Video Gamers Podcast - Sweetest Game Mechanics - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Gaming hosts Paul, Michael and Josh are back with another incredible Bonus Round. This week we break down our favorite gaming mechanics. Those things that we often take for granted, but stand out and make games truly incredible. From skill trees to non-scaling monsters, moral choices and more, we break down the best mechanics in gaming in an episode that can’t be missed! Make sure to check out our Streamer of the Week: https://twitch.tv/daveguy_ Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming 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

hello fellow gamers and squad mates welcome to the multiplayer gaming podcast we are three dads who are lifelong gamers and we release three episodes weekly on mondays thursdays and saturdays before we start this bonus round episode please make sure to toss our show a follow in your podcast app, rate us five stars, and leave a written review. You can also support our show on Patreon and get two bonus episodes monthly. You can go sign up today at MultiplayerSquad.com. I am your host, Paul, and joining me today, he's just loving life out there, running escort quests with NPCs that run at odd speeds. It's Michael. I don't know if they're going fast or slow. It's always I'm going in between a sprint and a walk.

So you have to like speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. I bumped into him. Now they're confused. Yeah. I'm confused, too. And the fact that Michael loves this as a mechanic has always really made me curious as to know what makes michael tick i have no explanation on my face at all no expression whatever and joining michael and me he loves games that constantly stop his action so he can read tutorial screens and then be stuck still while the game narrates to them it's josh how else am i going

to learn how to push a button you guys like okay number one i got are we are we not past the point as gamers when a game says to move press w a s d yeah is that something that's really necessary at this point no to to use your controller use the stick like yeah uh by by the way on that we really have to make a drop out of a little clip from josh with his i just want to play the game let me play the game i in my it's still in my head and i'm dying every time i hear it i i mean just let me play That's all I want to do. Oh, yeah. In case anyone doesn't know, we are being a little sarcastic here at the beginning. Today is a very special Monday bonus round episode. On these bonus rounds, we tackle

any variety of topics. Sometimes we do drafts and tournaments. Sometimes we answer listener questions or we each bring a top five list of some sort. Today is going to be a little bit more of just a free-flowing conversation. We're going to be talking about gaming mechanics that we really love. And I think it's hard to come up with a sexy title for that, but I think you guys are going to pick up on this pretty quickly. It's basically what makes a game good, right? So today in 2023, you load up a game. What makes you excited to see or experience? In the past, we did do a tournament on gaming trends that we hate. And so this is going to be a little bit of the opposite where we get to talk about some mechanics

that we love. So for example, it might be something like customizing your gun with attachments or games that include a battle royale mode i mean i don't know i'm just throwing out some some bad examples but we're gonna be getting into this in just a minute or two here before we do that josh i think you have a review to read i do have a review to read if you have not left us a review yet please take a few seconds to leave us a review it really really helps the podcast. It helps other people know that, hey, this is a good gaming podcast. And honestly, we kind of just love hearing what you all think about the show as well.

So good chance that we'll read it on the show as well as we do. And this one is titled Best Podcast Five Stars. And it comes in from Ed God, the best. And it says, this is one of the best podcasts I have ever listened to. It is good for all the latest news. And I would recommend this to everyone who's into gaming. Lots of thanks. I'm Vin Ut's brother, Vin Ut's brother. You may have seen us on Discord and Terraria made us fall in love with gaming in 2015 and we have loved it ever since we really enjoyed your episode on it p.s please do another prank episode oh man oh that was one of our most beloved episodes josh that was a two-man show just you and me it was man yep i

still remember we called it terraria hysteriaia because we were being all creative with our titles back then. Was Terraria even mentioned on the episode or no? In the Terraria episode? Yeah, the Terraria episode. Josh is thinking about the Terraria episode. I was referring to the Pranks episode. Oh, the Pranks episode is a classic, man. The Pranks.

We might have to do another one at some point. I've actually stolen your shower curtain idea and used it at multiple, like New Year's party, I went over with a shower curtain, the Jeff Goldblum one with the monkey or the gorilla. Yep. And I absolutely used that because I heard it on the show. Oh, I love it. It's one of my favorite pranks.

Before I was even on the show. Yeah, it was great. Oh, man. I actually recently was looking at the worst books on Amazon, and one of them is like a romance novel of a woman who falls in love with the coronavirus. And I don't remember the name of it. And I was like, I got to order like five of these books and just start leaving them at my friend's house is like on a coffee table.

I love just silly little pranks like that. It's so fun. All right. And Michael, do we have another streamer of the Week segment for today? Streamer of the Week. We don't have a drop for that, so I made my own music. But yes, we do. And we love our community here.

We love listening to what you folks say. We talked about Minecraft a lot in Discord over the last week. And so you know what? We found ourselves a Minecraft streamer, you know what we found ourselves a minecraft streamer you know because there's an upcoming release coming up that was outstanding and his name is dave guy underscore it's all one word don't worry about trying to write it down while you're driving we'll put the information in the description below but dave's unique because uh he's crazy active in his chat which we love, but he has some really unique and different

approaches to what he builds. He likes to really focus on combining original technical builds with still keeping it aesthetically pleasing and so forth. And so I just thought it was really interesting. I think you will find Dave Guy interesting as well. So go check him out. And when you do, tell him the multiplayer podcast sent you. Actually watched a little bit of his stream earlier today he was doing half heart hardcore mode uh which i thought man that's gutsy because i i would not do that i'm not that good at minecraft but it was really cool i was his chat was popping off super cool guy active uh really really fun streamer to watch so definitely go check him out yeah i don't even know what that means, the half-heart hardcore mode.

