Video Gamers Podcast - [Deep Dive] Dragon’s Dogma 2 - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Video Games Hosts Paul, Ryan and Josh are climbing cyclops and reviving fallen pawns, oh and bringing you our thoughts on the recent major release of Dragon's Dogma 2! One of the more hyped video game releases for 2024, we break down the combat, the world, the pawn system and more so you can know what works and what doesn’t. It’s another fantastic gaming breakdown from your favorite video game podcast! Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: YayaArizona, Disratory, Cykasniber and Ole Jake Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

🎵 Hello, fellow mystic spearhands, tricksters, and thieves! Welcome to Burnworth. Methinks ye should order a round of drinks at the Star Drop Inn before departing the city where aught can happen. Alright, yeah, we're not gonna do that anymore. Welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Today we we are deep diving Dragon's Dogma 2. I am your host, Paul. And joining me, he's never going to have to look for a ladder ever again

because his pawn is going to point one out every 14 seconds. It's Josh. We can climb to new heights. Look, Arisen, a ladder. I've never had so many ladders in my life guys might be treasure up there oh i can't wait to see what's inside all right and then joining josh and me he has caught a nasty round of dragon's plague he is not a hundred percent right, but he's giving it his best. It's Ryan. 100% is not me. That's for sure. Dang it.

If your eyes start turning red, Ryan, we're just going to have to drown you in the river. Throwing you off the cliff, Ryan. Throwing you into the brine. I'll take my punishment. All right. Before we start our deep dive here, Josh, I think you've got a review you're going to read. The reviews have been pouring in. Listen, we've been asking and you guys and gals out there have been answering the call. So it is incredible to see. But honestly, from myself, Paul and Ryan, thank you to everybody that has taken the time to leave us a review, rate the show, leave us five stars on Spotify. It really does mean the world to us. And we always like to read one or two on the show.

I've got one for you guys today, but it's a good one. This one comes in from LilMosey88, and it's titled, Came from Spotify Just to Leave This Review. And it says, I've been listening to the show on Spotify since December. I joined the Discord recently, and I can say with 100% certainty that these guys are exactly the type of content creators that we need in the gaming community. In a turbulent time filled with layoffs

and digital ownership battles, these guys managed to bring out the best in gaming. The best comparison that I can make is that of five-year-old me playing Nicktoons Battle for Volcano Island for the thousandth time on the GameCube with my older nephew, pure enjoyment. Nothing less than outstanding camaraderie

and exquisite enthusiasm of games awaits when a new episode of this podcast is released. Nice. Wow. Okay. What a well-written review as well. Also, okay, you made me say camaraderie, exquisite enthusiasm.

Like Lil Mosey, I answered your challenge pretty darn well. But also thank you for the awesome review. Oh yeah, thank you Lil Mosey. Yeah, exquisite enthusiasm. What a phrase, i love it somebody's a good writer oh yeah and we would also like to ask all of our listeners to consider signing up for our patreon it really does go a far way in helping us stay on the air supporters get bonus episodes all kinds of perks you can check it out at multiplayer squad.com wait and so what ought they sign up at multiplayer squad

i'm gonna be honest i i'm not entirely sure how to use the word ought apparently it means all things anything i i still don't totally my problem is i thought it was like not oh wait is that the opposite of not maybe because it's a u g h t it's just not without the end nothing ought means something everything yeah i think so okay well ought you should go multiplayersquad.com also we just figured out the english language here boys right here right now yeah me thinks that you did a good job there josh all right so speaking of patreon we owe shout outs to two new patreon supporters we want to say thank you so much to jiggle puff who signed up with epic status and uh jiggle had posted that they wanted to share the good news of

a positive annual review and so signed up on patreon which is awesome congratulations to jiggle and also we have added to our pile of jakes that we've been collecting we have old jake underscore who signed up with legendary status thank you so much old jake jiggle puff uh and old jake thank you both jiggle puff super active in the discord old jake comes in i don't want to say an older gamer but a seasoned gamer from some of the chit chat uh that i've seen uh there and looks like we're gonna have another hijack a host here in a little while once old jake decides what game he wants to make one of us play oh here we go and weirdly enough they were both posting at the same time the other day and they're both from indianapolis like what are the odds but they don't know each other yeah so they

were talking about micro centers over there and how you know we lost our our fries electronics over here we got nothing but best buy in phoenix so we were we were a little jealous all right well let's go ahead and jump into dragon's dogma 2 this is is a pretty heavy game, a lot to cover. We always like to start out with a description from Steam. Dragon's Dogma 2 is a single-player, narrative-driven action RPG that challenges players to choose their own experience, from the appearance of their arisen, their vocation, their party, how to approach different situations, and more, in a truly immersive fantasy world. Now, some of our listeners might be wondering, like, how spoilery are we going to get?

I thought it's probably best if we just kind of cover the game more or less chronologically. We're going to start out by talking a little bit about the release. We'll get into some of the mechanics of the game. We will share some basics, really just the structure of the story, along with some of our thoughts. And if we're going to share any major spoilers, we'll make sure to let you guys know as we record further into the pod. All right. Now, let's start out by talking about our hype leading up to the release. What is... Because we talked about this game a lot. It was... That train was rolling, boys.

It really was. So let's kind of go back in time. What is it that you were hoping Dragon's Dogma 2 would be? Legitimately, I think I was hoping for a modern Witcher-type game with a just giant fantastical world with this like political intrigue, really good combat. You know, I mentioned this like an insane variety of monsters, little secrets around every corner, you know, a really good gear system. Like I know this sounds crazy, right? But legitimately, because I think I might have been the most hyped out of the three of us for this game was i was kind of hoping for like a skyrim meets witcher kind of

hybrid you know and and i i hate to use two like absolutely legendary games but my hype level was kind of up there for this man so i think that's what i was hoping for. What about you, Ryan? Yeah, that's what came to mind too. Something along the lines of a Skyrim just with a really cool, deep world, epic battles, and lots of enemies. Kind of something along that line that would transfer into just an awesome experience where you just kind of dive into the game and three hours go by. Yeah. I think more or less I was in the same boat as you guys. I thought it was going to be like an old school action RPG, but made modern. So they had kind of talked an awful lot about lack of fast travel, but they also said that there would be a lot of handcrafted content. So as you're retreading ground, it's not going to feel old

because there's a lot to do and i i was also really hoping for like a really great fantasy story getting into that political intrigue and all that kind of jazz and of course like big monsters to jump on top of like i know i mentioned there's it seemed like there was so much verticality in all of the trailers uh i i think in all those things we listed i think we got some of that. Some other stuff on that list, probably not quite so much. I think all of us have different opinions on this game, and I think we all feel like it's a little bit scattered where it did some stuff, I think, remarkably well, and other stuff really left me kind of scratching my head. Why did we do things

this way? I think we should also mention when we did our auction draft of the most anticipated games this year, we all had a $200 budget. Dragon's Dogma 2 was the second highest valued game. That one went to you, Josh, at $68. Only $1 behind a very nice first place $69 for Black Myth Wukong. Safe to say we were all hyped to drive up the price that much. Yeah, this game was what I would say going in with the hype level that I had. And I think for all of us was like a game of the year contender, right? If we were going to say, hey, pick a game right now that you think might be a game of the year contender, right? If we were going to say, Hey, pick a game right now that you think might be a game of the year contender, Dragon's Dogma 2 was, was it, you know? And so what we're going to do is we're going to break down, like, kind of like Paul mentioned, we're

going to break down the gameplay. We're going to break down the vocations and kind of the things that worked, some of the weird choices that they made about development and stuff like that too. And, you know, obviously like we always do, we'll give our opinions on the game, but you know, you make up your mind, whether it sounds good to you. And the thing that I love, and I mentioned this to Paul before we started recording, cause we were waiting on Ryan a little bit. Cause he's, he's diseased right now with the, the plague was we don't, we do not share with each each other our thoughts on a game. It just makes it fun for us, right? I have no idea whether Paul loves this game or hates this game. I don't know if Ryan

loves this game or hates this game. They don't know how I feel about it either. So we're going to find out. There's a lot to cover though, man. This game is not necessarily what I thought it was going to be, but that doesn't mean that's a bad thing either. Totally agree. I had a lot of expectations and I think this game played quite a bit different. And so I think that'll kind of help as we break things down and kind of set expectations for maybe listeners who are deciding whether or not they want to pick this up. And at the end of the show, I want us to return to the fact that Josh drafted this for $68. Like, do we think Josh got great value? Is that fair? Is that underpriced or overpriced? You know, we'll kind of swing back to that at the very end. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the release. To be fair, it was pretty wild.

All right, this game was getting a lot of buzz. It was not all good. There was a lot of false information out there, but there were also some fair criticisms. The game was definitely review bombed. And for the most part, it was not over politics or anything like that. Most of the criticism was about microtransactions and performance. Now let's first talk about a little bit of the misinformation. A lot of people were under the impression that the only way to change your appearance or to start a new game was by paying $1.99 in the in-game shop for a Metamorphosis book, which just wasn't true. There are lots of things you can criticize, but if anyone out there is still under the impression that you have to pay to change your appearance or start a new grant game,

that is false. Josh, you, you were taking this battle to the streets on day one. Ryan and I just, Ryan, I just kept joking. Like Josh is really defending Capcom here.

