Triple Click - Triple Play: Elden Ring

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

You may have heard: Elden Ring is out. And the Triple Click crew has been playing it — for a combined 200+ hours. Kirk, Jason, and Maddy put on their Burger King wizard hats and take a trip to The Lands Between, where they're collecting Great Runes and trying not to fall off cliffs. They talk about the vast scope of the game, the brilliance of player notes, how to avoid burnout, the rewards of exploration, and oh so much more.One More Thing: Kirk: Carrie & Salem’s LotMaddy: AliasJason: Inventing Anna / Tinder SwindlerLinks:Iron Pineapple on Elden Ring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg_hveDzzvoMossbag’s Hollow Knight lore explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XDiWYFGGqYSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy a Triple Click t-shirt: https://topatoco.com/collections/maximum-fun/products/maxf-tc-tclogo-shJoin 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 lot of people have been wondering why George R.R. Martin can't seem to finish wins of winner. The answer, of course, is that he can't stop playing Eldon Ring. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. Today we are talking about Eldon Ring, a wonderful new game from Software. We get into the big, big world and talk about all sorts of things. Let's go. I'm Jason Trier. I'm Kirk Hamilton.

And I'm Maddie Myers. Today we are putting on our Pope Turtle hats and diving into the land between to talk about the Pope Turtle. We're just going to talk about the Pope Turtle for 45 minutes, right? We are. That guy owns. Definitely the best character in the game. The most relatable character in the game is so far.

Is he the Pope who happens to be a turtle or is he the... Is he a turtle who became a Pope? The Turtle Pope is unusual that the Pope is a turtle? Or is it like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will never know. A lot of questions. That's the mysteries of this wonderful, beautiful world. Well, that's why this game would be ruined with a quest log because it would say the Pope Turtle.

Oh, my God. The mystery would be revealed. Jaser, coming in hot with a quest log take. Just coming in. Before we get into this week's episode, just real quick, just want to say thank you to everyone out there who subscribes to Max Fun, who is a MaxFun member and supports this show. Because we are entirely supported by listeners like you. all. The show would not be possible without Max Fun members making it happen.

So thank you to all of you. And if you are not a MaxFund member, you should know that if you become one, you will get monthly bonus episodes of this podcast. Triple Click, monthly bonus episodes. We do a new one every week. Sorry, every month. And in fact, if you subscribe,

if you've never become a member and you become a member right now, you have like an archive of like two years worth of triple click bonus episodes. Nearly two years worth. No, yeah, it is two years. Yeah, almost two years now. April, no, May of 20, no, April, April of 2020 we started. Yeah.

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It's nice, you know, that we're really setting ourselves apart from other video game podcasts by talking about Eldon Ring. it is we do our own thing we like to be unique yeah we like to do our own thing we liked from soft before it was cool that's not true

I said that and it was not true we've the exact same amount as other games critics of the modern day well I think two two thirds of us got into from soft

recently that is true I did because of this podcast because Kirk forced me to play bloodborne and Maddie you did last year when you started into Dark Souls. Yeah, it was more just the pandemic and being like, well, I got a lot of free time

and a lot of depression. So why not just try fighting a skeleton over and over again? And that is the vibe, you know? That is the vibe and it's still the vibe. Yeah, Dark Souls is the game for that. It is a soothing therapeutic series. But hey, let's introduce this episode, shall we? Today we're doing a triple play of Eldon Ring, a video game by From Software, the now legendary developer behind the Soul series, Dark Souls, Demon Souls, Bloodbourne, which is kind of the Catuloo of the Souls games,

Coutou Los Souls, GautSoles, if you will, and Sekiro, which is just Ninja Souls, samurai souls. Yeah, sure. And this, I guess, you would describe as open world souls? Skyrim Souls. Breath of the Wild Souls. Yeah.

Breath of the Souls. I feel like it's got a lot in common with Skyrim as well, though. There's a lot of pressing Y to pick up a plant in this game and that is a compliment. A lot of just, yeah, vacuuming up materials that you find as you as you explore. I believe it was on Reset era that someone referred to it as Death of the

Wild, which I... Oh, that's good. That is good. That is good. All right, fine, I'll take it. Eldon Ring just came out. We've all been playing it. Needs no introduction. I think if you're listening to the show, you've probably heard a thing or two about Elton Ring. We've talked about it on the show at length. You heard a thing or two or three from all three of us for weeks now.

But before we even, before we get into our impressions and start talking about the game in depth, I just want to say that like we're probably going to be spoiling some things you can discover in this game. So we're not going to kind of hold back. We'll refrain from mentioning like big plot points to which they are. And like some super late stuff. Yeah, it's some super late stuff. But like. Yeah.

But I mean, if you don't want to know anything, you could just play this game right now. experience to listen to this episode because we're going to be talking about like cool things that we saw and whatnot. All right. With that intro out of the way, it is time to get in. We're going to start as usual with first impressions. So I want each of us to say how much time we've spent in the game so far and our kind of overall thoughts. Try to keep them short and then we'll get into meteor stuff. Kirk, why don't you start us off? I like the idea that these are my first impressions after 91 hours. Oh my God. Just given some early impressions of this game.

And it's funny because I'm kidding, but I'm also serious because it does kind of feel like there's so much more. Is that what you've really played? Is that we've actually been 90-11? Something like that, yeah. Somewhere in that area. It's kind of hard to tell my steam clock is all messed up. I think my end-game clock says 80-something maybe. I'm really far.

I'm now in the sort of final act, I guess you could kind of say, even though this game goes on and on and on and on forever. But I've sort of cleared the capital, let's say. and am past that, which I think is will give people who've played a lot of Eldon Ring a sense of where I am. I love this game. I mean, it's incredible. It's super engrossing.

It's a little overwhelming eventually. Like, I'm just sort of feeling like, my God, I could just keep going forever. And I'm at that point now where I just sort of blast through things because I'm a little over-leveled for some of the stuff I'm doing. Like, from games always have this issue where there's this period, this sweet spot where you're in the pocket, maybe like 10 hours into the game

when everything is kind of appropriate for you. You're a little overleveled for the place where you started out, but then pretty much everything else is fine, and then it kind of tips the other way, and I'm definitely in that realm now. So my experience now is just learning all these little weird secrets about the game, like things like fire spells do less damage when it's raining and just exploring these fun little things about the way they've designed the world.

But anyways, my impressions of this game, and just my opinion of this game is that it is, absolutely fantastic. Maddie? So I am just a measly 35 hours in, really barely played it compared to you guys. Also just barely on the loading screen. No, for real, that is actually quite a bit for me. So I also adore this game and I would like to play it for the rest of my life, please. And it is everything I wanted and more. But I would say I'm probably in the sweet spot that Kirk described still. My level's also in the 30s somewhere, maybe like 31, 32. And that is a pretty fun place to be in this game. I just got to, there's an elevator. Once you find two halves of a key, you get to a really big elevator. If people

who are further along in the game know what I'm talking about. I just wrote it up. And then I was like, oh, this is like a whole other part of the game. I'm going to go back because I want to discover every single little thing in the previous part of the game because I'm, I don't know, I'm really enjoying just stumbling across things in this game and finding things organically, not even using a walkthrough, just relying on the player messages, which we can talk about, something about from soft games that I really enjoy is the player messages, and just digging it, digging it, using an axe, as people know very well, but recently got a bow, getting into my long run. range trying to become a long range person and yeah i'm loving it um jason how about you how much

have you played it's a good it's a good game for smashing things in the face but it can it can get a little i'm also playing like a strength and dexterity build and it can get a little frustrating because you find so many cool spells and you're like man i'm yeah i'm kind of struggling with that i i briefly was like should i just switch it'd be a mage but that has its own frustrations too because then it's like you can't, usually the mages that I know also have like some type of melee weapon in their arsenal as well for the moments when they have no other choice. So, you know, there's no perfect build, but no imperfect build. So I have played also 80 plus hours, Kirk, I'm a little bit further than you and I've done a couple more things that you haven't quite gotten to yet.

Because it's kind of like, because this game is so open and nonlinear, there isn't really a linear path to No, yeah. I've been doing a lot of, like you and Maddie, just sort of stopping and going back and doubling over and re-exploring. Right, because like, in addition to the kind of, quote-unquote, main quest, whatever that means of like going around and finding these massive great ruin-bearing bosses, there are also these like intricate, convoluted sub-quest that you can do that take you to whole new areas, like underground stuff and like other kind of secret hidden teleporting stuff. yeah, if you talk to people on the roundtable hold, you'll start getting hints of other quests, and there's just all sorts of shit in this game. Yeah, so 80 plus hours in, I'm starting to feel burnt out. And I think that's because I played 80 hours of the same game over the course of like, what, two and a half weeks, three weeks or something.