Sounds scary. Is that your max health? Just half a heart? Yeah. Yeah. And hardcore means if you die, your world is over. Oof. Yeah, I'm not a huge Minecraft player, but I don't mind watching other people do it. So yeah, you guys can go check that one out. All right. Now, Michael, I believe that the idea for this episode came from you

earlier in this week when we were throwing around bonus round ideas. I think this came as a listener recommendation, right? It did. One of our legendary supporters, Toro, actually put this idea in Discord, which by the way, if you're not in our Discord, go over to multiplayerpodcast.com, follow the Discord link and go there because it's an awesome community but we listen to what the discord folks our community say and toro was like hey have you ever done like a show on gaming mechanics that you like or don't like and we were like well we did the you know like the the episode about like gaming trends that we didn't like it was like this is a good idea so let's just keep it on things we like. And thanks for the suggestion, Toro. It's great.

All right. So basically for this episode, I think we're just going to go round robin and share our ideas, talk through it a little bit. Who wants the honors of going first today? I'll go first. Ooh, all right, Michael. I feel like Josh normally throws his name in the ring. I like Michael jumping in there. That means he's got an amazing one. I have an amazing one i have an

amazing number one by the way i may or may not have misread the show doc on this i thought it was the worst game mechanics so everything i say is gonna be i love it when games don't do this totally kidding yeah the first thing that i do have is absolutely one of my favorites the first time i ever noticed this was in a small game by Guerrilla Gaming called Horizon Zero Dawn. There may be a few examples of this coming, but I love it when there is an immersive tutorial. The tutorial exists within the game. We're playing Hogwarts Legacy right now, and that's a very easy one because you're a student, so it's a very native world where you're going to be learning how to cast spells and do things inside that world. And so it's like, oh, as you learn this spell, learn how to cast it, hold down this trigger and do that. It's very natural. In Horizon,

it's cool because you're a little kid and you go around with your father figure who's called Ross, and he's like, hey, look, here's how you hold a bow. And you learn how to do that in the game. I love it when games do that and keep it within the story immersively because there's a lot of games that just like to be like, oh, you've come across a box. Press X to open the box. Well, it's not immersive in the world. And so I don't know. That's what I wanted to start off with.

It's just it's one of those things that I just absolutely think is the best when they align gameplay with story in an immersive way. Are there any games that stand out to you, Josh, that have really good tutorials or opening levels? absolutely think is the best when they align gameplay with story in an immersive way. Are there any games that stand out to you, Josh, that have really good tutorials or opening levels? I was going to say, not to fanboy with Michael, but Horizon Zero Dawn has one of the best I've seen. And honestly, Hogwarts Legacy does it really well to talk about a recent release. I remember thinking, Hogwarts Legacy is fairly complex in a lot of different systems and what you can do, but they do such a good job of introducing new things to you in a fun way. And all they're really doing is saying, this is how you manage

spell sets, or you reveal something, or you use use a heel or you can use the fast travel map and here's how you unlock fast travel points and all that stuff. And it's funny because I joked at the beginning of the show about games that tell you to, you know spending programming man hours to tell people how to move like is is somebody's who's very very first video game experience ever hogwarts legacy like like where they're like hey we have to tell you how to move forward like i like i get it sometimes but then other times it's almost frustrating it's like dude, dude, I don't need a tutorial. I've been gaming for longer than I care to admit, you know, as far as that goes. But some games you do need that instruction, you know, and it's like, hey, this is how our game works. Here's the mechanics that we're going to throw at you. And so a way to provide that in a fun, you know, meaningful way, I think is definitely a nice touch. I think another game that really stands out to me for having a really great opening level is Dragon Age Origins. And it's not even so much teaching you everything about the gameplay and the combat, but simply the fact that the game can start out with so many different storylines. So you can play as a dwarf or an elf or a human. And even within those, there's different backgrounds. And all of them have different characters,

but they all serve the same purpose, which is to teach you about the world at large and to introduce the whole idea of the dark spawn and the Grey Wardens. And that game really encourages you to just start 12 different saves just to experience all the different origin stories but yeah like there's nothing worse than a game like Forspoken where they immediately hit the brakes and they're preventing you from playing the actual game just get out of your own way let us run around in the world give us just some interesting hook right off the bat we're gamers we'll be fine with it the last thing we want are tutorial windows up the wazoo. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's a great one, Michael. I think that's a really good first one to pull up. What about you, Josh? What do you have coming up here? Man, I got so many I want to talk about here. Okay, I got one because I absolutely love when games have this. And that's a skill tree.

Give me a game where I have a skill tree or multiple skill trees. I will nerd out like nobody's businessman. I absolutely love the idea that I can craft a game to the style that I want to play it. And you have given me these cool mechanics. And they usually come with spells or combat and abilities and stuff like that. But basically what you're doing is you're saying, hey, here's an ability, here's a spell. Oh, do you want to customize that to how you'd like it to be? Sure, go ahead. And I absolutely love that in games.

Outriders had one of the best skill trees that I can remember in recent memory, because your skill tree in that game would determine how you played. And it would drastically swing the game from weapons-based to ability-based in these builds that you could do. Hogwarts Legacy, just to bring it up again, because we're all playing it right now. Now, they do have skill trees. They call them talents, and they're very, very small. But I still love that even, you know, like, I just I love the ability to customize, like gameplay elements to the way that I want to play it. Do I want to go all just fire based and explosions and have that chain to other people? If I have a skill tree that lets me do that,

great. Do I want to go super tanky and maybe I'm not doing a ton of damage, but I can absorb a ton of damage and I don't have to really be on point with dodges and blocks and stuff like that. If you give me a skill tree that lets me spec into that, I love it, man. So any game that incorporates that, I find to just really resonate well with me. I have a good example of that actually i have a game that gives a good and a bad example of that and it's world of warcraft when it first came out up until i think cataclysm the skill tree was immense a lot of people thought it was confusing because there were so many things you can do but in that light a major strength like

