Video Gamers Podcast - Outriders Demo, Valheim Visits and Curse of the Dead Gods - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Video Game hosts Paul and Josh are back with another This Week in Gaming. What’s on the agenda for today you might ask? Just the best video games news and chat you could ask for. Valheim updates, Outriders demo thoughts, Josh’s thoughts on Curse of the Dead Gods and more in another stupendous gaming episode. The video game podcast you want, with none of the fluff! Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe on YouTube Visit us on the web Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today's a Thursday, so you guys know what that means. This week in gaming. If you're new to the show, then maybe you wouldn't know that, but on Thursdays we like to break down recent gaming news and what we have been doing lately in the world of gaming, either together or sometimes individually. And I am your host, Paul. I have many leather-bound books, and my apartment smells of rich mahogany. And with me, he could be wrong, but he believes diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era. It's Josh. I know. Oh, don't tell me. I've seen this one, man. Diversity.

Are you sure? Because last we had talked about, you had not seen it. Maybe I only know the quote. Okay, because that's from Anchorman. Oh, what? Anchorman. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes. All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump into this week in gaming. Josh, I've been so busy farming barley and grinding barley into barley flour. It isn't even funny. We have still been playing Valheim. We are. Yeah, we're getting close to the end game in Valheim, man. I'll be honest, my Valheim playtime is tapering off. And I don't know. It's one of two things. It's either that I know we're approaching the end and we're about to kill the final boss, and I don't know it's one of two things it's either that i know we're approaching like the end

and we're about to kill the final boss and i don't want it to be over so i'm like intentionally like dropping my play time or dragging it out i might have checked steam and realized that i have 70 hours in that game over the last like two and a half weeks and so i might have been playing it a little bit too much. Sure, you haven't seen your children in three weeks? Yeah, so now it's kind of like, all right, well, maybe I'll take a little bit less Valheim time. Oh, that rhymes, Valheim time.

Yes. So, yeah, we're very close to finishing out Valheim. I actually finished upgrading basically all my gear, so everything's maxed out. We have just one boss fight left. And then I don't know how much we'll be playing after that, but we'll have to wait and see. We definitely have been playing a ton. If you guys want to hear all of our thoughts about Valheim, we actually just covered it in an hour long show on Monday. So just go back one episode and you'll be able to hear all about that although there is some recent news about valheim josh there was a really big patch this week that addressed some well-known

issues there was man and here's the thing like this game's so popular and like paul just said like we just released our hour-long episode on it so if you haven't listened to that yet go listen to it because it's great number one but it's really everything you could want to know about the game, plus some really great stories of things that have happened to us along the way. But what I love about this is this game's in early access. And I mean, it took the world by storm. And as complete of a game as it is for early access, the developers are not just sitting back. There's this whole roadmap of content that they're going to be releasing. They're doing big patches. And this latest patch was fairly nice, actually. They did a few things. So number one, they killed the world destroyer bug, as they called it,

which, man. Which is not good. The world destroyer bug sounds pretty bad. It did just that. It would wipe all of your progress. It would wipe your world, all of your gear. I mean, everything just gone. And what's funny is we actually brought that up to a friend of ours and said, can you imagine if that had happened? And the guy said, well, I'd quit. And we said, well, that's Rust.

And he said, yeah, I'll never play that game. Rust has the built-in world destroyer bugs on basically a weekly timer. Oh man. So they did that. They added Vulkan support. So if you run it in Vulkan, it's kind of like a DirectX 11 kind of thing, DirectX 12. It's one of those API things where you can force it to run in Vulkan mode. It's supposed to increase the performance so that you don't get huge frame rate drops when you go into your base and stuff like that. You know how it gets kind of wonky when you go into what we now have as a giant castle, but it's supposed to fix that. They made the bosses more difficult, which I am all for, by the way. I love the combat in this game.

I think without the combat, I would not like this game nearly as much. In all honesty, it's a great survival exploration game, but if it didn't have that aspect, I don't know that I would be so into it. And one of the things that I've noticed is, as cool as the boss fights are, we took out every boss on our second attempt, at most. Yeah. There's not a boss that we were like, oh man, this is our sixth try, I hope we get him this time. Yeah, so we kept our Valheim episode relatively spoiler-free, and we'll do the same here.

