Video Gamers Podcast - Beta Breakdown Episode: New World and Back 4 Blood - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Gaming beta testers Josh and Paul are back with another video game news filled episode of This Week in Gaming. This week we chat about the recent gaming beta’s for Amazon’s New World MMO and Back 4 Blood, the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead 2. We chat our thoughts on both games, whether the hype is real and if we think they’ll be games we want to pick up when they officially release in the next couple of months. Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world needs heroes to protect us from bad takes. There once was a man named Paul who said that Star Trek was better than Star Wars, and we can't stand for this type of injustice. Join the fight against bad takes and support the show over at MultiplayerSquad.com. But Josh, I'm scared of Patreon, but still want to help. What can I do? Well, future hero, you can now subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts and get amazing rewards like two bonus episodes each week, early access, and ad-free episodes. Paul said it's more so that you don't have to listen to my terrible intros anymore,

but we all know how bad his takes are. Now for listening to the multiplayer gaming podcast we are very excited to have you guys here with us today while we have a half hour podcast about this week in gaming we will keep things family friendly as always. And I am your host, Paul. And with me on the other line, he is staring at me like a crazy man right now. I don't know what's going on, but it is Josh. What on earth was that? I was really trying to mess up your intro. Yeah, yeah.

I was hiding behind my microphone with my eyes really buggy, like I was just peeping at you through a window or something. And you know what, Paul? You kept the professionalism going there. I was pretty impressed. It felt like a serial killer was staring at me from behind your giant microphone. Don't pick up the size of my microphone it's a family friendly show goodness yeah all right well josh this is kind of one of those crazy weeks for this week in gaming normally we talk about what games we've been playing over the

last week and we also break down some recent gaming news however this time there's not really a whole lot of gaming news so we're probably going to spend most of our time talking about some of our recent gaming experiences. And if we have a little bit of time, we've got a little bit of news to cover. But I think the two main things we wanted to talk about today are New World and Back for Blood. Now, which of these do you want to tackle first? I'll leave it up to you. Let's talk about some New World. Because we kind of amped that up.

We amped up the fact that the beta was coming. It was supposed to release on August 31st. You and I, me more so than you, professed my love of the fact that this was going to be an MMO that we could play. We did not think it was going to be great, but we said, hey, maybe it'll be serviceable and something that we can play for a month or two. Scratch that MMO itch that we've had for a while. The beta came out. We hopped in. I played a pretty good bit. I think I hit level 17 or something like that it was only like a two-week beta too right so yeah relatively short yeah and honestly i don't even think we've played it for

the full beta period no no i played for like five days i think and then uh yeah we were done after that so yeah like what the what were your what were your thoughts So, yeah, if you didn't hear the previous shows when we talked about it, Josh was a huge fan of EverQuest. I was a huge fan of World of Warcraft. We have kind of bemoaned the death of the MMO genre because we love it so much. And we kind of felt like the two MMOs that might be able to stand the test of time here coming up in the near future are New World and Ashes of Creation. And given the history of Amazon Game Studios, you know, no shade. I mean,

I want them to be successful. I really do. But we mercilessly poked fun of Crucible, which did not last long, and they pulled all the servers down, the game got canceled, and we didn't have a whole lot of confidence that this would be good. But I think we approached it with an open mind, hoping it would be good. And we jumped in on day one of the beta, paying to pre-order it, and I thought the first one to two hours was pretty incredible. It was great. I really enjoyed it. And I thought the first one to two hours was pretty incredible. It was great. I really enjoyed it. It was great.

The graphics in the game were amazing. The polish was incredible. I was very impressed. And I was like, oh, this game feels really good. It eased you into the controls in the starting area and all that. Gave you some weapons. And you could see how the different weapons, they had skills and they behaved, and that's kind of how you would form your character's build by the weapons that you had.

