Video Gamers Podcast - Hearthstone Mercenaries, BF2042 Hazard Zone and DC Fandome - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Gaming hosts Josh and Paul are back with another incredible This Week in Gaming. In this titillating tale of new releases and upcoming ones, we chat Hearthstone Mercenaries, BF 2042’s Hazard Zone and the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Gotham Knights: Court of Owls game reveals. It’s all the gaming news you want… or that we talk about in this episode at least. Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad  Thanks to Razer for sponsoring the show. Use code: Multiplayer at checkout for your free gift! Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we get into this week in gaming, we want to give a special thank you to Razer for sponsoring this episode. Razer is for gamers by gamers, and they provide some of the best gear that you can get. These new Huntsman Razer V2 keyboards have everything you could want. 10 times faster response time over a mechanical keyboard, double shot PBT keycaps, linear optical switches, RGB for days. It's the greatest thing you'll ever use. You can get yours by heading to multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer. Enter code multiplayer at checkout to receive a free gift. Paul, let's talk some gaming news, buddy.

Hello, everybody. Happy Thursday! Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We have two episodes that we release every week on the topic of gaming. On Mondays we have full hour episodes, and then on Thursdays like today, we cover what we've been playing over the last week along with recent gaming news if you have not already done so please rate our podcast five stars and leave us a review and also if you enjoy what we do here we would like to ask you to think about supporting our episode financially you can do that by subscribing inside apple podcasts or you can do that on patreon by visiting multiplayer squad.com where you can pledge a couple Patreon by visiting MultiplayerSquad.com, where you can pledge a couple of dollars a month. You'll get some awesome perks. Josh and I record extra bonus

Quick Take episodes that run five to ten minutes. You get two of those every week as well, and so that's a way to get extra content and to also help out your favorite podcasts. I am your host, Paul, and joining me here, as always, he's been breaking riffs left and right these last few days. It's Josh. I thought you said riff for a second, like a guitar riff, and then I was like, Paul, I don't know if you know this, but I'm not musically inclined, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Josh has been hitting the whammy bar and playing those guitar solos. No, no, no.

Usually here in the beginning of the episode, we talk about what games we've been playing in our personal time. And a long time ago, we did cover the game demo of Riftbreaker. And I think you picked it up, right? I have a problem, Paul. I have this thing where I get tired of games really quickly, and then I want to try new games. And I call it game ADD. It's very rare for me to finish a game. If I do finish a game, that's a very high compliment.

And so I had this itch, man. My brain was yelling at me going, you want to play something new? You want to play something new? And Riftbreaker just released. And the gameplay and the footage on Riftbreaker looks incredible. So I finally went, you know what, man? I'm going to get it. I want something to play on top of the other 30 games that I have that I haven't played yet either. And so I downloaded it and I started playing it. It's a very well done game like this screams triple a title without being triple a everything is super polished the graphics are incredible it is basically

i have heard people describe it as factorio but with action fighting combat almost now i've never played factorio but we've played a lot of satisfactory um and basically what you do in this game is you are you're in a mech suit. You build up this base. You go out into the world. These hordes and hordes of aliens swarm you. You have a plethora of different weapons that you can use against them that are amazing. And the graphic effects in this game are phenomenal.

It was so fun. It was top-notch. I was playing it. And then all of a sudden, I realized you're never going to finish this game. That sounds about right. And then I went, oh no, what have I done? So I stopped.

I immediately exited out. I checked my play time because Steam has the two-hour refund policy. I was at 116 minutes. Did you refund it? I Sure. I was at 116 minutes. Oh, did you refund it? I did, I refunded it. Now that is nothing against the game itself. I highly recommend Riftbreaker to anybody

because it seems like it's a really, really good game. It was just my own thing where I kind of went, you don't have time for this. What are you doing? You just wasted like $25, man. And so I refunded it. Steam went, yeah, okay, fine. You're less than two hours. No big deal. But man... Oh, that's too funny.