i'll give an example i had a buddy who played a fury warrior and that's when you can use two uh two two handers that's the whole specialty thing of it and instead he found a way by like basically breaking the code looking at the math and stuff and he's like i know a way that i can go very unorthodox nobody tells you to do this online and use two one handers and he was like the top dps on the server by doing something so outside the box now blizzard thought that was too complex so right after that expansion they went back to like a diablo ask where it was much more simple still a nice skill tree but you couldn't customize as much but i do hear they brought it back with the most recent expansion the old skill tree although i haven't played that game in a long time and i probably won't because then i wouldn't be on this podcast because i

wouldn't play any other games one of the biggest problems with World of Warcraft's skill tree, especially back then, was the enormous cost to get your points back. And that is a trend that has kind of died off. Most of these games now give you a skill tree and they give you a pretty easy mechanic to refund your points. And in some instances like Outriders,

you could refund all your points at any point and rebuild your guy that is so helpful when you play games i get i get paralysis if i can't respect like a legitimately i will just save up skill points to where i have like 10 of them because i get so paralyzed and like well what if i don't like the bill did i go into then what do i do but if i can respect and i don't even mind build that I go into? Then what do I do? But if I can respec, and I don't even mind if you have to pay for it, just give me the ability to do it. I'll work for it, man.

I'm doing that in Hogwarts right now. I have like 10 levels of skills because you can't respec in that game. And I'm like, I don't know what's going to be important later. So I'm just going to keep a reserve, just like you're talking about. Yep. Yeah. So i love the customization i like the theory crafting that a good complex skill tree gives you yeah i think that's a really good choice josh i i love me a good skill tree but you know what i like even more than skill trees i got an alternative for this josh abilities or gear that level up because you use them instead of using a skill tree. This is one of my favorite mechanics.

It is actually on my list. It's a little bit further down my list. But I mean, Skyrim, right? For people that want to know what this means, Skyrim was one of the games that really, really brought this to the forefront. I mean, there's been a lot of games that have done it. But is there a game that jumps out to you instantly, Paul? Oh, yeah. I think there's a few really good examples. I remember when Grand Theft Auto San Andreas came out, and me and my wife's cousins would just sit down and play it for hours,

and we loved riding the bicycle. And every time we would start a new save, the first thing we would do is jump on that bicycle and start riding, or go to the gym and start pumping iron because your guy would get stronger and bigger. And the whole idea of that being in a game seemed so cool to me because yes, I understand from a gameplay mechanic why you would have a skill tree, but it feels more immersive that your player would get better at something through practice. I mean, listen, we're talking about practice. Not a game, not a game, not a game.

We're talking about practice. And to me, that felt so much more immersive, and I really loved that. So San Andreas is like an early example, but there's tons of games that still do this today. Valheim is a great example. That came to mind for me yeah the more you swim your swim rating goes up and now you can swim longer without needing to take a breath uh a great example with gear apex legends they have all the different body shields right well they added the evo shield which starts out really low and garbage but as you do damage

it levels up over the course of the match where it can actually become the strongest shield in the game so i really love when games have this i was trying to search for this on google like it's kind of a hard concept to google you know uh level up while you use abilities skill leveling by using skills apparently it's called activity-based progression so that's the official term yeah so there you go the more you know i learned i learned something new i just totally make sense though the more you use your bow the better you're at a boat bowmanship that's a word now the better bowmanship you have and like yeah exactly the more you sneak the better you are at sneaking. I think it makes so much sense. And I love immersion.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think the only example I can think of where this went wrong is World of Warcraft. And I can't believe I'm using World of Warcraft as an example of what not to do twice already in this episode. But in Vanilla WoW wow it used to be that if you needed to use a weapon you would have to level up your proficiency and so if you had never used a one-handed axe before and all of a sudden you equip it you could not hit high level enemies you would have to go back to the early stages fight level five boars to level up your axe to like level 100 go now and fight a level 20 mob and that was really a nuisance if you got a really good new weapon you couldn't just use it you would have to level it up so i get it sometimes it was used wrongly but i love the idea of trying

to get your 10 000 hours so to speak with your ability to make it better i would yeah i like i do enjoy that it can backfire a little bit. This is not slandering this at all. But like I do remember in like Skyrim just jumping everywhere because it was like, oh, I really got to get my jump skill up, you know, and it's like whatever. I'm not jumping that much in a normal video game, but it's like I'm bunny hopping for miles because it's like got to raise that jump skill up. Yep.

Yeah. I remember like in EverQuest, there was a place where you'd level up swimming in the Oasis of Mar. You could lock it into where you just swam perfectly in this one pillar. You would leave and go to work for the day while your character's swimming. You came back and you were like,

yes, just three more days of this EverQuest and I'll be at 200 swimming. Oh my goodness. Like 16 hours later. All right, Michael, what you got coming up? So this one might be a little bit of a shorter one, but I think that there's been a lot of games that deploy or employ... Deploy?

Man, words are hard today. Do cover mechanics really well. But more recently, we're seeing games with cover mechanics that work so much better than they used to. So games with cover mechanics that work so much better than they used to. So more immersive cover mechanics. And I'll give an example. Like if you're running and you go into crouch mode, your character kind of slides behind the wall. It makes a lot of sense.