And I was like, you know, this game's starting off pretty good, man. And it seemed like the consensus was the same across the board. Everybody that I talked to that was trying it out was like, hey, new world beta, man. I'm pretty impressed so far. Yeah, it was gorgeous. I think a lot of people were fans of melee combat that you actually had to aim. So as opposed to like World of Warcraft, where you would kind of just sit and use just the keyboard, you'd hit tab and then start hitting one, two, three, four to do your different abilities. This game, you actually had to aim, you had to do some dodging and sprinting, and I thought that that was a lot of fun. But I think my number one concern about

New World going into the game was simply the fact that you would have your three abilities that you would have in your hotbar, and as you spend your skill points, you could learn new abilities and put them in that bar. But ultimately, when you're just cycling through three abilities, to me, it just kind of grew old relatively quickly. And then the questing itself just became so repetitive so quickly that I kind of fell out of love with New World rather quickly. And I was very bummed, because I don't think I've really played an MMO since... Boy, my timeline is all twisted. I don't know what was last. It was either Latro, or Star Wars The Old Republic, or Guild Wars 2. One of those I played last, and I just haven't had any MMOs in years. But at least for me, New World is not going

to be one that I'm going to return to. I ended up refunding the pre-order. So I got to play the beta for free. But ultimately, this one's just not for me. I feel you. I have a few really big complaints with the game. I think graphically, it's incredible. I think that the world that they have built is really neat. Honestly, there's plenty of times where I was running from one area to the next, and I would come across a tower that was on the edge of a lake, and there was a bunch of skeletons around the edge of the water. Or I'd be running through a grove and find lots of things to collect, and then there would be lynx wandering around the grove or something. And then you could hunt the lynx and get their furs and stuff like that. So I was very impressed with the world that they built. The combat, when it very first started,

I was like, oh, this is going to be great because it's skill-based. Like you said, you kind of have to aim your attacks. There was ranged weapons. So that was kind of neat that you could get like a musket and have skills. The problem is, is that as I started to level and the way that you level the weapons is you just use them. Right. The more you kill things. Right. Then you unlock new abilities with those. But problem number one arose for me in that when you looked at the skill trees for the weapons, it was like 80% passive abilities and 20% active abilities. And it should have been

the other way around. Honestly, I felt there was a severe lack of triggerable abilities for these weapons that really limited how they felt. And passives are great because they're active all the time. But when you have 80% of the stuff that you unlock are passive abilities, it really doesn't change the feeling of combat that much. And so that was problem number one. So I started to get a little disillusioned with the actual combat portion of the game. And then, Paul, can we talk about how terrible is the questing system in New World, man? It's unfathomable to me that in today's day and age, when you were trying to make a big MMO and you were trying to be the next great thing, how do you still have 90% of your quests be, hey, go and fetch me three wolf pelts. Go collect 50 bushels of wheat and bring them back. I need you to go to this tower and kill 20 skeletons for me.

It's the worst questing system I think I can remember. Yeah, it's a lot of rinse and repeat. But I think even worse than that is that basically once you get out of the beginning noob areas and you start getting to the major cities basically what you end up being forced to do is to choose a faction that you want to join and we ended up joining the syndicate and these different factions can control different cities and do different things and that faction will ultimately give you a majority of the quests that you're doing as you level up in these big cities. And so what happens is you go and you talk to the faction leader and you are given a choice of quests that you can accept.

Some of them are PvE content, some of them are PvP enabled, and they are just always the same things in the same areas. Return to this farm and loot six things or kill eight skeletons, and then you go back and you return it, and then it refreshes the quest, and guess what you're doing? You're going right back to the same old farm, and now it's just looting eight of a different kind of item, and now instead of killing the skeletons, you're going to kill three of these other guys. And it was just so quickly running back and forth to the same areas that I just ultimately was not having a whole lot of fun. I mean, I kind of get it. Like in World of Warcraft, you would have to run these really long quest chains.

And sometimes they continued from one zone to another. And if you ran out of quests, you just didn't really know what to do and you would start grinding. And so I get that they don't want you to do that. And World of Warcraft kind of infamously added these daily quests where all of a sudden it kind of became like a chore. And then Amazon, I feel like they took it to the extreme of, well, now instead of it being like a daily quest, it's going to be an unlimited source of quests. But it's just the same thing over and over and over. And the one other problem that I have with the questing system, because I can slog through some quests, right? You're gaining levels, you're getting stronger. And it's like, okay, I get the grind and I can handle a little bit of grind.