But for all of the boss fights, when we played them, even the ones that were difficult, it was just because we did not have the right gear. And we realized that immediately, because maybe the boss was resistant to our kinds of weapons. And then we realized, okay, we have fought that type of unit. We know they're weak to a different weapon type. Let's craft some new ones. And then we would obliterate the boss. So it was kind of like you would either get stomped and you immediately knew, I can't beat this boss. Or it was a little bit of a walk in the park once you figured out the strategy. So I really like the

idea of them tweaking the boss difficulty, making it a little bit tougher. The one thing I don't want though is like when they say tweaking boss difficulty, like that doesn't mean just give the guy like double the amount of hit points to be honest with you like tweaking difficulty to me means like increase the mechanics like you know each boss generally has a couple different kinds of attacks like increase the uh like how often a certain attack occurs or something like that you know what i mean like if you can't just double the hit points and then double the damage like yes that makes it harder but that doesn't make the fight necessarily more fun. Or increase, like, boss running speed, something like that, so you have to be more mobile.

Right, yeah, exactly. So you can't kite them quite as well or something along those lines. So we'll see. I guess we'll find out when we attempt this last boss and see whether or not we crush him or get crushed. But I just, you know, I love seeing that they're still patching the game. They're still improving the game. Even if we do beat the last boss and then kind of taper off for a while,

this is definitely a game that I see us coming back to six months from now and then playing like crazy again to absorb all that new content. Oh, 100%, yeah. Especially since we got so many friends to play this one with us, and we know just so many people who picked it up, being that it's a $20 game. We'll definitely come back to it, and we'll definitely fill in the audience every time we go back into Valheim. So yeah, I think that's about all the news we had as far as Valheim goes.

Anything else you've been playing lately, Josh? I'm springing this on you because we didn't talk about this before the show. I've been playing this game called Curse of the Dead Gods. Okay. Whoa, that's a cool name. Which is very similar to Hades. You know, you've heard me kind of brag about Hades. And it's just a hack and slash dungeon crawler, roguelite. You play it over and over, and it's just a good combat game. You get gear, you have different weapons, you can play three different temples. It's got the same color palette as Hades, but it's different enough that I'm glad I picked it up. I picked it up for like 16 bucks. I think it was on Steam sale or something like that. And I just, I love having that single player game to play with a controller that's cheap so that if

it sucks, I don't feel bad spending like a little bit of money on it. You know what I mean? And to just sit back and mindlessly kill monsters and that kind of thing. So I've been having a lot of fun with it. I can hop in and play just a few levels. You know, it's one of those games where it's like, it's great to play for 10, 15 minutes, or you can sit there and play it for like an hour, hour and a half. But it's been a lot of fun, man. Yeah, this seems very on brand for you being roguelike and also being like more of an action RPG. This is totally up my alley also. So now that I know that you recommend it, I might have to check it out because i don't really have any one-player games i'm doing right now like i'll hop in and play hearthstone still and i've still been getting that sr up see i'm done with hearthstone i see you guys playing and you guys will ping the channel and be like josh you want to hop in and play some battlegrounds

and i'm just like yeah no well i think for me one of the main reasons it tapered off is that we were all brand new to hearthstone not all that long ago and my sr kept going up and up and up and up and up and that was so much fun to keep playing and then it tapered off around 5000 and then i kind of just had some really bad matches that just made me mad at the game for having just bad luck and then i uninstalled it, took a couple weeks off, watched a couple of streamers, because really I didn't even learn a whole lot about Hearthstone, to be honest. Reinstalled it.

Now my SR is 6300. So it's going up again. It's more fun. And I feel like I'm getting a lot better. And so Hearthstone's been calling me back in a bit. And then I know that you and I also have both been playing the Outriders demo that just released a couple days ago. I played this demo. I'm still hyped for this game. I think we had kind of different impressions from

playing the demo, so we'll have to talk about it a little bit, but I was very impressed. Number one, the game is absolutely beautiful. I mean, dude, the graphics in this game are bar none. We're also used to playing Valheim. Maybe that's true. To be fair, anything that's in 1440p is going to look amazing. Yeah, that's very true. But it does look great. It does look good.

