CSB297: The Ubidome

Hey, bro, what's up?

How much caffeine can you get into your system in

23 hours?

So there's a fun, fun story about that.

Is that I can get a lot, like a lot, like a lot.

But then my wife will be like, how much caffeine did you drink?

You look like you're vibrating.

And I'll be like,

one caffeine?

And she'll be like, no, you didn't.

And then she'll be able to check the tape.

Yeah.

So one caffeine.

I have one caffeine.

There is video evidence of it.

I suppose as long as you have your other cans pre-cracked and sitting just out of frame, you can see it.

So

you want to hear the fucking pro tip is you make sure you get all the same color of monster.

And then you're like, bro, I got a pee.

Oh, it's time to pee.

Okay, we're going to go to break.

Yes.

Got it.

And then you crack that shit.

And then you drink.

You have to drink a little bit before you get in because if you don't, then it's really obvious that that's the first drink.

I see.

I see.

Yeah.

That's

wow.

This is the tech that has to be invented.

Got it.

Bro, this is just one of those days where it all just

syncs up, and both of us join this Discord call, just going.

yeah it's good it's good shit no i just i had a like really rough sleep night i don't know um i i'm super burnt and and you know what you're super you i feel you very strongly i'm i'm tremendously cooked it's one of those days that my poor little man he had gas or something um

he did not have a good sleep night therefore so i didn't have a good sleep night yeah and that's like i feel bad because it's like oh poor little guy.

Just

fart, dude.

You got to massage it out.

So I've never had

much use for that.

When it's in there, it's in there.

Okay.

It's just got to come out.

Well,

I have.

It doesn't work for me either.

Well, like,

I can't massage my belly and get it out either.

So I just cry in the bathroom.

Okay.

But I pretend I'm watching videos, but I'm actually crying.

I know, I know that

I have exactly two and a half cans of guru

in my system before it's like, that's your limit.

Oh, okay.

I mean, that is the limit, but it's.

What are you going to pour a half a can of guru out?

No.

But like, I can tell because right around that halfway mark is where it starts to be like, oh, there's that little, yeah.

You know, you start to be like, yeah.

So for me, it's like when I slam into 490 milligrams of caffeine,

when I slam into 480,

490,

that's when you're fucking going.

So to break it down, one of these regular ass sugar-free white monster cans is 170 milligrams of caffeine.

So when you are at the two two and a half mark on this monster can and you're crushing 450,

everything, it feels like

the way that I had someone describe what it must be like to be Spider-Man with spider scents, but no spider agility.

Nope.

So everything's really, really fast,

but I'm not faster to accommodate my increased perception.

You just see it coming.

I'm just really, I'm just

so fast.

Yeah.

I've realized as well that like if I still need, if I'm at my two and a half limit, if I'm at the limit too early in the day,

if

I have to push it even further beyond

a normal cup of coffee with nothing in it, just straight, straight black coffee

can do one of those.

Because I think, I feel as if the taurine, gorine extra stuff

is not helping with the you got to get that taurine, bro.

The jitter, but uh, yeah, just a straight coffee after that is like, okay, I can do one more bump up, and then that's my energy limit.

But it's not actually energy, by the way, it's it's it's it's tired masking.

Yeah, no, it's like you've decided to turn off every chemical that your body is sending that says, dude, lie down.

Yeah, yeah, no, emergency bean water, but that's energy, emergency bean water.

Um, this reminds me of a TikTok I remember seeing like three years ago, maybe two years ago, where it was this regular-looking white lady who was putting up a TikTok that was, I'm gonna prove to my family that they're full of shit and that I know what I'm doing.

So, this is how many monsters I drink in a day, and she drinks exclusively white

sugar-free monster,

and you're watching it, and she's had three

by the time she gets to work.

And

I counted them up, and by the end of the day, she has like nine.

And

I'm just sitting there aghast.

And I remember the top comment being, like, why don't you just switch to cocaine?

It might be healthier.

Like, why, like, yeah, micro-dosing

mushrooms, whatever you're doing.

Like, you might be better off just switching to like caffeine pills or cocaine.

That is three times over the daily limit,

if not four.

Between two days.

And that's, and that's like the average test day that she recorded.

Oh, my God.

So, like, you know, there's those bad days.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, so, like, I just assume that the, um,

um, what's it called?

