Video Gamers Podcast - Lost Ark, Elden Ring Gameplay and Grand Theft Nvidia - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Gaming hosts Josh and Paul are back with another incredible This Week in Gaming. We played the Lost Ark beta and give our initial impressions, get hyped about the Elden Ring gameplay reveal and chat the fast and furious heist of a truckload of Nvidia graphics cards. Gaming’s biggest heist maybe? 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 today's episode, we want to thank Razer for supporting the show. It's time to up your game and take it to the next level and go wireless. Razer has the best lineup of wireless products from headsets to mice to keyboards and everything in between. With Razer's wireless technology, you are going to get three times faster connectivity to make sure you never lag when you're playing your games. You can pick up your wireless product over at multiplayerpodcast.com slash razor, enter code multiplayer at checkout, and they're going to send you a free gift. Now Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are two dads who run the show here. We keep things family friendly and we talk about all

things related to gaming. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or on Patreon by going to MultiplayerSquad.com. You'll be able to help support the show, and you'll also get exclusive access to two extra Quick Take episodes that are only available to supporters, and you don't want to miss out. I am your host, Paul, and with me, he's been posting a lot online that if you need a GPU, he can get you hooked up, and for some reason, he doesn't want to let anyone into his garage it's josh paul some might say that i have truckloads of gpus available i was gonna say you don't want to let uh any any police near near your residence right

nope nope uh you know don't look in my garage there's's nothing to see in there. There's definitely not 1,000 GTX 3080 cards. I know this is a prelude to a story that we're going to talk about here in a minute. But all I can think about... Oh, we're going to do it right now. Oh, are we? Okay, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it first.

Because all I can think of is the Fast and the Furious when they're robbing the trucks. Exactly. It's just like, in my brain, that is 100 100 how i feel like this whole thing went down oh my goodness such uh well i mean it's kind of a funny story i mean it's also kind of tragic but we heard this week that evga had a truck stolen which was apparently packed to its gills with graphics cards so a whole bunch of rtx 30 cards are now no longer available we know how many people are already struggling trying to get graphics cards and now we don't know exactly how many but a complete truckload was stolen apparently fast

and furious style and uh i just want to know do you think someone is scalping these or do you think they're using them for cryptocurrency? If they were smart, to be honest, they'd be using them for crypto because I don't know that they can track them at that point. Because I was reading this article and they said, hey, now this is a little goofy, right? I think this is some fear tactics here because EVGA came out and said, hey, you better not buy any of these stolen cards because we won't honor the warranty or anything else on these. And then I went, how are you going to know? Yeah, I think the serial numbers. If I buy a card off of eBay, let's say, I have no idea whether that card is stolen or not.

I mean, they're brand new in the box at this point. So, like, I don't understand how that tactic works. It's like, oh, I just won't buy any cards from anywhere other than Amazon. I don't know. You know? Oh, man. Yeah, it was very funny because they also said like, hey, just go to our website and put in all of your info and we'll tell you if your card was stolen or not. And that, to me, seemed like a little bit of an entrapment situation also. By putting in my address, I authorized EVGA to sell my data to everyone.

Yeah, exactly. They were also asking that if anyone has any tips or information about the theft, to please email them. and the email address cracked me up because it's kind of long and it's a little little uh wieldy stop rtx 30 theft at evga.com i mean i applaud the the effort to get people involved there yeah that's a full sentence email address. Yes. And my thing would be, wait, is it stop RTX 3080 theft? RTX 30 theft? Is it 30 robbery? Like, wait

a minute. I'm getting confused now. There's too many variables here in this email address. Yeah. So I was going to ask you if you've been in Southern California lately, because that's where these things went missing. I have an alibi, Paul that's within driving distance for us. I have an alibi, Paul. I've been playing Lost Ark way too much.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about what we've been playing this week. So for these Thursday episodes, we call them TWIG episodes. And if you're new, it's an acronym for This Week in Gaming. And so we always talk a little bit about what we've been playing in our personal gaming time and also recent gaming news. So yeah, I think the big news of this week is you and me getting into the technical beta for Lost Ark. More and more people are hearing through word of mouth how excited they are about this game. That's exactly how I found it. I immediately started messaging you and sending you videos all about it. And we've been putting in some time here in this last week. But for anyone who has not heard of Lost Ark, what is it? It's an MMO.

