Video Gamers Podcast - Phantom Liberty Fun, Unity Drama and Mass Effect 4 Deets - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Video games hosts Paul, Ryan and Josh bringing you the week's hottest video game news like no other gaming podcast can. XDefiant failed certification but should be releasing soon, Unity gives the finger to developers with some shady stuff, and we’ve got the latest video game news on Mass Effect 4! Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Redletter and Gaius214 Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com//videogamerspod Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/videogamerspod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. Hello, friends and fellow gamers around the world. We are the Video Gamers Podcast, and we are absolutely thrilled to have you here as we break down this week in gaming. So much news to get to this week. I'm so excited. It's going to be an absolute blast. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, I'm going to start charging him a fee for each podcast he downloads, even though that was never our arrangement to begin with. It's Josh.

You can't do this, Paul. That's not the agreement we had in the beginning. You said that I only had to pay you once a month to be on this show. Not anymore, buddy. I'm changing the terms of the contract. I've altered our arrangement. Pray I do not alter it further. Very nice. And then joining Josh and me,

I know that he got burned by the release of Cyberpunk, but I'm hoping that he might be willing to give it another go and get his first case of cyber psychosis. It's Ryan. I feel like I keep saying this, but I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready.

So much good stuff on the horizon. All right. So as we jump into this week in gaming, we want to make sure that our listeners go check out our social media account. We, you can find us everywhere at video gamers pod and also come check out patreon support options you can think of it as like a tip here for this free podcast uh despite what some people probably out there think podcasting's not

terribly lucrative we do rely very much on listener support we operate because of you guys and you also get bonus episodes and perks on Discord, stuff like that. So come join the squad today over at MultiplayerSquad.com. All right. So, boys, I thought it would be nice if we maybe, like, prioritized the negative news first. That way we can end on a positive note. I think it also works because I think the biggest news story of the week is regarding Unity, one of the most popular gaming engines. To give our listeners an idea of how popular Unity is,

half of all mobile games are designed in Unity, also 60% of VR games. There are many popular games that I'm sure our listeners have heard of, including Hearthstone, Rust, Among Us, Hollow Knight, Fall Guys, Pokemon Go, Outer Wilds, Genshin Impact. I mean, these are like huge games. And Unity basically announced a new business model that will start in January, which is going to add runtime fees. Previously, larger companies just had to pay a flat monthly rate, as Josh mentioned in the opening. And now Unity has basically come in and just said, hey, moving forward, we're going to start charging you every time someone decides to install the game. Which, if you want that to be

your business model from the outset, that's one thing. But it's a whole other thing when you have an agreement with developers, and now you just come in and unilaterally change that agreement what are your guys thoughts on this news about unity uh well you said uh unity i think six or seven times so that's going to be 79 95 you can make that table right away cens it. Just put beeps. Put beeps. Beep, beep. Beep. The only thing I want to say to the developers and to Unity and all that is, nobody likes microtransactions,

do they? How's it feel, devs? I'm just kidding. I'm really on the dev side on this one, but it is a little taste of your own medicine for some of them. I couldn't help but just be a troll for a second. I will say this is super crappy, dude. Unity is a huge engine.

Everybody, the big thing is Unreal Engine, right? Because Unreal Engine 5 is around. Unity is huge. So this is no small potatoes side news story. This is monster news for the gaming industry. And I mean, the devs that use Unity are rightfully upset. Cult of the Lamb, which was a very popular game, indie game that came out, I think last year, just basically told people, you better hurry up and buy our game because we're pulling it. We're not going to support Unity anymore. There's no way you can't strong arm us into this. It's just bad, man. You can't have an arrangement with people and then come back and say, hey,

we're going to change that arrangement now that you're in this middle of your dev cycle at this point. Games take years to make. So this is not something where you can like, oh, well, I think I'll opt out. Or, okay, you're stuck. And nobody likes that. In case anyone out there isn't sure how game developers feel about this news, I don't know if you guys saw this, but Gary Newman is the guy who developed Gary's mod and rust. He posted a blog and the title was the title is unity can get effed.

And it's just it's out there. This is a family friendly show, obviously, but like that is out there for the public. He swore that, well, he did swear, but he also swore in the future that Rust 2 will not be designed on Unity. We are also seeing very similar news come out of all kinds of other developers. Among Us, Slay the Spire, they have all said, we will not partner with Unity in the future. We're going to move on to Unreal or something else. So this is a really big deal. For smaller people who are just learning, you can get a free license with Unity. So this is only hitting the larger developers.

