Video Gamers Podcast - Dragon's Dogma 2 Deets, Avowed’s Skill Progression and Blizzard Busts - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Video games hosts Paul, Ryan and Josh with the Video Gamers Podcast are back with another packed episode filled with the gaming news you NEED to know. This week in video game news, we go deep into Dragon’s Dogma 2 travel system, discuss Avowed’s Skyrim like skill progression, lament the loss of a Blizzard survival crafting game, discuss the Palworld Roadmap and more in this gaming packed episode! Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Redletter, Gaius214, Nate, Kiitaclyzm, YayaArizona, Morgau, Disratory and Jwaf 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

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. We are here on Thursdays to break down recent gaming news over the last week today we have some topics to cover including pal world dragons dogma 2 avowed skull and bones and also a little bit of sad news about blizzard's survival game that started in development six years ago i am your host paul joining me, he's got his Ubisoft Plus subscription running. He's counting down the days to play Skull & Bones. It's Josh.

Joke's on you, Paul, because guess what I literally did earlier today? Did you finally cancel it? I canceled my subscription before I got charged another month. I can't make fun of you for it anymore. I'm a little sad. No, we still can. Sk, skull and bones, guys! Right? Crickets?

Right? Crickets? What? What? All right. And then joining Josh and me, he is dreaming about future plans to Palworld where he can PvP and kill raid bosses. It's Ryan.

Hold on. PvP? PvP? You mean I can burn other people with 40 campfires oh that would be really funny all right so before we jump into this week in gaming we do have a couple of patreon supporters to thank we want to give a very special thank you to the kachow kid who signed up with rare status and panda Bear Music who signed up with epic status. So we really wanted to say thank you to both of you guys. I know we've said it on the show many times.

We are able to do what we do because of support on Patreon. And we really appreciate the fact that both of you signed up. Yes. Thank you for bringing joy to the world, for our amazing smooth buttery voices to the masses is that what we have yeah i will say kachow kid is super active on discord too uh yes and anyone else if you're not on there hop on the discord totally free um awesome community lots of people get on there lots of cool games conversations to be had it's it's just a great time absolutely so for our listeners out there if you want to support what

we do and sign up on patreon as well you can check that out at multiplayer squad.com you'll get a shout out on the show you get all the episodes ad free a day early you get bonus squad cast episodes we really do try to make it worth your money. All right, moving on. We have to talk once again about pal world. I mean, I know this has been a lot of pal world content lately, but this is,

you know, the biggest news story of the year so far, guys, I have a little PC gamer article here that I want to read the headlight from pal world players channel, their inner hunter gatherers to fell a giant mammoth by herding it into campfires devs call it genius guys that's a news article about us somebody called us geniuses are you sure you read that are you sure they've never heard the show

right you sure about that you sure about that you sure about that oh what a what a fun week man we had that tweet go viral it got picked up by a bunch of news organizations very surreal to have people on discord be like did you guys see this and it'll be like a new story about us but oh man so much fun um hard to believe that yeah that video got 1.6 million views even just the other night josh and i were hanging out with some friends for game night and one of our buddies had heard about our video and didn't realize it was us that was oh wow really hilarious to be like he was like wait a minute that was you guys and we were like yeah yep that was us he's like yeah i heard like running around with a mammoth running over campfires. And we're like, yep, that was our video.

Oh, too funny. All right. So the real news story about PAL World, though, is that they did release a roadmap for early access development. So their immediate plan is to focus on fixing bugs, key configuration improvements, and improvements to PAL AI and pathing down the road they plan to add pvp end game raid bosses a pal arena and also new islands pals bosses and technologies um i would imagine their key focus right now is to dodge lawsuits from nintendo that we know are being

you know probably lobbed their way but I was curious to hear your guys' take about this roadmap. It seems to have some fun stuff down the road. Yeah, I agree. I think there's some cool things ahead. I know some of the critical things that they tried to fix, I never really experienced.