No, you don't do that. You're not as video game ADD as I am, are you? No, no. In fact, I have joked, maybe even on the podcast, but there's a line from the movie The Departed that always stuck with me. When Matt Damon tells his girlfriend, if this isn't going to work, you have to tell me because I'm Irish. I'll deal with something bad until the day I die. So if I start a game,

I'm finishing it good or bad. Like we're going to go all the way. I'm going to finish it. I am very task oriented. So whereas you'll bounce around between a few games, even when we know the next two deep dives, you'll start juggling both. I can't do that. I focus on the one game, and then as soon as I beat it, I'll move on to the next. And it's very rare that I drop a game midway, unless it's something like The Forest or something that I just really

do not like whatsoever. Yeah, man. And the crazy thing is, I was enjoying myself. It's a great game. I was darn near two hours in, and that's when I just had this moment where I was like, dude, you're going to play this game for like five hours, maybe, and then it's just going to sit on your desktop and never get touched again. And that's not from it being a good game.

It's just knowing myself. Why didn't you buy this, man? Yeah, I remember Riftbreaker. Kind of their whole little niche was that it was like a tower defense game. But then in between waves, you would go out and explore the world and do more action. You love tower defense games. Every once in a while, you'll just tell me, do you know any good tower defense games? I'm just looking for one.

So this one I definitely had pegged as being a Josh game, but I think with everything else we have to play for the show, and there's so many releases here in the holiday season, I kind of see why you would refund it. Yeah, I did. Thankfully, I didn't play it long enough to not refund it, because then I don't know what would have happened. But I came to my senses, thankfully. But I did enjoy those 116 minutes a lot. So if you're thinking about Riftbreaker,

if you've never heard of it before, definitely worth checking out, because I think it's a very well-done game that a lot of people will like yeah i definitely remember liking the demo in my single player time i re-downloaded and restarted disco elysium so ironically we've talked about games that i did not finish and this was one of them and i remember saying on the show i just remember kind of like fizzling out i don't really know why. Well, as soon as I reinstalled the game, I clicked on load and it had my last save as March 17th, 2020. Oh, a day that will go down in history, Paul. It's literally like plus or minus one or two days of us starting the podcast. So clearly I was like, okay, that's why I stopped because I knew I liked it. But that was when we started making our schedule and we had to play all the same games between you, me and Todd. So I have not gotten too far into it. I

played for about 90 minutes or so, so far. I tried making a lot of decisions different than I did in my first playthrough. And so my guy's a little wackier. And this game's got some weird funny crazy moments that kind of drop out of nowhere so my guy is just like waking up hungover he lost his badge and gun he doesn't remember anything you know hits on this woman with a cigarette and then i walk downstairs and talk to this bartender and he tells me that i owe him money on my tab and i selected the option instead to give him the middle finger so my guy starts running for the door throws up two middle fingers at the guy and then slips and gets knocked unconscious and then comes back later so i was like okay this might be one of those games where i just have to be an agent of chaos because when you can have funny moments like this, oh man, I really do enjoy it.

So I think I'm going to like this playthrough of Disco Elysium. I am very curious to hear your thoughts on that because that is one of those games that ranks at the top of a lot of people's lists for Game of the Year contender for, I think it released in 2020, but then they did a a director's cut or something in 2021 but it this game gets critically acclaimed i think it's review scores are through the roof like i'm very interested in it it's not necessarily my type of game because there's no combat at all from right here it's all dialogue yeah and i heard somebody say for those of you that need combat in in like an in an rpg think of the conversation as combat

and then that will kind of help you understand like the flow of the game and i kind of went i kind of get that like okay that that kind of makes sense to me but yeah i'm really curious because i've heard the story is second to none like The characters in this game, the story, the writing in it is Oscar-worthy, is what people are saying. And so I'm very curious to see, number one, if you stick with it. And then if it's as good as people say it is and you feel that way, then I may have to pick it up and give it a try. Yeah. We'll see if I stick with my my agent of chaos playthrough i i'm pointing guns at kids and feel guilty man all kinds of wild stuff like i don't know why i can't be a jerk in video games it's probably because it can't be a jerk in real life either but it's one

of those like i can do a little bit like like that but then i'm like i'm i kind of feel bad i talked to that lady that way and uh so now let me go on this quest to make amends yeah yeah i i think i'll stick with it i saw it's about a 20 hour game or so that's too bad i'll definitely play through at least once i might even do it twice because i feel like whatever archetype you pick and however or wherever you put your points probably plays out pretty differently yeah so i think it has that high replayability also i just keep waiting for you to like beat this and then just message me and be like josh you have to play this game it's incredible and then it'll be like that'll be the thing that pushes me over the the ledge and i'll be like i'm buying it right now and then 118

minutes in i'll be like what have i done i'm never gonna play this game all the way through that's the trick whenever you buy a game you just need to start like a timer just get like an egg timer or something that goes for like two hours and just set it yeah i really do it's smart i'll save a lot of money oh man and then this week well it's this week for us i know it'll be just over a week by the time this podcast releases, but Hearthstone Mercenaries released on October 12th. We've had it available almost for a full week now. And I played it today for the first time. I did not play it terribly long. I put in about an hour or so. I got through the whole tutorial. I ran a couple of missions. I spent a lot of my coins because I had a ton of coins available.