The other problem that compounded this for me was that there's no mounts in this game. And I don't think they plan on having mounts in this game. So you would run like 1.5 kilometers, which doesn't sound very far, but that's a solid probably three to four minutes of just running through the wilderness to go talk to this hermit. And like, there's no real storyline that I cared about at all. Right. And so that didn't help. So the hermit would be like, oh, you've got to go, you know, track down the, the, the manuscript from the soul warden, which is over at this keep that's three kilometers away. So now you run eight minutes to the keep, you kill four skeletons, you pick up a piece of paper, and now you got to run three kilometers back to the old hermit that gave you the quest. I mean, I can't count how much time I spent just running for no reason

whatsoever. And then people go, ah, well, there's fast travel, right? No, there's not fast travel because you can't fast travel unless you're in a city, a fast travel shrine, which are rare, or an encampment, which is not very common either. And it's consumable. You have to have the resource to fast travel. You have to have the resource to fast travel. It was just like, everything was just grindy and almost made to just take up time. And so I found that it just wasn't fun. The PvP aspect sounds neat, but I'll be honest with you. I mean, I can't imagine doing those questing that... I asked. I actually went on Reddit and I said, hey, people that made it further in the beta, like I'm level 17, has anybody made it to mid-tier? Are the quests any different? Maybe this was just tutorial type

stuff. And everybody went, nope, quests stay the same the whole way through. And that's when I was like, I remember reaching out to you and I was like, dude, are we going to refund this game? And you were like, yeah, I think so. And so, I mean, I'm sad to do it, but it's just not, it just doesn't do it. It's not a bad game. Honestly, it could scratch that MMO itch, but I don't want to sink that kind of time into something where it's just rinse and repeat grindy kind of bleh. Yeah. And one other thing that I was not crazy about is the way that some of the crafting works. So there are so many different things that you can craft. And even just

looking at cooking like the cooking system is so much more complicated than it needs to be you your inventory after you play for an hour you have 112 different kinds of items in your backpack like in in other mmos that i've played it's just a little bit more streamlined i think in a good way so if you play world of warcraft you can only have two professions and maybe you have like herbalism and alchemy and if you go into this zone there's really only like three kind of herbs you can pick and you grab them all and then you can cook up a bunch of potions and you've only got like four potions to choose from with those herbs and it's rather simple but you do have choice. In this game, you have to fish, but then you have to break down your fish to get fish oil. And then you have to combine fish oil

with something else to make cooking oil. And now I need cooking oil and seven other different types of food. And I can't find nuts, so I can't cook this dish. It just felt overly complicated and difficult to try to find the resources you needed instead of like, honestly, maybe just let me take fish and a vegetable and make a meal. And there are some cooking recipes like that in this game, but I just remember always having 700 different food items, and yet I couldn't cook the dishes I wanted because I was simply missing one type of nut. And now I'm running through the forest and I can't find it,

so now I'm just going to throw everything into the bank and just let it sit there and ultimately not even use it. Yeah, it has a really, really robust crafting system, but I'm not much of a crafter, and so that part of the game didn't interest me very much. I know a lot of people like it. If you love complex crafting, great. But this was also the beta. And so I knew everything was going to get wiped. And so it was just kind of like that. I don't want to spend the time on this, man. Yeah.

So I'm okay to just wait. I mean, it was nice to hop in for like a week. It did scratch that itch for me, but it's just, I would rate it like this game right now, like a solid five. And I don't want to spend $40 and a month's worth of gaming time to experience a game that's only a five out of 10. Yeah. I think the phrase that I used with you is, New World is exactly what you would expect for an Amazon game studio to make out of an MMO. There's nothing revolutionary. It is perfectly fine. I would say everything is middle of the road compared to other MMOs. There's really nothing that catches me that makes me interested in this one. World of Warcraft, you've got a lot of deep lore that you might be pulled into. Star Wars, of course, you've got all of Star Wars culture that pulls you in in and of itself. This one, I felt like it was a rather mediocre story. I don't really care about the corruption. I don't really care that I'm shipwrecked on this island. uh the the crafting was fine the combat was okay but

i only have three abilities so it's kind of boring i do think that the pvp is the best draw but every time i saw pvp in the world it was a group of eight guys against one dude yeah yeah so it's like well uh okay and i know that there's the other modes later in the game where you can play the set matches and maybe that's going to be totally different but at least for me the leveling was just so unfun i didn't even want to put in the time to get there so 40 for the game i think is a fair price there There's no monthly fee. I thought it looked great. It's just not for us. No.