But it's so messed up to say, hey, you just have to pay a monthly fee to license our program, and then now change the deal. Rust has been in development for 10 years, and you can't just go back on that later. I mean, this is just complete insanity. This wouldn't stand as a business model anywhere else. So I totally understand why developers are mad. Plus, people were saying things like, am I going to get charged if they download a free demo?

What if my game's free to play? What if it gets added to a bundle that I didn't even know about? You get charged for all of those. Well, they came out and they've said, like, if you're part of a bundle, you won't, or if it's a charity giveaway. But then people are like, well, how are you even going to know? So there's still a lot of questions here. But what a weird story. That's wild.

Like, you can't treat people this way. The only thing, too, like, it kind of bugs me is like, obviously this is all monetary based, right? Unity is going, we need to make more money guys. How are we going to do that? And somebody went,

what if we just charge everybody like per install of a game? And let's just double dip. Yeah. Let's just charge them again. But at what point is enough money, enough money, man? Like,

is there not a company out there that is just like, we're good, we're making millions. Of course not. You know, everybody's just like, how do we make more? I need more money. And I mean, I am very glad to see that the response to this was so unilateral amongst developers. I will say that Unity just posted on Twitter, I believe it was

earlier today, that said, listen, we've heard the outcry. We've talked to people. We're listening. And they came out and basically said, we're going to talk about this and we're going to make some changes. Now, that doesn't mean that they're doing away yeah doesn't mean they're doing away with the plan they're just you know they're they're aware that people are upset at least well and the irony is the whole purpose of this is to make more money and unity's stock has taken it's yeah i mean it's gone down really bad over the last several years but even just over the last week i mean it's dropped from being pretty much right around 40 now it's trading around 36 like that's a pretty sizable drop so i don't know if it's gonna stay there or not but yeah what a banana story it's such a weird business practice shooting themselves in the foot

really yeah all right let's go ahead and move on let's talk a little bit about x defiant this is a game that we've talked about on the show quite a bit in the past this is the ubisoft take on call of duty ryan and i got to play several matches together as well during beta testing the weird thing about this game is that it's supposed to release sometime within the next few weeks but there's still no release date what we found out is that x defiant actually failed certification on console, both with PlayStation and Xbox. We do not know the specific reason why it failed certification. It does not necessarily mean that the game has bugs. As we all know, Cyberpunk 2077 was horrendous on Sony, and it still made it through certification. I guess it more so has to do with meeting certain

standards like displaying a save icon or friend lists working, things like that. So the game failed certification. They say that they have resubmitted with both consoles, but depending on those results, then we'll find out when this game is going to release. It might still be September. It might be October. It might be that they get a conditional pass with a giant day one patch. That's why you sometimes see those, by the way. Are you guys worried about the state of the game? Or do you feel like this is more of a non-story?

I feel like it's kind of a non-story. They never really came out and said the exact day that they were planning on releasing anyway. This game felt pretty finished when we got to play the beta. And that was what, two months ago, three months ago. It was a little, they've had some time since then. It ran smooth. It was fun. I mean, this is one that it's going to be free to play too, which is really nice. So I did start to get a little tired of it towards the end of the beta. Cause I mean, it's just, it's just call of duty really um but um yeah i i mean i think this is just going to be we're not going to hear about this again until it releases and then all of a sudden it's like hey guys x defiant is out everybody's gonna hop in and pick it up and you know we'll see where the longevity of it is but

i mean i want to play it it's a fun game yeah it was good we had we had paul and i had a ton of fun when we played together so um sucks that you know this had to happen this way and it's kind of probably puts kinks kink and things and then people may be turned off a little bit but i i think it was really really fun i i think a lot of people will enjoy playing the game so um i i think this won't deter too many but uh you know hopefully hopefully the they get on it just time your release to not be with another huge game exactly like phantom liberty yeah or something like that yeah i will say that i did find it refreshing that ubisoft was just open about the process i'll admit i never looked into it i didn't know how certification worked until just this week and i liked that they were just

like hey um this is why we don't have a release date it's not a big deal a lot of games fail certification at first that's why you get these day one patches but seems like the game is shaping up pretty well i just want to get back to throwing spider bots on the ground. That was so fun, man. So fun. There's a lot to be said for transparency. It just brings a comfort to the consumer and then where you know, okay, I know what the deal is. I have some sort of idea of what's going on