Bought a whole bunch of packs. Messed around a little bit with setting my little band or my party, whatever they call it. I think you jumped into Mercenaries a little bit too. Did you not? I did. Actually, spoiler alert, one of the Quick Takes bonus episodes that we will be releasing, I did on Hearthstone Mercenaries. Now, obviously, I go a lot further in-depth on that one than we will right now.

But it's enjoyable. It's slow-paced. Like, Hearthstone's never been, like, a quick game. But I feel like Mercenaries is slower than a lot of their other modes. And that's okay because you can just get up and walk away. A lot of it's single player. And so I find it very relaxing until it gets boring. So it's like, there's this line of like, hey, I want something just chill. I'll sit there and play Hearthstone Mercenaries for a little bit. It's very relaxing and calm. I don't have to think too hard.

And then it's so slow that I start to get bored after like 30 or 40 minutes. And I'm like, okay, now I'll go play a real game. I've been enjoying it, man. I don't think I'm going to enjoy it for very long, but it's been fun so far. It's nice to just have something brand new that's completely free, that somebody says, here you go. Why don't you play this for a little while? There's no stress involved with giving it a try. It's probably not going to be my favorite mode. I think Battlegrounds will still beat out Mercenaries. Unless things change as you finally get to the higher levels, like maybe some of the boss fights in the PvP.

I have done some PvP, but maybe that gets a lot more entertaining later on i don't know it seems very simple even though they couldn't explain it in the reveal at all it's it's actually a very simple game so i i've been having fun with it i think people should definitely check it out yeah we definitely piled on blizzard when everyone was making fun of the mercenaries reveal when they kind of jumped right into the specifics and didn't really seem to be able to explain the gameplay. When I jumped in and did the tutorial, it made a whole lot of sense to me. Like, this is like any RPG game, just in card format. You use your cards at your disposal to put together your group of six,

and then you can have three guys fighting at any one time it's divided into protectors fighters and casters there's a little bit of that rock paper scissors thing going on where the casters do double damage to fighter or or however it works whatever the order is and you know i i thought it was a blast and especially having my backbone of World of Warcraft, you're going out to the Barrens first, and that's like the noob zone in World of Warcraft. And then later on, you're going to Blackrock Mountain and stuff later in the game, and you're seeing a lot of the same old figures. I thought it was a blast. It's fun. You level up, you get

to add new cards and abilities to certain characters. And I think it's's fun. You level up. You get to add new cards and abilities to certain characters. And I think it's really fun. You get to play taunt cards and you heal. And it's kind of just like a little contained 3v3 battle that just has all these RPG elements. It's fun. Let's not talk. Yeah, there's some strategy involved too. I mean, I don't mean to poop on it i just worry a little bit that the slow pace of it is going to turn off some people what i would love to do you know is is finally get my mercenary band in a combo that i like and then like pvpu you know to see the strategies that people employ because i think that's where the game will actually shine but i'm so busy leveling my guys up right now that i've only found a couple synergies that really work well like i've tried doing like an

all murloc band because the murlocs like affect other murlocs which is kind of neat right right right and so that's one of the things that like i want to play around with is you know here's my murloc mercenary band against your whatever you put together. Which one's stronger? How does it play out? That kind of stuff. I think that's where the game will really shine. I just don't think I'm there yet because I am still in the process of trying to level up my skills, level up my mercenaries. I've only found two pieces of gear for them at this point. And I know that's a big thing because you can equip lots of different gear with perks and stuff like that as well. So I like the long-term aspect of it. I hope that it continues to get better along the way because it does play very slowly. There's a lot of grinding