Yeah. Yeah. And so part of me is like, oh, my God, I can't believe how much is left. Yeah. And then another part of me is like, man, I don't want this game to ever be over. But I kind of do want this game to be over. So I don't know. I'm kind of grappling with that. That said, I stand by what I said last week and the week before, which is that this is one of the best games I've ever played in my life.

Like, it is tremendous. It is such an achievement, the combination of like the bliss of exploration and the sense of mystery that it creates and how evocative that is combined with like the soul's challenges and design aptitude and that feeling of like, okay, I'll just try that one boss one more time. Okay, almost beat him one more time, one more time. And that combined with the fact that it isn't really that difficult, like if you get stuck in a bus, you can just go do so many other things that I just think, I think thinking of this is a, I think thinking of this is a difficult game isn't even accurate. It's more just a game where you can't think of death as an obstacle. But we'll get into that.

But overall, overall love it. On the difficulty thing, I will say, this is mostly just from speaking with our friend Mike Rugeot, who is at the very end of the game. Right, yes. I do think it's worth mentioning that the final stuff, and I don't even know if this is fully necessary, like required stuff, but the final stuff in this game is apparently unbelievably, ridiculously difficult, like to the point where he's at least not happy about it,

and I see a lot of people being sort of very frustrated with the very, very, very, very last bosses, but that is only the stuff at the end. But I do gather that it becomes quite difficult. So, okay, so a little bit about the structure of the game. I think that like when you start off, you're talking to Gideon, who's the knight at the

round table hold, and he gives you like explanations of all of these great ruin bearers and where they are. Lord Daddy is what we call him. He's our Lord Daddy, yes. Go see Lord Daddy and get a refresher on the Lord. He's kind of a bad person, it turns out.

He is, yeah. Shocking for a character in a Frumsof game to turn out to be morally gray and perhaps even ethically corrupt in some way that is revealed over time. I've never seen that. So he tells you about these five run bears, or six, six run

bearers. Um, and it's kind of... Pieces of the Eldon ring. They have runes, but they are shard bears. Shards of the Eldon ring. Shards of the Eldon ring. And it's like, okay, Limbgrave, Learnia, Kalid, etc. And the implication

is like, okay, you beat all these five dudes and then you go to the capital and you take on the big boss and that's the end of the game. But then it turns out there's a whole lot more after the Capitol. And that kind of like has put me in an interesting position. That combined with hearing from Mike that the end end is like super tough and impenetrable has is part of what's contributed to my burnout. And I'm very curious to see like what happens to people as they reach the end of this game. I don't think, I think this is the type of the game that a lot of people are just never going to finish. And

I'm hoping that I will finish it, but I don't know. That said, I think most of our listeners right now still in the blissful early to midgame stages, which for me was just like... Yeah, they're still only having played 60 to 8 and 80 hours. So then they're in the blissful early stages. Yeah, yeah. So in that sweet spot of 1 to 80 hours. Yeah, God. Yeah.

But then after that, the game really starts to suck. So like, is it even worth buying? You know what I mean? Like, it's barely with the constant admission. No, for real, it owns. And like, honestly, I feel like if you don't beat it, I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot with the bosses because, so we've kind of glossed over it by just saying you can explore anything, but you really can't. Like, I took a really long break before I beat Godrick because he's the second boss.

But he doesn't have to be at all because you can just keep running around. Yeah, he was like my seventh boss or something. Yeah, I've went and I found a bunch of other. Well, second major boss. Second, like story boss, if you want to think of that. But again, he doesn't, he doesn't necessarily have to be because you can go north and Learnia. Yeah, you can go fight Renala first. Yeah, you can fight the wolf character and then the, I don't know what her name is,

but she's basically like evil Hermione Granger. You can go for her. Yeah, and you can fight all these other bosses. She's like Evil McGonagall, Professor McGonnell. Like the fact that, oh yeah, fair enough. The fact that there are all these other, you can basically fight the bosses in any order, Mega Man style, but also you can just keep exploring lesser dungeons at any time. and there are sort of mini bosses all over the map of varying degrees of difficulty.

Like there's, I don't know if you guys checked out the Siafra River well at all, where there's the ancestor boss. Like, that's a boss that's pretty hard. It's a cool boss fight, actually. There's just kind of bosses you can stumble and fall into. And how would we even describe something like that? And so then that meant that when I finally circled back around and did beat Godrick, I was a lot more capable. but that wasn't necessarily intentional. I was just exploring the world.

And that's part of why it's hard to talk about the game in a linear sense because everybody's playing it this way. And like some people are meeting Godrick really early on. Some people are meeting him way later. Don't even know what the first or second boss is. And that's really neat. It's just a neat way for a game to be designed to have anything in any order. Yeah, it's truly open.

I think that that's a really cool thing about it, is it is just a non-linear game. Like, we're thinking of it because, like, there are these story inflection points, and I guess those are the shard bearer fights. You can kind of, like, you know, when you look at the map or when you look out from a vantage point on this game, and you see a bunch of fog with some towers coming up out of it, that's kind of the game, right? You'll see people talking, and they'll be talking about the towers. They'll be like, oh, I'm fighting Redan. And you're like, oh, I know that fight. And, you know, and that's kind of this whole thing.

But it's mostly just this huge expanse that you can just move through in any direction. It's a genuinely non-linear experience. It has like kind of contours. There's clearly level suggestions for different areas, but it's so open-ended. And yeah, that is a really nice thing about it. So I think, here's my theory, I think that almost hurts the game. It hurts, it's so good that it hurts itself by being so good. And let me explain what I mean.

It's actually too good. An incendiary take. Stop praying for Eldon Ring. So as you're playing, because the designers have made, made the exploration feel so good and so satisfying and there's so many interesting things around every corner and in every catacomb and in every little village and you just want to go to a new area and then just see every little thing you can. You wind up, A, getting super overpowered and B, just because you're killing so much stuff and getting so many items. And B, you wind up

just spending a lot, a lot of time to the point where you could spend 60 hours in this game and will only have seen Limgrave and Leornia and not realize that you're like 30% of the way for the entire game. And so I think that is kind of hurting it because you get to the point where I'm at and where Kirk's at and where our buddy Mike is at where maybe you're towards the end of the game

and you're just like, man, I am feeling a little bit of burnout here. I'm feeling like, oh, wow, there is so much left to go. And I spend all this time exploring and poking away at stuff. It almost feels like this game is just not men. for anyone to 100% it the first time around. And that like to enjoy it more, you almost have to like resist the urge. Or you just never finish it. I'm sure you can enjoy it quite as much by exploring all of like the first couple areas,

then take a four-month break and then maybe come back to it. That's kind of what I'm going to do. Yeah, I think it's a common thing like with Dark Souls, people who just constantly play the first 70% of Dark Souls and then, because that game, I've never finished it, but it famously has a kind of lousy final act and no one really was going to say that game is. And I've been in the middle of Dark Souls for, I don't know, a hundred hours. For six or seven one more things.

Yeah, I mean, well, that's what's so wonderful about it. And Dark Souls is almost an open world game. Like, that's part of why I'm loving Elder Ring so much, because not only is it absolutely beautiful, like it's a next generation game. It has really great graphics if you've got a good enough graphics card. But Dark Souls, what I almost miss about it sometimes is just the, the sense that you can almost go anywhere, but certain things are gated off by story moments,

and there's a sense of mystery. Eldon Ring is just, you can really go anywhere. Nothing is closed off to you at any point. Yeah, well, it's not entirely true. I mean, first of all, if you wind up, like, if you wind up in Kalid early, you're just going to die. And many people have had that experience of getting teleported by the test to Kalid. That incredible joke that the game plays on you, yeah.

Yeah. And also, like, there are locked up. So you can't get into the Capitol until you've gotten two great ruins. You can't get up that lift until you get the medallions or the left. Or there's a way around. There's a sideway. Yeah, but it's tough if you're under level. So you can't really, I mean, this isn't like Breath of the Wild.

Breath of the Wild is a lot closer to that kind of or example of like the nonlinear experience. Right, right. You can go to Gannon right off the cuff. Yeah. In Breath of the Wild, you can literally do anything at any time. You can complete the four dungeons in any order. In this, you can't. You're not going to go fight Redon before you've done god.

because it's just not like practical. That said, I think that, yes, 100%, like the nonlinearity is so fascinating in this game. And like the fact that you can just go in any direction and find something cool is one of the reasons this is such a masterpiece. Yeah, but I don't think it's a downside, Jason, is what I'm saying. And I think that the way I've been playing Dark Souls, which is to say when I don't have a game I need to play for work, I dip back into Dark Souls and play that for a couple weeks and force you two to hear me talk about it.

