Video Gamers Podcast - Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty, Evil West Gameplay, Ubisoft Forward - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Gaming hosts Josh, Paul and Michael are back with This Week in Gaming. Tons of gaming news this week means an amazing episode. We chat the announced Cyberpunk 2077 expansion, Evil West shows why it should be on your radar and Ubisoft announces lots of Assassins Creed. Overwatch 2 confirms new characters only available via battlepass and more! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming 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

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this podcast, consider being like Ted. You can support the show and get bonus content by going over to MultiplayerSquad.com. We're an independent podcast and we'd sure appreciate it. Now, on to to the show! Hello and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are three lifelong gamer dads that love to chat casually about video games. Since today is Thursday, that means we are going to be breaking down recent gaming news. Please make sure to rate our show five stars and leave a written review. And please also consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll help keep the show running and you'll get bonus episodes, early access to all of our pods.

And the cherry on top is that all of it's going to be ad free. I am your host, Paul. And joining me here today, he is a resident of Night City. He's just taken an oath to defend the new United States of America. It's Michael. Oh, it is the new United States. Los Estados Unidos Nuevo, if you will. I don't remember taking that oath, but I'll take that oath. I'm down for it. Night City is a scary place, but the new United States is good. Yeah. And also, joining us, he's here, but you're going

to have to listen to 400 episodes of our podcast, Battle Pass, before you can actually unlock his voice in the episodes. It's Josh. It'll be worth every microtransaction or hour of grinding, I guarantee it. Can we go full EA and find a

way to put a battle pass on this podcast once we're making billions yes right yeah right i would be really funny though if like literally we had to unlock josh and it's just paul and i talking and there's just a blank like there's just dead air for a little bit it's like you can unlock josh for 24.99 times four month install payments plus get your character level 64 like wait what it would be so funny just to completely cut one person out of the podcast it would be so confusing all right well we have so much to cover today guys i think we should just jump right into it i think the first thing we should talk about is the ubisoft forward which just aired on saturday and you know we don't need to spend too much time here but i did want to mention that i i did check out the skull and bones segment

because we have really cooled on skull and bones these last few months a little bit and i was kind of curious like they're gonna show some more gameplay or something right there's got to be something to get excited about and i don't know if you guys even checked this part out of the forward they basically showed a little bit of cinematics they kind of talked a little bit about it and all they did was play clips of people who joined their insider program who talked about how excited they were. They didn't really show us anything. Dude, Paul, gamers out there are smart, and they're picking up the fact that they're not showing anymore. The only gameplay part that they showed in the Skull & Bones stuff was the switching of the cannons.

To say, like, guys, look how many guns we have. Look, we've got, like like five different types of armor. And then the rest of it was literally just hype. It's almost embarrassing to me, to be honest, because there's got to be this gigantic PR division at Ubisoft where they're like, look, we can't ignore Skull. Just say a whole bunch of cool things. Don't show the game.

Just say a whole bunch of cool catchwords't show the game don't do just say a whole bunch of cool catch words you know uh let's get some twitch streamers i'll tell you what man the the biggest thing that i learned from this video is i don't know any of those twitch streamers but i will i will never watch one of them because if they're saying like oh skull of bones is great you guys just like no credibility checking you off my Yeah. A little bit of a sellout type situation right there. I'm sure they're sponsored. It's funny. I was watching this and I'm like, Ubisoft forward.

More like Ubisoft backward or lateral at best. I was not going forward with watching this. I did one of the very first things that the developer or whoever they had on. I wasn't paying attention to who this person was, but were talking and they're like oh yeah and back in july we announced a bold new direction for skull and bones and i was like your bold new direction was to remove all the fun things we were looking forward to that was your bold new direction and they went right into the streamers filler words hype words catchphrases and then they showed us some girl talking on the deck of the ship. And I was like, what? I actually was expecting something new. I got nothing new.