Or even more so, which is something that Hogwarts is doing well, that Horizon does well. I'm not going to keep using these two examples but like most games when you're in cover and you want to hop over a wall you hop over the wall and your character's standing straight up going like hey guys here i am but i like it when games allow you to still do things like hop over a wall or you know run somewhere real fast and still be in cover without breaking the cover because just because you hit the x button to hop over a wall you're not dropping out of cover and being like hey guys just shoot me didn't gears of war kind of have that i feel like that had a good system to run from cover to cover i feel like the i feel like the term for it is called sticky cover where the game knows that

you want to take cover against this object so it'll kind of stick you to the box, or it'll stick you to the wall. Gears of War did that really well because your guy would kind of slam into it and you had that nice feedback from it. Then it became a problem because I can't think of a game off the top of my head. But what happened was games were trying to incorporate sticky cover, but then they were overdoing it to where i just wanted to run through this doorway but because i was close to a wall my character like takes cover on the wall all of a sudden i'm like no no no i don't want to take cover like oh yeah just run through the doorway you know a way out a way out was terrible at that when i played a way out i'm like just go through the door stop covering yeah it was like you had to almost jump when you have to jump off the wall yeah i feel

like some games have really found a good balance uh cyberpunk does really well where if you're just near a ledge it's almost like a soft cover system where it's like okay clearly this guy is so close to the wall they're trying to take cover and if you just move a little bit it puts you back in normal gameplay but yeah it's hard to find that right spot on the pendulum where it's not too sticky and not too loose i feel like cyberpunk did really well yeah i'm more talking about also not as much the sticky mccover uh mccover sticky cover mechanic but like in horizon if aloy wants to quickly climb up a ladder to get to the top of a ledge and silent strike an enemy if i'm crouching at the bottom of the ladder when she gets to the top of the ladder she's still crouching when she gets up there and it's like okay it knows that i don't want to just hop up there and be like hey guys shoot me yeah oh very nice all right

josh what you got i got dude this one is such a simple simple thing And it makes all the difference in the world to me. Because we have recently run into this, and that is the ability to pause a game at any time. If it's a single player game, dude, undoubtedly, dude, without fail, I'm in a cutscene. I've been playing the game. I've been running around fighting. And all of a sudden, all that part's done. And it goes to a cut scene. And the characters start talking. And then somebody in my family walks into the office because they need to tell me something. Right?

And then this is where I go, uh, uh, wait, shh, shh, shh. Don't say anything. And then they're like, oh, okay. Because they understand. It's a five-minute cutscene. You know what I mean? My poor wife is sitting there just standing still, like, waiting for this thing to end. And it's like, why can I not just hit escape and the game pauses right in the middle of the cutscene so that I can go, hey, what do you need?

Or I got to pee. Like, let me pause this real quick. I don't understand games that don't let you do this. Now, in a multiplayer game, sure, I get it. That's not even a thing. But if I am playing a single player game, I want to be able to pause the game at any time. And when games let you do that,

it is such a breath of fresh air. And I know it sounds like the stupidest thing ever to say, like, I love this gaming mechanic, but dude dude it's one of those quality of life things that makes all the difference in the world for something that seems so stupid it makes so much sense too and almost always it's like a lot of games have quests that will start you get up to the quest person and then you'll press like x to start the quest they go into a cut scene but sometimes in that same game you'll walk into a room and bam

the cut scene starts and you're like no no no i wanted to get up and go to the bathroom no yeah and you're stuck there watching a cutscene because you cannot pause it during the cutscene how hard is it to just make it so that you can pause it like okay i can't change weapons during the cutscene that's fine but let me pause it oh did you guys have moments when you were a kid when like your parents were calling you and you're in the middle of a cut scene and you're trying to yell like i'm in a cut scene and then your parents are like i don't care you come help get groceries out of the car and i hated that so much there's so many times when i would miss a cut scene and i just i had no idea what did i miss

why all of a sudden is this house on fire like i don't even know what happened and i also really love being able to press and hold a button to skip cut scenes oh yeah because you could accidentally hit space bar and skip a five minute cut scene on pc back in the day and i feel like everyone's gotten rid of that where now it's like press and hold f or something to that extent which is really nice i will say on the kind of the same vein of the same mechanic, if I can skip a line of dialogue without skipping the whole cut scene, that's huge too, because it's like, there's always that moment, right? Where it's like, okay, I've read a lot faster than what the character is saying. If I hit space bars, like what's going to happen? And it's like, is it just going to end everything?

Like, oh no i i skipped the entire thing versus like oh cool it just went on to the next line of dialogue that's great yeah but i cannot agree more all right well we are going to take a short break and we will be right back with more multiplayer gaming podcast this is an ad from better help online therapy we always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities

so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online, and sign-up only takes a few minutes. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. And we are back and we are up to me here. So continuing our gaming mechanics that we like, I'm going to bring up my number one favorite mechanic in gaming.

I thought maybe one of you guys would bring this up first. I am talking about where your choices matter and it leads to multiple endings to a game. This is by far my number one gaming mechanic because it makes you feel like you're actually making a difference in the game. You're not just simply a viewer. You are forming the world around you. And I think that it always makes your playthrough feel more unique and more real. And the endings matter so much more because you know how you got where you are, and it's all your choices.

This is in the top three on my list, and I could not agree more. I wrote it down as a morality meter or choices matter. Yes. As like the way that I phrased it. But it is so nice to feel like what I am doing in this world is affecting the world around me. And you know what? Some games fake it. I get that. There's games out there where they give you a choice, but your choice doesn't really matter. The game's just going to go, okay, but at least you're making me think it matters. And that's the part that I love, man. Games that take that to the next level and they say, hey, if you want to be good, you want to be evil, it's going to start to affect your character. It's going to start to affect the characters around you or the world around you. It's going to lead to new quest options or dialogue options and things like that. That's just the icing on the cake for me. But man, you hit the nail on the head, Paul.