I didn't have any issues with the rollbacks or any of that stuff. I know that we would have, and I know Josh would always be like, make sure there's not a guy up there on the hill. I didn't have any issues with the rollbacks or any of that stuff. I know that we would have, and I know Josh would always be like, make sure there's not a guy up there on the hill. Why is this guy starving? Why is his eyes bloodshot? So there was a few just hiccups.

But other than that, for me, the game ran smooth. And it's cool to see them kind of advancing to other things they're going to do to dial it in and make it just even better. It's always interesting to me when you have a game that comes out in early access that is fairly feature complete, like Palworld. Palworld is not a game where I dive into and I go, oh, this is super early access. The game for us ran well. There was plenty of content to do. There were a few areas where you could tell like, okay, there's definitely more that they have in mind here. But you know, this reminds me of like Satisfactory when we played that, where it was like, this is a pretty complete game. V Rising was technically early access when we played that.

And again, feature complete for the most part, you know, those sorts of things. I'd like seeing the path forward for this game. You know, personally, I think I'm done with Pal World at this point. You know, my gamer ADD has kicked in. I've got some other things on the horizon. I know we're all super pumped for Helldivers 2 coming out,

but there are people that are picking up Palworld right now and discovering the joys of that game. My daughter, who does not play anything besides Roblox and Minecraft and Genshin Impact, eventually broke down and picked up Palworld. And it is her favorite game that she has played in years. I mean, I can't tell you how often she comes down and tells me that she just caught some super cool guy or she's like, Dad, you know the Fire Dragon

Van Worm things? And I'm like, yeah. She's like, I got a crystal one. And I'm like, wait, that exists? So she's teaching me things about Power World at this point that I had no idea about. So it's like, I definitely understand the mindset that maybe people are starting to get tired of hearing about Power World all the time. But again, our job is to put news in front of you and kind of catch you up on things. And so the news here is that they're not, it doesn't look like they're going to just sit back and rest on their laurels and just swim in their piles of cash like Scrooge McDuckwood. You know, they do have plans for the future of this game. I like the idea of PVP.

I like the idea of a pal arena where you can let your pals fight it out and stuff like that as well. I like the idea of endgame raid bosses. I kind of assume that's what the towers were, but maybe not at that point. But it is interesting to just kind of say or to see, hey, game is doing great we love that everybody's having fun but we do have plans for this early access and we're going to keep

working on it for now for now until the lawyers show up yeah yeah so josh is done playing pal world what about you ryan are you still planning to play or are you kind of done at this point um i don't know how i still do have a draw to go back and check on our base and do the things that, you know, I was doing before as far as maintenance and kind of advancing in the game. But I we have a lot of stuff coming up. So I'm kind of on the fence. If you guys hit me up, I would 100% get on. Ace hits me up. Hey, let's go play some Power World.

But other than that, I'm probably not as gung-ho as I was maybe a week and a half ago. Yeah. I think I'm done with it as well. I enjoyed my time playing. I think there's a couple reasons why I might be done. First of all, you guys just really outpaced me in leveling to where i have not built a single like crafting station in ages so for me it's kind of like well you guys have already kind of done most of the progressions so now do i just ask you to make me

certain weapons like that i don't know i kind of feel like i kind of got a little bit out leveled and we just have to cover so much stuff for the show. So I think if the show didn't exist, I'd probably still be dabbling in it. I don't know that I would return to it based on the roadmap. There's still so much we could do now, like finishing the syndicate towers. But yeah, I think I might be done with pal world, but man, it was a really fun week of jumping in that game and really just playing nothing else. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's not any shade towards Pal World itself. I mean, again, I love the idea that people are going to get 100 hours worth of enjoyment out of this. Honestly, my daughter is probably one of those people. I mean, there's not an end in sight for her right now. And she's been playing a lot. It's just more, like you said, Paul, our schedule with covering games and needing to kind of know what's coming up and what we're going to cover and talk about and things like that. It just generally, you know, puts a kibosh on how far we can dig

into certain games. You know, I don't know that I would stick with Palworld like solo if it wasn't for that either. But again, I mean, I feel like I got my money's worth out of that game. I had a lot of fun with it. Oh, yeah. And Paul, I get the left behind. I literally just had that conversation because my daughter is playing with her cousin, and she is able to hop on a little bit more than he is. And I told her, I said, you need to be careful because if you leave him behind, it's going to make it harder for him to play. And it's one of those things where we have seen this repeatedly. When we were playing Rust a lot, we had a couple of friends jump into Rust and we're like, here's an AK, here's armor, like come raid the space. And they're just going like,