I think that is how this game, Eldon Ring, is absolutely meant to be played and that I do feel like I've been experiencing a bit of the too much of a good thing. Like you're eating an extra slice of cake over and over again because you're like, oh, it's so good though. But like unlike a cake, this game isn't going to go bad after a week and you don't need to hurry up and eat it. Like we probably could have savored it a bit more and been completely fine. It's just that it's so good that it's really hard to get yourself. to do that because there's always something exciting around every corner and you just want to keep playing it over and over and sinking into it, even though some piece of you feels burned out by it. Yeah, I think that it's paced really interestingly. I think that we haven't really an encounter

a game with this kind of pacing in such a long time that it's hard to even really understand the way that it's paced. Because it's well paced and it's also paced out over. I mean, this is a game that I thought was going to be a 90 to 100 an hour game that's really like a 120 to 130 hour game. I just can't think of the last time I played a game that big and it's hard to even conceptualize the pacing of it. It does these gear shifts between being a sort of older style souls like game, the legacy dungeons,

but then also just later in the game, once you've kind of gone through the four major open areas, like the main four that you're exploring, it starts to become more like more of the levels that I was doing, I was just finding I would play a whole night and everything I was doing would be in a soul style legacy dungeon where I'm like unlocking shortcuts and moving forward. It's not in the open world. I'm not on my horse basically.

Like I can't access my horse at all. I played for three hours tonight and I didn't even get on my horse because all I'm doing is going through these various dungeons. And then I start to kind of miss the open world and I just find that the game is like making these huge swings between being two totally different kinds of games. And I can't even, I mean even now after all these hours get my head around that. I described it as like, it's like they made Dark Souls 4 and mixed it with an open world game that they were also making. And then that's like this whole game.

And then they also made Dark Souls 5. And then that just comes at the end of Dark Souls 4 in the Open World game. So now I'm in this part where I'm like, oh, I'm playing yet another Dark Souls sized game that's more of just a Dark Souls game. That's just like a totally different scale of pacing for me compared to almost anything I've ever played. So, okay. So another important part of this, and I think one of the reasons, that all of us feel so compelled to keep playing is because the social aspect of it is so important.

And that comes into three forms, really. What is the multiplayer, which is fun, super fun, super janky and buggy, but fun. And you can't, it's so limited because you can't even, you can co-op only for, only really for bosses is how it's designed. And like, you can't even summon someone to an area if you've already beaten the boss there.

It's very janky. The other part of, the number two, of three is the notes, which I think are such a key pivotal part of this experience as they are with All Souls games where, like, you're going around and you're seeing these player-driven notes that are guiding you or tricking you. And it's just so much fun to, like, see this and have this communal shared experience with other players from anywhere and try to decipher what they're saying. And, like, sometimes what they say will save you from, like, a trap or a death because it'll be, like, watch left. And suddenly there's a dude to your left. Or, like, watch out for a hole. And

suddenly you look down and there's a giant hole in front of you. So that's super cool. But the third thing, and I think what is really coolest about this experience, is the experience of playing communally with friends who you're talking about it with. And so at the beginning, at the very beginning, I was talking to a lot of other reviewers and people who had early copies of the game. Then we started a big Discord chat, and we've also been talking on Discord with, like, we have the triple-click Discord where I'm seeing a lot of people talking about it,

and that's been fun to watch. And people are using Twitter to share memes and talk about all sorts of things. And I think that's such an important part of the game too. And that's one of the reasons that we all feel compelled to just keep playing is because it is just so much fun to find something cool and then be like, holy shit, guys, did you see this cool thing I just found?

Like, have you found this yet? No, where should I go? And there's something really, it's fun to play a game like this and use walkthroughs. Like, there's definitely pros to that approach. But it's even more fun to play with your friends and for you all to be organically discovering things and then telling each other where to find those things,

which is just such a cool experience. Yeah, it's so great. And telling each other's stories about how you defeated each weird thing you came across because usually it'll be completely different. Like a lot of my friends are playing with mage builds and like wildly different builds than I have. And so when they share Twitch clips or whatever,

it's so different from how I beat whatever boss they're fighting against. And that's fascinating to me and it also then makes me kind of jealous. and I'm like, wow, they're like playing a completely other game. I guess I have to play Eldon Ring again. Like, oh, man, life is so hard for me. But also it's like they can have the experience that Jason described of like, oh, I had this really fun time with this enemy or in this area, but hated this one.

And then I'll be like, that was like my favorite area because my play style meant that I thought that was super fun. And then the part that you thought was super fun, I found extremely challenging because I was playing it in a completely different way. I don't know. It's wild. That in shortcuts, like I accidentally discovered a shortcut in Stormvale Castle and like skipped

a bunch of it and like just didn't even realize how huge it is and how much I missed until I circled back after beating Godrick and was like, holy shit, there's like so many other items here. Like just that sense. Did you find the basement? Yeah. I mean like there's all there's like so many levels

in there. Like Stormville is fun as hell. Like it's a great Castle and some of that was like me discovering things on my own and some of it was like seeing other people's clips or like friends of mine talking about it being like wait a minute that's in Stormvale like I got to get back over there and see where the heck you work yeah I want to I totally agree that the that just the the way that we communicate about this game with our friends is cool I've actually been really enjoying the Eldon Ring subreddit as well just because it's all memes there but the thing about the memes of this game for me anyways it's like they all rely on that sort of that type of

meme, maybe this is like the most common type of meme, which is articulating a feeling or an experience that you thought you had that was unique to you, but in a way that it's like, oh, everybody had the same thing. This game, because of the way it works and the way that it's designed that they've so carefully created all these little experiences, they know what's going to happen to you, how you're going to feel, that you're going to see the thing and walk over to it and then the enemy's going to drop on your head or whatever, that you're going to find this one enemy difficult in this certain way.

So everyone has the same experience, but it feels unique. So then when you see the meme about it on Reddit, it cracks me up over and over and over again. I almost never read video game subredits, but I enjoy that one. I do. Can we talk about messages a little, though? So I want to. Yes. How poetic and weird they are.

Like half the fun of messages is trying to figure out what they mean, because you have to use these specific words and terminology in order to write a message. Like you can't write whatever you want. You can only write certain key phrases, which then means that certain key phrases have come to mean things among the player community that are ridiculous. Like, the phrase you don't have the right just means you can't go here yet. This door will maybe be able to go here later, but you can't go here right now. The actual phrase is, you don't have the right. Oh, you don't have the right.

Oh, you don't have the right. Oh, you don't have the right. Yes, that's correct. So I like the way that this game, speaking of memes, the messages in this game, like, allow for this game to have its own memetic language. There's a lot of the, like, corny, like, overplayed stuff, you know. Tri-finger butthole, for example, which has been in the game for thousands and thousands of messages. Yes, yes. And then someone saying secret passage ahead and then someone saying liar ahead, which is just literally everywhere to the point where I'll just find liar ahead.

And it'll be there won't be a secret message notification because that one went away because you only get 10. You don't have the right as a big one. And then there's just cool little shorthands that develop, you know, like home will mean that there's grace ahead. It's actually really nice in some places where people tell you, oh, there's a site of grace. but go down, don't go forward, or you're going to fight a boss. But the ones that are really amazing to me have been the ones where they really have helped me solve a puzzle. There's one dungeon called, what's it called, the Gilmar Heroes Grave, which I won't spoil the particulars of it for people who haven't seen it because it's a unique and very cool challenge.

But there's this final phase of this sort of death trap puzzle thing you're making your way through that I was like, I do not understand what I'm supposed to do here. And then I found notes that actually indicated and walked me through. They were like, you know, here is a good one, here, exclamation point. And it showed me a little secret path. And then I was like, oh, and then I got up. And there was another note being like, this is what you do. And I figured out this actually very complicated solution to this puzzle.

Or in another really cool unique dungeon, you're kind of shifting between different spaces. And I guess people who have done it will know what I mean. And at first you don't realize that you're shifting between differences. spaces, but someone left a note, and it's like there's a lever in one of the spaces, and there's no lever in the same place in the other one. And I was in the one where there's no lever, and there was just a note that said, lever, exclamation point. And I was like, oh, this is where the lever is supposed to be, but it's not here.

That means I'm, like, not in the same place. And it's solved the whole thing for me that someone left that note. I think that kind of stuff is amazing, like, the way that they've just, I mean, the system has been in from games forever, but the way that people come up to use it just transforms the game, it's so, so cool. Yeah, especially for a game like this with so much platforming. Oh, yeah. I'm like previous,

I'm like previous games here, it'll be like, down, that is always essential. Because there will be... Or just the existence of a message will tell you someone can go there, like it's possible to be there. Yeah. Although sometimes there'll be, they'll be false leads or it'll be like, only message here or something like that.

Oh yeah, or like they did some crazy glitch. Or it'll say try jumping in a place where you should absolutely never jump, which is a classic from soft bit. But there are try jumping in places where it is the correct place to jump. I mean, this is, you know, you've got to use your eyes. But it is part of what makes it cool. But it's also, it's wild to play a From Soft game where there's a jump mechanic, first of all.