So I don't think we'll be reviewing it, at least not anytime close to release. Who knows? Ashes of Creation is the one that I'm moving on to. Now, that's not anywhere near release. I mean, I think they're saying maybe 2022, more likely 2023. So it seems like a long time to wait. But like I said, I got to scratch the itch for a week. That was nice. It reminded me that it's going to take a mighty good MMO to really pull me back into that genre, which I want to have happen. It's just New World,

wasn't it? Yeah. All right. Well, let's go ahead and take a brief break and hear from one of our sponsors hey guys this episode of the multiplayer gaming podcast is brought to you by logitech you have the opportunity to help support the show and also get some awesome gaming accessories to help maintain your competitive edge while gaming i actually use a Logitech G413 backlit keyboard. Actually bought it with my own money back in 2017, long before the show, and it's still running great. Actually, as I'm looking around, I also have a Logitech webcam,

and they sell so much more than that. They have tablet keyboards, they've got mice, speakers, Bluetooth accessories, all kinds of stuff that you might need for your pc or for mobile devices so you can actually head on over to multiplayer podcast.com slash logitech store and that'll forward you right to their website thanks so much for your guys support now let's get back to the show all All right, Josh, now that we are done skewering New World, let's go ahead and move on to something that at least I was a little more happy playing. I don't know about you, but the Back 4 Blood beta opened up for people who had pre-ordered the game.

Apparently, this is just our new thing, Josh. We're going to pre-order games, and we're just going to cancel them if we don't like the beta. Change the podcastosh we're gonna pre-order games and we're just gonna cancel them if we don't like the beta change the podcast we're the pre-order guys now yeah the the pre-order podcast and so back for blood we have talked about on the show previously as well we talked a lot about it looking an awful lot like left for dead which of course you know we know it's the same developer. It's going to be very similar. They added a lot of mechanics to try to make it bigger and better than Left 4 Dead. And so we picked up the pre-order, we jumped in, we played not a whole lot simply because the beta just opened. And I know that we want to get more time into it. I was very pleasantly surprised with

how this played. And I'm already a Left for Dead fan. I was much higher on Left for Dead 2 than you were. But Back for Blood, I think, is a rather good game. And it was a blast. We had a lot of fun. I was pleasantly surprised as well. I was not real big on Left for Dead 2. I think it was just it was starting to show its age a little bit. There's tons to do, but it just didn't really grab me. It just felt dated, I guess. And with Back 4 Blood, I remember hopping in and going, this game looks incredible. The gunplay feels pretty good. Let's see what happens when we have friends to play with. So it was me, you, and I think Jake played probably a couple hours at one point.

We made it, I want to say like two-thirds of the way through the campaign. Had a blast. Honestly, it was a lot of fun. It was challenging. Everything felt good. It was neat to find the different weapon attachments and the cards that you could use to add perks. And I really like the corruption system. So it's like the computer gets to play cards

to make things more difficult. Yeah. And I really had a really good time with it. And then what happened is I hopped in a little bit later on and tried playing with just some random people on a harder difficulty level. And it was terrible. These people did not know

what they were doing they were dying left and right i was dying left and right nobody was rezzing anybody it was just absolute chaos so i was like okay well i miss my friends now you know yeah you've never appreciated friends more than after playing in pugs right yeah it's true and then uh so then i tried just creating my own match, but it just filled my match with bots, which was really weird. And then that was terrible. So that experience was not nearly as good.

But this game with friends, I had a lot of fun with it. To the point where you and I have talked about, man, they're asking $60 for this game. I feel like this should be a $40 game. And they're asking $60 for this game. I feel like this should be a $40 game. And they're asking $60. And I'm a little on the fence because of the $60 price tag. But if I knew that it was going to continue to be the fun that the three of us had, I would do it because it would be worth it at that point. But if my experience with pug groups was any indication, then that is not what I want to go through either.