to level your characters up and stuff like that right now. And then I don't know if you're like me, but i unlock some new character who starts at level one my other characters are level 25 and now i've got to like power level that guy because i want to see like oh what can i do with this character and but i'll use a lowly level one so then i have to go back and redo like a lot of the missions that i've done to try to like power level them and stuff so maybe i'm going about it the wrong way but there is a good bit of grinding involved there but again sometimes that's relaxing man yeah i mean sometimes it's just to like artificially inflate the time played numbers but this is one that does play a little bit slow i could definitely see multitasking

playing this while doing something else especially when you're not doing pvp and you're playing against the ai you can take all the time in the world between every turn so if i'm working and i need to answer an email or a phone call you can definitely kind of do two things at once so it might kind of fill that that void yeah all right well we're halfway during that show josh so we want to give a very special thank you to razor they are the world's leading lifestyle brand for gamers they are an incredible gaming company we love the gear that they provide josh we have talked about the huntsman v2 keyboards we absolutely love them do you have one or two things you want to share about that keyboard i do man it's it's funny i just made a social post because i started looking around and i have

this huntsman v2 keyboard sitting on my desk i have the razor tartarus v2 which is my gaming I do, man. It's funny. I just made a social post because I started looking around and I have this Huntsman V2 keyboard sitting on my desk. I have the Razer Tartarus V2, which is my gaming keypad. I just picked up a new Razer Naga X. They're just quality, man. That's the biggest thing about this stuff is if you're going to spend this kind of money on stuff that you are using all the time, quality matters and paying up a little bit will get you a lot more. And I feel like that's where Razer really shines because you're getting your money's worth out of the technology that you're buying. And the technology that goes into these keyboards is phenomenal. I have recently discovered the built-in mute button on the media controls on

the Huntsman keyboard, which I love. I didn't have that on my old keyboard, and it's just a click of a button to mute things. It's a turn of the dial to turn the volume up and down. It's crazy. I know that sounds simple, but I didn't have that before. But of course, Razer thinks of everything when they put this thing together. Yeah, they absolutely do. They also have a sustainability initiative,

so they're environmentally conscious. It's a company that Josh and I love, and if you want to use some of the same Razer gear that we do, you can head to multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer, and just make sure to enter promo code multiplayer, and they will send you a free gift along with your purchase. All right, so Josh, getting back to this week in gaming, one story that I have to pull up that we don't need to spend a whole lot of time on but i got an email in my inbox that i immediately took a print screen and i put it in our uh discord channel that has us and our friends here in the phoenix area but the cycle sent out an email saying that all all of the cycle servers are now taken down for the rest of the year. You cannot play the old

Cycle game. And they have refunded any in-game purchases made in all of 2021, and that they're going to be coming back with their brand new format in 2022. I have played their beta for that new game mode, which is basically just Escape from Tarkov, except cartoony, and it looks like it's set in the Cycle universe. You and I famously loved the Cycle when it first released. They massacred this game over the course of a couple years to where it does not have any DNA that it had in the beginning. Are we ever going to try the new Cycle when it comes out next year, or is this just a final rest in peace the beginning. Are we ever going to try the new cycle when it comes out next year? Or is this just a final rest in peace, the cycle we hardly knew you?

We loved the cycle. People have heard us say that. We've joked about it. We've complained about where they've taken the direction of this game. And so it's hard on us because we found this game that nobody had heard of that was amazing. We got all our friends to play it. Everybody thought it was amazing. It was free to play. It was just all around. We were like, wow, where has this game been? But they had no players. That was the biggest problem. But they also were exclusive to Epic Game Store. And people kept saying, hey, your game is awesome. When are you going to go to Steam? Because then this game will blow up. It'll actually become

mainstream. There's nothing to not like about it. And they just went, oh, we're not going to Steam, you know, whatever, blah, blah. And then the player base slowly just dwindled and dwindled and dwindled. And we hung in there for a long time to the point where we were playing a lot of the exact same teams in every match over and over. And that's like, that's when you know, you have a low player base. And it's not like we were the same MMR, like, you know, rating because some of these teams were incredibly good and would just, we're going, well, we're playing for second this round, boys. You know, that kind of thing. I will definitely give the new mode a try. You and I are not fans of the sweaty, hardcore nature of Escape from Tarkov. We rated that game very low because of that.