And in fact, when they were like, three things, step one, step two, step three, I'm like, that's all the stuff that you showed us two months ago in the trailer. There's nothing here that's exciting me anymore. In fact, now, my excitement back in july which was very high simmered a whole bunch and then now it's like the burner's off i do not care yeah i i couldn't care less at this point it's very telling when you can't get the people excited by showing footage and instead we're going to tell other people to tell you you should be excited yeah because they are also it's just bad it's embarrassing to be honest it's just sad all around i think what people were most excited about is the assassin's creed showcase and this was like the last i don't know 22 23

minutes something like that uh announcement after announcement we we already knew about a little bit of this through leaks so we already knew a little bit about what to expect but there is just so much to talk about here in regards to assassin's creed i i guess we should just start by talking about mirage that's the big one yeah we talked a little bit about how the name had leaked and then the announcement had come but basically what they are doing is it is going to be set 20 years before Valhalla, and it's all about Bossom and his journey from becoming a master assassin after starting out as a humble thief. It's going to take place in Baghdad, which I think will be a lot of fun because it's a very dense city, and it's a little bit of a harken back to the original Assassin's

Creed, which is now 15 years old. So we're going back to the in-city assassinations, not so much open world, a little bit more condensed. And I think we're all on board with that kind of direction. A hundred percent. This is what we said last time when we talked about Mirage. We didn't really have very many details with it. We were kind of poking fun at it a little bit. I mean, as much as I troll Ubisoft, I want to like this game. I watched the entire presentation that they had for Mirage. I like the direction that they're going. I like that they're saying, hey, this is going to be a more finely crafted experience. It's going to be a shorter gameplay experience, much more intimate, back to our roots. They're hitting all these things where

I'm like, yes, yes, that's great. You guys might actually get me interested in Assassin's Creed again. And I hate to sound skeptical. And I don't mean to come across as being grouchy on this, but we saw this with Battlefield 2042, right? Hey, we're returning to what made the Battlefield franchise great. We're going back to our roots. It's a better experience. So at this point, it's kind of like, especially with what we saw with the Skull and Bones presentation, how much of this is just lip service and hype piece versus, I want a great game. We talked about it. I loved the early Assassin's Creed games. And then I think they just kind of fell off the track and Ubisoft

went with their safe Ubisoft formula. So I want to be excited about Mirage because I think it's the right direction, but I just don't know if I actually trust them. Yeah, I think that the difference here is that assassin's creed games that they're for people that like them they're good games they're always the best seller that none have ever flopped from my understanding and none of which are gonna get problems yeah and it looks like it's it's gonna be fine i don't feel like it's gonna truly delve into or devolve into like a battlefield 2042 where they're going back and it's absolutely an absolute colossal train wreck and it's terrible.

I think it will deliver on what they're promising. I think, you know, they're saying stealth, parkour, assassinations are the big three pillars of the game. We're going to get that. It's exciting. We have a familiar character. I think for the first time, they've gone back to the same character,

which is Basim, who I believe was from an expansion in Valhalla, right? He's some kind of tie to Valhalla, yeah. Yeah, and we've got more on his story because we have Roshan, who is his mentor, who from what I understand is not really in that game much, is going to be a big part of this new game, Mirage. I couldn't figure out if Shora Agneshlu

is going to be the main character on that, or her, or that character, but I just love that actress. She's in The Expanse. Go check that out. She's got an iconic voice. It's very gravelly. Very distinctive. Very exciting the second i heard her i'm like i know exactly who that is yeah and i'm very excited about her being a part of it um but it's interesting i think that's as far as i can really get into mirage because it's interesting that we're going back to our roots but there's a few other things coming with assassin's creed that yeah we'll talk about those

in a second. Yeah, and we'll just kind of shotgun through it because we have so much to cover this week. They are releasing more content for Valhalla called The Last Chapter. It's a free quest arc to tie up the story. We're also getting another installment that is called Codename Red. This is the one that is taking place in feudal Japan,

which was part of the rumors that we were going to be getting that. We also know there will be a mobile game that is called Codename Jade. That one will be set in China. And also, maybe most interestingly, we're getting another Assassin's Creed game codenamed Hexe,

which we are told is going to be a different kind of Assassin's Creed experience. This one only had about a 10 second teaser we see creepy woods we hear dogs in the background and then there is a string hung on a tree that has like a little wooden sculpture tied to it has like blair witch vibes i was gonna say blair witch 100 yeah i got i got hellblade setting was sacrificed a little bit too oh there you go yeah very much yeah so i i don't know if you guys really care about any of those i'm mostly curious to see what's going to come out of hexay people have already kind of guessed what they think it'll