It is, I believe, a Korean MMO. And so there's a lot of MMOs that exist in this world. You and I talk about the fact that we're ready for the next great MMO. And we were very much let down by New World to the point that we didn't even pick it up to talk about it on the show because we knew. Now, all the news coming out about New World makes me very grateful that we did not do that because their player base has dropped. The last I read, they've lost a half a million players since launch. That's a lot. And I get that you had to buy the game. And there's not a monthly subscription. But anytime you lose half a million players, that doesn't bode well.

But the thing is, I know that there's probably 100 MMOs that exist out there that if I went hunting for them, I could pick up and play. I've seen things like Black Desert Online, Bless Unleashed. I know there's some of the more common ones, Final Fantasy XIV. I feel like every time I'm on Facebook or Instagram, there's some Eastern MMO that is being touted, and I always just scroll right on past. So it's funny because the other day, you messaged me and you said, Hey, have you heard of Lost Ark?

And I was like, Yeah, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark way, way back in the 80s. Yeah, I saw it in theaters. It's like, No, no, no. It's an MMO. It's called Lost Ark. I said, I feel like I've seen that name before, but I know nothing about this. You started explaining it to me. I will admit I was a little hesitant at first because, I mean, it feels like there's just dozens of these things. And so I said, Paul, if you pick it up and you like it, let me know. You get to

be the guinea pig on this one. Sure. And then what did you say? Oh, I absolutely loved it. And I will not lie, I was 100% trying to emotionally manipulate you because I was like, Josh, this game is basically just Diablo mixed with Wildstar. And I know a lot of our listeners won't even know what Wildstar is, but I know how much you loved it. That might even be like the last MMO that you really loved, at least that I can remember. Yeah, that's very true. Yeah. So I think when you have just so many of these MMOs available, what makes Lost World stand apart is that it's an action RPG MMO. It looks and plays an awful lot like Diablo,

but it also requires a lot of placement and dodging. And you get like the, you know, the boss telegraphs on the ground like in Wildstar. And I immediately loved it. And so I told you right off the bat, I was like, I'm definitely going to play this when it has a full release. I was more than happy to pay for one of the founders packs to get into the beta. I really loved it. And then you started downloading it the same day that I did. I love that you know that it does not take very much at all to get me to jump into a game. I tried really hard to be resistant to this one. I was like, all right, Paul, well, it's 15 bucks. You try it out. You let me know what you think. If you like it, I'll spend $15

to get into it. My only caveat to that was this game actually releases in March and they're doing a closed beta right now that you can only play if you have paid the $15 to buy the founder's pack. Otherwise, it's going to be free to play. And so I kind of went, man, a week worth of playing something for $15. I don't know. You go ahead, Paul. Let me... And then an hour later, you're like, oh, this game's great, Josh. And I'm like, downloading right now. I'm easy is what i'm is what i'm feeling there paul yeah yeah i feel like there's so much to love and like any mmo you know the the experience of leveling is one thing end game content is another thing and then you've got a million other factors whether it be like economy uh pets pvp you know all of these different things that every MMO tries to incorporate.

But I think what I like most about this one is that it does not feel grindy, at least here in the early first dozen hours. It plays like a single-player RPG where you have a storyline, a lot of cutscenes, but it's not just as simple as go out and kill 10 boars and then come back with 10 hides you know it feels a little bit more single player it's very polished it's been out in korea since 2019 so it's it's under beta for a worldwide release so there's already a certain level of polish and tinkering and figuring out, you know, balancing with all these classes. So it's really kind of cool to be able to get this like finished product that's just going to roll out here in North America. Yeah, I find myself playing it more and more and I find myself

enjoying it more and more. The combat is top notch, man. These abilities in this game are really cool looking and it does. It plays a lot like Diablo. And I don't know how you make an MMO with that kind of combat, but I feel like they've done it because I have like eight different skills now and I will just absolutely obliterateate 40 mobs all at once. I just run around in a circle and line them up because some of my abilities fire in a straight line. Some of them are like an AoE cone in front of me, stuff like that. But anytime I get to fight stuff, I'm just tickled pink, man.