And the skills, the first class I picked was the Trickster. There's four classes. You know, I kind of said before, hey, I'm going Trickster. I like what appears to be the skill set, kind of get in, do damage, get out. But yeah, I've beaten the demo twice so far, and I'm pretty impressed with it. Like I'm, I'm a hundred percent picking this game up to play it. But your first impression was I hate snipers. Like I don't, you didn't say anything else about the game other than sniper rifles suck in this game. I'm not sure how I feel about it. And that's when I was like, huh, huh, I don't know what Paul really thinks about this. So what were your thoughts? I feel a little conflicted about the demo,

because first of all, the expectations are through the roof for both you and me. It would be very hard for the demo to meet, let alone exceed expectations. I'm really surprised that they met yours. I thought that the demo was very good. I did not think it was great. And I was secretly hoping that maybe this would be the next Mass Effect being just as good and just as deep with the lore and everything like that. That's a hard thing to do, though, man. Yeah. I know. But that was still the hope and because this game you can tell that the mass effect dna is all over it oh yeah as far as the cover mechanics combining the

guns with the abilities a lot of it's very similar i even told you the storyline is almost identical to the storyline of andromeda which of course is by far the worst Mass Effect, but it's still fine. But yeah, I thought that it was slightly lackluster. I'm not saying I'm not going to buy the game. I still thought it was really good, but the guns just did not feel very good to me. They felt very weak. Like I said, I felt like the snipers, even though they were giving me one-shot kills, it felt like I was shooting a peashooter. And I really love sniping in games, and that's what I really wanted to do. But after experimenting with that, I realized that's probably a no-go.

And so I have only messed around with the Technomancer. And I'm going to have to try out some of the other classes, because that one just wasn't really jiving with me. I liked the idea of plopping down a freeze cryo turret or whatever it's called. That was kind of neat, but that class just wasn't really doing it for me. Did you try any other than the trickster? I played the trickster, which I absolutely loved.

Like maybe go play the trickster because he's got some of the coolest abilities. Like, dude, I was completely geeking out this is slightly spoiler territory but i mean you get it at like level four but the trickster gets this like time warp bubble so you like it triggers on you and it sends out this blue dome and anything that's in the dome except for you slows down to like a tenthth of its speed, including enemy bullets. So if you're surrounded, like you pop this dome and then you're running around full speed and all of the enemies are like one 10th speed and you can see their bullets like very

slowly traveling through the blue dome and anything that shoots into it. So it's like this really awesome, like defensive skill. And dude, I was geeking out on it, man. The trickster can warp in. So I would warp in. Because you warp in behind somebody. And then he has this time blade.

So he'll slash in front of them. And it turns everybody into skeletons. Their skin just melts off. And then they turn into skeletons. And then just fade away. Which was super cool. And then I'm surrounded by like 18 guys. So I'm about to die. So I'd pop the, like the time warp bubble and then I'd run away into cover. And it was just this amazing combo, you know? And then I was playing with our buddy, Andy, who was the

pyromancer. So then he would like nuke everybody that was in the time warp bubble. And it was just this really neat, neat synergy, dude. I was having so much fun figuring out, how do I use these skills together? It never gets old watching guys turn into skeletons, that kind of stuff. So give them a try, because I also play the Devastator, which is the very tanky class,

which I think you're probably going to need in a party, to be honest honest because there was a vast difference in between like the trickster who does a lot of dps and kind of his hit and run even though he's close range like he's supposed to be in the fray but you want to like get in get out kind of thing whereas the devastator is like this earth guy and can just cloak himself in like stone golem armor and you actually see it like envelop your guy so that's what i'm saying the effects in this game are bar none some of the best like character effects i think i've ever seen in a game you know that's not really glorious like just getting a bunch of armor

but he did have this one cool skill where he turns like he like leaps up into the air and turns into like a bunch of rock and then you can pick a guy that you want to teleport to, and you'll teleport and then earth shatter around it. And then it just impales everybody, and they just turn into bloody little giblets. It's super satisfying, man. So far, Trickster is my number one. Devastator seemed very fun.

I could see... I know he gets some cooler skills, but he's definitely the tanky class. So I, I would say if you're not jiving with the Technomancer, like maybe try one of those two. Cause I, the skills seem pretty neat.

Yeah. The one thing that I found disappointing is just the fact that there is no jumping in the game. So it's not quite as mobile as i hoped it would be because i was getting into fights in one area you fight outside a door and you're inside and there's like these longer corridors and when you can't jump over anything if the enemies corner you in at least as the technomancer you have nowhere to go like i can't do anything other than roll on the ground,

but if they're blocking the path, you can't get past them. And so the game did feel a little bit older, because all of the modern games tend to be a little bit more vertical, where you can jump, maybe even fly, and you're fighting. And being stuck on the ground is definitely a little bit more of a callback to like the division or mass effect. And I was surprised at how much I missed being able to jump over stuff. It's true. I mean, that is,

you can mantle over things. So you can like jump over cover, but there's no just, Oh, I want to jump up and down in this game. I don't know why they left that out. Is it really that hard to code for jumping in 2021? You know, know like especially since

cyberpunk did such a good job where they let you jump but then you could also do cover so it's not even a matter of like not having enough buttons to do this because a lot of games it would be spacebar is either jump or take cover but we've seen other games incorporate both the the last thing that i'll say about it that I just found kind of silly was related to the storyline. So I don't think this is really any kind of spoiler because this is literally how the game starts out. But basically, Earth is dying.