Like, the game itself is plenty fine. It's polished. It's way overcomplicated. But I'll give it a try. I mean, I don't hate the developers. I hate what they did to a game that was already amazing. Instead of trying to figure out how do we get people to find this game? They just went, Hmm, this game must not be very good. Let's change it. It was just like, no, like don't change it, man. It's great. And they went, Nope, we're not

listening to anybody. We're changing it. We're going to turn it into something different. People went, okay, what are you going to make it? And then finally they went, we're not listening to anybody. We're changing it. We're going to turn it into something different. People went, okay, what are you going to make it? And then finally they went, we're going to make it Escape from Tarkov. And everybody went, what? Like, no. Well, especially because the old gameplay was so fast-paced and it felt like an arcade shooter. And then they slowly just kind of like grinded down the speed and the fun. And yeah, it just seemed like such a weird 180 degree turnaround where it's just not

even, not even is it not the same genre game. It's just a completely different attitude and feeling. So yeah, I think the cycle is just kind of done. So for us, but on a brighter note, there was a certain event that happened here it's the dc fandom and we were able to see a couple of trailers now i think the the major big

reveal during the whole thing was the trailer for the movie the batman yes by any chance did you watch the trailer oh absolutely oh i can't wait yeah robert pattinson's gonna be amazing dude robert pattinson he's awesome i i i was one of those people that saw him in twilight and completely went oh this guy's just whatever man you know i i guiltily like the twilight movies i have seen all of them many many times because my wife loves them and i've watched them with her a few times. I think they're fine. Legitimately, I think they're good movies. But I think in my brain, I kind of shoehorned Robert Pattinson in with those. And that guy is a freaking amazing actor, dude. He's really, really good. And I am pumped for him to be the new Batman. And yes,

the trailer is great, man. He looks crazy like it ain't easy being batman apparently because batman's gone down a dark path and i love it there's so many things i can't wait for they're not gonna cover the origin story of batman which of course we've all seen 10 000 times and they said it's gonna be completely self-contained it's gonna be a self-contained detective story and i i can't wait it's gonna be a blast oh it's going to be completely self-contained. It's going to be a self-contained detective story. And I can't wait. It's going to be a blast. Oh, it's going to have the Riddler. It's going to have the Penguin.

They're bringing in a lot of these characters that you haven't seen in the other mainstream Batmans. But not so crazy where it was, what was it, Batman Forever that had Mr. Freeze and all those guys in it. The really terrible one. Yeah, both Batman Forever and Batman and Robin had like 14 villains in each one. It went off the rails a little bit there. Yeah.

Well, one of the fun things is that even though I'm not a huge DC guy in general, I'm actually not a big comic book guy either, but I have always really loved the Batman line of video games. And so at the DC Fandom, we were able to see trailers both for Suicide Squad, Kill the Justice League, and we also saw Gotham Knights. So let's talk about Suicide Squad first. How about that?

Yes. Okay. Number one, the title, Suicide Squad. Sure. Kill the Justice League. I am instantly like, yeah! Suicide Squad. Sure. Kill the Justice League. I am instantly like, yeah! I want to be the bad guys, and I want to kill the good guys.

Yes! Apparently in this game, we're going to be hunting down Superman, Flash, Wonder Woman. Yeah, Scream Lantern. Yeah. This looks... I think they finally figured it out. Paul, we have jokingly said you can't take a video game and make a movie out of it and have it be good because everybody that's done that has failed for the most

part. Right. But I think what they're learning is you can take a movie and make a video game. That's like, that's exactly what they've done. Both of these trailers looked great. Honestly, there's a little bit of cheese in them, but I think that's intended.

And there was no actual real gameplay. These are just story trailers. But they're in-engine footage is what it looks like. And I was highly impressed with both of them now with the suicide squad kill the justice league you're fighting the justice league as the suicide squad and to me that just makes me giggle inside because i want to fight superman you know i want to fight the flash now there is a little thing in the trailer where there's this weird like purple veiny glowing stuff on their faces so it's like i don't think you're actually fighting them just to be evil i think that something is corrupting

the justice league and so your job is to now go fight them but what a premise man yeah the the real big bad in kill the justice league is brainiac who has brainwashed the justice league and so that's what we know about the story so we have all been given the task of subduing the justice league but ultimately brainiac's the one behind it all and it definitely leans right into the comedy which is great so like the trailer ends where penguin is going to run for the door i love that part and and they they're like on the radio back to whoever their boss is, but they're like, the Penguin's flying. And so she's like, all right, delivering a shock.