And it's also wild to play one where there's a horse. With a double jump. And fast travel. Like, I know we've talked about this before, but it's a great horse. It's a great little pony. Love Torrent. Torrent, the best. is probably only there so that no one ever pirates this game.

That's fine. I respect it. I respect the choice. But it's wild. It really, really changes the game and makes it completely different from Dark Souls 1. So if you Google Eldon Ring Torrent, you really just will not be able to find.

You'll never find anything but adorable pictures of your adorable horse. Of course. Just fan art of a wonderful horse. A horse with like goat horse, it's kind of a goat horse. Yeah. It's a little bit more than just a horse. So what do you guys?

guys think of the combat in this game? I think that's obviously a pivotal part of what makes Eldon Ring, Eldon Ring. And there's a lot to it. There are a lot of different types of weapons. There's a lot of different types of magic. There are a lot of different types of ash summons that you can use on bosses. There's a lot of cheesing that you could do. And people have already found some super creative ways to cheese enemies. I'm curious to hear what both of you have thought so far of the combat in the game. Are we all playing melee? Are we all playing strength decks?

So, no, I'm actually playing strength faith. So I do have some spells as well. I'm playing the mix of strength. I got my Claymore and I got my incantation. That's the way to go. I think so. It's the way to go. Are you doing like two-handed weapons, like some of those magical knives and stuff like that?

I've seen some cool clips of those. I'm a Claymore for life kind of Soulsplayer, which is a total type. It's either Zwhi-Hander or Claymore There's a whole We have a whole complicated back and forth In our sub-community of two-handed sword users But I love the Claymore Your sub-community? Do you have a discord for it?

So you're just using the thing that says Claymore, you're not using like one of the greats One of the other greatswords No, I just use a claymore with like a I think it's that bloody slash weapon art Heavy Claymore to get maximum string Because there are some special great swords That are like pretty badass

are so colossal. I don't love them and they're very heavy, which I like being able to carry like a great shield and heavier armor. So I like the claim where it works for me. But there are so many cool weapons. I mean, one thing we were talking about with builds, I think once the build science really gets down, there's going to be some super cool hybrid builds in this game because there are some swords that are like really cool, like inth, decks, strength scaling swords. There's the one sword. What's it like the sort of fire and ice? It's not fire and ice, but it's the song of ice and fire but it's like...

Well, it could be. It's like night and fire. Night and flame, I think. That sword seems incredible if you level to it. But yeah, so anyways, we're talking about combat, though, not weapons.

I like it a lot. I think this... It's basically Dark Souls 3 with some extra stuff, right? Like, this is the closest to Dark Souls 3 rather than Blood-Born or Securo. It's got casting,

it's got faith, it's got different, like, decks and strength. It's got the backstep, but no quick step. Like the combat is basically, you know, a lot of blocking you can play really reactively with a shield. I love that. I think it's really good.

I mean, the block counter or whatever it's called where you block with a shield and then you get this. Yeah, that's a fun one. Yeah, that's a fun one. Yeah, that's a funerful. And then, of course, Ash Summons are really cool, too. The way that it just sort of encourages you to do more summoning, it just makes fights a lot more fun and feel a little bit more like punishing one-on-one fights. Though I will say, I've seen a lot of people talking about the Crucible Knight fight. and that's just an ever-jail fight that you can do, I think, in Limgrave.

And it's just this guy with a shield. Well, there are a lot of crucible nights. But the, oh, are there? Well, that first crucible night is the one that everyone talks about. And I was sitting there in Discord chat with our friends fighting him just, and I was like, this motherfucker. Like, I just kept going, because he's so relentless, and he just kept rocking me. And it was the first time. And he has his wings and stuff.

When you heal, he just punishes you. Like, and that's kind of the thing. He knows. That fight where there's no summons, there's no Ash Summons, I just had to do it. I was having that sort of traditional, just I'm doing a hard fight in a from game experience. And it just made me appreciate how good the combat system is, how fun it is. I've seen a lot of people talk about Crucible Night as just being a fun challenge. I watched this video of a guy who's like level one with the club and no armor beating him without being hit.

And it's just, it's like the fundamentals of combat are great. And it's a really fun combat game. By the way, when Cricks says Everjail, most of us out there are going to read that as Evergal. or Evergal. I'm being sure to pronounce it correctly. That's how I pronounce it. Yeah, I thought it was Evergal, but Ever Jail makes it sound like it's spelled Ever Jail, like J-A-I-L. It's not.

It is not spelled that way, but it is pronounced that way. I was pronouncing it wrong in my head, too, but I'm trying to get it right. Well, good to know. Good to know. Yeah, what I think is really cool about this combat is just how many different ways it allows for. And so I have been running around with my Bloodhound Fang, which is like a wicked weapon. pretty early is one of the best weapons. I discovered it early on and just have never stopped using it because it's so good and does so much damage.

Yeah, if I was playing decks, I would be using that thing. Yeah, and I just rip apart bosses to the point where, like, I beat some of the bosses in the capital and just like two tries. I beat most of those bosses. I'm over-leveled anyways. Yeah, well, that's the thing. I think you're not meant to play, like, be there as strong as the two of us had been. Men too, yeah. I don't know, I guess.

I don't know, who knows. But that's the point I was making really. It's hard to resist exploring every inch of the map and then thereby getting tons more levels. I mean, I think I'll be over-leveled by the time I get to the Capitol too. That's part of why I turned back when I got off the elevator. I was like, I want to go make sure I unlock every last thing before I leave. There's a lot more to see up there besides the Capitol. But anyway, so my point was that the way I play is with this thing, I roll around.

Sometimes I use a shield. Sometimes I just use the weapon art instead. head and I'm just like kind of doing a lot of dodging, swiping, dodging back, swiping, that sort of style. But then I've watched all these videos and seen friends playing and they're just like sitting in the back, castes a summon to attract the boss's attention and like casting a bunch of magic at the boss and like ripping bosses apart with magic. Yeah. And like running around and rolling around to dodge but still just doing long range entirely. Yeah, it's completely different style. It's very cool to see. and I'm sure this is also the case with other souls games,

even though I tend to play with the Dodge Attack method with all of them. But yeah, but there's just so much variety in the combat. It just feels so good to play and to attack enemies and so much about it. And I think one of the big appeals of it, and I just started playing another action game that I've got an early code for that I'll talk about more next week because it's under embargo. but there's just in that game, there's just a lot more information on the screen that's happening.

Like, when an ability is cast, you'll see the name of that ability pop up and you'll just see a lot more like things going on. And I think one of the reasons Zelda Rings Combat feels so graceful and elegant is because of that simplicity of like what you can actually see. You are just watching the boss and watching their pattern. And that is it.

There's no like messages on screen to tell you what they're doing. no like buttons you have to smash at certain times other than just like what you know. And I think that is one of the reasons it's so good. Yeah, I agree. I am mostly playing with, well, I got a 100% damage negation shield very early on. I can't imagine playing this game without one. I had a friend who was like, I only recently got one. And it's really changing things for me.

I'm like, what are you doing? Like you got to have a shield that negates damage. Can I ask, is it a medium shield or a great shield? Oh, gosh. Ask me later. I would need to boot up the game. Maddie already said it was a great shield. Well, it's a great shield.

That was merely an adjective. A thing that I just learned that I just will say really quick is that I switch to great shields. Because I've been watching some Iron Pineapple videos. He's like this Super Souls expert on YouTube. Post these videos are like 30 things you didn't know and they're all amazing. You can wash yourself off with soap. And he posts, he was talking about Great Shields. Just like in real life, you can wash yourself off with soap in this game.

Can't usually do that in video games or at least it doesn't matter. I'm just saying it's like to the listener who doesn't know what Kirk is talking about. He wasn't just making a joke about it. No, it's a real thing. If you roll through like poison, you get it on your outfit and it keeps infecting you and you have to wash off. There's all this stuff like that. Anyways, I've been watching his videos and he was talking some about great shields. And I didn't realize this, but a great shield with 100% physical deflection causes way more enemy attacks to bounce off and stagger the enemies, which gives you an opening for your counter.

Anyways, great shields rule I just started using them. You can also use the barricade shield art, which gives you kind of the same thing. Anyways, go ahead, Maddie. Yeah, I'm just, I'm very into the shield. Not to say I don't enjoy rolling from time to time, but I'm very much a shield person. And I'm also like a run around the boss person, like using just run and the back dash in order to get out of the way. Which is a great strategy. Very, very fun and very cool.

And as everyone knows, I have an axe. I'm not so much too handing this time because I really like the shield mechanics in this game. So I'm mostly just axing it. The only reason I've started using a bow at this point, It's just because there are some enemies. Like there's that cave with all the ants in it. Those guys really benefit from having a book. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Just way easier with a book. There's some bows that scale with strength too. The ants like skeeve me the hell out. There's a big, man, the monsters in this game. From Software is incredible coming up with monsters. And some of them are like these truly horrifying abominations. But nothing creeps me out more than big versions of real things. Like the big ants, the big crabs.