The engineering law of

the law of how a thing needs to be literally twice as strong as it's given, like, load, right?

So, in other words, the margin of error

has to have a safety rating of zero or a safety rating of one.

There's a calculation that says this thing, this table, or this bridge has to support twice as much as someone would actually use it for, right?

It needs to be so a weight limit of 1,000 pounds on an elevator has to go up to 2,000 pounds.

It will not fail until it hits 2,000.

Exactly.

Right, right.

So that's the kind of bit where I'm looking, and I go, if they say you can have two cans in a day, you can probably have four for

the damage, right?

And you're saying nine, and it's like, well, I guess you don't drop dead then, but you are taking, you're shaving off time from the future.

You know, it's like, it's like the cigarette that subtracts from your final life count number.

I feel like that's kind of what you're looking at, if not instant damage.

Delayed.

Cool, good, good.

So with that,

and yeah, yeah.

You see,

the good part, the positive, is that we've had a long,

healthy experience of taking this type of energy and redirecting it

into the content for the better.

So.

Yeah, you know what?

Listen,

it may not be the healthiest thing to jam myself with anti-sleep drugs and stimulants in over-the-counter gigantic cans, but at least I did something healthy and useful with it.

Like sit on my ass for eight hours and beat metaphor.

Yeah, there you go.

This is the only job.

This is truly the only job where you show up and then it's like, oh man, I'm so tired.

I'm fucking out of it.

Yeah, how are you?

I'm really out of it.

Oh, perfect.

Good.

That's good.

Use it.

That's it.

It's also the most like

dog shit job in the world or even like hobby if you stream as a hobby.

Because like, thank God Paige also streams.

So like the empathy is there.

Because like,

oh man, oh, that metaphor stream was rough.

Oh, I'm so tired.

Hold on while I move 40 feet so that I can sit down and play metaphor to relax.

No, it's different, though.

No, no, it's it's it's different.

No, yeah, how do you explain?

No, it's different.

I swear, there's gonna be, there's gonna be some great studies in in a couple decades on this shit.

Isn't it fun to be like pioneering into the unknown?

Yeah, dude.

It's so fun.

To create all the mistakes that everyone's going to.

I'm guinea pigging myself.

Exactly.

All the data is going to be pulled from us.

It's going to be awesome.

Okay, so let's go.

No spoilers, but

how'd that?

Okay, so Metaphor ends really strong.

Nice.

Good.

My total takeaway is that I really, really appreciate that Metaphor tried a bunch of different shit.

And I think from a gameplay standpoint, it's definitely a more fun game to play.

Like the Archetype system is better than the Persona system.

But overall, I did not come away from it as strongly and as in love with it as I did for three, four, or five Persona.

Okay.

You started talking about feeling your way towards the end about two weeks ago.

So

was the ending here a classic Atlas style?

We're going to linger as long as possible.

The pacing doesn't.

No,

pacing's aces.

This is where we say farewell.

No.

The pacing is aces.

It doesn't overstay its welcome.

Excellent.

It gives you tons of time at the end.

Like, I did, in fact, finish the game with like 10 days of just going to bed.

Okay.

Just I'm just going to go to bed because I got to run out this calendar.

Wow.

Which is wild because I've never experienced that in an Atlas game before.

Yeah, when you press the touchpad and you see it says some people went straight to bed, I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Yeah, no, you got time.

You're good.

Yeah.

There's a couple things that start to happen that

are

objective improvements in a vacuum,

but I don't think they make the thing better overall.

I think that the persona-style game has gotten weaker and weaker with their use of teleporting around conveniently.

Huh.

Okay, so you don't have to travel and deal with the journey from location to location.

But also, this is a game that's taking place in a large fantasy country versus like running around a lot of different places.

Running around school, you know?

But

I'm actually specifically referring to like teleporting to shops.

Oh,

quick teleporting in town.

Yeah.

So like I think back to P3, P4, P5, and how like you could, you know, you could, you'd, you'd hop around to different areas, but you always had this thing where like, oh, you got to run down to Shibuya.

And like, you spent like a proportion of your character's daily life section moving from place to place throughin the areas.

Um,

you're at Brielhaven, so I'll use Brailhaven as an example.

Like, I never

ever spent any time in Braulhaven after that first couple of days because it would be like, I'm going to the shop, I'm going to the Coliseum, I'm going to the Beetle guy,

and

just instantly run there.