He really wants the word out. He's on the payroll, man. I wish I was on the payroll, man. Nobody thinks otherwise. otherwise nobody he went and corrected every single one of them it's here's the thing right like we we're not experts we've never said hey we are not you know we're not you know experts in the industry we are just guys that

have been gaming our entire lives and have you know we've been gaming our whole lives like we have a lot of experience with it and we like to talk about it and we kind of understand what gamers want. And that's not to speak for everybody. I don't like the same games that Paul likes and Paul doesn't like the same games that Ryan likes. And I mean, that's fine, right? Like people have different tastes, but one of the things that really bugs me is this weird social media mob mindset where people won't take two minutes to just do their own research, you know? And that honestly bugs me. And maybe it's because I'm an old guy shaking my fist at the clouds, but it's like, don't believe everything on the internet. Just because some dude is angry and screaming about microtransactions doesn't mean he's right. And so I did what any old man would do. And I went to Google

and I went Dragon's Dogma 2 microtransactions. And it took me like two minutes to figure out that all of this stuff is available in the game. This is not pay to win. This is not a we're charging you to reset your game and all that. And then it was just like, I just wanted people to understand. I hadn't even played the game yet at that point. But don't go out there and say things that aren't true because now what happened is all of these people, what do they do? They run to Steam and they review bomb the game and they go, oh, it's microtransactions game bad. And it's like, if you don't like the game, A, 100% understand. That's agreeable. And you write whatever review you want to write. But if you are puppeting something that you heard on the

internet without looking into yourself, you're kind of part of the problem at that point. I had a very good conversation, believe it or not, with somebody that DM to me, you know, and said, hey, like, I'd like to talk to you more about this microtransaction thing. And I went, absolutely. Very good adult conversation to that guy. He said, listen, I won't support any single player game that has microtransactions in it. And I went, dude, that's awesome, man. Like, I'm glad that you, you know, you have your line in the sand that you won't cross, you know, for me, as long as this stuff is available to me by playing the game, then I don't have a problem with it. Do I, would I prefer it not be there? Yes,

I'd prefer it, but I'm not going to like boycott the game over that. Anyway, I don't want to rant forever because we've got to cover this game, but yes, I did go to war because I don't like misinformation and I don't like people slamming a game for something that they don't know anything about yeah well so many people nowadays it's like headline news so they just they read probably a lot of those that went and review bomb didn't even read any further than microtransaction 70 single player game and they're like what and they go and they just leave that so i was just laughing my uh you Twitter ex was just filled with Josh on there, just talking to everybody. It was just Josh, Josh, Josh, Josh, Josh. And here's the biggest thing, right? Right now, this game on Steam is at a 58%.

Yeah, that's not fair. This is not a 58% game, man. And so it's just... That's what bugs me, is if somebody's not listening to a a podcast and they're not reading reviews or looking at that and they're simply just browsing and they come across this game they're gonna fly right past it you know and maybe this game is perfect for somebody so that's what i take contention i have contention with that i don't like it i'm yeah i'm not a fan of the review bombing like for any for any reason the political or whatever you guys whatever people want to do it for give just give a fair assessment of the game after you've played it like that's what it's

there for not for you to just go voice your opinion because of something else or you especially when you haven't even played the game so i don't know yeah and the irony is that capcom has always done this and if you look at like the Resident Evil 4 remake, that's got microtransactions that flat out give you upgrades to your guns. Like that is a little bit of pay to win. Now, a lot of people do draw that line in the sand, like you said, Josh, because they say, I don't want developers driving a game to make you want to go to the in-game shop. And the irony here is that the stuff they're selling in the shop is like wake stones and rift crystals. These are things that fall from the heavens constantly in this

game. I would go so far as to say, to me, the shop, if anything, seems like an afterthought where they're like, well, we got to sell something. Well, what's really common in this game that's helpful? Oh, wake stones? Go ahead and toss them in the store. I mean, there is nothing in the in-game store that gives you any kind of advantage. I don't even know why anyone would pay for any of this because it's so prevalent in the game. So it's a little ironic that this is the one under Capcom that got all the heat because it really doesn't deserve that. All that to be said, if the issue with the microtransactions was something that you wanted to hear about, it's a non-issue. Does anybody here disagree with that? Because for me, it's an absolute non-issue. I wasn't

even aware in playing in the game that they were there. It's not like I got a pop-up every single time I logged in that went, buy a wake know, and I had to click decline or something, you know, so, or every time you pause, you get the ads for the other Capcom games, you know, nothing like that. Uh, now performance wise, we all have really beefy PCs. The game looks nice, but I do imagine all of us had some performance issues in the major cities. Did you guys get like frame rate drops down to like maybe even the thirties? guys get like frame rate drops down to like maybe even the 30s yeah i i definitely i mean like you said we all got some pretty killer pcs especially you guys upgraded recently um i would drop to 35 45 frames in in town um i i had heard

looking into some stuff that it was a lot of npcs were drawing a lot of CPU percentage there per one, and they're working on fixing that. But I would definitely drop quite a bit. I didn't have too much stuttering or any issues like that that bad, but I definitely had some crashes. I had six or seven crashes, which is not fun when you're pretty far into a game and you lose some time there

and you got to go redo stuff again. So yeah, performance-wise, not the best, but it wasn't anything unplayable. Yeah. I'll be honest, for me, I was actually kind of pleasantly surprised. Again, I get that we may not be indicative of the normal population of PC users, but I was playing at 4K, maxed out, ray tracing on fully, as much as I could pump this game. In the wilderness, in most of the game, I was pulling probably 80 frames a

second. In the cities, I would dip down to about 40. I mean, you could definitely feel it. Did it impact the gameplay? Not really. I mean, it's noticeable, but 40 frames a second. It's not like it was dipping into like the 15s and now I'm stuttering or trying to keep up or something like that. It was noticeable. I didn't feel like it was super distracting, to be honest with you. I mean, I don't feel like it took away from the game in any way. Did you guys feel like performance was ever an issue where you went, went man this game could just be better if it just wasn't slow in the cities other than other than you're fighting in the wilderness yeah yeah yeah for me other than the crashes there was no issues i did i ended up because i kept every time

i go in the city i'd look at my frame rates and be like dang it you know they're dropping again so i ended up just popping that off so i stopped looking and just from the feel i really wouldn't notice you know any big difference yeah well we should probably actually get to the actual meat and potatoes of the game here so i'm not going to go into any spoilers but let's just set the stage a little bit of the overall story of what you're doing here basically and i will admit i have not watched videos or studied Dragon's Dogma 2 lore. I did find a lot of elements in this game hard to follow, but I think if I understand correctly, the whole premise is basically that there is this perpetual cycle that goes where every so often a dragon will come forth and starts attacking the world at large.

The dragon will then select a worthy opponent where they will pierce them in the chest, pull out their heart, eat it, and then that turns that person into an immortal person who can now control pawns. Put a pin in pawns. We'll talk about them in a minute. And then that person is now called the Arisen, and they are going to contend with that dragon until they defeat it. And then the cycle just continues over the course of time. Now, what sets this game apart a little bit different is that you are turned into the Arisen, and yet at the same time, you hear word that there is already someone who is

purportedly to be an Arisen sitting on the throne and that that person has the queen's backing so they are setting up a little bit of drama a little bit of intrigue here you know do we maybe have two arisens are they an imposter are we gonna have to face off against them you know how's this all gonna go down so i just kind of wanted to ask you guys without getting into spoilers did you guys find this story compelling? Did it work for you? No, no,

no, me neither. This story was so underwritten and I thought some of the side quest stuff was fine, but I felt like they set up so many little threads that never paid off. There are main characters and antagonists that never once meet or have a conversation. I didn't always even understand what certain characters were doing. Yeah. For me, the story, and I love fantasy, but this story, the overarching plot just really didn't do a thing for me. Other than you're the arisen and we need to prove that you're the true arisen. That's the plot. That's the whole gist of the game. And it's like it's like oh well there's a guy that we think might be an imposter arisen on the throne and go

figure out how he can do that and oh yeah let's go hide in a masquerade party yeah it's like yeah oh don't get me started on that mission so i will say that i did enjoy the smaller stories that were told through the sub quests same a lot more than the main plot to me the main plot was just a why am i in this world and that was it and maybe that's all they really intended it for but the it was pretty lacking but there were some pretty good side quests that had pretty good stories to them yeah i felt the same i thought overall the story was very meh um not good not horrible but the same thing the side quests there was some that that really kind of panned out where you felt satisfied after you finish it you're like okay cool that had a good kind of ending and climax it it i felt good

after i finished that part um but i didn't just you know when you play a good single player game and it's got a good story you just get that connection to the characters and you bond with them and their story and how you progress through the game. And I just did not feel that with anyone except my pawns. That's like, you know, and we'll go on more into those later, but that's the closest I felt to any character in the game was the pawns. Yeah, I just kind of felt like it was really muddy storytelling i i would go so far as to say i thought it was bad uh i thought it was a cool idea i like the idea of this dragon arisen combo but they set up so many things where normally in storytelling right like you set up and you know these characters are gonna have to meet and one of them is gonna have to fight the other

or they're gonna have to uh give an account of what they're doing. And a lot of that stuff just never even really happens without giving names or spoilers or anything. There's one person that you kind of think is going to be a big bad and you do not talk to them until the very end of the game. And literally all you do is run into their room, pick them up, run them to another room and put them down. And you never see them again. And there's just a little bit of dialogue. And I felt like they set up a lot of cool ideas that just never paid off.