be i guess hexay is witch in german oh and so a lot of people think it's going to take place during the witch trials in germany back the 1600s. Regardless, we're going to have to wait at least two years because these other ones are not coming out anytime soon. We don't even have names. They're just codenames for now. But did any of these grab your guys' attention? Yeah. So what I found most exciting about this whole reveal is that Mirage is going back to stealth, parkour, assassination, and Codename Red is going the other way. It's going to be much more open world sandboxy. So it seems like they're kind of like saying, let's save all of our fans. Let's save all of our subscribers to our games and say,

the ones that don't like the new stuff, the open world stuff, they're going to get the old stuff. And the ones that do like the new stuff, we're not losing those people. We're going to keep them with Codename Red because it's going to be a lot more of the open world piece, which I think is an interesting strategy. We don't know if they're at all coming out near the same time. It seems like Red is coming quite a bit behind. But that's an interesting thing to put that teaser in there in case there are people who are listening and saying, Hey, I don't want to go back to stealth. I like the open world. Well, you're getting that too. You just got to wait a little longer. The one thing about Codename Red that I got excited about was

they did mention a Shinobi. And I don't know if you guys were fans of the Shinobi games back in the day. But anytime I hear Shinobi, I'm like, ooh, okay. And so I like the feudal Japan setting. I like the Shinobi idea. I'm not sure I like the open world idea. I just don't know how they're going to innovate. That's the thing. Are you giving me Assassin's Creed Odyssey, but just with a feudal Japan skin? Or are you doing something different? And that's the thing. I should clarify a little bit. I think Ubisoft makes fun games. Even Skull and Bones, if you buy that, I'm sure that game's going to be fun for 10 hours or so. Sure.

You know what I mean? But this is why I'm actually more excited about the Hexe, because incorporating witchcraft, which is what some of the people are projecting that that game might include, I think is a very neat twist to the Assassin's Creed formula. Playing as a female protagonist that is a witch that maybe is being hunted or something like that, that's a great idea too. So I really like these ideas. I just want to see them execute on it.

Run with that, man. That's a great idea. That gets me excited. You said something in there that I think answers a little bit of your question going back to earlier. You just said the word Ubisoft and innovate in the same sentence, which I don't think yeah i don't think those belongs trying to be hopeful here i am too and i'm hopeful about hex too because this is interesting to me

um i wrote down code name hex wtf is this question mark um because they're talking about players can jump to old experiences in a new experience they jump to it seems like you're going to be able to jump to anywhere in the animus and anywhere in the old parts of any game before which i think is really interesting and if you add a wishcraft piece in that that could be really interesting especially when they're hinting at multiplayer yeah it's pretty wild that we've talked so much about assassin's creed here these last like three weeks because we basically didn't mention it at all for like a good 18 months and now i guess you have to give ubisoft credit they're releasing these bits of news week after week and we keep coming back to it um let's go ahead and talk about the next story that we wanted to cover here this

week cyberpunk 2077 which of course was very polarizing upon release, especially if you had a PlayStation 4. Polarizing this room right now, actually, between the two of you. Cyberpunk's one of my all-time favorite games. At least on PC, it was mostly playable. But I feel like they inserted

a huge shot of adrenaline straight to the heart of Cyberpunk fans because we got a teaser this week for Phantom Liberty, which is what they are calling a spy thriller expansion set in an all-new district of Night City, and that'll be coming out in 2023. We do see that Keanu Reeves is back as Johnny Silverhand, and all of a sudden, everybody we know is playing Cyberpunk again. There was something about this teaser that just made everybody want to jump back into Cyberpunk. We even decided, let's cover it as our next deep dive, even though we technically did a deep dive

on it. But you still had not finished the game, Josh. Todd had barely put in five hours. We're going to give it its full due credit. And now we're all back in the throes of Cyberpunk. I will say that this trailer works like gangbusters because it comes out of nowhere. I haven't even thought about Cyberpunk in a while. And it's funny because I meant, Paul, you and I were chatting and this trailer came up or something, something about Cyberpunk. And you went, I was like, yeah, that was only last year. And you were like, dude, that was two years ago. It's crazy.