I don't know what I'm doing and I don't have the investment. I didn't spend the time to get here. Right, exactly. And so that really does matter for people when it's something where you started off and you built this with your own two hands with somebody else versus I'm 30 hours in and now I want you to join me. And it's just so much harder for somebody to dive in at that point. Yeah, for sure. Any kind of game with survival and progression like that it's i remember in world of warcraft that being similar like one person all of a sudden's level 30 and you're level 19 and now you can't really play together and so it's almost best if you just agree okay we're only gonna play if we all get on but then when you do that inevitably you, you'll never get on. So there's no perfect system for it. But yeah, it definitely helps when everyone kind of levels together.

All right. So moving on to our next story. Normally, I think we would jump into Dragon's Dogma 2. I want to make sure we leave plenty of time to talk about it. So let's hold off until after our break. Let's jump into Avowed. So Avowed, I had listed as one of my most anticipated games of the year. I know you guys were very much into it as well. It is a game that just keeps growing in estimation

every time I get more info. I've already said that on this show before. But PC Gamer ran an article that explains that Avowed has no class system at all. You're not picking like a fighter, archer, mage, or anything like that. Instead, it is inspired by Skyrim. You will be able to pick and choose any of the abilities that are available as you level up, along with your ability to respec. I personally love this news. I love when you can get a bit weird with your build outs and you can kind of just like make your own frankenstein's monster through a skill tree i think this is great news it's just more stuff i love about avowed yeah absolutely i you know i freaking love skyrim more than i should and i've bought more copies than i should so i love the thought of the option to just have a heavy

hammer or a heavy axe and you're bashing this guy and then boom you pop to a fire blast and you just hit him. And that's the only one you've done in the sorcery kind of spec but you know you can do it so not having a specific class based character

you can kind of tinker with things and mess with what you want or sometimes i would have a heavy heavy armor guy and then have healing you know you kick back to some healing so i i love the thought of it just like you paul so i'm i'm super stoked this game is definitely on my height meter and it's growing and growing yeah the the train is speeding up for me as well. I really enjoy the Skyrim method of leveling skills because you can play how you want to play and you don't get that F these abilities, but now I have to pay to reset my skill tree or some games don't let you reset it. They're just like, dude, you committed to it. You're playing through like this. The beauty of this type of system is if I find a play style that resonates with me just naturally, I'm going to level those skills up just because I'm using

them more often than other skills and having fun with them. So I actually enjoy that system because you just have to play the game the way you want to play it without too much forethought on builds and skill trees and things like that. Because a lot of times what happens is these games is it's too early. I'm an hour in and you're asking me to pick my path right now. And it's like, maybe I don't know what my path is yet. And so I do like this. The joke here is that

I'm always going to wind up being like a stealth archer. Yeah, you know what I mean? Because it's like, well, that works really well. So I'm very curious to see how they pull it off. Is it going to feel just exactly like Skyrim did, or are there going to maybe be a little bit more like modern tweaks and things like that? One of the things I read is that you will level up skills by just using them all a Skyrim, but there are still like skill trees that you can look at and kind of have an idea of where you might be able to go, which I think is a really

nice hybrid of that. And I will see how that's implemented and if it's actually true or not. But that to me is a perfect mesh of the two. It just makes perfect sense to level up an ability that you use. I remember playing San Andreas with Ryan way back in the day. And we'd be like, you got to pump iron and your guy would get bigger and you would ride the bike and your guy would gain skill into riding bikes and you know next thing you know your guy can go just as fast on a bike as in a car because you've spent the time working out on your bike so i really love when games do that i think it really just helps the immersion uh i don't know about you guys i feel extraordinarily confident about avowed

at this point i would actually be rather shocked if it's not a very very good game i feel like at minimum it's going to be like an 85 on metacritic possibly higher i think this one is looking really good i mean if this is a i mean this is by obsidian, right? And so Obsidian's made Fallout New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. I mean, they have a pedigree, the Outer Worlds. They don't make bad games. That's the thing.