Now, with all that being said, I do think that this game's bread and butter is the combat and the vocation system and the pawn system. So while we are being pretty negative here at the beginning, stick around. I think we have a lot more positive stuff to say. Let's go ahead and take our first break, and we'll be right back. All right, so we got to cover combat and gameplay. I want to be able to say some nice things about Dragon's Dogma 2. I think this is definitely the most positive stuff I'm going to have to say about the game. The combat mostly revolves around two systems, vocations and pawns. Let's talk about vocations first. Initially, the game gives you four to choose from. These are basically just your classes. You can choose

between fighter, mage, thief, and archer. They're all very self-explanatory. What's interesting is that as you play the game, you do earn currency. I don't even remember what it's called in the game. I think it's DC that you can spend to unlock new abilities or new classes. So as you play the game more, you have more currency to go unlock and play around with more stuff. The game definitely wants you to tinker and switch between them all. I wanted to know what vocation did you guys start with and what was your initial impression? Take a guess for me, guys. I'm guessing Thief. Yeah, I started Thief. Josh loves the Rogue. I will say this. So I started off on Thief and they talk about mobility. They talk about being

able to climb the big monster as well. That kind of thing. I remember getting out in the open and the second it let me start using my abilities, I was just like wailing away with my thief and dodging quickly and then like running forward real fast with like a stab. And I was just like, oh baby, like, oh man, this is going to be good, man. And I get to do this with a fighter and a mystic spear hand thingy that I saw in this one trailer and everybody's talking about. And so I got really hyped about this ability to try all these different vocations and kind of just feeling what the combat in this game was going to be like. Because let's be honest,

you can watch trailers, but until you're the one that's mashing the buttons, you know, you don't really get a feel for like, what's it going to feel like? What's the flow going to be like? How, how technical do I have to be in that sort of thing? So I was very pleasantly surprised when I kind of got to put the combat

system through its paces initially and feeling like the thief was exactly what I was hoping for is this zippy character that could, you know, bounce all around the battlefield, stab things, you know, climb things and then stabby stabby them. Um, I could, I, you know, I got an ability where I could cloak myself, which I mean, come on, you're not a thief if you can't go stealth in some fashion. And I thought it was the coolest effect because he just basically grabs like a bunch of dirt and throws it on himself. And now you're like, you're you're camouflaged and I was like this is kind of cool man so my initial impressions with the combat system were very positive you might have picked

the best starting class Josh because I had a different experience what about you Ryan I what did you pick I picked a fighter oh okay Fighter's the one I started out with. And I was very underwhelmed in the beginning. I'm like, wait a second. So I just got this Slash and Shield thing, and I was just like, man, this is taking forever. And I know you guys are going to skewer me here, but there was no roll, right? There's no roll. No roll. there was no roll right there's no roll there's no roll the only dodge ability is with the thief

with the fighter the archer the mage none of them can dodge or roll no i know that i'm the biggest uh simulator solitaire not having a dodge roll drove me you can block yes it drove me insane not having that because they the enemies would stun lock you like they would come in and they'd step step stab and then they'd all surround you and you would just get destroyed and not having a role or a way to get out of there i just find myself like just frog jumping trying to get away and just get to recover and then come back um and and i know you guys again said you kind of liked it it just felt clunky to me it felt so clunky um i just i could not vibe with with the style and the way it played um especially

initially it got better as i kind of unlocked other abilities but to start i was uh definitely not a big fan of the the combat Yeah, I had a very similar response. I started as Archer. I figured Josh is going to be thief. Ryan, I figured would go mage. And so I just wanted to do something different. And Archer could not be more vanilla. It starts out where you can just quick shot your nearest enemy or manually aim.

And then it's like one button to rapidly fire a bunch of arrows at the closest enemy. And that's kind of like all you can do. And for the first couple hours until I kind of figured out upgrading your vocations, it was pretty awful. Ryan and I did share a little bit, I think it was on day two, because Josh had already played like 14 hours. And I told Ryan, I said, dude, I'm like 48 minutes into this game, and I am really struggling to double-click Dragon's Dogma 2. Archer, I think I got up to like level rank four, and then I ended up hopping off it.

The game does let you unlock some other vocations pretty fast. There end up being 10 total. You get to unlock the warrior and the sorcerer almost immediately. After a couple hours, you get the mystic spear hand if you want to get your Darth Maul on, and you also unlock the trickster. And then in one of the weird decisions in this game, you unlock the magic archer and the wayfarer way into the end game. You are literally minutes away from the end of the game when you unlock that. And then I know that you have like the true ending

when that's really your first opportunity to play those classes. I will say, once I switched off Archer, I went Thief and it is a completely different game. Like this game could not be more different in how it plays switching between them all. I like being on the outside doing range combat generally, but playing as Thief, man, they give you the mobility.

You get to jump on monsters and do these like gut and rip crazy abilities on weak spots of monsters. You get your little charge abilities. You're flying around the battlefield. Thief was a thousand times more fun than Archer. Did you guys end up having a favorite class? I ended up maxing out Thief and then I ended up switching to Magic Archer, which I really liked as well. I actually bounced around a good bit because I wanted to try a wide variety. It's kind of funny because I never played Archer once.

It's like the one class I just had zero interest in. So bad. And I never actually played Sorcerer, because my main pawn was a Sorcerer, so I just never felt like he's got it, man. Just let him do his thing. Oddly enough, man, I tried the Warrior, which is the giant two-hand, very slow attacks,

which would normally not be my play style at all. But maybe it was just that it was such a change of pace from the thief, but I actually really enjoyed that class. Um, I mean, when you hit, you hit like a truck, man. I mean, it's just kind of funny because a lot of these abilities are like two, three second, like wind ups. And then it's like, please let it hit this guy. And then when it would, that sword would just come slamming down and the ground would shatter and like a big cloud of dust would pop up. And if you were fighting a big monster, he'd stagger backwards. And it was like, you could just feel it, man. Praying the heartbeat doesn't pick you up right before you get it off. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. It definitely was very high risk, high reward kind of thing. I will say as much as I enjoyed the combat, and it sounds like I'm lucky to have started with the thief, I'm with Ryan a little bit because without having an active defense ability, combat felt very weird to me at times as well. As somebody that absolutely loves Dark Souls, loves Elden Ring, this is why I was kind of screaming when Ryan was talking about needing a role because if I have to criticize the combat, and again, the combat in this game, I think is very enjoyable. So don't, don't construe this to be something different, but when you don't have to actively try to engage in defense, it takes away this weird element because you are oftentimes fighting four, five, six guys at a time. And if they would get on you, which is going to happen, what do you do at that point? As the thief, I can zip away and I can do this. But when I was playing the giant two-hander guy

or even the spear hand, it's like, I can't dodge roll. I can't hold up a shield. I can't actively parry. What am I doing? I'm just trying to kill that guy before the other six guys kill me kind of thing. And they do stun you and stuff. So they do. And one thing that the game doesn't necessarily teach you is that it uses traditional aggro like in MMOs. And I learned very early on that if I immediately jumped into combat, I'm going to have everyone attacking me as the thief. I kind of learned, send in the fighter pawn that I created, which we'll talk about pawns in a second, let them grab enough aggro and then jump into the combat. And then I found it to be very different. I would have zero desire to play fighter in this game. Half the abilities are like banging on your shield. so you attract all the enemies to

you and activating a block ability and things of that nature i don't like playing melee that way um but i think that that a lot of people don't even necessarily know that aggro is a thing in this game also so like for you ryan jumping in that kind of sucks because your role is to kind of just hold aggro while your pawns do most of the damage. And so it's, I feel like so much of this game is class class specific in how it plays. Yeah. Yeah,

definitely. I, I mean, I, um, I played fighter, mage, uh,

spear, uh, spearhead, and then, uh, Archer Archer only just for as long as it took me to do that stupid quest. Cause I got on, I was like,

Oh, this sucks. Archer is so bad yeah so i switched off that right away i ended up playing um i i did a fighter to like rank six or so and then i switched to mage and then i switched to spearhead but i played uh mage the most and that's the thing when um i would i would aggro these monsters and then i i had no way to get out away because they would come in on me. And then I have no role. I just try to get up and just run as fast as I could.

And, you know, so you develop a technique. I would go and I would try to, like, enchant all my pawns' weapons and then send them in. And then I'd start attacking to try to keep the aggro off me. But when they come in, they just hit, hit, and you get knocked down. And then there's just, like, ah, and they just hit you while you're on the ground and you can't get up. So, yeah, I definitely played you're on the ground, and you can't get up. So yeah, I definitely played the most on the Mage. Once I developed that kind of attack base, it helped a little bit. But yeah, still, the combat for me was just not as much as I was hoping for.

It felt like it was just missing a component. And like I said, that component for me was just an active defense. Again, Thief solved that problem. but if you're not playing thief and and i kind of mentioned mystic spear hand earlier but you do get this kind of dash ability with the spear hand so you can kind of get out but like a lot of the other ones it's like okay i've got four guys wailing on me like what am i supposed to do well nothing, nothing. Just hope you kill them fast, you know? Yeah, or try to run. Or run. So it was just this weird, like, there's just a piece of this puzzle that just wasn't there.

And I'm not sure why, but it definitely was noticeable. Just pick up your tank, your fighter pond, and just throw it at another enemy. Yeah, or anybody walking by. Yeah, or anyone walking. All right. I will say the vocation system, or anyone walking. All right. I will say the vocation system, I liked a lot about it. I liked the whole idea of unlocking classes and you're not stuck in one. And I liked being able to, oh, I just leveled up. Let me go check and see what new abilities I can get.