You wouldn't even want to play for free if that's the kind of experience. Yeah, it was just bad. I played with some decent pickup groups. Some of them were bad. I played in one that had a technical glitch where every time someone left the match, it would bring in a bot. And then as soon as the next guy would connect the bot would stay oh really yes so by the end of the match we had four humans and about nine bots oh my running around in a giant cluster it was the funniest thing i had ever seen

and yeah all the bots were in there and every bot would run and act the same way like i thought someone was hacking at first. And then I, cause I had just joined. I'm like, that's crazy. Why are there so many players on our team? And they're like,

it's bugged. Anytime someone quits, it adds another bot. So that was very funny. I think the thing that really makes this game interesting, I guess two things, mainly the weapon system and the card system. So the weapons are very cool. I mean, this game's got like umps and scars and M249s

and sniper rifles and tech nines. And there are so many weapons in this game and there's different tiers. So you are constantly upgrading weapons. You are finding attachments for those weapons, like extended mags or silencers or laser sights. And you can also buy attachments in between every round, which is a little similar to Killing Floor 2 when we just recently covered that. Basically, you run around. You earn money as you find it on the ground or as you fight mobs. And then at the end of the round, you get to spend it in a shop and use this new gear for the next round. And I thought that that kept it really fresh and fun. And sometimes you'll just swap out a weapon simply just to try a new

one. I really did like the weapon system. The attachments were really nice because you could tell when you got an attachment. It was like I got a laser sight on one that I didn't have to aim down sights anymore and I was popping heads on that. I got an automatic shotgun at one point and I got an extended mag for... I think I was using a SCAR at the time. And it was just... I really enjoyed that because you felt like you actually improved your gun at that point. Yeah, there's just so much. Like, grenades

in the game really matter. You kept getting pipe bombs and because they leap, they would draw a horde of the zombies that would all go crowd around the pipe bomb, and then you just sat there, like, gleefully waiting, and then three seconds later it would blow up and blow up a hundred of these zombies, and you're like, dude, this is great. The card system is really what I think is going to make this game. Now we were playing on the easy, the normal level, I should say.

And I felt like we were kind of cruising through that a good bit. Like we really didn't run into too many challenges. But bumping the difficulty level up just one made a huge difference for me in that you really had to be careful at that point. You could not get surrounded. I think that's probably going to be the sweet spot when you have a coordinated team. Because I don't like games that are too easy. There has to be some threat from the monsters and stuff like that. So I'd love to hop back in and try it on a higher difficulty level with friends to say like, Ooh, this is really where it's going to be at. And my understanding is, is that on the harder difficulty levels, the cards, like the corruption cards that the computer plays are more significant, but you also get better cards for your team as well.

So you can start building out strategies and stuff. And that's the stuff I love. And I think that's really going to be where the longevity in this game comes from. Because ultimately, it's just going to be, hey, you're shooting zombies. So how do you make that more interesting in the long term? Yeah. So basically, the way that that functions is you earn points when you finish every round. And then once you finish the full campaign, or when you quit and go back to the main menu, you get to go spend those points on unlocking cards. And basically, the game gives you three different types of cards to buy. And as you complete one, it disappears and it pops in a new one. And so I started buying these cards, and then you can

build your deck. and what happens is when a round starts it will basically tell you what the enemy team played and then it's going to shuffle your deck and give you five cards and you get to pick one and it gives a bonus to you and also sometimes your team so i unlocked a card that was like 10% extra ammo for everybody on the team. Or maybe it's, you know, adding 15 health to your HP or whatever it might be. And between every round, you're adding another card and building your class. So it's not necessarily always played exactly the same way where you're going to play your best cards. You sometimes have to tailor it based on what the computer played or what level you're doing because not every level is just fighting zombies and moving from one side to

the other some of them you actually have to run away from the horde and just get to the end point or it might be where you have to load up these giant artillery shells and while you're loading those that your teammates have to protect you so sometimes you might want ammo or you might want stamina or whatever it might be and i thought all of that combined together i i think it is a 60 game and i'm very surprised to say that because i kept saying this game's gonna be like 20 bucks right and then when they said 60 i was shocked but i think it, it works so well and is a lot of fun. I think it's worth it.