They don't really make bad games. But we used to say that about Blizzard. I don't want to jinx it, man. Don't bring it up. I don't want to jinx it. But if this comes out and this is Skyrim or Oblivion or Fallout or any of those games that Obsidian is known for, this is going to be a massive hit with gamers. I don't really see them messing this up either, which I think is why all like the three of us collectively are kind of just getting more excited as we get closer to that, because we feel like they know

what they're doing. And if you give me a modern Skyrim, I mean, who doesn't want that, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, let's go ahead and take a short break and we'll come back and talk about dragons dogma 2 all right dragons dogma 2 again one of our picks for one of the most anticipated of the year we have talked a lot about this game behind the scenes we've covered it a couple times on the show it is set to release on march 22nd and this is kind of a two-part story that i want to get your guys reactions to first of all the director of the game had some really interesting comments on fast travel and video games. Basically, in a nutshell, he said games over-rely on fast travel, and if travel in your game is boring, it's because you've made a boring game, and you have not made travel interesting

enough for gamers. So when I hear something like that from a director, I'm thinking, oh, they have really thought about this experience from the ground up that they're putting this much time into thinking about travel. They basically said, we have put real thought into the process where, yes, there are fast travel options, but it's incredibly expensive. It relies on a really rare material that you have to have. And then there are other options that are cheaper to do fast travel, but they all come with risk. So if you ride on a wooden cart, you have to take whatever path they're taking. It doesn't necessarily go anywhere. And maybe you get attacked and now you have to fight a griffin on foot and now you

have to run the rest of the way and so they have intentionally built travel to be risky and to be expensive to fast travel but they have intentionally thrown so much stuff into the world that travel is going to be fun i'm curious to hear your guys' take on that. Do you think he's right? Do you think that games rely too much on fast travel? And if you make it a good experience, running on foot could even be preferred? I think that I love what he is saying, to be honest. We talk about quality of life issues. We talk about... I mean, it's been the last five years or a decade of remakes and remasters and things like that, right? And we always talk about quality of life stuff and bringing games into the modern age. The problem with that is, is that quality of life doesn't mean it needs to be easy or take less time.

It just means that it needs to be accessible or not boring or something along those lines. And we have gotten into a world where everybody wants fast travel because I don't want to spend 20 minutes running across this giant map. But in a game like Dragon's Dogma 2, where you are living in this world and you want the escapism of this fantasy universe, traveling's dangerous, man. Like, I mean, go back to the days of World of Warcraft or EverQuest or any game that you want to pick out from 20 years ago and traveling, you were scared. You didn't know what you were going to come across. Maybe you were going to die, you know, 15 minutes away from your bind point or something like that. I mean, it adds a certain flavor when you are just thrust out into the world. I'll use Skyrim again, right? What is one

of the joys of Skyrim is sometimes you're wandering through the woods and you see some ruins or a cave entrance and you go, ooh, what's that over there? And it's like, you can go exploring. And sometimes that exploring leads to great experiences. And if we take a page out of Starfield's book, where all you ever had to do is fast travel, it makes it feel soulless to a lot of people at that point. And so I am 100% behind exactly what he's saying in that if people only want fast travel, it's because you made it boring to get from point A to point B. If I know that every time I head out from point A to point B, that I risk some cool experience or a monster attacking me or a random encounter or something like that, that gives me immersion in the world that I

want to be in. So I'm honestly all for it. Now, that said, big words. And if traveling is boring, then guess what? I'm really going to be wishing for more fast travel options. But I think he's on the right track where he's saying it's because people don't like the world they're in. You don't want to spend the time walking back and forth i i don't know i i understand what you're saying but also i've used fast travel a whole heck of a lot in skyrim and another one that i've used it in quite a bit is red dead but i also have gone along the path to where I need to go in Red Dead as well. The one feature I love is the cinematic mode.