And so they shock Penguin and he falls over unconscious. But then they just keep going, wait, he's getting up. Hit him again. He's run out the door. Somebody stop him. And so they just keep shocking his you know already unconscious corpse so they definitely lean into that style comedy of comedy which is so needed in the dc world and not only that this is already confirmed as four-person co-op multiplayer so you get to pick

in my love language paul yep so this kind of harkens back to like x-men legends and those style games you get to pick harley quinn captain boomerang deadshot and king shark and if you've got a couple buddies you can all just pick one and play it together it looks like a blast it really does look like a blast i hope that the gameplay is fun um what was the game with uh dr, Dwarden, and Caddy Bree we were going to play? Dark Alliance? Yeah, Dark Alliance. Dark Alliance. Please don't let it wind up being like that game where it's a huge disappointment.

Make the combat fun. Make the gameplay fun. Four-player co-op is incredible. If this game comes out anywhere near decent, I want to pick this up and play with buddies because that just screams a good time for me. I love The Suicide Squad too. The latest movie I thought was great. I know you're not into them quite so much, but everything that I saw in this trailer really just hit all the right points for me. Now, the gameplay could come out and be a potato. Let's hope that that doesn't happen. But so far, so good. I have a high level of confidence because it's being developed by Rocksteady, and they're the ones who did the Batman Arkham series.

Which are phenomenal, dude. Yeah, I kind of said I feel like it almost kind of got forgotten in the books of history, but the Arkham games are some of my all-time favorite. They're great. Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, they're classics. They're overlooked a lot, but they're so good. Yeah, so I really hope Suicide Squad turns out good. And then the other trailer is for Gotham Knights, where we find out that we are going to be dealing with the Court of Owls,

who apparently are doing double duty also as the vips in squid game wait paul because they've got golden masks that look like owls i don't know who funny hilarious the the court of owls i i did not know anything about them before this trailer i didn't i guess i've never even heard of the court of owls yeah Yeah, I mean, I guess they're in the comics where they're like rich people who hire assassins called Talons to go out and do their dirty work. And I guess kind of one of the interesting things

is that they've been active under Batman's nose the whole time and Batman didn't even know about it. So in Gotham Knights, Batman and Commissioner Gordon are dead, or at least we're being made to believe that they are dead. We see the tombstones. And now you are able to play as Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin, and Red Hood. And they are out fighting the Court of Owls. We also know

that Mr. Freeze and Penguin will be in this game as well. This one will not be four-player co-op, but it is two-person co-op, which is better than nothing. But I did appreciate the fact that they said in one of the videos that this is like any good old-fashioned action RPG. They will present you with problems and a range of solutions, and you have every opportunity to use your character and your talents to play your own style. So I think this is going to be some action, some stealth, and they're going to give you that choice.

Paul, I just hope that you're ready for me to blow our cover when we try to go in stealthily. And then I go, he looked at me funny, Paul! I just throw stealth to the wind, and in we go, fists blazing. I just always think about Metal Gear Solid and how you could enter a room with a bunch of people and just go, brr-r-r-r-r-p, and you'd see 30 guys all turn. That's definitely what it's like playing with you, Josh.

Yeah. Oh, man. All right. So, boy, we're technically out of time here, Josh. Should we jump into Battlefield Hazard Zone? Yes, we have to. We've got to go a little bit long on this one. So, all right.

Go ahead. So we talked about the cycle earlier. The reason that we loved the cycle so much was it was a perfect execution of PVEVP. And if you guys have been listening to the show for a while, you've heard us talk about this genre that is still in its fledgling stages. And many games have tried to make this genre work and have kind of failed. The Cycle absolutely nailed it. It was perfect. Scavengers, eh, not so much. It's okay, but it's not the best iteration of it.

And it seems like what Battlefield 2042 is doing is trying to have a mode that is not a battle royale, but will interest people enough to get them to pick up this game. And so they have this mode that they've been touting, but have had no information about called Hazard Zone. And what they have described this as is PvE VP. Well, when you say that, I instantly get excited and they have not shown any gameplay. This was just kind of a cinematic trailer, but what it appears to be is these satellites will break up and crash down to the zone that you're in every so often. I'm sure there's a bunch of them that break up in the very beginning of the match, but then more seem to come down as the match progresses. And your job is to go to these satellites and recover the hard drives from them. And then you want to extract. And extraction in

PvEVP is kind of how you win the game. You score higher than all the other squads, but you have to get out alive. And if you do that, then you've won the whole match. It can be a lot of fun. There's a lot of tense moments, especially when everybody's trying to extract at the same time. And that is what the mode is. Now, we don't know a whole lot about it, other than that that's what they're going for. We don't know how they're going to execute it. They've even said, hey, this is not necessarily about killing other squads, although wiping out other squads is paramount, because if they're out permanently, then one less thing you have to worry about. So color me very interested and intrigued.