Or, oh, this is my favorite ability. Now I can upgrade it to a more powerful version. The thing I found weird is that the length of this game is drastically different than I thought it would be. I thought just to complete the main quest line, it was going to be like a 50 hour game, probably more akin to like a Dragon Age or something like that. The fact that there are 10 classes, there is 0% chance you're going to be able to taste all 10 in one playthrough. The game is just too short. And at the same time, you only have one save file. And so even when you beat the game, you're still playing on your old save. And so you've probably pumped a lot of gold into

upgrading all your equipment. Well, guess what? Anytime you switch vocation, you lose all that gear. And the game does give you a base set so you can now use that. But I found it very hard to switch classes because you kind of felt like you were hitting a big reset button on the game. I was literally on the last quest trying to learn Magic Archer on level one. I fought a bunch of enemies and then ran all the way back into town just to learn a couple more and then finished the main quest line. But I did find that a little weird in the pacing. It's almost like too many vocations for this size game. I will say I did like the ability to switch quickly. I mean, if you're in just about any

town in the game that has an inn, you could change your vocation and just say, hey, I want to be a mage now, or I want to be a fighter or that kind of thing. You would need to go and then switch gear because if you switch to a heavy armor class, or if you switch to a thief from a heavy armor class, you can't wear all that heavy armor now. And it would just be like a red square on it and say, hey, yeah, you can't use this. So there was a little bit of time spent on that, but they make it pretty easy to just say,

you know what? I don't feel like playing thief anymore. I think I want to play a fighter with a giant two-handed sword. And it's like, okay, well now I can do that fairly easy. They don't penalize you in a money aspect or any of that stuff either. So other than

just the time of having to go to a town and then having to swap your gear, weight is a big issue with inventory in this game. So I'd have to then go deposit all my armor because it's super weighing me down now. But I liked that ability to just change the feel of combat in this game. I won't say on the fly because you can't just push a button, but it's pretty simple to do. Yeah, it's nice to have the ability to do it, but the thing is, like Paul said, it's so short. You get something to a rank

where you can really kind of start to figure out how that class works. And then if you want to change and you've gone through maybe two classes, by then you're at the end of the game. So you can't really get into most of them because it takes a while to unlock all those attacks and techniques to make it even worth it to play that class.

So that was the big thing. And then I know it's not a big deal, but having to switch out the gear and run back and then change everything over every time just annoyed me. It's just one of those kind of quality of life things that just bug me. Have a preset. It's not that hard. You've got to be able able to just say hey i want my my warrior gear now like boom yeah yeah it should be a little easier the managing your chests in the game was pretty

annoying like one managing your on-person inventory i didn't find to be all that bad but i don't know about you guys but my chest ended up having so much crap in there. And we'll talk a little bit about why, because the game kind of punishes you if you sell the wrong gear and all of a sudden you realize you need it again later. But let's go ahead and we'll take our second break and then we'll come back and talk about the pawns. All right. So the pawn system, I was very skeptical leading up to release about this i don't like running around games with ai controlled companions i feel like anytime you see that in a game pathing is bad you lose pawns they get stuck even in one of the trailers i poked fun at the fact that you see a fighter swinging a sword right in front of it. And it's because there's a Harpy 20 feet above it.

But here, this fighter thinks that can like hit it. So it's attacking the air. All that is 100% true in this game. Pawn pathing is terrible. They're not always attacking the same stuff, but you know what? I grew to really like the pawn system in this game.

It has some very cool aspects to it that I found very surprising. We already talked a little bit about what kind of pawn we had, but I wanted to know, was there a strategy that you had going into how you designed your pawn? Because the way it works is you design your own pawn, and you can also hire two more that other people have made. So sometimes you run across a character in the open world and they wave at you and they pledge their allegiance if you'll hire them,

or you can activate these little like a riff stone things where you can sort and pick out a certain pawn that you want to take. You can favorite pawns. So that way, if you dismiss them, you can call them back later. Did you guys have any strategy as far as like trying to build a team or did you just hire like the most attractive female characters like seemingly

everyone else does like how did you guys go about it were you watching my screen i've watched a lot of streamers and i know what people go for um so i uh i definitely i think there is like a good strategy to have based on and i know josh kind of talked about it earlier with how he set up his but my main was my main pawn was an archer. So how I like to do it because I was playing the fighter a lot. You know, you have your main as was my archer and then I'd have a mage as like kind of a support class. They're good for support class because they can enchant your weapons. My guy had a lightning and then he could heal. So I'd get heals and then bonus damage,

and then I'd have either a warrior or a rogue. So we got a couple tanks, some kind of range, and then support. So that's typically how I would set up mine. And, man, I just fell in love with the pawns. I had Momo, the mage. He was just this grumpy old beast tiger guy that he just talked in like an old British accent type thing. And he was just so grumpy. Every time I would ask for a heel, he'd be like, if no one else can do it in my stead, I suppose I can.

You know, and just different things. He was so sassy. And he would crack me up every time. I'd be like, oh, shut it, Momo. Get over here. And I was just talking back and forth with him. So I definitely had a blast with the pawn system and swapping them out and stuff. So I think that was one of the things they definitely did well in this game.

And other than, you know, they were kind of blind sometimes and just going off nowhere. I tried to lure an ogre over a bridge and drop the bridge and my pawn wouldn't come to me. And so she just fell down into the water, too, and died. and died oh they fall they fall off all the ledges all the time yeah all the time yeah these are some death there's some depressed pawns man because they are they are ending it very often i i you know i'm with you paul i said before i do not like having ai companions just let me be my character. I'll tackle the challenges. That's not feasible in this game. I'll be honest. I don't know that you could play this game solo. And this ties back to the fact that there's no active defense. If I had an ability to dodge, it makes me wonder, could I play this game

a little bit more like Dark Souls? Just as a thief? You know, yeah. Well, you know. I bet you could. Maybe, but it's just that I learned very, very quickly. Okay, the pawns are part of this game. Just embrace it. And I actually liked the pawns, man, which caught me off guard. I will say this.

I didn't switch them very often. I tend to get attached to my characters. I think I was 25 hours into this game before i finally was like i'm switching out one of these guys i needed a fight your level one pawn that's been following okay game so they don't level that's the thing i was so attached to this guy i got this thief dude i think his name was walter and it was like i found this rift that was way off in this like hidden area and out pops walter like does it it's not a rift that was way off in this like hidden area and out pops Walter. Like, does it, it's not a rift where you can go in and hire this dude just materializes in front

of me. And I'm, it's like, I got a little pop-up that said, occasionally you'll find special pawns. And I'm like, whoa, I got Walter now. So Walter must be a bad dude. Right? So Walter starts leading me to treasure. And he's like, you know, this way it risen. I know of a secret. And Walter was the best pathfinder in the world, man. This dude was scrambling up rocks, showing me shortcuts and 25 hours into the game. It was time to say goodbye to Walter because I needed a fighter in my party. And I knew it. And that's when i looked and freaking walter was level two and i was like what have you been doing to me like you didn't level you know and i didn't know

i and to be fair i think the game i seem to have this vague memory of the game telling you by the way pawns don't level up so you might need to swap them out from time to time. But I completely forgot about that. Me too. Or favorite, favorite them, dismiss them. And then as that player is playing the game,

then the pawn will level and you can resummon them. So that's why a lot of people will add pawns as favorites. That way you could get Walter back and maybe he'd be level 35 or something. Well, I'll say this. I booted Walter to the curb. I picked up

elise who was a fighter um it was a much better party but i kind of miss walter still you know dude that's what happened to me too i had to say bye to momo because i looked i'm like wait he's only 13 what the heck and then i got some other sorcerer or a mage chick and she was 33 or something like that. I'm like, okay, this is going to help me a little bit more because once you get up, you know, later in the game, I was getting my butt whooped and no heals and all that stuff. So yeah, I just say goodbye to Momo. And it's very cool that your pawn will get selected by other players. So when you sleep at an inn, sometimes it would say your pawn has returned from the void.

And anytime you dismiss a pawn, you have to send them with a gift. Now, that might be something like dried flowers that are kind of worthless, or you could maybe actually send something of value. But I always love that you would get a little speech where your own pawn would come back and be like, oh, my other master was bloodthirsty. I could barely keep up with him. He murdered everybody. So you would always get a little bit of a rundown. And I thought that was bloodthirsty. I could barely keep up with him. He murdered everybody. So you would always get a little bit of a rundown. And I thought that was kind of fun. You actually develop a little bit of a relationship with your pawn. I love that. Ryan, I know that you enjoyed this as well, at least early on. After a while, it got a little annoying,

but you would dab up your pawns after beating a group of enemies where they're like high-fiving and you know my pawn would always yell you are mighty indeed or isn't like after every battle and eventually it got on my nerves but it was kind of fun you know it kind of like gives you that team aspect even though you're playing single player for sure i love a lot of the the dialogue lines that they put in for the pawns it did i wish there was more because eventually they'd repeat the same one like 30 40 times throughout the game but it was it was i love one of my favorite was when you look through a store and then you just would sell some stuff or not buy anything and then they're like oh just looking you know and they're like master is always prudent

with his coin yeah yeah yeah the chatter is good it really does kind of help flesh out that these are personalities around you for me the the coolest part for me was just having a guide this game doesn't have like i mean you can set a marker on your map so it's not that hard to find your way around but like having your pawn just be like hey i know where that place is follow me and you could follow them for miles you know what i mean this dude would run from one town through the wilderness to another town or he knew i was going on a quest and he'd be like hey i know a shortcut follow me and i followed him and this like i said this dude's climbing boulders i never would have found this path like ever on my own and then i like i'm like where the

heck are we going and all of a sudden we just pop out at the destination. And then I forgot how to go back. And it took me like twice as long to go back. So I was like, dude, that was like, like a legit shortcut. So they really are like kind of the heart and soul of the game in a lot of

ways. They're dumb. They're going to get themselves in a predicament when they fall off a tall cliff and they die down below. And now you've got to either just let them die completely or find out how to get down that cliff so you can res them is kind of like oh man like i was just trying to run to the city man now what that's like unless you happen to be a magic archer and then you can yeah shoot them with a revive arrow which for some reason but i was talking i talking, I'm like, dude, you're staying down there.