The big lobster? Did you find that big lobster? Oh yeah, there are a lot of lobsters. You know what actually. There aren't big spiders in this game and I think that that's kind of interesting. That's true. Yeah, I might be speaking too soon, but I've seen a lot of a game. Come on.

A spider is going to show up. But they've had spiders in so many of their games. They've been in other games. Yeah, maybe they're like, you know what, we're sick of spiders. Yeah. Or like arachnophobia is a thing. Yeah, no more spiders. Not even a spider with a sexy lady on top of it.

No more spiders at all. There's nothing. What if the final boss is just a giant's bomb? They're like, we saved it all for now. Yeah, that's why people are so mad. Yeah, that's why people are pissed. So I wanted to talk. So, Kirk, one of the things you just said, I think, is an interesting thing,

which is the point about the soap and how that isn't really explained in the game. And I think if you click the soap item description, it'll just be used for washing off clothes and stuff like that. It's soap. It's for cleaning off. Which is just a very, like, it's just such a from software thing. And it's interesting. This game, so Frum software is known. for making these games where the descriptions are all esoteric and you're just like what the hell's going on

you have to go look it up um like the most infamous example i think is the most infamous example of an esoteric thing in bloodborn and in a from game is in bloodborn i think when you fall to the basement and there's this giant like head with eyes on it that you found and if you do a certain gesture to it you will get an item and it's just like nobody could possibly thought about this except that someone did anyway so i actually think eldering is a lot better about explain stuff to you in that if you go to your quest log, first of all, you have all these tutorials open for you. But also, if you go into your inventory and you look at, not quest log, if you go into your inventory and you go to key items and you look at like, oh, this letter, it'll say to be

delivered to such and such. In fact, I didn't even realize this because I just looked it up, but there's this elaborate quest called Ronnie's Quest that everyone should do if they haven't already, if they're at that point in the game. But at a certain point, you get this key. and I was like, all right, I was like, fuck it. I just looked it up because I didn't know where the key went. But if you actually just look at the item description, it'll be like, seems to belong to a key and such and such, and it'll just tell you where to go.

And that happens a lot. But then there are the more opaque things like the soap. And I'm sure this is a game just like Breath of the Wild where years from now people will be posting, there'll be Kataka articles, 20 more things you didn't know about Eldon Ring. Yeah, totally. And I think that is so cool.

And I think it's so cool to have that balance. of like some things where it'll tell you, okay, you have to deliver this letter to such and such, and especially when it's important quests like that Ronnie one, and other things where it's just like these are cool things that you can either discover or not discover, and the game will leave it a mystery and leave it up to you, how you want to engage with it, and on what level you want to engage with it. I think that is really important. And there's been a lot of discourse about the opacity versus the transparency and how that affects people and how that, um, affects people and how that some people don't like it and some people just want a checklist type of game. And we talked

a lot about that last week. But I don't even think, I think on a micro level, just having those little details that are just kind of kept mysterious is part of what makes this game so engaging. It's because you just never know what you're going to find and what you're going to discover. And there's just so much appeal to that. And that's why so many people consider it in a masterpiece, I do think it's been nice to see. So many people talking about the eco-tag system. by name on social media. Yeah, I think this is really an interesting thing too, and that it's a good conversation

when it's had very specifically about specific examples because I do think there are ways in which this game could communicate things better or it makes things a little bit unclear. The U.S. in this game is probably the best of any From game or at least of any Souls game with magic and all these complicated things, but it's still pretty confusing, like when you're reading stats and bonuses and stuff. And the fact that you can't.

And the fact that you can't, you don't know what those icons are. Yeah, there's not a great compare screen. Like, you can't just get a good sense of armor you're shopping for. Yeah, that's annoying. That's really. There's a lot of stuff like that. Or like they don't even tell you what the little icons on your health bar. I mean, which is like sort of cool, but also means you have to Google.

What is that red square? And like, how do I get rid of it? It's like, why is there an up arrow next to some things and a down arrow next to other things? I guess that's bad or good. Real quick on that. There's been, I've seen all these posts on social media being like, don't get a hug from Fia. No, no, yeah.

Because the deep ass, absolutely do not listen to that advice because you want to be talking to Fia. Give hugs to Fia. Talk to Fia. Also, it's fine. It's like saying you don't want to die in this game. It's like, what are you doing? Have the experience.

Also, but if you don't give hugs to Fia, you'll miss out on a whole quest. So go do that with me. Yeah, there's a whole, Fia is an important character. Yeah, it's just like, there's more to Fia than just a nice lady who hugs you. Yes. But that tends to be true in these games. So anyways, I think that like when you're specifically talking about something

like that. It is good to be specific because otherwise the conversation can spiral into, well, what are you saying? This game should be like a Ubisoft game. It's like, well, no, no, no. It's like, I'm talking about this. Oh, what are you saying? Every single game should be exactly identical to Elven Ring and no other video game should ever be created again. And they should all just be this game forever. Why are you saying that? Why? So that's like less useful. But I think that getting into the specifics of this game, there's so much interesting stuff with the way that it conveys information. One example that comes to mind is the merchants all sell these little tip cards that you can buy. And each thing, it's like, note from a stranger regarding

mausoleum ruins. And then it'll be basically a hint about how to like stop the big walking mausoleum. Or you can like, you know, there's a hidden cave. There's this one hidden cave near a town in Kayla that I never would have found because I didn't, you know, I just wouldn't have gone and looked at the like random cliff you have to go and like explore to find it. But there was just a note. And the note was like, I don't even remember. It's like note from a stranger. a hidden tunnel. And I was like, well, that sounds cool. And it was like a thousand ruins or something,

which I had so many at this point. I just bought it and read it and it like told me where to go. There's a lot of stuff like that or tips for how to beat enemies that seem really difficult. And that I think is like just part of this game's language. You have to figure out, oh, it's worth buying these little things because they tell you how to do stuff or where to find stuff or how things work. The game explains itself more than it initially seems, even while there are certainly places where it could probably explain itself better. Mm-hmm. And some of that is like almost half-life 2S trickery where it like shows you where to go with environmental clues. Like we've been talking a lot about like the UI and the UX and the map just especially last week. But I feel like part of why this game doesn't feel that opaque to me is because you can see where to go based on what's shiny right in front of your nose and everything is within your sight line sort of like Diablo.

And you can put giant waypoints that show you glowing markers on your own map and you can you can you can put. put little like little circles on the map with different icons for yourself. Like you can absolutely take notes without taking notes in a notepad document. That's all true. Like that part of it is actually not that opaque either. But I just mean navigating the world feels really good and that is design choices made by the game. That's what I was saying last week that like if you strip the UI, if he stripped all the markers from a lot of games, it would be an emperor's new clothes situation. because you would realize that like, wow, this world isn't really designed well as opposed to Eldon Rings where you just, you see something. And it's like, whoa, yeah, I can see that. I can, I can,

I can visualize that. You can see where you're supposed to go. And you can look at the map and you don't need to put something on top of the castle because the castle's on the map. You can just see on the map like, oh, there's a castle. Exactly. Which is really, I mean, that's just a traditional from thing where like you, because you don't, in other from games, you didn't have a map at all. And in fact, one brilliant thing about this is that your map is totally. useless when you're in a legacy tension. But as a result of not having a map, you have to have this spatial awareness

and be like, oh, okay, like, oh, whoa, I wound up where I was before because I followed this tunnel and now I'm going to shortcut. Like, whoa, like, some of those are some of the coolest moments in From games where you just realize where you are in relation to other things. I had this amazing moment that I'll be a little

vague about, but I was in the sewers and I was in these like super narrow confined spaces and then wound up in these other areas where I I realized that I was looking at the same super confined spaces that I had been in before. And it was just incredible. Like so much of that is so cool. Yeah.

Managing sightlines is something this game is really good at. And that's like something that Breath of the Wild is also great at. And that Bethesda Games, actually, Bethesda Game Studios games like Sky Room and Fallout 3 are very good at as well. Yeah. You see that mountain? You can go there. You see that mountain? You could get on your horse and glitch your way up.

And jump into it. No, it's like it's more than just like if you see somewhere you can go there. and more that they, it's like an amusement park thing where it's kind of guiding your eye and it's telling you like it's drawing your eye toward one feature on the horizon. When you enter a new area, you know, you see, oh, okay, like there's where I'm kind of supposed to go.

You see kind of where you're intended to go and they're managing you in a very subtle way, which is actually very, very valvey, very half-lify as different as the games are. It is very valve. And it's just very player-friendly in a way that I don't think enough people are acknowledging. because I don't know, there's a little bit of bragworthiness to From Soft Games even now, even with Eldon Ring where people are like, oh, it's so mysterious.