And so I actually like spent, I didn't get the

vibe of these places nearly as strongly.

There's a couple towns in the end of the game that I barely spent any time in at all.

Interesting.

Okay.

I feel like I'm currently...

So for me, I just

completed the Brialhaven calendar event.

Which is cool.

It's cool.

Also, it's a that this whole third section is an yeah, it's an anti-dungeon.

It's quite interesting.

It's very weird, and I really like that it's super, super weird.

Even combat expectations are super minimalized, and it's actually just like plot-heavy, you know, you know, as opposed to everything.

Very, very strange and interesting.

This is the chill part of the game.

But in terms of how it feels about quick teleporting, I just had some thoughts on that because

I have been, yeah, as once you get to town, you're like, okay, let me go to the armor shop, let me go to the sword shop, update, da, da, da, and you quickly get in and out and do your business without really stepping foot into some of the actual like sections of the town.

Um,

and I noticed that, uh,

once or twice, like,

uh, I would run outside and see somebody that had like just a text prompt that it that wasn't there before.

And talking to them was like a little activity for like, oh, hey, help me do this thing or that thing and raise your ranking with the people.

And I was like, like, oh, so there's some good reasons to like hit the streets every now and then.

Oh, absolutely.

Like, when you want to debate the gang, like the other candidates, like, you have to go check manually.

And I, and there were a lot of days where I was looking to debate, and I noticed I was like, I couldn't find anyone, you know?

Um,

so, and like, yeah, going to check manually then involved like literally teleporting to each town and trying to figure out what was going on, whether anyone was there or not.

Um,

and so I kind of had this

thing of like, okay, as the ability to quick travel got better and better, I was like, this is awesome.

And then it streamlines things.

And then there's times where I'm like, you know, going back to the Gauntlet Runner and teleporting to Grand Trad is taking too long.

I'm just going to go through the S-Link menu.

And it says that Maria wants to talk.

So you do it that way.

And then you get there faster, right?

You know, like, you go there instantaneously.

Yeah, and like you, you need to speed up the already instantaneous method of getting to another location.

But no, that transition is taking too long.

Yeah.

And like, it's kind of like, okay, but you, when you see these people out on the streets that are worth talking to, that have like some good stuff for you, you kind of be like, okay, hold on, back up a bit.

Actually, live in this town a little bit and explore it, you know?

Um, and I liked that I had like a quick, a reminder to go do that every once in a while.

So, I

like that you have the option when you're in a hurry to do that for prepping stuff, but then if you kind of want to just have a day seeing what's around or stuff like that.

And maybe I'm early enough that it's not at a full-on, like, okay,

you're in there.

Okay.

But I did feel like

I was moving around too quickly and ignoring too much.

And then the game gave me a good reason to kind of slow that down.

So that leads to, because that's like definitely to taste, right?

Like, do you want to just go really fast?

Do you want to vibe it out?

And that leads to like part two of that for me is like, I don't think that the game's soundtrack is as good as P3, P4, or P5s

overall.

I think a lot of it, I think the, I think the really incredible tracks

are incredible.

I think the best piece of music in the entire game is the normal ambush battle theme.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very good.

To the point where

all of the boss themes, I was like, I wish this was a normal battle because the normal battle theme is so exciting.

I see.

Okay, I

feel that the

normal town themes are usually just like you know, melodic fantasy themes that are not standing out

like the battle themes are and like a lot of the Esperanto stuff.

But

if you're if your comparison point is the bad,

you know, the funny

persona joy of like hanging out in the different cities and getting that that bop going.

You're not getting the bop running around the cities.

Yeah, so that's kind of like the core big point of these two micro points is like I did not have the the humming along bop of navigating the game world at any point that I did from any of the persona games.

I only I got but I've I was super like the fucking gauntlet runner theme when you're on the road is an absolute banger.

i love that shit every time and i can't spend enough time on the road just because of how awesome it is to hear the

gauntlet runner stuff is incredible um running through dungeons i think those dungeon themes have been excellent as well um

i would just say yeah i'm like if i'm thinking about it i guess the the day-to-day the day-to-day town stuff is fine and but but you're not tapping along with it as you are with like P3, 4, and 5 day-to-day, you know?