It really, really stands out in this game. I have fought a couple bosses that looked really cool. The monster variety, there's a lot. And I'll tell you what, man. The questing, I asked this in our chat because I don't know if this technical beta is dumbed down a lot for the questing. I don't know because I keep getting these quests where you have little quest markers. So I talked to the guy and he's like, hey, the plague is wiping everybody out. We need help burning the corpse piles. And then I go like, hey, the plague is wiping everybody out. We need help burning the

corpse piles. And then I go like, yeah, okay, sure. I take two steps and there's literally eight corpse piles right next to this guy. And I'm like, dude, you could throw a torch on this? Like, okay, I'll do it for you. So I click, I click, quest over, hand it in, I get some reward. And this quest took me literally 15 seconds. Yes, from reading it to accepting it to completing it to getting my request reward. It's like 15 seconds. And I don't like, is it going to stay that way? Well, I think there's some things that I actually kind of like about that. So each little area that you're in is relatively small. Like World of Warcraft, there are some quests where they ask you to go grab something, and you're literally running 15 minutes to get there.

In this game, everything's relatively close, and then you can also always teleport to what they call, I think, triports. You just pay a little bit of silver. And so you can actually get around really quick, and the are kind of small but the world itself is enormous yeah there's multiple zones and like continents continents yeah yeah i there's a couple things that are like slight drawbacks that i was very nervous about so it definitely gives off some weeb vibes for sure oh yeah so right off the bat i was like oh you know like that to me is like a real turn off and i get why some people like it uh but there's definitely a lot of female characters running around in shorty shorts so i think you definitely get a certain player who is drawn to the weeb vibes. And also it's a little goofy,

but anytime you teleport, why does your guy play the air guitar? Yeah, I don't, the song. I don't understand that. That's so random. It is very weird. I will say this. It is definitely weeby.

I picked an assassin. You can't pick a male assassin. Apparently they're only women. And so I was like, okay, hey, no problem. And then my character spawns. And then the very first set of armor i get is like booty shorts with like a bra i don't think this is very effective armor here people but yeah so you know that part is i just kind of chuckle at um i mean it's it's there it's not like overdone it's not inappropriate or anything like that but it's definitely the the flair or the flavor of

their style i guess they're going with um yeah i haven't found much i don't like about it to be honest with you i i have asked some questions because i just don't know my one complaint was combat seems way too easy at this point um i actually asked in like the game general chat and i was like hey i you know i'm an unstoppable wrecking ball of a murder machine does that change and people are like yes it actually gets really hard in the dungeons and later on this is just leveling like leveling combat's never hard and i kind of went okay cool and then i have heard that the dungeons in this game which let's be honest when you get to end game content dungeons are you know where the fun is at and the raids and everybody was saying dungeons are phenomenal

raids are phenomenal pvp in this game they said is phenomenal which with the combat style i can't wait for man because pvp i could see being an absolute blast in this game as well. Yeah, the gameplay and the combat, I think, is just so satisfying. So I picked a heavy gunner. So one thing that we didn't really talk about is that there's a whole lot of class options. So you can be an assassin like Josh. you can be like an assassin like Josh. You can be a gunner like me. You can also be a warrior, a mage, a martial artist.

And then inside each one, you have multiple specializations. So I chose heavy artillery. So my guy runs around with like a 400-pound chain gun, essentially. And then all of my different, all of my different abilities, they work really fast. All of them are on different level cooldowns, but some of them are where I just open up like full chain fire in a cone in front of me. And that's like my favorite move because there can be 30 enemies rushing at me at once and it just pushes all of them back and kills them all.