And I just so happened to discover this cool spot. Right, me and my amazing brain, solving mystery. Yeah, you and many other people. Yeah, you and thousands of other people, dude. Like, no offense. It doesn't mean it's any less cool, but the game actually led you right to it. And that's what's the magic of it, too. So I will say one of the downsides of this opacity, or maybe it's just kind of a flaw that I'm finding with the game,

is that I think it's really important for a game to have a structure that's clear to you and that it makes you, you know what your overall, you know what your overall goal is and you know what the kind of the acts look like. It's simple, Jason. I want to become the Eld and Lord. I mean, it's so straightforward. Are you saying you don't understand the word Molina has said to you this entire time? Is that what you're saying? No, that's totally fine. It's more like, I think I was just, I was so taken aback by the fact that what I thought was going to be the end of the game wasn't. And I think that kind of like, part of that is cool because it's like, whoa, there's so much more.

And like, whoa, this game really pulled the rug under me. And part of it is like, oh, man, just like I have to totally recalibrate my expectations here. And I was thinking, actually, I was thinking about the last time that I just spent so much time being absorbed in a giant, meaty RPG like this. And I think the last time was Divinity Original Sin 2, which I played a few years ago. And that was the type of game that I played something like 80 hours, like over the course of two weeks. I think it was before I had a kid.

So I was just like totally sunk into that world for many, many, many hours. And I think something that really allowed me to finish that game and not get burnt out, even though I was a little kind of fried by the end. But not get totally burnt out was that it is a very clear four-act structure. And you know when you get to the fourth act, when you get to arcs, that is the end of the game. And I think I appreciate that in a game, especially a game like this. Same with like, Breath of the Wild. You know you've killed the four beasts. You're going again in castle. This is it. This is the end of the game. And I think I would have appreciated a little more clarity on this rather than where I currently am, which is like, I kind of, I have a goal and I have a story that is like, you have to do this thing. But I still have no idea how much longer it's going to be. And if they're going to keep pulling the rug out under me and like, give me even more places to go. And I don't know, I kind of have mixed feelings about that. Yeah, this is just your life now.

You have to live the rest of your natural life inside of Eldon Ring. Well, I am an Eldon. I am an Eldon Lord. It's true. I think, yeah, I think there's something to that. And I think, I mean, I totally agree. I'm joking before about the story because it's... I can't wait for the two-hour YouTube video explaining the story.

Yes, I will watch Vati Video's video 100%, just like everybody else will. Bloodborne stuff was amazing. Well, and like, it's sort of similar. I'm so confused. It's very similar to me. to Hollow Night, actually, which was a game that I think had a tighter structure. Like, that game did feel like, okay, you go and you find each of the sort of goal points that you're given at that certain point in the story. Once you do that, then there's some kind of extra stuff to get the true ending, but then you finish the game.

And then there's DLC and extra stuff. But it's really, it's pretty tight. But it does have that feeling of like, my God, there's more. Oh, there's more? And eventually, the stuff that's being revealed, I couldn't keep it all straight. And then eventually, in that case, not Vati Video, but it was Mossbag, who made a YouTube video explaining. the whole story of Hollow Night. And it's incredible. Once you watch someone put it all together, it's like, oh, that's what I was doing. Okay, cool.

I think that's going to be true of this game, too. It's interesting because there's more story here than in a past Souls game. I'd say Sekiro is the closest comparison, where there was a pretty clear story in Sekiro, and then Bloodborn also had not a clear story, but it felt sort of similar. But there's a thing that all of these stories do, these from soft stories, it's like they start pretty focused. They start, like they make sense. You kind of understand the stakes. And then they just start to kind of spiral and spiral out of control.

And then it's like, there's suddenly they introduce all this new stuff. And pretty soon I'm just like, I'm just killing bosses and I don't even know. And then like DeNaris turns evil and she's riding on a dragon. And basically this is all George Ar.R. Martin's fault. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can see. I think the George Aramartin influence is clear in the names. I think you can see it.

is the same. Godrick and Godwin and Goddra. It's just like Renala and Ronnie and Renna. I do think that like the stuff with the houses and the politics, like there's a more, I have much more of a sense of this kingdom and what it was like. And I would imagine, I'd have to guess, I mean, it's so hard to tell what George Ar. Martin did on this game. Or didn't do, yeah, I mean, some of it is just the souls of it all, but I'm like, I don't know that this has George R. Martin's voice per se. Like some, these characters just talk like Dark Souls characters. Not an insult. made it. He just wrote the lore. It's more the structure of the world and the kingdoms and the politics that feels a little like him. I suppose so. But yeah, but yeah, you can definitely see it.

The Dark Souls also has plenty of shenanigans and politics and, you know, people you can and can't join and you don't really know why it would matter whether or not you joined each little click. I mean, this game has some of that too. But hey, I'm only 35 hours in. So, so. I've really barely even met anybody at this point. I don't know. Maddie, to your point, I don't think that it's like necessarily something that from couldn't have done on their own. And if we hadn't known that it was George Aramorton, maybe we probably wouldn't know. But that said, since you know it's George R. Martin, I think you can see, you can kind of grow like grok some of the influence. Yeah, yeah. So we we do have to have things up soon. But a couple more things to talk about.

One is performance issues, which I think are a pretty important part of this story, especially for those people playing on PC. Yeah. I hadn't run into many PC issues until like the most recent patch, which I think was last week. And then my game just started crashing nonstop. And it's so irritating. It's just, it's like it ruined a couple of days of playing for me because the game was crashing like literally every 30 minutes, every 20 to 30 minutes. And that was just, it really ruined the experience for me. If I had gone through that when I first got it, like the first couple of weeks I was playing, I might have just stopped.

them and I've been like, man, this game is unplayable for me. And now it's really annoying. So I do think that some of the performance issues have been a problem. Maybe that's just me. I don't know. What do you guys think of it? You're both playing on PC also, right? I've had some crashes.

And I also lost a pretty significant chunk of progress, one day's worth of playing. Because of the cloud save, steam save issue that I ran into. And several other people ran into it. It's a specific bug that just, I don't even know. It sucked. But then also, I had only, spent that time exploring and not fighting a boss so I didn't lose

any progress that felt really bad I just lost some levels but you could imagine if you did oh if I had lost a boss fight like I was reading that Reddit thread and people were like I just immediately started crying because I had like beaten Margaret and Godrick and then lost that and I was like yeah I would have cried

if I had like a lost a significant boss run that had been hard to think about how satisfying it'll be to beat him again well yeah I mean also whatever but it meant then that when I went back into the game to recoup my loss levels, I just went to places where I knew there were a lot of golden ruins already because I was like, well, I already explored these places. I know exactly where to go. So it wasn't as hard, but it did mean that it was, I don't know.

I feel like it says something about the quality of this game that I didn't really feel that sad once I got back in the game. And I was like, oh, I got to play five to eight more hours of Eldon Ring again. That's fine, I guess. So whatever. They got me. They got me. The game definitely overcomes the technical problems. Like when it first came out, especially in PC circles, there was so much rage about it that I was like, y'all, I've played like 30 hours of this game, and it's so good that this is going to balance out these problems eventually,

and of course it did. But it is too bad. When I was playing it before launch, I was thinking, oh, well, you know, there's this constant kind of frame stuff that happens, like kind of constantly in this very weird way. Digital Foundry, I think, did a video trying to figure out what's going on, but it's almost like every time a new enemy loads in, you get this weird little like slowdown for a second,

which just sort of sucks. And there's definitely frame rate issues. And I don't, I just play through them and don't care because the game is so good. And I mean, Breath of the Wild is one of my favorite games ever. And that game has all kinds of frame rate issues. Yeah, when you get to the woods, the hidden woods.

When a game is good enough and it's third person, it's not a huge deal. But it's a shame. Well, the frame rate is a very different issue than crashing. Oh, no, and it crashes for me plenty. And that sucks. Of course. But we already talked about that sometimes.

talking about the frame, I think. Got it. Cut it. Yeah, the crashing is a huge disaster. It doesn't been, I haven't had a crash during your boss fight, but it still sucks when it happens. Kills your momentum. I have. It's really sucks. Yeah. No, I'm sure it does. The boss and it crashed. It was really nice. The bummer to me is I was playing before it came out and I was like, well, okay, there's some issues. The fact that it's capped at 60 FPS on PC is just wild, just given that like it's 20, 22 and most games don't have 60 frames per second cap. And I was thinking when it will come out, like when it comes out, someone's going to mod this thing like they did with Sekiro where they'll unlock the frame rate.

And Sekiro runs amazing on PC, mostly because there's a mod that uncaps the frame rate, and you can play it super smooth. But this game has this anti-cheat software that makes it pretty much impossible to mod as long as you're online. And so that just hasn't been a thing. So now we're kind of just waiting for From to fix it. I wonder if that's what's causing so many of the issues, that freaking anti-cheat software. That's been a theory.