You fell off that cliff. I'm trying to get back to the city. You're in timeout. Yeah, you're just staying there. Good luck. Don't fall off cliffs anymore. You made your bed. Now you're going to lie in it.

The last thing I'll say about pawns, because obviously we'll need to move on, but there are different personality types that you choose. They also can learn a different specialization. And this is something that I thought was such a cool idea that's just really underbaked. I know I played it the most out of the three of us. I don't know if you guys ever made it to the Sacred Arbor, the Elvish city, but if you just run in, they all speak Elvish. You can talk to vendors. All the items are in Elvish. The only way that you can interact with them is by

learning Elvish, which is kind of impossible unless you look up a guide, or pop into the Rift, sort by specialization, and you can find pawns that have woodland wordsmith, and that means they can speak Elvish. And then if you hire them and go into the Sacred Arbor, it'll translate all the Elvish for you. And I was like, that is so cool. The problem is that the other five specializations are super boring. It's stuff like it'll mark minerals on the map when you're nearby and boring stuff like that. The whole idea of being able to translate Elvish, I thought was so neat. And I felt like they could have really had more creative specializations. But overall, Pawn System, quite a surprise, I gotta say. All right, let's talk a little bit about the open world. I kind of feel like there's three main things here. Exploration, enemy types, and fast travel. I don't know about you guys. I very rarely felt compelled to explore the open world.

Oftentimes, you would just run across a cave entrance, run inside, kill some enemies, open a couple of chests. There's no story. The game has a decent amount of side quests, but not a whole lot. Did you guys just go running off on your own in this game? I almost never did. I only had one exception, but I'll let you guys answer first i tried i tried it you'd run it you'd run into a giant wall or the ocean or something else this is not an open world and i'll die on this hill this is a guided open world it's it's like an illusion with uh huge valleys and and canyons you run through and then you got a

mountain of ocean here and mountains over there you can only go through like 30 of that map oh look we got this huge map it's it's the the areas you can actually explore and do stuff it's so small i was super super let down on that it's it's interesting because they use water as a boundary a lot of times because you can't go through semi-deep streams and stuff like that because they have the stuff called the brine that swallows you up and then you technically die without dying kind of thing. I get what you're saying about there's a lot of steep cliffs that you just can't fall down and that kind of thing. So I did go off and I did explore. The only real reward is combat for me. Paul, you kind of hit the nail on the head. Yes, you might find a cave. You might find this little

secret area where there's a little tribe of goblins kind of hanging out, guarding a treasure chest. At one point, I followed this river bed down and then there was a dragon at the end of the river bed. And I was like, oh, this is cool. What's this dude just chilling down here for? And so I got a really fun fight out of it. The gear in this game is not super rewarding, to be honest. It's not like I got this new piece of armor and now I feel really tough, or it gave me this cool new ability or something like that. It's fun to get a new weapon. I mean, especially as a thief, I got these poison daggers that were inflicting poison. And then I found these chill daggers that would slow things down and you can see the effects on

them and stuff like that. But all the other armor pieces I felt were almost cosmetic in nature. They just didn't feel like they made any kind of impact. And it's funny because even your pawns will say when you clear out a cave and you get to a treasure chest and you find a potion or something, even your pawns are like, we ought not to expect to find great treasure at every turn, you know? And it's like, and then like,

yeah, but I want to find great treasure at every turn, you know? Like I just did all this. It was fun to fight, but so like, yes, you I want to find great treasure at every turn. You know, like I just did all this. It was fun to fight. But so like, yes, you know what I mean? Like the reward is the gameplay and the combat in the game. But the reward for exploring other than very cool vistas.

I mean, this game is beautiful. You know, like there's just not a ton of reward other than just I get to fight more. That's my opinion on it, at least. It's a little underwhelming. Now, they showed this in the trailer, so this is not a spoiler, but there's the Sphinx. And the Sphinx, you have to explore a little bit to find the Sphinx. And this is where you'll find some of the bigger monsters and things like that. But it did feel a little underwhelming to me. Yeah, it's very underwhelming. The map is not as large as you might think. And I felt like it was going to be bigger with more to find.

But they did say everything's handcrafted. So that immediately shortens how much they're going to put in. The one exception is the Medusa cave. So as I'm running around, I start finding enemies that are frozen into stone. And if you hit them with a weapon, they kind of shatter into dust. And then all of a sudden, as I'm looking around, I'm finding more and more. And now I see a cave. And of course, I'm going to go off the beaten path. I go in there. It's a Medusa. I fight the Medusa. I'm the thief. I jump on top. I'm fighting her. I chop off her head. She's dead.

And now I loot her Medusa head and I can turn enemies into stone. Now that was incredible. That is the kind of exploration that's super fun. You get this fun boss fight. You get a really unique item in the game. It's not just a wake stone shard, which is kind of like, or like a fairy stone, which is like best case scenario. That was incredible. I'm sorry. The Sphinx quest lines are kind of BS. You have to follow guides. There's no way. And the fact that they punish you for not remembering where you looted your first seeker token is really dumb i don't think that's a spoiler alert fair warning to everyone out there remember where you get your first seeker uh token because you have to return to it later um yeah the the exploration's not

really their enemy types i this is ironic i said this game seems to have so many enemy types well guess what if you've watched the trailers you have seen every single enemy in this game seems to have so many enemy types. Well, guess what? If you've watched the trailers, you have seen every single enemy in this game. You have seen every single boss fight. There is not a single thing I saw in this game that I did not see in trailers. I would say 99% of the time you're just fighting wolves, goblins, harpies, and bandits. Throw in the occasional ogre, cyclop, minot minotaur griffin or drake uh that's really about it now if you do the true ending they do start throwing new enemies at you but i actually

found enemy types to be really underwhelming as well oh and undead skeletons i get and the the little uh wispy ghosts that run around at night i mean specter overall i was a little underwhelmed i i was underwhelmed with the enemy variety as well um i even said you know man one of the things i would love is if there's just a thousand different enemy types you know and that was not the case i mean you know you you do have the goblin like there's the one goblin that has more armor on them than the other goblins but one, one with a shield. Yeah, but combat is so kind of frenetic at times that you're not really paying attention to that. The big creatures in this game are incredible.

It is so cool to come across a Minotaur or Cyclops or a Griffin or any of that. That is wild. The problem is after the third or fourth or fifth time coming across to griffin you're kind of like i've already killed like three of you guys like this isn't like the all is kind of gone at that point um so more enemy variety i think would have done this game a lot like a lot better in that regard you know um even like i mean like there's bandits and stuff but did you guys like every time i saw bandits i didn't know if it was wandering pawns or not yeah you know so i'm like oh that's just a pawn and all of a sudden they're wailing on me and i'm

like wait wait what why you know and i'm like oh i gotta kill these guys so yeah i mean kudos to the giant monster combat the the mundane stuff started to feel a little mundane after a while well and once you fought three cyclops there it's it's just repetitive yeah it's like i know this and that goes to the exploration part of it too because pretty much other than like the sphinx or medusa everything you you see when you wander off the path you can fight on the path too. If you just run far enough. So you don't even have to go anywhere else. To fight the same creature.

So there really is. And like you said. There's no big reward. There's no awesome armor. Oh I got this armor. I don't remember a name of any pieces of armor. I had the whole time. So yeah.

I was very underwhelmed with the with the enemies. Yeah, there were some fun weapons like Josh. I think I had the same weapons you did. I remember getting the frozen daggers, I think, while clearing out the bandit cave with the kid that goes running that you end up talking to later. All that. Yeah, you rarely ran across anything like that. Any of the you loot so many chests in this game and it's almost always gold

or just like a crafting material. So it does feel a little underwhelming. I did not really feel any need to wander a whole lot. And then we have to talk about fast travel. I feel like this is a real hot button topic that again, I think has some misinformation and some of that is is on the developer to blame the developers kind of said that there's no fast travel but then there kind

of is and you can use these very expensive is how they super expensive yeah which is not true fairy stones are 10 000 that's nothing five minutes in this game you can afford them i i and i'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who did go all the way into the end game when this game ended i had seven port crystals and i probably had 12 fairy stones in my inventory i was fast traveling like there was no tomorrow they also give you ox carts, which is fast travel. It's just only to the neighboring town. You pay them like 100 or 200 gold, hop in the back and you doze off. And maybe a third of the time you get there immediately, no problem. And the other times you get attacked, you quickly fight some enemies. You jump right back on the ox cart and you wake up there, or maybe it gets

destroyed and you run for two minutes. For so many people saying that there's no fast travel, I actually think this game has a lot of fast travel. It's just a little different in how they do it. And you don't have access to that in the beginning. The more you play the game, the more fast travel you actually have. Yeah, dude, the fast travel thing in this game was way blown out of proportion. Like, honestly, I played for 12, 15 hours before I fast traveled for the first time because I was so terrified, you know, that it was like, oh, I mean, I better save these two fairy stones I have. That's pretty for the whole game. That's what I thought.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I was spending 30 minutes running to one quest and then running all the way back to town because I was so scared to fast travel. And then finally, like the ox carts opened up

and I legitimately expected that I had to sit there almost like Red Dead where you have to like, you can watch your guy like cinematically run across the landscape. Yeah.