and I feel comfortable with this. So yeah, as long as we can get through that and then like you said throw spider bots i'm i'm in at first i saw the title of the articles and i was like oh no are we gonna have to like do another drive by on ubisoft because we're always trashing them on the show here at least i was like okay it's not as bad as it sounds once you know what it actually means to fail certification i mean it's not great but it doesn't mean that there's an issue with the actual game all right and then our last uh quote unquote sad story of the week is in regards to immortals of avium this is also a game that we previewed quite a bit on the show. It released last month, and it sold so poorly that they announced that they

had to lay off 45% of their workforce. This game looked absolutely gorgeous. The graphics were incredible. That also came at a cost. Josh and I poked fun an awful lot at the fact that you had to have a supercomputer just to get 30 frames per second on high settings and this game did so poorly on pc the all-time high concurrent player count on steam was only 751 players and that was 26 days ago i checked it today there's only 80 people playing immortals of avian through. That's only half of people playing Forspoken, which came out several months ago and is a complete wreck. So what went wrong? I mean, honestly, if you make a game where the requirements to play your game are supercomputers. I mean, I have a very good computer. I would be able to play this at like 30 frames a second at 4K. I mean, it's just,

I think you severely limit yourself in that regard. I know that for me, that was part of it. I don't want to spend $60 for a game that I can't run very well. Part of that is, is that we've seen so much poor optimization this year that I think people are starting to get like nervous about, is this game going to run good? Is it going to be choppy? Is it going to be laggy? Like all that stuff. I think that's kind of moving towards the forefront for a lot of gamers. And so when you say, Hey guys, here's this game, it looks beautiful, but you probably aren't going to be able to run it i'm just going to not play it at that point i just had built this computer you know i built it right when we were starting kind of like when i joined the podcast

and everything but the way you know the way they have these games set up now with optimization and everything you know you you get these people like that i'm not gonna risk it i'm not gonna risk not having a good time a good experience a good um you know enjoyment playing this game or trying to play this game with my with my my rig because not everybody has these crazy 4090s and and all these you know however many gigs of ram and everything so nobody not everybody has a crazy system to play these things. And so if it's not optimized properly and it's not set up to where they can play this game, they're not going to take the risk.

They're not going to put their money down, you know, which we've experienced that it's hard to get that money. So why would they waste it for something that's not enjoyable to them? Yeah, I think you both make really good points. I think also it's a rough year for anyone. That's what I was going to say next. Oh, yeah. Even worse than that, I think it's a truly terrible name.

I think when you call your game Immortals of Avium, first of all, that's a really long name, and it does not tell you a single thing about the game. I mean, obviously something like Starfield has Bethesda behind it and all the PR and everything to go along with it. But Starfield is like a short name. It implies space travel, right? Like it at least gives you something. Immortals of Avium is a terrible name.

This to me is like Immortals Phoenix Rising. Like you get these goofy long titles that are just really bad so i think it's a bad title i think the the high requirements no one really knew what this game even really was i do think that it's a shame so many people got laid off but i i wouldn't say it's a complete surprise in this regard it is still a bit of a bummer yeah i feel bad for the people i mean nobody likes losing their job by any means i do i just think this game lacked any kind of flavor uh its flavor was that it looked really good but it was because it was like a like a shooter it was just particles and stuff everywhere so even though it was really pretty it's just kind of like i i get tired of seeing

all these bright colors and particles so then what am I looking at at that point? Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah. All right. Well, the good news is we're done with all the sad news of the week. So let's go ahead and take a break and we'll come back to all the fun stuff. Get,

get, lose the depression and dry your eyes and we'll come back with the, the, the fun, happy stories now. All right, guys, onto the happier news of the week week very exciting week for cyberpunk fans

as of today when this episode releases cyberpunk 2.0 is already live josh and i have really tried screaming from the rooftops that cyberpunk is largely fixed most of the issues at launch have been dealt with it's still not perfect. There are some technical issues, but this update comes with so many improvements to the base game. And not only that, we're still going to get five days down the road,

the expansion Phantom Liberty, but here in Cyberpunk 2.0, there are things added to the game like vehicle combat. Cops are more ruthless and an actual threat the skill bush has been turned into an actual usable skill tree i love the fact that if you hack too much you're gonna get cyber psychosis that's something that should have been in this game from the very beginning but i love the fact that they're adding stuff like this what do you guys want to talk about with Cyberpunk?