December 2020. And I was like, no, it's been like nine months, maybe 12 at most. And you're like, no, man, it's been like two full years now. And so the trailer really worked. It really did get me thinking about Cyberpunk again. Everybody that's been listening for a while knows I was insanely disappointed with that game. Paul, you and I are very polar on that. I was very much let down on Cyberpunk. But man, did this trailer get that Cyberpunk juices flowing again? Because we are. We decided we're going to do a full-on deep dive of Cyberpunk 2077. It'll probably be a month or so from now, but we're

going to dive into it in its current form. I think part of that is to selfishly get ready for Phantom Liberty just a little bit, even though it doesn't come out until 2023. But we've always said, dudes, they could have just taken an extra year or so with Cyberpunk. They could have made it one of the best games ever. Maybe it is. I mean, we're going to dive back into it, but I'll tell you this DLC. Is it a DLC? Is it an expansion? I think it's an expansion. Yeah, we can call it an expansion. And they said it's going to be the one and only expansion for Cyberpunk. Yeah. What's funny with that is there's actually whispers of Cyberpunk 2.

I don't know if you saw that. We're not covering that in the show. But amongst all of this hype that the expansion is generating, actually, there's a little bit of rumors that the sequel to Cyberpunk is being worked on and stuff like that as well. But I think the expansion looks great. It hit everything that Cyberpunk supposedly does well. And I like the mystery aspect of it, like the solving the crime aspect. There's so much they can do in Night City and with that engine, man. I am so happy that you had a lot to say about that. Because I have not played Cyberpunk 2077 more than the first four hours. And I watched this... By the way, I think we're incorrectly calling it a trailer. I think it's more of a teaser because i have no idea what's happening and i'm like i mean you guys

are excited so i'm really excited for you and also i get to play the game for like 50 hours coming up here in the next over the next month or so yeah and to try to stay spoiler free but to still address the story let's just say at the end of cyberpunk there's a lot of options that you can take and none of them are terribly good endings they all kind of have their own pros and cons there there's like one ending that's actually pretty bad where like v can die in the end um but regardless let's just say that at the end even in the best endings v's future is very uncertain and it doesn't look very optimistic so my best guess is that i think in this expansion there's going to be some kind of new faction that's taking over because we see the current united states leaders laying dead on the floor and we hear v take a what's where i'm looking for an oath, I solemnly swear to protect the new United

States of America, something like that. And then we hear Keanu Reeves' voice say, bad idea. So, there might be some kind of promise that V is going to be able to survive and get something from this new faction. Those are the kind of vibes that i get but it's kind of interesting because the story in cyberpunk is so fascinating i'm really excited to be able to play as v again and to still have johnny in the story i i could not be more excited about this and and i really can't wait till it comes out this is cd project red's last chance to like save cyberpunk that's the kicker i know they want to nail this they gotta do it i think they've learned to be honest like i i don't know

how long they've been developing this but i'm with you paul and that i think that they learned their lesson with the mess of the release on cyberpunk and so i think just like they did with the expansions for the Witcher 3, which are phenomenal, they're some of the best DLCs that you can find in a video game ever. I actually think they're going to knock it out of the park with this one. As much as I am hesitant to utter these words, I think they're going to do it. And I kind of have faith that they've learned from their prior mistakes. And this is going to be phenomenal. It's really interesting going into this that we're going to deep dive this.

Because the things that I'm wanting to get out of this too is not only is the expansion, is it a complete story now based on what Paul just said, but also watching you guys play it after having not played it since it was still a very broken game. Is it fixed? Did CD Projekt Red actually live the commitment of making a good, complete, full, buggy game are they going to nail this bring it home just like what josh was saying yeah and to an extent i mean they've dug themselves into such a hole by over promising before the game came out they had to cut feature after feature after feature you know the game is hardly rpg ish it's really an action game.

So, I mean, are they going to be able to deliver on all those promises? No, absolutely not. But hopefully it'll release without any kind of technical issues. Hopefully it'll have some innovation. We do see some kind of lightning whip that V is using. So it looks like they added a few things on top. And I'm not expecting it to be great. but I will say that the signs look pretty good. It's the bottom of the ninth for CD Projekt Red.

They're losing in the game, but they've got people on base. Hopefully it'll be a grand slam, and we can see more Cyberpunk content in the future. Let's talk a little bit about Overwatch 2, guys. Let's go high low high low i feel like we're bouncing back and forth i feel like i'm in a bouncy coming back down off the excitement train the hype train is left and now we're just standing at the station going uh we saw this coming wait are you not hyped for overwatch 2 i am hyped about this isn't a hype piece no oh man what are you what are you gonna tell me something

about the whole free-to-play model now paul could be could be so first of all overwatch 2 is literally right around the corner it releases on october 4th it's only a couple weeks out oh my goodness yeah wait a minute i was just shocked when he said that. It's not like, wait, what? Wild, right? And we still have no idea how this game is monetized. Like, we don't really know for sure. They were still sending out surveys asking people, would you pay $700 for this cosmetic? I mean, I'm exaggerating.