That's fast travel. You just hop on the ox cart. You say, let's go. It's fast travel. You just hop on the ox cart. You say, let's go. It's fast travel. You click the doze off button and voila, you arrive at your destination. And I was like, what is it? This is fast travel. Fast travel also to places you've never been.

Yes. Usually you have to run there first and unlock fast travel here. If you're in, I don't remember all the city names. Melv, i think connects to the checkpoint you can just that's how you can discover the checkpoint is just ride the ox cart so i don't know i felt like this game not only has fast travel it actually has more fast travel than like some other games how did you feel about this ryan you guys are crazy i don't know what the heck you're talking about that was, the travel in this is horrible.

I hate it. I know that they said they wanted you to explore and run. They don't like fast travel. Well, one, what are we supposed to explore? There's nothing there. We've already covered that. And two, half the time your stupid ox cart gets attacked. I had one, and this goes back into the stun lock and no defensive rolls or anything.

I'm on the ox cart. I'm driving away. All of a sudden, boom boom we're getting attacked by a freaking ogre he's smashing everybody and i'm like destroyed your cart didn't he he destroyed the cart cart's gone ogre's attacking everyone then a griffin lands right on top of us smashes us the griffin starts attacking us as i'm underneath the griffin then wolves come up grab me by the arm drag me against the hill and then three of them surround me and then just eat me alive till i die it was and i'm i mean that's pretty cool let's be honest it was it was i was like dang it but so you reload and you just do it again it's just that's so annoying after all of this to make it i i feel like they and they they talked a big game

about how we don't want fast travel we don't like that we want you to explore the game and then you know we go to back to the microtransactions i feel like they created a problem to solve it with microtransactions i know you guys were saying you get fairy stones were falling from the heavens oh so you could only buy them though like every couple days like yeah they were only 10 000 but but then they're sold out for two or three days so so go rest three days and go buy more some chests will give you three at a time i don't want to have to go rest for three days to go if you're gonna put it in there why not just let me just fast travel i should just be able to click go go there and then be done i so many times i was out of fairy stones when i used one to get there to do this quest and then i'm like crap i gotta run all the way back now and we also left out one important thing

these port crystals you can place anywhere you want in the world and they're not permanent you can pick them up and move them so if you're running quests for the sphinx plop one down right next to the sphinx you don't have to run up there anymore so you can actually place your own custom fast travel i i i had a very different experience than you ryan i would actually say that's a feature having those kinds of battles on the why though i don't get it why if if there's so many fairy stones and there's so but the it's just what's the point why are you putting this in the game if i have to do all this just to fast travel if it's so easy to do it, why just not just let

me fast travel? Here's the catch for this, because I actually experienced what Ryan experienced, right? Except I survived that fight. And I was going from the major city to the checkpoint, which is a long, long run, dude. I'm talking like a 20-minute run. Oh, I did that one. And my Oxcart got attacked about a third of the way there. And it was like, I can either run back to the city and try to take another Oxcart or I'll just finish this track. And I was like, you know, I'm just going to run. But to think that I was going to fast travel and then be stuck running for 15 minutes because an ogre smashed my Oxcart was a little disheartening,

man. You know, like I took the fast travel because I wanted to save time. I'd already made this run. I've already, you know, discovered the checkpoint city. So, but then it's like, dude, you tell me I got to run 15 minutes now, like to go to where I was going to go. There's nothing along the way like the the the world being interesting is kind of a lie because the roads are not interesting especially at night when it's all dark and you can't see nothing anyway so all i'm really doing is wasting 15 minutes of my life at this point to run to the city with zero like reward It's not like, whoa, this is the most interesting run I've ever seen in a video game, guys. So I get Ryan's point. I'm with Paul in that the fast travel was actually way easier

and more prolific than I thought it was going to be in this game. But I don't understand why they decided to limit it. It's either like, just give us fast travel and say that we have it or don't. I'm really glad they gave it to us because the whole like, oh, well, if your world's interesting enough, people don't need to fast travel was not really true. That's not true.

No. What's funny is sometimes I was rooting for my ox cart to get attacked. Cause like, if you had to go visit Luz, it's kind of like the halfway point between the checkpoint and bak batal and so sometimes i would just fast travel back and forth until my ox cart got destroyed because then you'd be closer so it's actually a feature in some cases to get attacked uh but in any case obviously we'll we'll have to move on here this is my

favorite topic that i left because i feel like there's so much about this game that we haven't even touched because it doesn't fall underneath like a specific category. I just want to open this up to random things that are awesome and random things that suck. Do you guys want to start with the good or the bad first? What, which, which one do we want to cover?

Let's end on a positive note, right? Let's let's. Bad news first. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to head out. Let's end on a positive note, right? Let's rant a little bit here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm going to head out. All right. Let's each... Yeah. What are some things that you guys thought was bad or left you wanting other than fast travel for Ryan and loot for Josh? So I'll start then. So for me, just some of the design choices in this game made zero sense, man. Don't claim that your world is so interesting that I don't need to fast travel. Like going off the beaten path. Yes, I'm going to get into fights. That's fun. I've already said I enjoy the combat in this game. It's really cool when all of a sudden a minotaur just, you know, is there and it's like, whoa, this is going to be an interesting fight. But other than a chest with a potion in it, and I barely ever used... I used zero of the buff potions. The only potions or buffs that I ever used in this game were the healing potions to save myself from dying. I also found the combat to be overly easy in this game.

I rarely ever died from combat like the only time i died consistently was because i had come across a minotaur at night and i don't know if i was just didn't have the right party composition or he was just really tough but level two walter yeah that honestly could be part of the problem because he was wrecking me you know and i didn't have a warrior to like keep aggro either maybe so So, you know, part of that might be my fault, but I found the combat to be way too easy. These over the top cinematic giant monster fights, they're neat, but like, there's no tactics involved with those, right? Like if you climb up the monster, I'm just, I'm, I'm smashing. Why? And why is just my thief plunging my dagger in,

pulling my dagger out, plunging my dagger in pulling my dagger out plunging my dagger in pulling my dagger out you know and so other like other than like the golem where you have to like do that at certain parts of the monster there really just wasn't like it was cinematic but it just wound up being kind of mundane after a while, you know, simplistic. Yeah. And so, you know, I had an issue with the difficulty curve. The, the gear system in this game is not the, like the best, like I liked my little chill daggers that I got, but again, the armor doesn't matter. The inventory system's not great. They put these artificial weight limitations on you that serves no purpose other than to just aggravate you in this game um by the way did you know that your character's weight and height change how much you can carry i did know that

and it changes your run speed yeah and see that's kind of interesting that's kind of the other thing right is there's gonna be people that are gonna be like what about all these really cool neat systems you guys didn't point out like you know time of day or you know if your character's big he can hold more weight and things like and it's like that doesn know, time of day, or, you know, if your character's big, he can hold more weight and things like, and it's like, that doesn't matter in the gameplay. Like the, just, I'm playing this game. That stuff doesn't really come into play a whole lot, man. You know? So I just, this is, this game had moments of greatness coupled with moments of like, why? Like, why? And as you guys know, that kind of frustrates me more often than not, because it's like, if you had glimpses of a great game,

why not just make everything great? And so for me, yeah, there were definitely some negatives to this game, but I wish there was more to the loot system to the to the finding treasure and that kind of stuff and the difficulty in combat which was the best part of this game was really simple man and the more you play the easier it gets right where you you it's like you you don't die at all late game yeah did you ever josh did you ever when you like you stagger your ogre did you ever push them over? Yeah. When I was playing as the warrior with the giant two hander, like that's kind of his major thing,

right? Is he can stagger these giant enemies. And so, yeah. And so that was really cool. Like the first time or two that you do it. But then, like I said,

after the third, fourth one, it's kind of like, all right, well, I got to do this fight now. But, and then the other thing is, I don't know. I'm not is i'm not gonna rant forever is like when you kill one of these giant

creatures the only thing you get out of it is crafting components so that you can then upgrade your weapons or your armor later on but it might be a type that you'll never use right maybe it's only for trickster armor and if you don't like trickster that's no good but combat's too easy anyway so i don't want to upgrade my stuff anymore because then I'm just steamrolling things even harder at that point. The game was so much easier than I thought it would be. Yeah, it was for me as well. Yeah. Well, since Ryan's blowing his nose, I'll throw out some of my things that suck. There's no morality system. It's sorely needed in this game it is you can you can pick up pick up city guards chuck them into the brine they're dead no one cares um little bit like in hogwarts

legacy you can cast dark arts curses everywhere even in front of your teachers and no one bats and i i really wish that it had a morality system did you guys think initially that the camps were one-time use? Yes. Wait. Dude. Wait. This is the only time I died a lot. They're not one-time use?