It adds to that sense of immersion. And what I am doing in this game is actually mattering to the game itself. I mean, shoot, there's entire games that are based around this. I like it better when it's a game that's not based around it. But games like Detroit Become Human, where that's the whole point of the game. But a game that did it perfectly would be Fable 2, where it's like you're still trying to get to the end goal, but your character literally will gain muscle if you do more melee activities or gain more weight in a negative way if you eat too many fatty foods. It's hilarious that simple things like that actually affect it. I can't agree more.

I love it when games do that and you don't know they're doing it also, where you think maybe the choice matters, but then it does affect it. Or maybe even sometimes it's just a small addition where you just get a little bit of a different post-credit scene because of something you did, and the characters come back and show something different, which love i love what was it fallout new vegas did that didn't really change the game and a lot of times but you had them post-credit scenes that showed you what was going on with characters that you'd helped around the world it's been a while

since i've brought up one of my favorite games uh heavy rain so go ahead and mark this down on your bingo sheet for pa bringing up Heavy Rain again. This game does it better than anyone else ever has, in my opinion. In Heavy Rain, not to rant too long, but basically you're a dad, your son's been kidnapped, you don't know by who, but you're being left little clues. And if you solve these puzzles, you're going to get hints of where your son is being held. And over the course of the game, you play as multiple characters. Well, guess what? These characters can die at any point during the game. You can have every character in the game die, and it doesn't get solved. You can have the

main villain get off scot-free. You can have Ethan solve everything and get his son and rescue him and marry one of the other playable characters where he gets to start a brand new life. I mean, there's even like really dark endings where Ethan still lives, but his son dies and Ethan gets framed for killing his own son and he commits suicide in prison. The fact that you can have all these different endings in one game and all of it makes perfect sense in how you got there is really, in my opinion, a masterpiece of gaming and making decisions. Like, I remember one playthrough of Heavy Rain goofing off. I intentionally failed every single trial for Ethan. And at the end of the game, he's pouring over all his notes and trying to figure out where his son might be. And he has no idea. And it's really interesting storytelling when you

can have such drastically different endings based on your choices. I absolutely love it. That's a really good example. One thing, this is more of a question but i i mean i'll go ahead and answer my thought on it too is like you know is do you do you prefer when it's black and white like you know the paragon renegade thing where it's like oh i know i'm being a jerk or oh i'm definitely making the right choice i personally like it like the way that the witcher does it where sometimes it's just shades of gray and there is no right choice there's no clear answer and that forces you into the am i saving the orphans or am i saving an entire like town like which one am i and that makes my brain spin because then i go well this isn't as easy as yeah i took the good route or the bad route this This is like, dude, what choice am I actually going to

make here? What's the lesser of the two evils? And how do I feel about that? I simultaneously both love and hate when games do that. I play almost every game as lawful good, just by nature. And so when it's like, okay, you have to pick the less bad choice, but you still don't even know what the less bad choice is because you don't know what's going to happen if you go down that path i just i go nuts but i also love it because it breaks me out of my shell a little bit and makes me do something different yeah i think having the moral complexity will always be more interesting the the paragon renegade system like in mass effect can still be really interesting. And especially because of the fact

that Mass Effect is a trilogy of games where decisions you make in each game carry over to future installments. Like I've said this on the pod before, but Morden is my all-time favorite character, and he's in Mass Effect 2 and 3. You can let him die in Mass Effect 2. And guess what? Mass Effect 3, it's a totally different character named Paddock. And it's not Morden. And it's a different voice actor. They say completely different things. You learn different things in the world. So the fact that you can even have these characters die in Game 1, like you can let Rex die, and it's a different clan leader in Mass Effect 2. Or if Rex survives, he's the clan leader in Mass Effect 2. So Ix survives he's the clan leader in mass effect 2

so i really love when games put all that in there but yeah the moral complexity i always find far more interesting in uh areas that are a little more gray it'd be really interesting if they paid those actors based on what percentage of character players kept their character life so okay more than yeah more than 42 percent of uh players ended up uh you know you were alive so you get paid 42 of the game sales yeah oh i love it there's nothing that gets me more excited when i open up steam and i click on a game and i see tag choices matter for me that's number one that's if i see that at minimum i'm going to read the description and watch some videos because i'm so drawn to it.

All right, Michael, coming back around to you. I feel like all the things I'm going to say after this now are just dumb compared to that one because it's so important. Dude, I brought up pausing. Come on. That's a good point. This one is totally Michael Butler right here because I spend way too much time looking around corners, trying to find loot boxes and stuff like that, trying to find things hidden on shelves, all over the bookshelf. And so I love games that allow me to

scan my environment, call it a second sight, but like Hogwarts with Revelio. Aloy's Focus, even Cuff in Forsaken did it, where it's like, okay okay i can do this and see there's a loop over there but it's called spoken for spoken that's for a second game nice

frodean slip there man this is a tough episode for me i don't even know what's going on um but games that just allow me to not waste as much time like looking around in every single like a prime example you come up on a little like a little burned down a village and you're like i'm gonna fight these goblins let's say it's the witcher and there's like six little huts in a semi-circle and you go through every single one of those huts and one of them has a loot box and it like it has like six gold coins let me just push a button okay that one number two right there has the gold coins i go get them i move on to the next mission. Thank you, video game.

I'm with you. Diablo with the highlight loot. Oh, yeah. A similar mechanic where it's like you just press left alt and, hey, everything that's lootable, the name lights up and you know where to go and you know that you didn't forget something either. So, yeah, I'm the same way. It's such a nice thing to just know that I'm not accidentally walking away from something great. Oh, that too. You don't miss anything. It's a better system than things being extraordinarily shiny on the screen to let you know that it's a leak. Evil West.