But then I can also call in heavy artillery strikes within a certain range on the map. Everything feels quick and fun, and you're dodging. I think the most fun I've had with combat in an MMO in forever, because it's more like an action RPG. It's very true. And I'll say this too, the quality of life stuff. Again, that makes me pause a little bit because I don't know, are they going to keep this? I joked about the quest where the quartz piles are literally right next to me. There was another one where the guy's like, I've lost my belongings and they're sitting in a chest like five feet away. And I'm like, well, I mean, that's your stuff right there, but I got a quest reward for it. And so I don't know, is that going to stay that way or not?

Even if it didn't, I don't mind running a little bit to go get something. But all of the quality of life stuff in this game is right where it needs to be. Like you said, there's multiple fast travel points that call them triports. It's super cheap. It's a few silver to teleport to one. When you're at the end of a dungeon, you can play the Song of Escape and it warps you out of the dungeon. Quests are very, very quick to complete, to pick up, to hand in. These are all things that are wonderful.

And that's okay if you have a thousand quests, but it only takes me anywhere from 15 seconds to maybe a couple minutes to complete a quest. I feel like I'm doing a lot versus New World, where I had to spend 30 minutes running back and forth just to complete one quest. And so I'm very curious to see if they keep that quality life stuff the way that it is. But I know I've been having a blast with it. The combat stands out incredibly to me. Like you said, everything is super, super polished at this point. It comes out in March, right? And it is free to play when it does come out. I know that we paid $15 to be able to play this beta ahead of time, but everything's getting wiped. All the beta progress and all that everybody will start you know at at uh level zero i guess from there so

i know we'll be picking this up based on our impressions so far oh yeah 100 and adding on to the quality of life stuff that you were talking about the pets in this game are also functional you can set your pet to go loot for you so So if you get separated, like I did my first dungeon and I kind of went like, because the enemies in this first dungeon are super easy and we had to destroy different things and I went in a different path and like your pet will just loot the money and the stuff for you, which is also another quality of life. You don't have to run around looting all these bodies, which is a. So there's just a hundred things like that that are just really good. That's good development right there. That is not, hey, we need to artificially inflate

gameplay or time played on this to halt progression. So let's make people run for 30 minutes. There's no need for that. Just have more content. And that's exactly what Lost Ark has done. Yeah. The only little bit of a bummer is that all the progress is going to be reset. So that's the one thing that's holding me back from cracking out on it, because I know it's just going to be wasted time. So I think I'm going to just play through the first hour or two with a couple more classes, just to figure out exactly what I want to play at release. But yeah, at this point, that's honestly the most negative thing I can say is just knowing it's going to get wiped.

That's actually a really good idea. I'm not going to be able to make it to the dungeons and stuff like that. And I have class fear. I'm like, what if I pick the wrong class? What do I do then? What if I don't like my class? I like my class fine,

but I haven't played any of the other ones. So that's actually a really good idea to kind of try those out in the beta while I can. Yeah. All right. Well, Josh, at this point of the show, we want to give a very special thank you to Razer for helping support the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. And lately, they have really been really highlighting some really cool wireless products that they

have available. And their wireless technology works three times faster than any other. So this is all top of the line stuff that works really well. It actually gives you a competitive edge while gaming because you have such minimal lag time. And I know in the past, wireless has always kind of thrown off a lot of competitive gamers, but they have some awesome products you can check out from mice to headsets to keyboards and they use adaptive frequency technology which sounds super fancy basically it's constantly analyzing what channels are available to use for wireless so that way it's not going to conflict

with any of your other wireless devices in your house and so these are great products that you can check out josh and I love Razer. We have several Razer products each, so they're a very easy company to talk about. If you want to use any of this gear, just head over to multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer and just make sure to enter promo code multiplayer. You're going to get your products and you'll also get a free gift from Razer on top of that and it does help support the show so if you're interested in Razer products please use that link and that promo code again it's multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer promo code multiplayer all right Josh a couple last things actually we probably have