No, they're unlimited use, dude. Unless they get destroyed and get attacked. You're talking the camping kit. Your camping kit. That's super heavy. Yep. Were you carrying like seven of them? Like completely unnecessarily? I would bring like two or three with me if I, and then my guys were all overloaded because they're the freaking heaviest things ever. No. Yeah. So you end up

looting so many different types that you'll end up. Yeah. Like carrying all these, these, uh, camping sites in the beginning. I remember being like, oh man, I just fought that Cyclops. I've only got half my health meter. Cause over time you don't just lose health. It, it lowers your max health until you camp or sleep at an inn. i would be like this is the closest camp to vernworth i don't want to use my camping kit i only have two of them and so then i would keep fighting now my game is saved in a bad spot where my max health is just one shot and and then once i learned that the campsites are not disposable i couldn't believe it and it's something that a lot of people have mentioned uh another thing here is just simply there's a lot of

stuff to miss a little bit like elden ring sometimes you have to keep talking to a guy and then they give you info that you need for your quest and there's really no indication you talk to a guy you're discussing the quest and the conversation ends, and then I would run off. And I had an unresolved quest that I looked up after I finished the game, and it turned out I had to keep talking to him and he would have given me more information. Last thing I'll say about bad stuff, sometimes your pawns or enemies or your pawns just kind of go wild. So if you pull out your weapons, sometimes like guards will draw

their weapons and they'll be like, how dare you furnish that against me or whatever. But sometimes late game, like a Griffin will attack the outside gates of Bach Batal. And now I'm just fighting the Griffin with them, but then like they would start fighting me. And so like i had one case where you uh go down into the slums and you have to find the place with all the books and as i ran out i had my weapons out and one of the homeless people pushed me or something and then my pawn struck them down next thing i know i've got a massacre where like 20 of the homeless people are now just laying dead in the area and i don't think i ever attacked any of them it was just kind of like things just sort of went crazy out of nowhere

and that's a little bit of like goofy ai stuff where i did not try to murder all the homeless in bak patal but it just worked out that way anyway that's the secret quest cleanse or burnworth yeah cleanse burnworth all right and then what about what about good stuff because i think there's That's the secret quest. Or Vernworth, yeah. Cleanse Vernworth. All right. And then what about good stuff? Because I think there's some really fun stuff in here as well. Did we hear Ryan's bad stuff? Oh, no, no, no. Because, yeah, that's right. He's blowing his nose.

You've heard it the whole podcast. Yeah, same thing. One thing with the camping sites is it just sucks because once I found out you only needed to carry one, then I'm running. I'm probably somewhere too far into the game as a low level, and I'm trying to camp. I hated that hit meter that lowered your max health because you're running through. You run into these areas. Some of the areas I know we talked about, it's kind of sparse as far as enemies like in the beginning.

But when you're going to like Batal or whatever, there's areas where there's an ogre on each side of the pathway and then there's wolves everywhere there's harpies there's the scale guys and so you get dinged up pretty bad and then i'm trying to camp i got one campsite i pack it up and then i get attacked in the middle of the night i'm not healed now i have like a third of my health it's nighttime and there's guys everywhere. So I just, I feel like they did a lot to intentionally make it not hard, but just annoying things. To which, to which other people would probably say it's part of the immersion, like clear the area and then camp.

Cause you know, it's safe and you do get higher quality camping gear. That's less likely to get attacked later. But I hear you. I have to mention one more thing real quick the save the one save system in this game ultimately cost me about seven hours worth of gameplay yeah i felt so bad for you dude i now to be fair i was chatting with my daughter i was half paying attention and i clicked load at the end because i was like, oh, I'll just go back there and then

I'll... I forget why. And the game warns you, if you load at the end, you may lose progress. Or maybe it said you'll lose your save, which makes zero sense to me whatsoever. But again, I was half paying attention. I clicked that and I lost three hours worth of play time. It's the worst, you know? And then I had another time where the game just, it auto saved at a very, very terrible time. And I was like, I can't play the game from this point. I had lost all my money at like just a bunch of bad things that happened. My pawns were dead. I had no money. And I was like, well, crud man. Like why did it save right there? You know? And so I

had to reload. And then I was like three hours back again, kind of thing. So the one save thing is asinine to me, dude. Like I doesn't make any sense. I even remember before this game saying like, it's like remnant two where you don't, you know, you, you just, if you, if you buy a weapon and remnant two, you can't reload and say, you, if you buy a weapon and remnant two, you can't reload and say, I don't want that weapon. But remnant two is set up in a sense where it doesn't matter. You know, in that case, this game, it matters a whole bunch, man, you know? And so it's like, I just lost like six, seven hours worth of play time because of a bad design choice. There's zero benefit to having one save file in this game man

well that's what's why even have last save or in save like that doesn't even make sense to me why even put that in there it just let it had all the save points like in like in skyrim or something where you can just load from where you're trailing three or five yeah something most recent saves or something but why what was the purpose of just going back to the end save? Like, oh, I didn't like what happened? To kick me between the legs. That's the purpose. Well, just like I said, I feel like they just did a lot of things that you just say why.

Why? Oh, see, I totally understand why. But not everyone's going to like it. I mean, I get it. They want your choices to matter. So you make a choice. The game auto saves. You can't go back and save scum unless you want to go back to your last end save. So, I mean, I kind of get it they want your choices to matter so you make a choice the game auto saves you can't go back and save scum unless you want to go back to your last in save so i mean i kind of get it but

it's obviously super annoying i i don't think this qualifies as a spoiler but i will say after you beat the game in order to get the true ending you have to reload your old save and play again and it turns into a roguelike where you no longer have saving at all. It's only save at the last in. And I had played about six days worth and was about to finish the true ending. And I accidentally fell off a cliff where I jumped weird and then I fell and died. And my only option was the last in. And I said, I'm done and i quit so i i i carried out almost all the missions in the unmoored other than the actual finishing of the true ending i said i'm not doing it again but that's dumb that is super dumb but that's because they take away load your last save entirely then

it's only a dumb decision dude that is dumb yes hundred percent all right good news i think there's a ton of fun stuff here we haven't talked about picking up and throwing people never gets old dude chuck enemies off of bridges chuck ponds directly onto that ogre i found that stuff to be utterly fun the whole time and i i many of you out there i've probably murdered your pawns because if i saw you on the side of the road and you were on a bridge guess what i picked you up and i threw you into the brine and it never got old ever i will also say i love the real life videos of cooking meat at all yeah dude it shocked me the first time i'm like that's not animation i'm like that's that's a steak and then the first time i'm like that's not animation i'm like that's

that's a steak and then the next time i was cooking a different steak i'm like oh it's a smaller lesser quality steak i found that to be so fun where i was like ooh aged beef steak and then sure enough it's like a thick like three inch steak that you're throwing on there. Sizzling on that can, yeah. Love it. So cool. Just a little cosmetic touch that I loved. I will also say I loved the fact that there was a NPC that would craft forgeries for you in the game. Yes, oh, that quest was great. I don't want to spoil anything,

but yes, I'm with you 100%. He came in very handy to me for a couple of quests because sometimes multiple people say, can you go get the same item? Well, guess what? I can craft a forgery and now I can decide who do I try to trick with the fake? Who do I give the real? And then there's ramifications of that.

And there's not enough of that in the game. It's very cool, but it only comes along a couple of times. There's one guy who was trying to find two parts of a grimoire. I tricked him, giving him a fake, but then that also had fun ramifications as well. I felt like the game doesn't give you enough opportunities like that. You also have to make a choice how to get past the checkpoint, and there's a couple of different ways to do it. And that kind of harkens back to like your dragon ages and mass effects and there's just not enough choice making for big quests like that but what is there is a lot of fun also you can troll people by sending gifts like woke stones instead of wake stones because they're

forgeries that don't work change the name but it's the same decal so someone might think oh i got a sweet item and it's just a forgery yeah yeah uh any other cool stuff that we haven't covered on the show um i i mean for me i know we've done a lot of like pointing out the detractors on this game for me the combat is fun um even if it is a little too easy it's active it's there's a lot of different skills that you can use you can kind of build your character the way that you want to build them. I enjoyed the vocation system. I like being able to just switch when I'm tired of playing one class and then going to another one.

The world feels really cool to me. This felt like a living world. It's beautiful. The vistas and the things that you come across that, you know, the draw distance is great. You can see stuff off in the distance, watching a Cyclops fight a dragon as you're just wandering around is super cool. Like that's a very good example of what I mean with this. Just the world is alive. Um, you know, having pawns that are walking along the road and just going about their business and guards and things like that. Like they did a phenomenal job of crafting the world itself. There is a lot of fun to be had in the game.