And so they send people out on ships and they're trying to find a new planet and a new place to live. So they send out probes, trying to find habitable planets. And the Outriders are the people who kind of go out there and they're going to check the status of the probes and make sure that it's safe for humans. And just like so many other games or so many movies, turns out the initial readings on the probes maybe aren't as accurate as they had hoped the planets are a little bit more hostile and then some some things happen and then there's a jump in time and all the humans the only

remaining humans a very small number are now at full-out war with one another and it's only been one generation of people and that to me seemed a crazy. Like, I don't know if you ever saw the movie 28 Days Later, but there's a zombie outbreak, and it's only been four weeks, and the military compounds are kidnapping and abusing women, and they're murdering each other. And it's like, it's been one month, guys. It hasn't been that long. and outriders had a little bit of that where i was like okay they specially recruited all these people for this mission and then you had some very cartoony villains making ridiculous decisions i don't know i'm i'm a little hesitant on this one i'm still gonna buy it i think the gameplay is gonna be good but i really lowered my expectations for story

the story i thought was see i never thought this game was gonna have a good story i mean i knew from the beginning this is all about the gunplay the cool skills the boss fights the gear you know it's like anthem grounded right? Sure. You can't fly around, but it's going to be super fun to play. Hopefully, unlike Anthem, it stays enjoyable for more than eight hours. I mean, I guess that remains to be seen. Did you fight the boss in the demo? Did you make it to the final boss? No, not yet.

I did not have a whole lot of time to play the demo quite yet. You were able to play it a lot more than me. I was hoping to knock out another hour or two before recording, but I still have to go back in. I still plan on putting in a good five or six hours into this demo. Yeah, it's fun. The boss fight's good. I think that'll give you a fairly good idea of what the game's going to be like. So, I mean, we can hop in together because I definitely don't mind playing some more either, but I'm excited for it. I think it's going to be, if I had to guess, it's going to be like a 7 out of 10, an 8 out of 10, which is fine with me.

Because it's like I've been jonesing for that kind of game for a while now. I liked The Division, but I like the sci-fi aspect a lot more. And like I said, dude, maybe after like the 5,000th time of like turning a bunch of dudes into skeletons with my time sword, like it'll get old, but it's not old right now. That's for sure. Yeah. And you got to give them credit for giving us a full blown demo. Like this is a 24 gigabyte download. You get to save your progress and you'll be able to play it at release. All that stuff is awesome. As soon as you finish the opening tutorial stuff you can hop in and play with your friends so you can very quickly get to the multiplayer which is very neat and kind of interesting

because you mentioned anthem just a few minutes ago we have a little bit of like a two-for-one news story but bioware has officially euthanized anthem it is no longer in development they have pulled that team and they are all now working on dragon age 4 because bioware said it was time to move on from anthem they are going to laser focus as they said on dragon age Age and Mass Effect titles. Which is good. I mean, go with your bread and butter, right? Like, I'm a little sad, man. I still have this little, little teeny piece of my heart that just loved, because we, all of us played Anthem. You know, we were all super hyped for it. I remember all, you know, you know, us flying around, like, just goofing goofing off like cackling like little kids because

of how amazing it was to fly around in these suits and like race each other and you know all that stuff and just explore the world and what's that giant like ash titan down there oh man let's go fight that and then getting wrecked like there was a lot of that game that i really liked man like i'm sad that they couldn't pull it off. And then not hearing anything about it for the last couple years and how they were redeveloping it. And I was like, I think I was holding out hope. Maybe they could turn this around. And then I read the news that said, hey, they're going to decide the fate of Anthem.