Right? Can I climb there? Oh, it's glowing. Yeah. Talk about negative immersion. All right, Josh, what's your next mechanic? Dude, I'm just going with the simple things. Because sometimes it's the simple things in a game that just make me go, yeah. And I know this is going to sound stupid, right? But I'm an easy person to please, too. If you make a game where I can pick up a cloak or gloves or a new sword, or maybe it's a mace or something like that, and my character's

appearance doesn't change based on that, I am instantly disappointed in your game. When your gear shows on your character, I like that a lot. And it's one of those things that's really weird because I don't miss it until it's not there. Because I'm so used to games doing this, but I almost feel like either it's lazy or it just bothers me, man. It's like my guy's running around with a sword and a shield. Hey, I got a mace, but my guy's still running with a sword and a shield. And it's like, well, that's not what I've got equipped right now. Like, come on.

That can go very wrong, too. Like, my Hogwarts character, I had to post pictures. He looked like he was straight out of Eyes Wide Shut. Because I'm running around with this goofy white mask on. Currently, he looks like the Mad Hatter, where I've got this preposterous hat on top of my head. But I'm 100% with you, Josh. And I'll go a step further i love when inventory systems have different size items that make sense for inventory so like

diablo if it's a giant broadsword maybe it takes up eight little squares and a little dagger might only take up three where in another game it's just oh well you can only hold 50 items and that's an item you know so i love when it incorporates size or weight into things as well yeah size is much more fun than weight because it's more immersive you know it's like okay you can carry 558 pounds no i can't what am i superman but i know that i've got like you know 50 spots of inventory and a broadsword takes up 20 of them okay well i have to make choice now you know uh yeah that absolutely just makes my day very nice all right coming back around to me that was yours right

josh it was okay i have on my list it's actually the very first thing that came to mind no loading screens in games god of war looking at you well done yep yep this is something that's relatively new now there have been versions of this for about 20 years now uh world of warcraft famously would procedurally load more of the map as you would walk forward so that way you didn't get loading screens in between zones and there are other games that took other approaches like splatoon while you were waiting for maps to load You could play a little doodle jump kind of game on the Wii U with a squid. Anything that lets you have fun during loading, I'm all for. But when you're able to fully immerse yourself in the game with no loading screens, God of War is a fantastic example. Even the old

God of War games used to do this, where you would walk up really high stairs and that's just because they're hiding loading screens you can be creative and do that now sometimes it's more interesting than not like mass effect they'd put you in an elevator where you can't move and for 30 seconds you're riding the elevator and it's really just loading content like that's better than nothing dead space remake just did that i just got done playing dead space remake and it's like same thing it's like hey we need to load some new assets uh by the way take this elevator up to this level and it's like i know what's happening but it's so it's great it's better than the hourglass spinning but god of war does it so well whether it's pushing your way through a black fog or where the game is putting you on a lift where now it's just showing you a video and it's loading in the

background so to me i think that's a really good one i think that's so much based on technology too you know it's where we've come because it wouldn't be possible 10 years ago to do something like that the best we had is like if you're walking you know to a different part of the map and it's like oh we have to take this u-shaped cave real fast where you make a right a left a left and a right and it's like okay i know what you just did but even that was them trying with limited technology you know so it's really nice that we now have like we're spoiled we are so spoiled that we have this now in gaming because the technology's caught up to do it. Yeah. I don't know that our younger listeners just understand how many loading

screens you used to get back on PS one. Dude, not to sound really old, but when you had to change the disc, please insert disc two or disc three. Right. Yeah. And then you had to,

everything would stop. The screen would just go to please insert disc two. You would have to eject the disc find this tube put it in there and then cross your fingers that it would actually load and pick up where you left off legitimately you were it was like christmas if you opened a game and you're like oh this is a four disc game oh my goodness this is a big game. I'm so excited. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. And talking about modern tech, no man's sky,

the fact that you can just jump in a plane or not plane, but a ship start flying, leave the atmosphere and start traveling to another planet. It's loading as you fly. You don't get any of the full stop loading screens. So yeah, I think that's such a cool mechanic. I always get excited when games tout that all right coming back around to you michael i think this might be a fairly new one

um at least it's new to me i haven't played a game that did this before but elden ring did it really well and it adds a bit of a challenge where if you die and you drop all your stuff you get to go back and get it where you were, but it's not based on time. It adds an extra, like, hey, now I've got to go collect that. But it's not based on time. It doesn't expire.

It's just, it's there until you die again. I kind of like that, because it gives you an extra reason to not want to die, because you have to go back. It's not as painful as some old games with their corpse runs but it's like hey i can decide if that's really worth it for me to go back there and get that okay i just got stomped by a giant troll he's 20 levels ahead of where i'm supposed to be but i dropped 30 coins i'm not going back to go anywhere near that troll but if i dropped like 10 000 gold and that's worth a lot of money that's like half of

what i've made in the game so far i'm to have to go challenge myself to go at least sneak around this troll or fight this troll and get my stuff back. And it just adds an extra layer, I think, which is a lot of fun. It's a nice risk reward. Honestly, I'm with you on that one. The beauty of that is Dark Souls did this really, really well where, hey, the boss killed me. I had 8,000 souls on my body. Now when I go back to fight the boss, I need to go get my souls first. Because if this boss kills me before I do, I lose all of that. The beauty there is that when you don't have any, it doesn't matter. Death doesn't matter

at that point, right? Because it's like, well, I've got nothing to lose. So I really do enjoy the risk-reward factor that that adds to games. Yeah. souls is the only game i can think of that still does that that's largely been phased out it's been a no it's been adopted actually um still rising corpse runs yeah steel rising does it but that is a dark souls clone too so that's true yeah will diablo 4 have corpse runs i don't know i don't know i'll be kind of curious yeah i feel like for the most part most games you don't lose items upon death. Yeah, the hardcore corpse runs is a thing of the past, thankfully. Yeah, no, that's no fun.