I don't know. I'm certainly not technically wise enough to know, but it seems possible. And, of course, they're trying to protect us from, there can be some pretty terrible stuff on PC. Oh, yeah. You guys been invaded at all? Well, that's just fun. But I mean, like, when someone invades and, like, gets your account banned or, like, hacks your PC or something. Yeah, I mean, that would suck.

I've been invaded and it's fine, but I'm just saying, I sure don't want somebody cheating and invading me. It's not fun. Right. Wrecking my save game or something, which used to be possible. Yes. I only think it's fun because I've defeated every invader so far. Who knows if I would think it was fun if I hadn't done that. I love, man.

I love getting invading. and taking them on with the person I'm playing with. Super fun, yeah. All right. Just like Eldon Ring, we have gone on too long. Just long enough. Special game deserves a special game deserves a specially long episode. So why don't we take a break and we will be back with one more thing.

Most game shows quiz contestants about topics they don't even care about. But for 100 episodes, the Go Fact Yourself podcast has asked celebrity guests, trivia about topics they choose for themselves. And introduce them to some of their personal heroes along the way. Oh, my gosh. Shut up. Oh, I feel like I'm going to cry. Oh, my stuff. It's so excited me.

Join me, Jake Heath Van Stratton. And me, Helen Hong, along with special guests, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and Faith Saly, plus some amazing surprise experts on the 100th episode of Go Fact Yourself. And join us twice a month every month for new episodes of Go Fact Yourself here on Maximum Fun. Hi, Maximum Fun. It's me, James Arthur M from Minority Corner. Okay, we got some good news and I got some bad news. Bad news. Minority Corner, after seven years and 340 episodes, we are wrapping up our show. I know, I know, but he, good news, good news is, that means we must have solved racism and homophobia and sexism and equality and equity for all.

Yay! No, no, we didn't. Well, I'd like to think at least that we are better off than when we started seven years ago. go. Some. Don't worry. We might be saying goodbye, but our episodes will live on in the podcast airwaves forever. Or until the internet crashes and burn. Whatever comes first. Minority Corner, the final episodes right here on Maximum Bun or wherever get your podcast. Minority Corner, because together, we're the majority. And we are back. Kirk, Maddie, it is time to not talk about more L. Din Ring. And it's time for one more thing. I guess. Maddie, take us away. What's your one more

thing. Okay. So my one more thing is the television show alias from the early 2000. Yeah, Kirk's going to add in the theme song and that's the entire length of my one four thing. We don't need to talk about the show. Oh my God, it's so catchy. And supposedly written by JJ Abrams. I don't know if that's true, but it does say theme by JJ Abrams in the credits of the show. So I think that's meaningful. So yeah, this is, this is a JJ Abrams show. starring Jennifer Garner as spy extraordinaire, Sydney Bristow. And it's wonderful. I watched it when I was much younger.

Dina, my girlfriend, had never seen it before. And so we watched all of it together and had a wonderful time talking about all the wigs that Sidney Bristow wears and all the people that she kicks in the face and all the ceilings that she glues herself to Spider-Man like while hiding from various people. But I just wanted to say, as somebody rewatching alias as an adult, I really loved Jack Bristow, this time around so much more than I ever expected to, played by Victor Garber. Spy Daddy, as he was nicknamed at the time and still is. He still like accepts the moniker Spy Daddy to this day. I just feel like he's so incredible on this show and I didn't respect like his

acting prowess as a kid. I was so busy rooting for Sidney and Vaughn to get together. They're sort of the will they won't they romance of the entire show's arc of course. And like that's just what I was invested in. you know, 20 years ago. But now I'm like, damn, Victor Garber is really so badass in this role. And I promise this isn't a spoiler,

but this is like a fan theory that I read before I did this rewatch that changed it for me in a super fun way. So there's a fan theory that Victor Garber or that Jack Bristow, the character he's playing, is Rambaldi, who is this sort of like sci-fi

Leonardo da Vinci figure from the distant cast. The McGuffin creator. The McGuffin creator, yes, who inventes. all these absurd sci-fi, like futuristic things that somehow, like, he could create many, many hundreds of years ago and then modern spies can use these technologies. Leonardo da Vinci and the Assassin's Creed games. Of course, yes.

And it's like, and also he has the power to live forever, among many, many other powers. And to see the future. Like, he's basically Professor X. Rumbaldi is an impressive guy. Yes. So, but there is a very funny fan theory that the reason why Jack Bristow seems so jaded and so badass and like he's seen it all and doesn't really give a shit about Rambaldi and thinks it's kind of like silly and overhyped is because he himself is Rambaldi. He's lived this whole time.

He's basically an ageless vampire. He's seen it all. He fears nothing. And that's a really, really fun way to watch the show. I just enjoyed it a lot. I don't think that theory is true at all. That is the kind of thing J.J. Abrams would do now if you were making this show now. But it's not true. It's just a fun way to watch Alias. So yeah, I recommend Alias. very, very silly show and really a fun watch. Victor Garber does rule. I recently rewatched Titanic, which just is a great movie. Yes, he's so good in that.

I also recently rewatched that. It's, first of all, great movie. Great movie. Holds up. And also, he has maybe three scenes in that movie, but he elevates the whole thing. I mean, it's really one of those great three-scene performances. He's so good. So, yeah, I'm like a huge Victor Garber fan now.

That'd be a good beans cast. Oh, man. I would do a Titanic Beans cast in a heartbeat. You know what? I would do that. Any James Cameron Bean's cast, do you guys want to do? I would do it. No, we're already doing diehard this month.

It's settled. It's settled. Kirk, what's your one more thing? My one more thing is two Stephen King books. So. Yeah. I like this sentence. My one more thing is two.

It's Stephen King. Look, they're a forced diad. Okay? They're not just one book. It's a diad and they feed off of one another. No, this is sort of one topic, though. So we talk about Stephen King a lot here. I think all three of us.

Stephen King, Maddie, I know you recently read Carrie. Jason and I know you're a big king fan. We're big fans of the podcast, Just King Things. And we swear we're not sponsored by Just King Things. We just really like that show. We probably should be at this point. And of course, and buddies with those guys and have gone on that show. So the first two Stephen King novels are Carrie and Salem's Lot.

I think I'd read Carrie. I always thought I'd read Carrie. I know I'd seen the movie, but I read it so longer that I hadn't read it. And I'd never read Salem's Lot. and I listened to, I hadn't, I had sort of saved those episodes. I'd listen to the Carrie episode of Just King Things, but not the Salem's Lot episode. So I went and I read Salem's Lot and then I read Carrie and just sort of back to back. And it's kind of the first two Stephen King novels.

And they're both great books for starters. Like if you just want two ass-kicking, you know, thriller books, but they're very different. And I think it's interesting how different they are. Salem's Lot, first off, town is not called Salem's Lot. It's called Jerusalem's Lot. People call it Salem's Law for short. I never knew that. And now I know that.

So Salem's Lot is a story, is a vampire story, of course, as everybody probably knows at this point. And it's about a town. And it's very much that Stephen King thing of like, I'm going to paint this portrait of a town and all these minor characters and this sort of their little dramas and their, you know, their sins and the different ways that they live. The best. There's nobody better at that. Like needful things under the dome. I mean, he's done this in so many different books. And he is fantastic about it.

This is his first book doing that. he was really, you know, starting out as a writer. Carrie is so different. And Maddie, you talked about it on a one more thing. But that book is wild. I mean, there's no other Stephen King book structured like this where every other chapter is some sort of like interstitial, you know, news report or excerpt from a book that was written after the fact.

And it's all told out of time where a lot of it is people looking back at what happened. You know that something happened at the prom from the very start. And it's so fast-paced. I mean, I read it in a couple of days. It's almost like a novell. It's like he wrote it as a novella and then added all the news clippings and stuff to flesh it out into a book. So it's just very interesting to me that both books are so different. Salem's Lot is so long, so multifaceted, so many characters.

Carrie is so focused and such a just like gut punch of a book. Both feel very edited. And I think that that's interesting. It's also been an interesting thing about listening to The Shrieking Shack as they talk about J.K. Rowling and how she... J.K. Rowling's work over time and how tight that first book is. and how not tight for us of them are. And you see that with Stephen King too, where I like a big long,

rangy Stephen King book, but it's pretty cool reading these first two and just like thinking about the editing and the way that this was clearly like someone controlled the flow of the story. And also self-edited. I mean, Stephen King wrote and rewrote Carrie and just that's not something that you necessarily do

when you become a bigillionaire. Right, and not all, especially in the 80s, like some of those books really just kind of are all over the place. The cocaine years. Yeah. He's got some new books that are pretty tight. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. Billy Summers, the newest one, one of the newest ones is. He's rallied, so I hear. Yeah. I mean, the girl who loved Tom Gordon, nice and tight book, and the way that he rewrote the ending to 1122.62.63, with the book has a great ending,

despite being a really long book. Anyways, I just wanted to say, Carrie and Salem's Lutter, a great one-two punch of Stephen King. And I also, I do recommend those Just King Things episodes, which is some really interesting conversation in context. Nice. Along with those. So, yeah, good reading. and good listening. My one more thing is stories about

swindlers, about con. Scammertainment. So there's been a lot of scammer stuff recently. Scammers are big in the news. And for some reason we cannot get enough of scammer stories and I include myself in that lot. So I recently watched a documentary called

Tinder, which is big on Netflix. Really good, worth watching. And then I also watched the Netflix docu-series, inventing, Anna, which is about Anna Sorokin, Nia Nita Delvey, who is this kind of iconic New York City.