You know, we said this before, you know, the cities, like, you know, having the different shops and the vendors sell different weapons and they have different armor. One of the things I've always loved about an RPG is is when you go to a new city you have all new gear to look at you know and i remember getting to to maybe it was the checkpoint maybe it was patal but like being super excited to run up to the weapons vendor and be like what do you got for me man and it was all new stuff and i was like oh yeah you know so like that's that's really cool to me as well um i mean there is a lot for this game that definitely works um in a lot of ways nice yeah i was gonna say it's i know i've been uh poo-pooing on this game quite a bit and i admit

it was i got dragon's dogma sitting right there next to hell divers and i gotta click dragons dogma you know to come in and play but um i i just i fell in love with the pawns and i love to kill the npcs and throw them over the cliffs that was probably one of my favorite parts warning though be careful because you could kill a questline npc and that's what i did and it took me a while and then i finally asked josh i'm like hey dude i know i can get these npcs back somehow where do i go he's like oh yeah you got to go to the morgue here and pay this money to get them back use a wake stone and i'm like dang it yeah so just be careful people out there if you kill the npcs that's a quest line one but um it was just to me the some of the little things i found really cool again with the pawns like if you get put to sleep by the harpies you know your pawn will run over and she kind of shakes you to wake you up and helps you up and yeah the comments

and the dialogue we've gone over so that that was a lot of the stuff that I thought was just really neat and kind of made the game for me yeah I totally agree it's it's a weird game in that there's so much good and so much frustrating it's it's almost like you don't know what to do. So ultimately, do you guys recommend the game at $70? Just in a short sentence, would you say yes or no and why? Yes, I do. I think that as long as you know that there's going to be some quirks, you're going to definitely scratch your head a few times and say, why? I think you have to have some patience with this game. Patience with the one save, patience with the traveling. It's not always going to go the way that you want it to go. Patience with your pawns falling off of cliffs and ruining things.

If you have that patience for putting up with that stuff, then I think this game is definitely worth the money at $70 ryan that's a big no for me at what price point would you say yes how low would it have to get uh i pay 30 bucks for this game 30 probably 30 yeah i mean because you again everybody knows i love hell divers you go you buy that game i i have over 100 hours not one of them was spent in frustration other than like, dang it, I died again. And then you're so excited to hop back in and keep playing. I just, this one just did not do it for me. I'm sure some people are going to absolutely love it.

Say game of the year. Say they'd pay $100 for it. But for me, I just, there was just too much that I didn't like and I was frustrated with to where I just didn't look forward to playing. When I get in and I play some parts, I'd be like, okay, that was cool or that was fun. And I'd laugh or smile. But for the most part overall, I wouldn't recommend paying 70 bucks. Wait for a sale. I would say yes, because I do think that this game does a lot of unique stuff I haven't seen anywhere else. The way that you hire and dismiss pawns, some of the boss fights are incredibly fun.

I would just say it comes with a caveat of you definitely have to watch a YouTube video, 20 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Played Dragon's Dogma 2, or look up some things like that, and just have on your second screen a a walkthrough and just look up any as soon as any quest feels too vague and you're not sure what to do if that feels frustrating just look up how to solve it i don't think there's anything wrong with that but why though why did they make it that way that was so frustrating they want to give you quests that you don't resolve for a long time and you stumble into it later they want you to play a hundred hours whereas if you beeline the main mission you're

going to beat it in about 25 they want you to take your time which i get but you got to give you got to give yourself enough to do out there in the open world and it can't just be the medusa and the sphinx you gotta have more that. Making a game frustrating is not the way to get people to play it for 100 hours. The masquerade mission, the ball, you don't know how long I spent on that stupid mission. So I don't want to spoil anything, but it was just the time of day and then that room.

And I was so annoyed by the time I finished that. I didn't look up a guide, but I wanted to finish it without looking up a guide. But I just don't understand intentionally making it that way and i guess you explained it but i don't know that that style just doesn't vibe with me my character stared into the void on benches for days sometimes oh there's not a masquerade tonight all right i guess i'm gonna doze off four times in a row on this same bench yet again and then carry on you run back and your pawns are like master master and then you say you run back away oh we'll wait here oh i i implore you arisen please

return to us quickly all right so revisiting the fact that josh spent 68 from the auction on this game fair value good value or bad value i think it's about i think it's it's slightly high but i think it's fair what else would you have spent the money on this is value i think it's about i think it's it's slightly high but i think it's fair what else would you have spent the money on this is still i would have given me more money to spend on like avowed or you know no rest for the wicked or some of these other games that i'm hyped for here's the bad one for 50 i mean you know yeah here's the thing i do not think dragons dogma two is a game of the year. Like winter. Like did it does something?

I think it'll be nominated. Maybe it may. I think it will. It feels different than a lot of games. Like that's one of the things that is neat is I have not played a game that is quite like dragons dogma two. I just don't know if the cool features of the world and the pawn system and the vocations is enough to outweigh the frustration that is built into this game yeah i hear you ryan i'm guessing you think it's just paying way too much i i wouldn't say way way too much but i would think

if he paid maybe like 45 50 for it probably be a better value but yeah i wouldn if he paid maybe like 45, 50 for it, probably be a better value. But yeah, I wouldn't have paid 68. That's for sure. I think if we held the draft again right now, having already played it, I'd still go up to 50, 55, somewhere in that range.

I think I, I mean, 50 is a fair, I'd feel comfortable saying, knowing what I know now, I think I'd say like, yeah, I bid 50 on this game and see what happens.

Yeah. I think that's totally fair. All right. Well, last segment of the show, we're going to go to our leaderboards for listeners who don't know video gamers, pod.com tons of stuff on there. Probably my favorite things are leaderboard. We individually rank this game against every other deep dive we've ever done. Josh, you're all the way up to 111 games.

I'm at 107. Ryan joined us about a year ago, so he's got 38. Where do you guys want to put Dragon's Dogma 2 on your leaderboard? I actually did my homework on this one, and I looked at the leaderboard before we started recording and said, hmm, where do I want to put this game? Now, this is what's going to sound funny, right? We've talked about all the bad qualities of this game. We've talked about how it sounds like we're disappointed, right? Like Ryan obviously said, hey, this game just didn't land for me. All of the bad things like, part of our job is to point out what doesn't work in a game so that you can make the decision, whether you think this game is worth it for you or not in the grand scheme of things.

I think dragons dogma two is a pretty darn good video game. You know, does not a masterpiece. It's not a masterpiece. That's the thing. I do not. I was the most hyped out of all of us. I said,

man, I really hope this is like the next witcher. This is not the next witcher. This is not the next Skyrim. This is not the next Dragon Age. But is it an enjoyable video game to kind of lose yourself in for a week or two? I have 40 hours in this game, you know, so I've gotten my money's worth out of it at that point. And I said, hey, I think for the 40 hours that I spent, I think $70 is worth it. So all that said, I think this is a pretty darn good game. I think a lot of people are really going to enjoy it.

I think that this game definitely is not going to resonate with people. Ryan is a good example of that, right? So taking everything we've said, make your decision on that. But I have to say, hey, there's a lot to be had here. And I think from an outside perspective, I think it's a pretty darn good game. I'm going to put it at 37. I'm actually going to bump down Final Fantasy 16 because I enjoy Dragon's Dogma 2 more than Final Fantasy 16. But they're very similar in a lot of ways where I kind of went, what are you doing? And then I went, whoa, this is cool.

And then I went, what are you doing? And then just kind of back and forth. Yeah. I am shockingly close to yours, Josh, but I want to hear from Ryan first. Ryan, where are you putting this? And is it above or below humanity, which you have dragged through the mud the last few months,

even though that's also a pretty good game? It is actually going to be above it, but not by much. Okay. I am actually gonna go again i think this is just one of those things where i think there was good parts in it but it just wasn't for me too much frustration too much vague missions you know i just just wasn't what i like to play in the style i like to play um having said that i'm gonna put it at 33 which okay hearing josh is you think that's pretty good but my list is a lot shorter so that's near the bottom yeah 33 out of 38 doesn't or i guess 39 now doesn't sound quite as good i would rather play a thousand other games and this is a hundred percent uninstalled and i will

never touch it again so you'd rather play play Rocket League, Monster Hunter World, Cuphead, Halo Reach, but you would play this over Deathloop, Battlefield 2042, and certainly Pacific Drive. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, Josh put it 37 on his. I'm putting it at 36 on mine. And I'll tell you why. To me, that is the end of my leaderboard of the great games.

So in the thirties, I've got stuff like Splitgate, Divinity Original Sin 2, Risk of Rain 2, Left 4 Dead 2. And then I'm putting in Dragon's Dogma 2 at the end of the great tier, but I am putting it above stuff like Far Cry 5, Dead Island 2, Broforce, things like that. I think that this game does some great stuff. In a weird way, it plays like a game from 15 years ago. It doesn't hold your hand. It's kind of frustrating. They choose to make it that way. It's going to land for some. I think there's a niche audience here that this is the greatest game they've ever played and those are the people that are different gamers than us i totally get it um but for me i'm gonna say it's it's right in between really good and great and i'm gonna put

at the very bottom of the great tier all right does that cover everything guys i mean this is our longest show we've had a long one oh one was a long one. Oh, one more thing. The old English. I know me and you were talking about it. You two were so mean. That was so freaking annoying. Me thinks is a crime. No one should ever say me thinks. That was like a grater on my eyeballs.

That's how it felt. Me thinks ye ought not complain about the old english in a video game that's from a fantasy setting oh goodness the aughts and the me thinks drove me wild a-u-g-h-t oh all right well that wraps up our deep dive on dragon's dogma 2 we hope you guys enjoyed this very long episode as a reminder please check out patreon at multiplayer squad.com make sure to rate us five stars follow us on socials at video gamers pod our next deep dive we have not released the name yet it is a hijack a host uh that one will either release next monday or the monday after where we do the pre-dive and we'll announce what game that is and of course we always have a new episode on on thursdays for this week Gaming. So please go check that out.

And until next time, happy gaming. Me thinks. See ya. No, you stole mine, Ryan. Ah, butthead. All right. See you, everybody.