You can set your horse to run, and then just turn it cinematic, and you can sit back and watch. If wolves come at you, you can grab it and click and take over, or if a bandit gang comes after you or bounty hunters, you can take over, but you still have that option to move there faster

instead of using the fast travel but i i don't want to be limited to just having to run to each place every time because what if you go you transfer all the way to this other spot and you're like oh i forgot to get something there you should be able to i want to play the game how i want to play let me fast travel back get what i need to. If I want to go through the corridors and the pathways and the walkways or the journey on that trail, I can do that. But if I want to just do it after I've unlocked it, then that should be my prerogative. I should be able to unlock that and then be able to fast travel where I want to go if that's what I want. Hey, I only got 20 minutes to play. Let me shoot over this spot and do this quest real quick you know i don't want to have to run the whole time and then oh i ran into

a blockade and now oh crap i'm out of time i just got to turn off the game anyway so i i get what he's saying but i just like the option to play the game how you know how i want to play it as far as traversing through the map so let me ask you a question, Ryan. Okay. Because fast travel, they did say exists, but they said that it would be pricey. It's going to be expensive if you want that luxury. And you just went to Disney with your family.

Did you guys fly there or did you drive there? Oh, I drove. Okay. So you went the slow travel route versus the really expensive luxury travel route well um a flight to california from phoenix phoenix probably roughly the same when you factor in driving to the airport tsa you understand my point right is that i get that you're saying this is a luxury and and again, if you use World of Warcraft or EverQuest or one of these MMOs where travel was legitimately an issue,

you would have to pay a wizard to teleport you somewhere if you wanted to skip the run, right? And so I kind of support the, it exists in the game, but it's a luxury versus the only option available. So I like that idea. If I am lazy and I just want to save up some money so that I can get these fairy stones or whatever they call them to let me fast travel, maybe it's worth it to me. But if not, then I'm going to hoof it.

But maybe that leads to some really cool experiences in the game as well. Maybe they'll have microtransactions where I can just buy fairy stones. Don't you put any ideas in their head, Ryan. Don't you put that evil on me, Ricky Bobby. What do you think, Paul? I'll tell you

what I think. I can't believe we've been talking about fast travel for 10 minutes. But we've said this about games like GTA, right? Arguably, the best parts of GTA is traversing the map. They got good radio. Yeah. When you have good radio and random encounters and ragdoll physics, you know, when you inevitably hit people or jump out of your car 200 feet in the air after hitting a jump, that makes part of the game so much fun. And we've seen other games that are abysmal at travel. I think it's the first Mafia, where if you speed or run red lights, the cops will pull

you over. And it's like, okay, well, now this just sucks. So there's pros and cons to fast travel. But if you can make travel work well, that to me makes a lot more sense. So kind of going into the second part of this story, IGN released their final preview of the game. And I think that they highlighted some of the ways that we're going to see travel be very interesting in the actual game. So for example, we've talked an awful lot about how you're running around with three AI-controlled teammates. I believe that they call them pawns. But when you're not playing, your pawns can go off with other people who log into the game. And when you log in, you're going to be running with pawns from other players.

And for example, they showed in this preview that if I... Let's say Josh has played 20 hours and he's explored a lot of the map i've only played 10 hours and maybe i join and i play online one of josh's ponds joins my group now if i'm running in the world he'll tell me oh i've run through here before there's a path over here to the west that um leads to a cave and so now i was like oh that's so clever. I just have to listen and pay attention. My pawns are going to teach me things that they've learned in their other playthroughs. Those are all ways to make travel fun and interesting. They talked about this too, that you don't just run into town and find all the people with a question mark or an exclamation

mark above their head. People might run up to you and give you side quests, or you just run around and start talking to people and it's going to lead to side quests. So I feel like they tried to not just do what's popular in games. It sounds to me like they just kind of thought from the ground up, how can we be as immersive as possible? How can we make every element interesting? And the more and more I see, the more and more i see the more and more i love i feel like this game is definitely going to be game of the year potential and i'm going to be so let down if it's not yeah i my hype i initially because i didn't play the original dragon's dogma i had very little interest in two other than that when i watched the trailer i went oh