Everything. Yeah, you guys have played a lot more than me, so you'll know. I was part of that beginning stage that got just inundated with all of the issues, all the horrible things, and I ground through it. I jumped out of that tower, and I slid down with Jackie, and I did all those things so I got pretty dang far in the game but yeah I had so many issues so many errors so

I'm so excited to see that one they fixed everything and then two they're coming with some new stuff that's supposed to be even better so I know you guys are super stoked I'm also equally super stoked as I see you guys like your excitement build so i'm just gonna let you guys riff on it for a little bit you've never played

it since your first time playing it where it was very janky right yeah yeah i haven't played that was me and then i went back and played it with paul because we did a deep dive on it and i almost wish i hadn't at this point because i want to play it again now that they're doing all this stuff with 2.0 there's no way i'm playing i mean there's no way i'm playing cyber fresh baby come on you can do it oh don't tempt me guys because i love that game they don't need a dad i mean check out man a few weeks you're good to go but you know i all of the stuff that we're reading says listen these changes we'll call it 2.0 these are changes to just cyberpunk the base game this has nothing to do with phantom liberty but they said that it fixes so many issues

that cyberpunk had with like its rpg elements and its builds and stuff like that like one of the best things i read was like basically you get all these clothes that have stats and armor. It doesn't matter. You know, like you get weapons, that's fun, but there's none of the stats really changed the way the weapons shoot or feel.

It's all just percentages of reload and blah, blah, blah. And so that part of the game really didn't stand out a whole lot. And apparently now it's like, dude, you get to be cyber ninjas And apparently now it's like, dude, you get to be cyber ninjas and hackers and, but like you're actually like playing as this build at that point,

which sounds incredible to me. So the skill trees alone, you guys know, I love me a good skill tree that alone would change the way that the initial game feels and make it even better, which is crazy to say, because it's already really, really good. Really fun. Yeah. So I, if I was Ryan, I'd be so doing another playthrough when 2.0 hits, if I hadn't already played it twice. I'm ready. Oh, I mean,

I love Cyberpunk. We have our top 10 games of all time on our website, video gamers, pod.com. I have cyberpunk at number six overall. So I am thrilled for these updates. I am the kind of guy who will replay games over and over the dragon ages, the mass effects. I've played through them so many times. Cyberpunk's right up there with me. I don't know if you guys got a chance to watch these YouTube videos, but CD project red put out three videos of three new

builds you can do with 2.0. By any chance, did you guys watch Bullet Time Ninja? I did. I actually watched all these, dude. It's sick. Yeah, it is really sick. I mean, this is what I was talking about is you now have a different way to play this game. I never was, I played Netrunner, I think on my second playthrough, but I never hacked like people, like they've got all these like things you can burn out their eyes and then you can contagion them where it's apparently it spreads to other people if they're close. And none of that stuff ever worked for me. The only time I ever hacked somebody was to blind them so I could sneak past. But like now they're showing that build where it's like they're blinding people and then it spreads to everybody but then they explode because the guy's got a grenade in

his pocket and you hack the grenade i don't like it's just crazy yeah so like this is much more like play the game you want like play it how you want to play it which wasn't really a thing that stood out in Cyberpunk to me. So I loved the net running build when I initially played Cyberpunk. And that was incredibly fun. But you were always limited because you only had a certain number of little RAM chips that you could use. So one of the things that they're changing is that... So all the abilities that you mentioned before, Josh, were in there. But what is different now is that you can actually keep casting hacks at the expense of your health. So you can just keep going. And they now synergize and do combos together. So that's where you're starting to see the net running get so much more powerful.

They also highlighted that you can hack cars. That was cool. And turn them into kamikaze bombs. Yes. They'll just like drive and like follow someone and then explode, which is cool. The bullet time ninja looked so much fun because this to me looked like playing your favorite action movie. So basically you can do dashes that put you into bullet time and you can also deflect

bullets with a katana, which is kind of funny. But when they showed the action, they had a guy come in hot, like on a huge group of mobs, flying in on a motorcycle. And he hits a ramp, jumps off the motorcycle, starts deflecting bullets, and just starts slicing and dicing everybody. I would love to play through with that kind of build. It just looked so incredibly fun. They even also highlighted in another build with a guy with a giant sledgehammer, and there's like earthquake abilities where you hit the ground, and you're knocking people back, and they've added all these finisher moves.