I want to go play again. Number one, but I just saw that Todd and legendary supporter, Jake are playing back for blood beta. And I'm like, we need to get in there with time to wrap up this show. That's a four man squad. We got all four.

We got to get in there. It's a, yeah, I want to play some more i i am highly impressed so so far so good with back for blood um you know it feels very good um i don't really have a lot of complaints about it you know um yeah i mean honestly it's one of those games where longevity is, I guess, going to be the only concern that I have right now. But the gunplay is so good. And I think that there's so many variables to how you can build out a round that I think you can continually challenge yourself and your team to say like, hey, how hard can we make this? How well can we work together? You know, that kind of stuff. And that always interests me because it's more about overcoming that challenge, you know, than it is just running through a level as quickly as you can. One final note about Back 4 Blood. Do you know what you and I are both very good at in this game? Rezzing other people? Shooting or scaring the birds. Oh, of course! I want the horde man we bring it we we somehow set off the birds that start hordes every round even though we see the birds we know where they are

inevitably we're fighting these giant mobs and we end up alerting all of them i don't know how it keeps happening i am an agent of chaos you think i'm going to let birds be still if i know that angering them is going to bring a horde of zombies and cause a bunch of chaos you think i'm going to let birds be still if i know that angering them is going to bring a horde of zombies and cause a bunch of chaos for everybody the problem is a lot of the levels will tell you that you get a bonus to your copper which is the currency if you don't set off any hordes and josh and they're like nope nope we're shooting these birds and we're gonna bring in the hordes yeah oh goodness yeah it's it's very fun and you're going to bring in the hordes. Yeah. Oh, goodness. Yeah, it's very fun. And you also get to play as the different characters.

And it's a lot like Left 4 Dead where they all have their own different personality and they talk and they have voice lines. And perks. The characters are all different. They each bring something different to the team, too, which is cool. And I thought it was really fun the first time we fought the giant ogre, because the ogre was enormous. I want more of that, to be honest. There are the special zombies, but I want more of them boss fights. Give me more of that, too.

And I have not beaten the campaign, so maybe there's some more later on. But I do like that they... Oh, don't tell me that, Paul. Maybe on higher difficulties, but at least on normal i i did that a couple times just to kind of get used to the game and to earn more cards and i'm gonna bump up the difficulty now but yeah the boss fights in particular were neat because you fight the ogre and then he runs away and then you fight him again later in the map yeah i do hope that there's more stuff like that down the road yeah yep i i like it impressed. I mean, between the two, give me back for blood over New World right now.

Oh, yeah. I do love this trend of, hey, if you pre-order, you can try the game out. And then due to Steam's refund policy, you can play longer than two hours. And if you don't like it, you can return it. So you and I are, especially with all the games that we play for this show, that is a nice thing to be able to do instead of us dropping 40 60 bucks every time we need to cover something you know and doing it like that so i do like this trend that we're seeing yeah and the uh the extra life pro tip here

is to pre-order on amazon because they do not charge you until the game releases so technically you could pre-order the back for blood ps4 disc even if you don't have a playstation get a code play it for free and then you can always just cancel the pre-order and you don't even get charged oh that's kind of so yeah yeah so yeah we had a blast i know we still want to play more of the beta and i might keep my pre-order on this one we'll have to wait and see. Yeah, so far so good. Yeah, all signs point toward yes as of now. All right, well, that's all the time that we have for this week, which is great because otherwise we were going to have to spend

a very long amount of time talking about Diablo Immortal being delayed. And I don't know that we have very much to say. And Rust had an update adding some underwater labs, which sounded cool, but we didn't have a whole lot to say so i'm glad that we we had plenty to talk about with those other two games that we were diving into and then we will be back with a bonus round episode on monday which should be a blast oh yeah that'll be a good one all right well thanks so much everyone we'll see you guys on monday All right. Well, thanks so much, everyone. We'll see you guys on Monday.

Todd and Jake, we're coming! We're coming to play! See you, everybody.