Let's not do that ever again. We've heard those stories from Josh staying up until 5 a.m. trying to get his corpse back. I have PTSD from that. All right, coming back to you, Josh. All right, this one, I'm not going simple this time because this is something that I All right. Coming back to you, Josh. All right. This one, I'm not going simple this time because this is something that I absolutely love. And I know that maybe I'm a little bit unique in this. I love it when games do not scale monsters or enemies. I'm with you. I want to round a corner, go down an alleyway, find some little glade in a fantasy game or

whatever. And a giant freaking Cyclops rushes out and smashes me one hit and pulverizes me into dust. I want to be in a game like Cyberpunk, where I'm like, oh, I can totally take this dude down, and then he one-shots me. And then I go, oh my goodness, what just happened? I don't like it when games scale everything, because the game never changes. So an example is I'm level one, I pew pew something, I do three damage. Okay, great. Well, now I'm level 10 and I pew pew something and I do 30 damage, right? But the hit points for the monster have just scaled up. Nothing has changed other than the numbers that are flashing up on the screen. And I get it.

Everybody wants to see big numbers. Before you know it, I'm critting for 30,000, right? But the monster has 3 million hit points. It's not any different. The time to kill is always the same. The monsters are always the same. And honestly, I do not like that at all. I want a game where I can wander around and find something that kicks my butt. You know what I mean?

And then be like, oh. And then on the flip side when i'm level 50 and these stupid little goblins that were wrecking me in the beginning i want to wade there through there like i am the four horsemen of the apocalypse and just be like i remember what you did to me you know feel my wrath and then just slaughter everything inside at the same time i it's just it's it's another one of those mechanics where I've seen way too many games move to the like, oh, well, everything scales with you. And I'm like, dude, stop. Like, I get that it takes more time to craft the individual encounters.

But man, does it add so much to a game for me when that happens. Well, I like it because you feel like the power that your character has has been earned like you can go back okay skeleton with a stone hatchet that i hit for three points earlier and you know it took me like a minute and a half to beat you i shouldn't take a minute and a half to beat the same skeleton with a stone hatchet at 30 000 hit points you know for every time i cast a spell you want to be able to say that the last 10, 20, 30 hours I spent in this game actually mattered. And like, now I'm fighting things that are toe to toe with me. I'm fighting that dragon, the skeleton with the hatchet. I can sneeze on him and he dies because I am now a powerful character because I've put these hours

in this game to become that way. And that's why it's difficult too, because you don't always know. You don't always know some games when you start out out if it's going to be doing that or not. And then you go back to the starting area and you're like, why is this hard? Like this shouldn't be hard. You know, I should be able to just wail on these things. So yeah, it's tough to know sometimes too, which is frustrating. Yeah, I totally agree with you, Josh. I think that's one thing MMOs have always done really well. And I think that's why we don't see it as often. Because in MMOs, you had to create your different zones with different level mobs. And so you knew that zone is 40 to 50, and I'm only a level 20. And that enemy's level is question mark. Don't run up and try to fight it. You knew that. And then once you

developed, you felt like your character progressed. Now I can take that mob on. And you miss out on so much when everything is just equalized based on your level. Now, sometimes that is necessary to do multiplayer. Borderlands does this where they equalize everyone's level so that way you can play together. But I do think you miss something like in MMOs when someone would carry you through an encounter to help you get gear or to help you level faster. And there is a little part of me that kind of misses that as well, even in multiplayer. EverQuest did this really, really well where you could have a low level zone, but they would legitimately throw a Cyclops that would path around the zone. And you better get the heck out of the way if the cyclops was near you to where the zone would actually report the location you know what i mean so that all the noobs didn't

get wrecked and it just it added that sense of excitement of danger of like hey i'm just farming these snakes i turn around and oh my goodness there's the cyclops and it's like you were running for your life at that point but then coming back later on in the game and being like time to take down that cyclops man it's finally time you know it was so in your example there was casel the sand giant who would walk around the oasis of mar remember how cool it felt when you were the dude everyone's like casel run run away and you're like in shout i got him yeah and like everybody's like oh someone's gonna kill him and he doesn't he doesn't spawn again for like two hours so everyone's like you're a savior you killed castle we can we can kill the specter safely it was so awesome oh that's a great

one i love that you brought that one up josh all right coming back around to me i have a feeling this is going to be my last one so i want to bring up this i absolutely love when games incorporate music intentionally into the gameplay all right now let me give you guys is it okay if i nerd out for just a split second on music videos depends on if you're going to talk about trombone Champ here or not. Oh, wait, no, that's true. No, no, Trombone Champ. No, and I'm not talking about Guitar Hero. So, for example, my favorite movie director is David Fincher, and he got his start with music videos. And my favorite music video of all time is Freedom by George Michael. And it always bugged David Fincher that he would watch other people's videos, and they're

making cuts at random times. It's not lined up with the beat of the song. It has nothing to do with the content of the music. And he would always make these music videos that made a lot of sense. So like in Freedom by George Michael, George Michael is not even in the video. He was mad that everyone was so focused on his looks. And so they have the world's most famous supermodels, like Cindy Crawford, lip syncing all the lyrics. And during the entire song, every time you hear the word freedom, it cuts and you see George Michael's jukebox, guitar, or jacket blow up into flames. And so it's the whole idea of dismantling his public image. And that's a really neat way to where you make a music video make sense with the music.