that looks really good but the more that we dig in and the more that comes out about how they approach this game, the more excited I get because it really seems a lot more in-depth. It really seems a lot more immersive than I think I was initially giving it credit for. It looked really cool to climb up this giant golem and stab him in the back with your guy and stuff. But the pawn system and the fast travel versus the ox carts versus just hoofing it on foot. And the fact that you don't just have a map that's flooded with exclamation marks and that you just have to listen to conversation of what's going on in the world around you, that's immersive, man. And in a fantasy realm like

Dragon's Dogma 2, that's what I want. And that's why I'll mention Skyrim once again, just because it's the topic of the show. But Skyrim gave you that immersion. You felt like you were in that world. And I feel like that we've sacrificed a little bit of that under the banner of quality of life stuff know stuff and i you know i think that there is a a nice happy medium there but i really like what i'm seeing from this and it's odd because this game was for me initially like yeah that looks good too like i can't wait to dive into this yeah it's definitely gone up the tier of the you know yeah section it's it's just like every time they release a little little tidbit you're like oh okay okay oh okay

all right and it just keeps getting more and more and more and so yeah i'm i'm with you paul too on the uh hopefully because if it's in the talks of game of the year that means it's going to be pretty dang good game so i'm i'm hoping for that praying for that i'm super excited so i think aside from you know maybe a fast travel issue that i personally may have i'm excited oh yeah we're definitely rooting that this game will be great the last thing i'll say is ign also said that the world is incredibly big, but that it is very dense with content. Like, for Spoken, gorgeous environments, the world felt dead. There was really not a lot to do

in between points of interest. So it's a giant map filled with nothing. And this sounds like it's shaping up to be the exact opposite. Like, if you're going to make a big map, that's great, but you have to fill it with fun stuff to do along the way so the fact that they seem to understand that and focus on it all great signs we'll definitely be playing that one when it releases all right we do have two last

stories to touch on here uh guys go ahead and put on your boxing gloves we're gonna talk about ubisoft and skull and bones briefly oh boy they are both regular punching bags on this show skull and bones after so many delays is finally set to release on february 16th that's literally right around the corner and from february 8th to february 12th there will be an open beta do you guys plan on jumping in to test you mean right when hell divers 2 releases you mean right when one of the most highly anticipated games for a lot of people is coming out man it's almost like skull and bones is not really being very smart in their development and timing on a lot of things it's it's which is shocking because it's run so well up to this point for Skull and Bones.

This is just another one of those, like, what are you doing? What are you thinking? I mean, I don't know, man. I don't want to just keep beating this game into the ground. It's going to be fun for some people. We've never said that there's not going to be enjoyment to be had in Skull and Bones. I think we've always taken the stance that six to eight hours in, the shine is going to tarnish, and you're going to realize that this is not a gold bar. It's just a piece of lead with gold paint on it. Everything about this game and the development of this game has put me off. You know, the open beta is a good idea because it's saying,

Hey, we want people to try this and hopefully like it, you know, but it's like, it's not, it's never been about the first four hours of this game. It's just that it's so shallow that there's, you're just going to hit a wall insanely fast,

I think has always been our take on this. So Skull and Bones, we've kind of felt for a long time is just DOA. It's just been too long. All the excitement is gone for, I think, just about everyone. They already had a closed beta. The reception seemed to be relatively mid, kind of like you can get a couple hours of fun but then that's just kind of all it is now in case you were worried that the beta only runs from the 8th to the 12th and then the game releases on the 16th josh if you sign back up for ubisoft plus

they will give you three days of early access and you can play all the way through whoa so if you if you want to play skull and bones overheld iris 2 you'll be able to do it i man wow they're really desperate aren't they all right moving on to our last story of the week whenever blizzard releases something new we have to pay attention right yeah blizzard's quality has undisputably tanked in the last couple of years but you still have to pay attention for what they do i mean we've given a lot of flack to overwatch 2 and diablo immortal and deservedly so but honestly overwatch 1 is not that far back. I mean, you're talking eight years ago, they released the biggest game in the world for a while. So we still have to pay attention.