Right. But that's the kind of stuff that they were still sending surveys on. Well, now we saw on twitter that the new support hero kariko is going to be available in overwatch 2 after unlocking her with the game's free battle pass system oh boy now we're locking heroes now now now now guys now, now, guys. Let me be the voice of reason. It's the free battle pass. It's not the paid one because they would never go down the route of pay to win. You guys know that. I know that.

This free battle pass is going to have 10,000 levels. And the character will be at level 9,999. Now, if you buy it, that character will be level 5 or whatever for the premium one. So it's available for both. This is a real problem. You really

can't spin this one. I just think from a consumer standpoint and playing it and having fun in the game, going into a quick play and you know like you're going you're like oh you know we need someone to switch to this hero i i don't have that hero yet yeah but that would really make our team better if what someone could switch to this hero well i i'm the support and i don't have that one and it's like oh bummer so

like the team is incomplete do you match only against people that also cannot match up with this support hero? Or do I just have that advantage? They want you seeing that hero, man. They want you getting your butt kicked by that hero. So you go, okay, I guess I'll break down and buy this hero. This is exactly the problem. Because a lot of people were saying, hey, they do this in Apex. You have to unlock new

characters in apex the difference though is in apex you pick a character that's all you get to play through the end of the match overwatch is about countering the other team swapping people out and now all of a sudden if you have one team that has access to a larger roster just by pure nature of the game they have a competitive advantage of course so this is a real problem even if you can unlock it for free you are paying you're paying with your time just not with money necessarily but like this is this is a real problem i don't like this especially because new characters are always overpowered that's the kicker we're gonna see that here and the team that picks junker Queen and Kuriko and Sojourn,

they're going to win the matches because they're going to have better rosters. That's the biggest concern. And what's funny is when this news came out, even some Overwatch pros, who are generally as supportive of Overwatch as they can be, were like, this is not good. Honestly, this is not good. Honestly, this is not good

for the Overwatch 2 scene and community because not everybody has access to these characters. And in a game that is about rock, paper, scissors, when you don't have scissors, you're at an insane disadvantage. Guess who's going to play rock every time. Yeah, exactly. And I would like to say

that we can trust that new characters are not going to be overpowered right that they're going to be finely tuned finely crafted but we all know how that goes man look at junker queen junker queen is super op sojourn i don't think is necessarily that op but they're very cautious with dps in that regard but a healer remember Remember when Ana came out? Remember when Brigitte came out? Like, dude, they're going to break the game, dude. They're going to break the game.

And the only way to fix it is going to be through this free battle pass system. I'm very scared about what this means for balance in Overwatch 2. And I think more importantly, one of the biggest ramifications from this is we are finally really, really, really seeing in concrete terms what Diablo Immortal has done to the gaming industry. I'm like, why can't we just pay 60 bucks for the game, buy it and have all heroes? Because Blizzard will make billions more if they go to a system that is more pay to win or pay for peace and peace and peace and give the game away for free and that's simply the way it works it's exactly what we're seeing with diablo immortal it's the same thing

that the industry is changing and here we are living with it the uh the the fortnight model that has uh influenced the entire industry. Yeah. Oh, Paul, I see what you're trying to do. Josh is picking up when I'm laying down. Yeah. Arguably more influential than pub G. I don't know about that. Sit back down.

That's a callback. Uh, so, you know, the last thing I'll say about overwatch too is also what happens if you don't unlock that character during the Battle Pass season? In my mind, in my naivete, I thought, well, surely they'll unlock it for everybody, right? When the season ends, they're maybe going to release a new character or whatever it might be,

and they'll give it to everybody. Not necessarily. The tweet that we got was incredibly cryptic. All they said is, don't worry, there will be, quote, free paths in future seasons. I don't even know what that means. It could be the next season, you could still have to earn that character and you still don't even have them. So you can't even necessarily say, I'll take this season off, I'll hop in next season. That may not be an option either. They're going to leave that character OP for the

season that that character releases because it would make zero sense from their model to nerf the character while people are actually grinding for that character. So if you decide to wait, or if you miss unlocking that character with the free battle pass, and then later on you're able to do that, you're going... I'm calling it 100%. You are going to get a lesser version of that character at that point. I think it'd be really funny if they make it so that the character... This won't happen. But the character is eventually tradable, and then they close it out, and you can trade the character, and you see people selling their accounts for like $10,000 like Flappy Bird on iPhones. I would die. Oh my goodness. All right. Well, guys, let's end the show on an upswing.

