, Nazis can have just as easy of a time gathering here as, you know, queer people seeking solace and places where they live in small towns, whatever. You know, all the good and bad of the internet. I don't know. I'm just, I don't know if I can watch it. I feel like it would drive me insane. I think it probably would take them a little bit longer to synthesize it than like the actual year of GamerGate happened. But I'm sure that that will. become an element and I'm guessing that it does. I'm partly thinking of it because I just recently

watched the new party downs, which I think are amazing and also have like Martin Star is sort of like a failure nerd character. And they have him like making Andrew Tate-esque videos online and then like Gamer Gators get really into him. And I like thought that was a really clever way to take the character where Martin Star had originally played this like sexist, clueless, MRA type and the first version of Party Down, but like never really interrogated that in that time period. But then later, having him grow up into like an unwitting MRI on the internet and having his arc be like, wait, I don't want to be this person. I thought was really well done while still being comedic. So it's not to say I don't think that Silicon Valley could pull it off. It just is like probably

way harder to do it between 2014 and 2019 as opposed to what Party Down got to do for better or worse, which was get canceled and then have like 10 years go by and then be like, all right, what social commentary do we want to make about celebrity in the modern era with these comedic actors? I mean, I think the key difference between back then and closer to now is that back then it was like, okay, reactionaries can take control of the internet and use it and like these sites and use them for awful things. But it was, it was, there was also an assumption that the people running the things didn't want that to happen. And I think more recently it's been like, oh, the people running these things, there's a lot of malice there too. And it's not just like blind incompetence and like ignorance and whatever. So I think that that to me is the difference when you're talking about a show that looks at these. founders. Like, if Game or Game or Game happened in that universe, it would be treated differently in 2014 than it was in 20, then it would be in 2020.

But yeah, anyway, that's just some, it's interesting, it's just interesting to watch. It's still very enjoyable. Like, it's a very fun show to watch before bed, like when you're playing Zelda or whatever, like a thoughtless show. It's a very fun to watch. And the performances are really good. I mean, Martin Stark, who, Thomas Millwich, they're all great.

But, yeah, it's really interesting. Zach Woods, by the way, is just like an all-time scene stealer. Zekwids is, uh, is Donald's, aka Jared, who just has the best lines in the show. He's amazing. In the new season of the After Party and is absolutely incredible in it. Oh, man, I forgot. I forgot that that was airing.

I have to watch that. Thank you for your mind there. All right. Well, this isn't two more things. This isn't five more things. But tune in for our Silicon Valley Recap podcast. We'll be launching the maximum fun soon. In the meantime, that's it.

That's it for us. This was a very fun episode because we had a really fun game to talk about. Thanks to everyone for listening. As always, Maddie and Jason, 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 maximum fun.org slash 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. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.