only time for one last story here but we had uh some new video footage of Elden Ring, and I feel like this might be the biggest game on the horizon other than the new God of War, Ragnarok. So, after having a full 15-minute video here of Elden Ring, what do you want to talk about? What struck you from the video? I love everything i am seeing about elden ring now have you played the dark souls games yeah i played a little bit of the first two and i watched our friend andrew play a lot of bloodborne but it's it's honestly it's pretty minimal i probably played maybe 10 hours of the first two Dark Souls. Now, I feel like Dark Souls is super not up your alley, just based on the melee combat, the darkness of the game. The vibe. Yeah. I feel

like this just screams like, not for Paul. But for me, I absolutely love the Dark Souls games. I love difficulty. I love combat. I like knowing that when I fail in combat, it's my fault. I hate RNG stuff being the thing that makes you die. I get that some games with randomness kind of accentuates it, right? Some, whatever that game might be. But in a combat game, if I die, I want it to be my fault because then I can learn. And then when you beat a boss, you feel even better because you're like, dude, I did that. I learned how to beat it. And so I really, really enjoy the Dark Souls games, Sekiro. I've never played Bloodborne. I hear it's a masterpiece, but I've not played that. So here comes Elden Ring, which was collaborated with George R.R. Martin,

famously from the Game of Thrones saga. And I don't remember the other guy that they did it with, but maybe it's the original creator of Demon's Souls or something. I can't remember who the other guy was on this. But they finally, they've been touting this. This game's been getting a ton of hype. They've shown off a little bit of the world and just snippets of gameplay. But then they finally released this 15 minutes of gameplay with narration and showing different things around the world. And what they have done is they have taken Dark Souls, and this is... Make no mistake, this is very much Dark Souls flavor, Dark Souls inspired, the combat, the theme, the tone, all of that stuff. And they have turned it into an open world, which I think is incredible.

And they showcase a lot of that stuff in this video where you can just go wherever you want. You come across random encounters. Maybe you find this merchant caravan where you can slaughter the people and then you get some kind of cool gear from it. They showed off a lot of the different weapons and the styles of weapons and stuff like that as well. Everything is shaping up to look absolutely incredible, in my opinion. Yeah, I would say there were a couple of things that made me just a little bit nervous about it. But the one thing that is just unassailably good are the graphics and how this game looks. It's one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen demoed. There's one shot in particular when the character is up on a high

ridge and the draw distance just seems to go out to infinity. And you see giant cathedrals, and you see other mountains, and some of them are behind clouds, and you see all the fog in the low areas of the map i mean it looks absolutely gorgeous and the part of the video that struck me the most is when they approach the giant castle like the castle is just so detailed every little wall every part of the roof everything that you see just looks incredibly well-made. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at. Yeah. And that's one of the faults of the Dark Souls series is they have never been very graphically pleasing. They're always dull. They're not high resolution. It's one of those things where everybody has always said, man, if you could give me a Dark Souls game,

but with really good graphics, that would just be top be top notch. And they've never done it. I mean, they're serviceable, but nothing fancy. But that's what I feel like Elden Ring has nailed. follows the tried and true formula of the dark souls series enemies with different attack patterns and things like that insanely cool looking boss fights they even do like the fog you know before you get to the bosses and stuff like that they have the weird odd characters that you come across that you can talk to that maybe they give you hints or they say hey don't go through the front gate of the castle go around this way but then they show the guy going through the front gate like, hey, I don't have to listen to you. But then he gets shot by a bunch of crossbow bolts or something. And then it's like, okay Dark Souls, is you get tired of some of the levels. I think it was Dark Souls 2, where you're in that underground city with all the wooden walkways. I freaking hated that place by the time I was done with it. I just wanted to be out, man. It was claustrophobic. It's dark, it's dank, it's musty. And I'm just like, I don't want to spend any more time here.