And an example of this is the music levels in Rayman Legends. If you play Rayman Legends, every single person says the best levels by far are the music levels because you do your button presses in time with the song and so it's got this little bit of a musical element with it now lofa or lo-fi rush hi-fi rush kind of takes that to the extreme but i love that we're seeing it in more games i love when it's a very clever way of working music in with it. Audio and music in general can heighten a game so well, man. Like, just so well. I mean, it's weird to me because in my mind, it's either a rhythm game or it's not. You know what I mean? So is there a game where it's like the music has really... Or are you speaking directly about rhythm games? so i'm specifically talking about like i can put a short

audio clip in here but where you have to do button presses that line up with the lyrics or the music in the song and so if you want to get an example just go search for rayman legends what's the name of the song i think it's called black betty yeah it's called black betty by ram jam uh josh you may know from your childhood yeah from 1977 that is the song he went way farther than i ever could have gone in that's pretty good oh yeah and you're literally hitting attack because they make the level design line up so you know to always every time the bass drum hits you hit attack and you're gonna break through this little skeleton pole and so i love the fact that they include all that in there so it's not just strictly a rhythm game but it's adding rhythm elements into an otherwise platformer or action game and i think that's really clever how they do that all right so we are running pretty short on time here but

we got time for a little bit more so mich, Michael, do you want to go through some honorable mentions or do you have one last one you want to bring up? I'll just do a couple quick honorable mentions without going too deep into them because they're quick and easy. One, destructible environments are awesome. I love destructible environments in video games. Target locks. Yeah, target locks. When you click in that little stick because I'm terrible at shooters and aiming things. Let me target that one dude and just wail on him. The ability to wait between day and night. I love the ability

to wait between day and night because I hate playing games at night. Last one I have would have been my quick one, and this is very, very recent and very, very niche, but the DualSense controllers. Evil West did it great. I didn't have to look at my ammo because when I'm shooting the gun on the PlayStation 5 5 the last three rounds the stick the the trigger gets progressively harder to pull until i can't pull it because the character's reloading i don't have to look at my ammo i love the way it's implemented makes it super immersive go dual sense controllers get on pc get an xbox yeah i don't have any of those um a couple honorable mentions for me i love games where you get to absorb powers from bosses what a cool mechanic dude um megaman games are famous for that i will say for spoken um

yeah yeah i mean honestly for spoken did actually do that and it's one of the it did i'm like cool i get to use like a lot of water powers now you can also pause cut scenes another one um steel rising we're gonna do a deep dive on that but in steel rising you know you when you kill a boss you get like an ability from that boss and i always thought that's such a neat mechanic i really like when that happens um turn-based combat i know that that's not everybody's jam, but for me, oh my goodness, I love turn-based combat. I'm not talking about XCOM. I hate the way that XCOM does turn-based combat. Talking more Divinity Original Sin and some of those type games. And then finally, a very quick one, active reload. Dude, there is nothing more enjoyable than I have to spend two

or three seconds reloading, but i get a little tiny mini game to play while i'm reloading where if i stop the little line at the right time that i get a faster reload or maybe i do more damage with the next magazine i think that's such a neat mechanic and makes something that's usually mundane in a game absolutely fun to do well it's immersive too because like your character if they're trying to reload quickly, they have to actively try, and now you do, too. I can't remember the last game that uses that, but I always thought that was a really cool mechanic. Gears of War did it very, very well. And Steel Rising, it's not a reload, but it's like a cooldown, like when your character overheats.

And if you time it just right, you can get more stamina instantly. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah. You guys brought up pretty much anything else. I would have mentioned a couple of just last things. I put bullet time on my list. Like, have you ever been upset with like, yeah. Yeah.

Like if you can do, whether it's dead eye and red dead, or if you're playing max pain where you can literally slow down and dodge bullets. I don't know that anyone's ever been mad about having that in a game like ever since the matrix came out who doesn't want bullet time i think that's awesome i also really love when you can pair up spells or abilities that synergize together so like you bringing up dos to josh i love when i can have one character shoot a barrel of water and now there's water all over and now my other character can hit it with electricity and now it

shocks everyone who's touching the water or like in dragon age origins one character maybe a major will freeze somebody and then another character calls down a meteor and that character will shatter and they'll die and it's like either ability on its own would have only knocked off like 10% of their health, but by combining them, it actually kills the enemy outright. And I think that's always really neat. I love when you have like synergy between abilities. Yeah. Divinity Original Sin 2 went one step further, which I thought was really, really amazing to where if you had water on the ground, if you hit fire, it would turn it into steam, which is now a cloud.

And then you could use lightning. And instead of just a little puddle with lightning, you had a steam cloud that was electrical now. That was, yeah, like a giant storm almost. And I was just like, that is super cool, man. That is brilliant to do something like that in a game. Yeah, or using blood with your characters that could consume the blood and use it for abilities. So it's like you're incorporating all this elemental type stuff, which is pretty ingenious.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that wraps up this bonus round episode. We want to say thank you so much to everyone out there for listening, especially our Patreon supporters. If you want to check out our Patreon page, check that out at MultiplayerSquad.com. That'll get you bonus episodes

twice every month. You can also follow us on socials everywhere at MultiplayerPod. We especially love to hear from you guys. We love getting your suggestions for these bonus rounds, exactly like how this one came in from Toro. So a very special thank you to them. And make sure to come back around and check out our next

episode on Thursday where we covered this week in gaming. And I think that wraps everything up for today. So until we see you guys, we'll not see you until you check out our next episode. Happy gaming twice. If I am not looking through your window right now, I probably, right.

All right, everyone enjoy clearing the fog of war throughout the rest of the week. As you go through the window right now, I promise. Right, right. All right, everyone, enjoy clearing the fog of war throughout the rest of the week as you go through the map of your lives. Cheers. All right, bye, everybody. Bye.