That actually is why I staggered these articles the way that we did. I'm like nauseous, though, because I feel like I've been hit by ping pong paddles back and forth. Yeah. A little bit of whiplash, right? Brain's a little scrambled. My other concussion. Guys, Evil West, which we have talked about a lot. We've been hyping it.

They released a new video called Extended Gameplay Trailer No. 2. And guys, this is how you grow excitement for your game. There is not a single person talking in this video. I don't know what these developers look like. I don't know anything about the president or the CFO of their developer. Flying Wild Hog? I was going gonna say something with flying hog something god bless the flying wild hog focus entertainment publisher and this

video is nothing but 13 minutes of gameplay wait wait you mean you have an actual fun looking game that you want to show off to people. And we're excited about it. We just get to watch the game and it's exciting. And it's, it's a fun blend between like cut scenes, story back to gameplay, back to seeing what the actual character does, what the fights look like.

And then back to some more like, Oh, I'm getting a little bit of teaser of what this villain's like. Like this was beautiful and wonderful. And I ate it alive. And I love seeing this because I'm seeing content, not someone talking about content. Or Twitch streamers trying to get you hyped about content.

Now this, I know we're very excited for this game. We've made our interest in this game well known. I was a little worried when I saw that there was a 13 minute gameplay trailer because I was like, Oh no, like, what am I going to see,

man? Like, is this going to be, and it was great. You know, I mean, I think that they showed off everything that they needed to show off. Now the focus of this game is combat.

Like, let's just be honest. There is a story. They do hint at some of it. They showed some neat set pieces, um, you know, with like,

uh, the, the big blimp crashing into what i'm guessing is like their headquarters the big plantation thing or something like that don't even look like they're west they look like they're very evil-ish like modern yeah and so so you know they're they showed off some of that they do show off the characters talking so you do get some snippets of the story and a little bit of like background as to what's going on at least but then they spent probably nine to ten minutes just showing combat in this game and all of the different things you can do it's punchy it's meaty you have a ton of options

it looks like you can fight the way you want to fight you switch between i was paying attention because there's your guy uses like electricity and these electricity and the gauntlet thing that he has. The power glove. Yeah. That's what it looks like. It looks like the Nintendo power glove. Electricity sparking out of it. But what I noticed is as he is meleeing these vampires, we learned vampires are the main enemy that they showed in this part of it anyway, that you build up your batteries. You fill your batteries for your abilities by doing melee, and then you can unleash these pretty fantastical abilities, which look really neat. They show you grappling something to you, and they're electrocuted. They show these huge area of effect like ground slams.

There's good gunplay combat with revolvers and rifles and all that stuff. There's nothing that I saw in this that gave me pause and made me go, that's not what I was hoping for. Everything about this game is looking up and up. From the very beginning, when we first talked about Evil West, and it first came out on a radar, I want to say it was May or June. Most of the time, when you see a teaser for a game or a trailer the first time, it starts out like this. Black text. Black text.

Black box. White words. And it goes... Drums. And it's just a bunch of like... I'm not seeing anything. From the very beginning, what you saw from this developer was gameplay. And then now you're seeing 13 more minutes of footage of which two-thirds or three-fourths of it was gameplay and then now you're seeing 13 more minutes of footage of which two-thirds or three

fourths of it was gameplay and combat which makes me think they're not hiding behind anything they're doing it right and they have a truly genuinely good product and the combat looks really fun again not super like western like the first one even still looked a little bit more western this one this one kind of changed what i felt the game was about a little bit, but I was still all about it because it's still got this kind of supernatural sci-fi fantasy West involved. It's almost like a Doctor Who version of the West, like some strange things are happening, but I'm totally down with it. And the combat looks incredible. One of the really cool things in using the abilities, and I'm sure you guys have noticed this, when you shock enemies, you can see their skeleton, which I think is so cool. Like, you see their entire outline inside their body.