I hope that they get it, but we just don't know much else. Are you excited for it, Paul? Is it kind of like, eh? What are your thoughts on it? I'll definitely check it out. I am definitely looking most forward to Portal and being able just to do those custom matches. But a couple other things about Hazard Zone.

It will be squads of four. On the old-gen consoles, it'll be a max of 24 players on the map. So you've got six squads. But on the newer. So you've got six squads. But on the newer gen and PC, there will be 32 players for eight squads. It seemed to me to be like Battle Royale meets Escape from Tarkov, because they have said that there will be two extraction zones, and only two teams can extract. So there is a little bit of that element of eliminating the other teams,

but also however many of these drives you're able to extract with, you get some kind of black market currency points, I think is what they called them. And then you basically spend that to upgrade your player and your gear. And now you'll have that available next time. So I think out of all the modes,

this one interests me the least but if i have friends who like it i'll love playing this with a group of buddies i don't think it's one i would play on my own but i'm looking much more forward to portal yeah part of me worries that it's the um what was the war zone mode that they had blood money or something like that yeah blood money and then hardline or something they changed the name yeah blood money was like it was war zone but instead you were just trying to accumulate a ton of cash and stuff like that and then call in the helicopter yeah that was a fun diversion but that mode didn't really work and so like part of me is like please don't let it be like that where there's just a few people that play it for flavor occasionally because i

really do enjoy pvev. And so if this mode can be a very fun one of those, I could see it being very popular. I don't think it'll be like the premier mode by any means. That's still just going to be Battlefield. But I like that they're trying to throw in some additional content, some additional flavor. I'm very intrigued. I would like to see some gameplay and how that happens because if it just devolves into a kill everybody fest, that's not really the point of PvEVP. And part of that is that you shouldn't have to fight in a game like that if you don't want to. For us, sometimes when we were playing the cycle, we would not engage people at all because it just didn't make sense. And if you saw people coming,

you would actually run because they couldn't catch you either. And then they were wasting their time. And then it kind of got to be where if we can engage these people on fair terms or on our terms and kill them, well, then that helps us out too. So I'd like to see that kind of balance in there. But we'll see. I mean, I guess they're saying that there's going to be some play testing or you know maybe a little bit before it releases but it's going to release with the the game here in a month so hopefully they've got it kind of ready to go yeah i'm a little worried based on what we saw from the ai in the open beta but uh i'm i'm i'm open to the idea of playing hazard zone how about that yeah there you go that's that might be a nice way of putting it it's i kind of feel like this the way i felt about zombies mode in call of duty like great it's there that's fine

if i have a friend who wants to do it i'll jump in and it's free i'm not going to complain about it but i think the last pvevp game we covered was hood outlaws and legends and this has got to be better than that it's i mean hopefully it's not at the bottom but it's like one or two up from the bottom of our list i think it might be second to bottom yeah it's it's pretty low all right well that's all that we have here for this week in gaming thank you again to razor thank you so much to everyone out there who supports us through apple subscriptions and on patreon we really appreciate it we will be back with a bonus round episode on monday we are going to be able to resurrect our old draft and tournament format i'm very excited for this one paul we're

gonna have a guest host joining us so we will have three. It's been a while since we've had a third on the show. I believe the last one was Outriders. I believe we had Andy. That's right. I'm really excited for this one. A good, good friend of ours, Michael Butler, is going to be joining us as our third host for this episode. It's going to bring back the tournament format that we absolutely love. You guys have said that you love it because you kind of play along with us while you're listening to the show. You get caught up in the debates once the show airs, you know, and stuff like that, too. So we're really, really excited about that. Yeah, I'm pretty pumped for that one.

Yeah, can't wait for it. So we'll have that one available and ready for you on Monday. Happy gaming until then. We'll see you guys for that next episode. All right. See you, everybody. Have a good one.