I think she's Anna Delvey, Nia Sorokin, right? Yeah, Anna Delvey, Nia Sorokin. And Inventing Anna is an interesting series. Actually, it's not a docu-series. I accidentally called a docuseries. It's actually a dramatic series that's kind of based on a true story. And every single episode opens

with this line that is like, this story is true except for all the things that aren't. And it kind of blends reality and fiction in a way that made me really uncomfortable. And it's very entertaining. So Tinder Swindler, Tinder, Swindler. I can't say that. You guys say it, Tinder Swinder or Tinder Swindler?

It's one or the other. For me, it's Tinder Swinder every time. So that's a pretty straightforward documentary. It's a true story, and it's really interesting, and it's totally worth watching. I want to focus more on inventing Anna, which feels like it's conning the audience as it's telling this story about O'Connor's. Because it paints this picture of Anna, Sorokin, as an almost sympathetic character and talks about some stuff that like tries to get into her mind

and create these motives for her in a way that is absolutely not true to real life. And it can do this because it's taking all these liberties with the character. So the story is it's about this woman named Vivian Kent, who's a journalist, who's based on a real journalist, again, a fictional character. And the real Anna Sorokin and their interactions, and then she goes around as she works, she's working on this story for Manhattan Magazine, which is their version of New York magazine. Again, fictionalized reality.

She comes up with, she finds these people who were close to Anna and each episode tells a different person's story of how they were connected to Anna and like what they learned and how they felt about it and whether they were conned or not, etc., etc. And there are a few parts of this that just like have not sat right with me as a journalist and as someone who cares about like the difference between nonfiction and fiction. And this, by the way, the real journal,

Jessica Bresler was like a producer on this show. So it is a story that is a sensibly being worked on by a journalist. So one of those things is like I said before that, that it creates a sympathetic character of Anna and one of the ways it does that is by inventing from whole cloth like this backstory for her. And like there's one episode later on where the journalist kind of sees these like hallucinations of young Anna and it's made to, we're meant to feel sorry for her because she goes through these dramatic moments, and it's like the journalist imagining in her mind what Anna might have been like in a child,

and it's just totally fiction. The other thing that really didn't sit right with me is that even though some people are given pseudonyms, including the main character of the journalist, who was Vivian instead of Jessica, there's one woman in the story, this woman named Rachel, who worked for Vanity Fair, who is given her real name,

and she is portrayed super harshly in this story. Like, she is made out to be like a total, please. But she is not granted the pseudonym and she is like given her real name and we still don't know what about her's version of the story is fiction and what is nonfiction. Because again, the show blends reality with fiction in a way that is just never really, it's like left to the audience, I guess, to figure out what's fictional and what isn't, which is super irresponsible when you're using someone's real name and like acting like they're a real person. And it just feels so unfair and kind of shitty of this show to do that and to grant like a fictional name to the

main character and the journalist who was involved with the show but not to this other woman who had nothing to do with the show and just was was one of Anna's friends who like wound up being conned by her and and was part of this story and yeah it just really didn't sit right with me and in general I just feel like blending reality and fiction is just such a bad idea. And I can kind of like, I guess sometimes it works if it's very clearly fictional, like the social network, for example. I watch that show and I don't think like, wow, this is really what happened to Mark Zuckerberg. But in this case, because so much of it is actually like hewing closely to what's in the article and what is real, it really just makes me feel icky to watch it and to know

that like millions of people potentially could be watching the show and like come away from it thinking like, oh, this Rachel is a scumbag based on who knows how much of this is actually real. So, yeah, there's something about the show that, like, even though it's very entertaining and enjoyable to watch, and I recommend watching it, just ethically speaking, it's just, man, something about it bothered me. And it made me think, wow, these people are conning the audience while they're telling the story of a con, of a con artist. Yeah. Yeah, Anna Schlumski, who plays the lead character, what's her name, Vivian Kent. Vivian Kent. She's great. She's so amazing. I mean, the thing with this show, and I've been watching it as well, we're almost done with it.

Despite her journalistic, questionable journalistic ethics. Well, it's interesting because I know enough about Jessica Pressler and actually recently reread her New York magazine. It was in the cut, the article about Anna Delvey, which is great. It's a great piece of reporting. But there is stuff that I even knew going in that just had me scratching my head. Like the fact that Presler also wrote the story that Hustlers, the film was adapted from. And she did that before this. But in the show, Vivian Campbell,

is portrayed as like this down-on-her-luck struggling journalist who's trying for a redemption story? Yeah, definitely didn't get a big movie deal starring J-Lo. Right, have her story optioned into like an Oscar-bate movie with all these superstars in it. Yeah. Or I shouldn't say Oscar-Bate, just a really good movie. It is actually a great movie, but it's like, yeah, people know about her work. So it's a little, there's just this feeling of unreality that even without thinking about the stuff you were talking about, Jason, which now that you, when you started mentioning it to me, I was like, that is true. like Katie Lowe's who plays Rachel

It's a great performance of this very unlikable person And then I'm thinking wow What if you were the This is a real person that they're portraying And this really kind of Yeah and she wrote her own I mean I haven't seen the show

But I know that the journalist Rachel wrote a Vanity Fair story About what happened to her with Anna Yeah that factors on the show Not only that she wrote her own book about it Which is part of what Which I guess Somebody on this creative team didn't care for

I mean like why did she end up coming off She's portrayed as being like money hungry and that's to be fair that's sort of a striver like striver so that's actually what happened at the trial I mean one of the other main characters so there are a lot of things that just really did not sit right with me one is that

one of the other main characters played by the guy who's what's his name Kendall's friend in succession oh Ariane Mojad he's so good I love him in this I think he's such a good actor so he plays this defense attorney so he's also one of the like sympathetic

protagonist he was one of the heroes of the story And he plays Anna's defense attorney. And so Vivian Kent winds up like offering the team up with him. And she winds up like rooting for Anna as the trial goes on. There's so many journalistic issues here. But but one of them is that like there's this whole scene where he acting as a juror as a lawyer is dressing down and like totally destroying Rachel on the stand. And were meant as the audience to root for him despite the fact that this is part of a case where he is not only is it a real person. he's defending a scammer.

Like, we are meant to be rooting for him and, like, getting her sentence down, even though she, like, took money from a lot of people and fucked over a lot of people's lives. It's just like... Yeah, like, $60,000 from Rachel specifically, I think. And I only know the broad... I read the articles and didn't watch this show.

Yeah, I mean, the story, it's a little more complicated than that because she, like, was clearly mooching off of Anna and, like, used her credit cards by, like, volunteered them, not... It's not like Anna actually stole it from her, but Anna Kantar. And Anna is like a clear con artist. Yeah, a lot of stuff just didn't sit right with me about this show.

And I just think it's a really bad idea to act as if something is true. And then also say, oh, it's okay because we can make up parts of it. And every time at the beginning of every episode, it said like, this story is totally true, except for the parts that aren't. I was just like, oh, no, that bothers me so much. Yeah, it's a kind of a whack move. I agree. As much as, I mean, we're certainly finding the show entertaining, but it's more as,

as time has gone on, I've just been more like... But it'd probably be a lot less entertaining if they, like, put a different filter over every single scene that wasn't true, and they were like, this part's a lie, this parts of life. Yeah, just like, Kyron, yeah. Yeah, it's just like, pick a lane, basically. Like, I think doing it both ways just leaves me asking too many questions, so I agree with you on that. Yeah, and I hate reading books like that. That's why so many books over the years have just bothered me.

So many, like, even revered books of nonfiction, you're reading them. And it'll be like, this character thought such and such. you're like unless you really sometimes it'll be someone who's like dead or like was an interview by the journal or the book was written by professor x you know yeah exactly that's true or the alias guy yeah a lot of professor x callbacks on this app yeah he's a great journalist that professor x anyway that's my one more thing inventing anna and tinder swindler tinder swindler is much more ethical i will say yeah i'll check it out all right that is it for this week's episode i am sure we will be talking about lots of Algin Ring in the future, but in the meantime,

in the meantime, I will see you both next week. See you both 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.org. Comedy and culture. Artist owned.

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