Josh, you mentioned the set pieces, and not to, like, geek out too much about this, I thought they looked so incredibly cinematic and really well-crafted. In a lot of these games games i feel like they just design a city and it's just like let's copy and paste a bunch of buildings and we'll change the paint they look a little different and the whole game kind of like looks the same as much as i love red dead redemption it's like you're either out in the wilderness or you're in a big city and there's not really a whole lot in between in In here, there was an entire room that was completely dark,

except for a Tesla coil shooting blue electricity all across the back wall. And as you're fighting in this room, everything's like cloaked in shadow. But when the lightning goes off, you see like blue everywhere. I thought that was really neat.

And then also they cut later to where you're running through the streets of the city and everything's on fire. And there's like parts of plants that are like on fire and falling from the trees down onto the ground. And it's like very, very artistic and very colorful. It's atmospheric too. Yeah. Like it, it really feels like they didn't cut any corners with this. Now this game did get delayed as well. We, I think I remember what the original release date was.

Wasn't it going to be September? I think so. Yeah. And they delayed it till November. I'll be honest from the trailer that I saw. Good, good. If you need time to polish this,

then, then take the time that you need. That's three months. Hopefully they're working out bugs or something else. But if you've heard us talking about this game and you haven't at least watched gameplay, you have a lot of gameplay that you can watch now. It is going to be combat focused as far as we can tell. They have not shown off a lot of exploration or story or anything like that but if you you know if this is what we expect it to be then so far everything looks great it's easy to say there's zero percent

chance that we won't deep dive this game so you might as well go watch the trailers and get with us on it because it's coming and spread the word so people know this game's really flying under the radar it It is. Yeah. I'm trying desperately to get Flying Wild Hog to let us have a game key. So Flying Wild Hog, if you're listening, they hit the heart button. They hit the like button, Josh, when you instigated that. They responded with a GIF, Michael. I didn't even see the GIF.

They responded to us on Twitter. Oh, Flying Wild Hog, I know that you don't take messages on Twitter because I tried. I'm trying desperately to get us an early release key so we can release this before the game comes out so y'all can listen to it. Yeah, and I was going to say my closing thoughts is that even though we don't know a whole ton about the story, the very end of the 13-minute video was actually pretty cool because we see a shadow of what we think is going to be like a giant beast that we're gonna have to fight or something and then all of a sudden the shadow like morphs and shifts and then they walk into the open and it's like a young teenage girl holding the severed head of her father yeah who's a vampire by the way yeah yeah and it's like

talking to it and then seems to be commanding all the monsters and like points. And then they start like running that way. So it also has a little bit of that creepy twist that we didn't necessarily see from before. So it's like that kind of tells me that this game is shooting for action, atmosphere, gunplay, creepiness, twists. I couldn't be more humped for Evil West. Yeah, I'm excited. It was nice to see that they toned down the number of glowy, interactable things. That was my one complaint from the first trailer we saw. They're still there. Yeah. But yeah, I'm very excited for this game, man. November needs to hurry up and get

here because there's... I don't know how we're going to play all these games in November, to be honest. All right, listen. Here's what we're going to do. At Flying Wild Hog, listen, I don't have any tattoos, but if you give us an early release CD key, I will get a one inch by one inch tattoo of your logo on my body somewhere. There. See? I've thrown the gauntlet out there.

Be the first one to let us review a game early. We'll do it that's that's what's going to decide in november is we're probably playing this game because they're going to respond to this and i'm getting a tattoo why did i just say that i'm not even drinking don't be a coward michael put it say you'll put it on your forehead yeah michael do it for the good i'm not putting on my forehead i'm not putting on my forehead i'm doing it though give us the review key that's it that's all i'm gonna say about that also uh real fast before we close out make sure you follow us on all socials at flying wild hog i mean at multiplayer podcast at multiplayer pod sorry oh yeah what what a what a wild week of news a lot to love some stuff to hate i was really

excited about this episode so i'm really glad we were able to talk about this here today uh we will be back with a quick take episode on saturday and then make sure to tune in on monday we're going to be doing a deep dive on saints row and we would love to have you guys follow us on socials michael already shared the handle multiplayer pod just in case there's any confusion not flying wild and yeah but like them too it'll help us out yeah you can you can like us both that's allowed and come join our free discord links in the episode description we'd love to hear from you guys on there and thanks to everyone for listening we really appreciate all of you out there for the support and the love and we will see you all next time happy gaming thanks for dealing with our madness

cheers all right see you all next time. Happy gaming. Thanks for dealing with our madness. Cheers. All right. See you, everybody.