But with Elden Ring, the world is your oyster. And I love the fact that you can go and just explore. They'll say, hey, when you go to this castle, you're going to be in this castle for a while. But that's your choice. You can leave and go somewhere else if you want to. And I'm very curious to see how that open world nature translates into a game that is dark souls basically yeah and i really liked the verticality of a lot of the fights that you see now the fights that are out in the open world a lot of those were kind of like more in like planes kind of settings but especially when you're inside the castle they really just kind of highlighted where it's almost like uh shadow of Mordor or those kinds of games where you can just climb up seemingly on any ledge.

You can run around, you can kind of go full action, or you can go more stealth. It did kind of make me chuckle a little bit that there's no fall damage. And you'll see the player fall 35 feet off a roof and make no noise when they land. So I was like, okay like okay well the stealth is probably going to be like pretty quick and relatively easy um but i really liked the idea that you can use the environment to get creative of how you're gonna get through these areas but you know i i think the one thing that seemed really odd to me and And I don't know if it was just for this video. The game seems incredibly quiet. And I don't mean like the volume is low, but there was like no music

when the character was just walking around. And so there was like shockingly few sound effects. You just heard crunch of grass, but that was it. Like no underlying music score. You didn't hear ambient noise, because you even see things like crows flying around. So it just seemed kind of quiet. And a little part of me wondered, is that just this demo? Are they still working on it? That was the one thing that seemed a little odd. Yeah, I don't know either. I mean, Dark Souls games generally, they're not super with music and stuff like that. I mean, that kind of lends to the darkness of it

and the quietness of the game, except for when you're fighting and stuff. So I don't know. I will say the one thing... The other thing that I got really excited about is that it seems like magic is much more prevalent in this game to where it's not just 100% melee combat where you're dodging and rolling and blocking and stuff like that. In this one, they showed a huge boss fight against a dragon where your guy stays on horseback and he winds up casting all of these spells.

And some of these spells look really powerful. You have to charge it up and then it comes together in a mega beam and then blasts this thing. Some of them were like homing in. And I know that there has been magic in Dark Souls, but it's usually been kind of a secondary thing to combat. But with Elden Ring, it looks like that is a very viable way to play the game. We don't know a whole lot about it yet, but a lot of the effects and stuff were very cool. They also showed you able to summon like other characters to help you fight

all the dark souls where you could actually have a player come help you. But now it's like you can summon these AI players to help engage these bosses in these battles and stuff. And that looked really neat as well. I know that they also talked about PVP cooperative play invas, and stuff like that. So it seems like they know what people like, and they're taking all of that stuff, and they're just accentuating it into this great, graphically pleasing, open-world environment, but keeping everything that works about it. I am really, really excited about this game. I cannot wait to play it. I hope that it's difficult.

I mean, that's one of the things about I hope that it's difficult. I mean, that's one of the things about Dark Souls that sets it apart is, you know, hey, these games are not easy. I hear like Bloodborne, I hear is super, super hard. Sekiro was really hard, man. Like, I don't want that frustratingly, just I want to throw my keyboard through my monitor, but I really appreciate the difficulty in the combat and the, you know, hey, this is on you. If you die, that's because you made a mistake. And so I hope that they keep that balance there. Yeah, you want that sweet spot where it's challenging, but still fun. Right. Yeah, yeah. Which this game, I mean, just from the demo, it looks like it does thread the needle in that regard. I'm very excited to play it as well. And even though Bloodborne is just so dark and almost monochromatic, in this game,

you do have different biomes. It almost looks like different seasons. And it is very colorful in certain parts of the open world. I really can't wait to get my hands on it. We'll just have to wait a couple more months because this one comes out in February. That's not that far away like not too far it sounds crazy but it's not that far away no somehow we're already in november yeah all right well that's all that we have here for this week in gaming as a reminder please make sure to rate our podcast five stars and leave a review if you have not we're going to start reading some more reviews on upcoming episodes so that might be one way to get on the show and also we give a shout out to

any new patreon supporters so if you want to sign up for that you can go to multiplayer squad.com and sign up there and then that's it we'll be back on monday for our next hour-long episode and we'll see you guys then. All right. See you, everybody. Have a good one.