Six years ago, Blizzard started working on a survival game called Odyssey. We now know that that game has been canceled. It is done. It will not be released. This is extraordinarily crazy to me because Josh, if you remember, we talked about this in April of 2023. Do you remember?

And the word at the time is that the game was almost complete. And that was almost a year ago. Because we went, man, a Blizzard made survival game would be one of the greatest things I think I've ever seen. Now, Blizzard is on my naughty list. I'm not happy with them as developers and the way that that company has gone with how

they treat gamers. But there is no denying that Blizzard makes insanely good, fun video games. And so... Sometimes now. Well, I mean, right? Or I or i mean honestly they're more prone to just ruin the games that they already have is is more the issue that i have but yeah we were insanely hyped for this and then to find out that they're canceling it six years later like do what everybody else does and just release it in early access, man. You know, I mean, Blizzard would never screw over gamers, man. They would never do that, right? Like stealing Overwatch 1 away from us after we paid for it?

Yeah, I mean, guys, that was all just a flash in the pan. It was, you know, an accident or something like that. They would never go that route where they're just trying to soak people for money so you know overwatch one imagine you have the the hard copy and a guy comes in oh no you can't play that anymore he just takes it away and he's like here you can play this and but it doesn't work i'll just just play it and then he just leaves and you can pay us some more money you can pay more money if you want yeah Yeah. That's so stupid. Now, of course, famously, Blizzard was working on an MMO called Titan that got scrapped. And from the ashes of that dumpster heap, we got Overwatch where they said,

you know what? We have some stuff there. Let's make a brand new game out of it and make it like this hero shooter. And so it's entirely possible that Blizzard will still take assets and elements of Odyssey and build it into something else. We don't know. The larger story is that there have just been more and more layoffs. I mean, we're not covering it as news this week, but we saw once again, Microsoft is laying off several hundred jobs. Several other gaming developers are as well. So I think part of it is just cost analysis and overhead. And unfortunately, this has to get scrapped. If the game was truly almost done a year ago, I can't imagine how bad it must be for them to scrap it at this point, because Overwatch 2 is a complete mess, but they're still making money hand over fist.

And so they don't have a problem with it. So the fact that they'll actually scrap this game does make me wonder how bad of shape it was really in. Yeah, we don't know. I don't know that we'll ever know, to be honest. It does make me sad. Is it also because of the release of Palworld and Enshrouded and we're getting this insane flood of these survival

games. We got Nightingale coming up. Did Blizzard just look and say, man, we missed the boat on this survival thing? So you know what? Scrap it. They had six years. Yeah, six years. I love the idea of Microsoft being scared of Palworld.

These five dudes. There's something that we have learned from Lethal Company and Palworld. There's five dudes. There's something that we have learned from Lethal Company and Palworld and Among Us. And I mean, think of it like all these games. Valheim was a huge success. You don't need 5,000 devs and $4 million billion

to make a good quality video game. People just want to have fun, man. And if you can make a game that people enjoy and they have fun with you don't need to overspend on that yeah that's the fun fun's the name of the game that's why we play these games but man could you imagine being one of those developers that you know those employees that worked five six years on that game and they're like yeah we're scrapping it that was your life's work for half a decade and it's just gone oh oh i'm sure you're like telling your friends like yeah hey i can't share any details but like this game's really shaping up like i can't wait till it comes out i'm sure there are people who feel that way oh you know they've poured their heart and soul into it

i would have really loved to see blizzard's take on survival maybe they'll end up reworking a new survival game because that's honestly one of my favorite genres i love playing survival games it always lends well to multiplayer so i'm hoping this won't be the end i would love to see blizzard's take on on survival all right well that wraps up this week in gaming as a reminder please make sure to rate our show five stars and check out patreon options at multiplayer squad.com thank you so much to everyone out there for listening until next time happy gaming see ya all right see everybody