And then you didn't hear anything. And then I was like, this can't be good, man. Like if they were pushing forward, man, they would have announced it. And then sure enough, they came out and said, yeah, it's scrapped. So the good news is if they're putting that effort into Dragon Age 4, like, yay. Okay. You know what I mean? Like, I'm all for that because we both love the dragon age series um

so kind of bittersweet huge fan of dragon age yeah kind of bittersweet um and but then when they did that they actually gave us some really good news about dragon age 4 so they decided that they would just make dragon age 4 single player focused which is what it should be because it's an rpg but apparently they were kicking around the idea of gaming as a service and so focusing more on multiplayer aspect maybe having some kind of monthly fee to do something or some kind of pay to win we don't really know all the details all we know is that they decided to scrap that and focus on single player, which is really what it should do because that's what the other Dragon Ages are. And I think one of the big reasons for that is that the numbers have come out about Doom Eternal

and how much money they have made as a single player. So anyone who says single player games cannot make money is just wrong. It just has to be a good game. Exactly. And see, that's the key right there. You can't make a single-player game and have it be crappy and then expect that it's going to make millions and millions of dollars. But if you make a great game, people will buy it, man. As much as we love multiplayer games, we're the multiplayer podcast, right? But it's like I mentioned that Curse of the Dead Gods. I like having a single player game to just kick back and play when nothing's going on. Or just, hey, I got a 15 minute break and I just want to pop in real quick. So it's like these games can be phenomenal, man.

Don't try to turn everything into this games for service thing. And oh, we're going to release, you know, DLC every three months. And it's like, dude, that's crappy. Like, give me the full game. Don't break it into eight pieces and then sell me eight different pieces. Like, I don't need that. Like, I get it's great from an economic standpoint for these developers, but as gamers, that sucks. So I'm super happy that they're finally just went, look, we're okay. we're not going to try to money grab everything here. We're going to give you a game that fits into the Dragon Age series. We're going to dedicate these people to this.

I think it's great, man. That was really good news in my mind to see them decide to do that. Yeah, I completely agree. The strength of Dragon Age is in one player and even if you go back and think about dragon age origins where so much of the combat relied on pausing all action so that way you could tactically decide your next move the idea of that series ending up as some kind of multiplayer gaming as a service would seem completely ridiculous so i'm glad they're kind of going back to their roots a

little bit uh i know you and i were both huge fans of inquisition i cannot wait for dragon age 4 the dragon age and mass effect series are my two favorite and for a while i was kind of scared about what was going on with mass effect with how bad andromeda performed. So I also really loved hearing BioWare say that they are focusing on Mass Effect titles, you know, plural, which is awesome. Cause I really can't wait for more Mass Effect content at this point.

It's such a good universe, man. Like I could see them doing like what Star Wars has done, where if you're willing to like open up that universe to people, like you can have these, these offshoots and they can be full fledged games to people, you can have these offshoots, and they can be full-fledged games, man. But if you're willing to open that up to various developers and say, hey, look, we're going to let you make this game,

it's a huge IP, man. There's a ton of possibilities there. One last thing before we close the show out. One story that I thought was really funny, I don't know if you ran into it or not, but Henry Cavill posted a picture on social media where he made reference to a secret project he was working on. Did you happen to see this on social media? No. So he was holding a piece of paper that was blurry, and people ran it through AI that unblurs things. And it turned out that it was full of Mass Effect language.

So now everyone's wondering, well, what's Henry Cavill doing in regards to Mass Effect? Is he doing voice acting for a game? Are they going to start developing it into a show like he already did for the witcher could you imagine if the same man brought mass effect to like netflix or something like that that would be hilarious you know how like every generation has like two or three action heroes right like henry cavill would be like your video game actor like i could see him being commander shepherd man absolutely of course like I think that'd be great. Yeah, so whatever he's doing with Mass Effect, I can't wait to find out.

Of course, he's kind of the darling amongst PC gamers, because we know how much he loved playing World of Warcraft and building his own PCs. So I'm glad that Mass Effect is still in full force, whatever it is they're doing. I can't wait to hear a little bit more. So I think that's all we have here for this week. Anything else, Josh? No, man, that about covers it, honestly. Yeah, pretty busy week. Lots of exciting stuff. So that's all that we have here for today. So please come back on Monday where you can join us for a bonus round episode. And then if you'd like to help support the show, please head on over to multiplayer squad.com.

That is a link to our Patreon page where you can help support the show because we do run this independently as a group of dads. And so to help keep the show running with two episodes weekly, we'd love to get some support there. Also, please rate us five stars, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. And then also check us out on social media at MultiplayerPod and on YouTube under MultiplayerPodcast.

And then we will see you guys on Monday. For a bonus round i had to get another singing squeal in there man absolutely all right see you buddy bye