It looks pretty incredible. So now for me, like this sounds almost overwhelming with how much more things there are. Because I've played some of the game, but is this going to be, is it really that much? Or is it kind of streamlined to where it kind of flows as you play? It's going to be streamlined because of your builds.

It's all in your skill trees. It's just builds. And they divide the skill trees into the categories of how you want to play. So if you want to be like a stealthy hacker you're going to want to go into this skill tree if you want to be bullet time flying ninja you're probably going to want to go into this skill tree so it's it's kind of like that in the sense that it's like how do i want to play and then you just play that way oh awesome it's it's actually ironically less confusing now because the way the skill tree worked,

which was the giant joke, it was a skill bush. Yeah, skill bush. You just saw, you saw 30 abilities and you'd have to mouse over all of them and like read a description. And then it was like,

you would start in the middle, but then it didn't make it clear what unlocked what. It was a mess. Yeah, it's been redone. It's more traditional. You can just kind of look, okay, I want this build

great here's the new design skill tree and it just makes more sense so i think it'll actually be better for everyone including noobs all right well as much as i love talking about cyberpunk let's go ahead and move on to our last story of the week this is a little bit of a gaming rumor so bioware has been surprisingly quiet about mass effect there was a little bit of a gaming rumor. So BioWare has been surprisingly quiet about Mass Effect. There was a little bit of a teaser that they released. I think it was like almost two years ago, maybe. But they haven't talked about anything else about the game. And then there was an uncorroborated rumor on a podcast this week that after the failures

of Andromeda, that they are now removing open world exploration from Mass Effect and going back to the original formula from the Commander Shepard trilogy, that it would be more of a linear adventure. And if that's true, I say hallelujah. I love linear adventures. Not every game has to have open world mechanics. Yeah, it's so funny because

we've been saying that for a while now like you don't have to do this i know that it was a huge thing for a little while and every dev tried to jump on it and went well we've got to have open world apparently you don't and what's funny about that is assassin's creed mirage is coming out and we think that it looks good because it's a return to the older formula, which is a linear story, right? We just got done talking about Cyberpunk, which is a true open world game, but does it phenomenally. And so there's games where it can work, and there's games where you don't have to have it, and it's not necessary for it to be a good game. And Paul, I'm with you, especially in the Mass Effect series.

They gave you little snippets of being able to just kind of go and do what you wanted to do. Like when Mass Effect was, I think it was one where it had the planet exploration with the roamer thing, the Mako, right? Or whatever it was. So they gave you some things to distract you, but the storyline itself was very contained, right? And that's one reason that Mass Effect is so good, right? I'll be honest. I never played Andromeda. I heard they tried to make it

open world. I just, it got kind of bashed from the beginning and I went, I just not going to do this then. I'll just, you know, I'll keep my, you know, happy opinions of Mass Effect. But yeah, I like this trend that we're seeing where people are realizing we can craft this experience. It does not have to be open world. Yeah. You don't always have to take something that's doing well and try to always mirror it and match it. You can always stick with what you're good at. They created an amazing game and they don't have to

try to change it to to match what's hot you know so i i'm not a big mass effect guy i know i know paul is since as long as i've known him but uh favorite series yeah so number one of all time absolutely so uh you know i get it i know he's gonna be super stoked for this we're all probably gonna definitely check it out um but yeah it's it's going to be super stoked for this. We're all probably going to definitely check it out. Um, but yeah, it's, it's exciting to see somebody also kind of put their foot down. We're not just going to follow the trend. We're going to go with what makes sense for us and what our development team is going to do and make a game that is going to be fun,

engaging and enjoyable and, you know, not just go with what everyone wants. Yeah. Fingers crossed that the rumors are true yeah there was a time especially as mmo started coming out that open world exploration was the big hotness of course and every game had to have open world and you had games like uh elder scrolls dagger fall where it was like the biggest open world ever made and that

was like something everyone touted but then like everyone started adding open world and it's like what are we doing even you know earlier this week josh you were talking about how the exploration of a game like starfield doesn't feel as exploratory because it's just more random procedural generation the planets just look different as soon as you throw open world, I think it just creates unrealistic expectations. There's nothing wrong having a contained handcrafted adventure that doesn't have a whole bunch of procedural generation. That's not a dirty word.

I think that's perfectly fine. I love if they are going back to the roots of mass effect. It's, it's a great thing. Yeah. All right. Well guys, that wraps up everything in regards to this week in gaming.

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Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, happy gaming. See ya. All right, see everybody. Bye.