Like, my last thing to say about the music is that it's like

the good stuff is good and the great stuff is great, but like, I remember beating P5

and then going to youtuberpeat.com

and throwing the 10 hours rivers in the desert

fucking link in there.

Yeah.

And just having that be the soundtrack of my day-to-day life for multiple weeks.

And yes.

And I don't feel that way about literally any song in this game.

Okay.

See, I, I, there I disagree because I feel like the, because I, you know, it's funny, I just did this because I was creating my

stream music playlist and I was going over persona music and uh some metaphor tracks as well.

And I absolutely feel that like the uh academia themes and like, yeah, I mentioned the gauntlet runner, um, the

ambush battle, like a lot of those themes are like, I want those, I, I'm, I want those playing, I want to hear that shit.

Those Those are the ones that stand out for me.

And going over persona as well, like it's the, it's the rivers in the desert and the life will change and a lot of, and basically a lot of the vocal tracks, you know, are the ones you're kind of looking for.

There's some stuff in between there that like is filler that we don't really think about as much on that really long playlist.

So I think in each of these cases, there's a lot of filler on the persona tracks as well that you kind of are skipping past to get to the really good ones that you remember, you know, the casino infiltration and

arc and all these things, right?

So, obviously, this is like the most subjective according to taste kind of thing.

Like, to some degree, I'm pretty sure I actually just prefer the style of like the more modern persona soundtracks.

Um,

what is not according to taste

is people are going to tell you, hey, Woolly, don't worry, that final boss has hands.

And let me tell you, the final boss does have hands,

However, and this is an incredibly core point:

the way that the archetype system works, you can give yourself those hands way more than you ever could in a persona game.

Like the most busted, like Hasutobi, firing off physical attack shithead you could ever fuse together in a persona game, that would be pretty good.

You can smash the archetype system over your fucking knee

just break the game mechanically entirely.

So I've started to feel that because where I've hit at this point is

the, I'm looking at all the second tier and above archetype evolutions and I can just kind of look and preview what they get.

And the last skill on each of those non-base archetypes is

game-breaking in a lot of cases.

Yeah.

You get the tier threes and tier fours, and you look at these, and you're like, you see, every now and then you'll see a skill, and you're like, that skill by itself

can wreck the whole game.

And that's before you even

fill up the rest of the inheritance with just all passives that support it.

There's another type of upgrade I like seeing, which is this dual tech is actually now a single tech on this particular archetype.

That's a fun one.

And now the new dual tech is the triple tech equivalent of whatever that was.

You just scale it up by one.

So we can add metaphor to a

list of games

that I have gotten to the end to

and optimized the final boss out of existence and had to be told later what it does.

You skipped phases from doing

damage.

I skipped

every mechanic the final boss had.

I did not see it do even one thing.

Oh, no.

All phases.

The whole way through.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

And the final boss does cool stuff and has cool mechanics.

What?

And I had to be informed of them later.

Is this what you wanted?

Is this the conclusion that you have fought for?

So

we had a really,

me and the chat had a very interesting situation where I grinded a little bit around Dungeon 4 and they said you should be fine to beat most of the rest of the game, but there's a bunch of fights that are really hard.

And then I went into, there's a bunch of optional bosses you can do before the final, and I didn't grind again and just completely fucking steamrolled them because I understood how to use the archetype system and what to equip and what to not equip.

And then I'm like, you you know what?

Since the final boss is going to be the final boss, it'll probably be a multi-phase affair.

You know what?

I'll grind out the archetypes on the main character, right, for the stat boosts.

And

just set up my party in such a way that I found something that worked.

And it worked real well because for

like 11 bosses in a row.

I was doing the exact same thing on every character on every turn.

And

just the winning of the winning stack.

Like I found, like, this person cast debilitate, this person does the strike attack, this character does the buff attack, you know, like the cycle, and it's like, oh, I have solved.

Metaphor.

I feel like what happened in the last couple of side quests off the main was I got there and then I started swinging at the enemies and they would die before a fight would happen.

And I went, oh shit, I'm a bit too strong, actually, because the the grunts are not engaging.

And then the regular tough things are coming in yellow.

And I was like, huh, I didn't try grinding, you know?

Yeah.

So

if you ever get to the point where, so I initially, a couple weeks ago, was like, this is one of the best systems ever because you never have to fight trash ever again.

Right.

Cutting your experience in half on auto kills is not enough

because you're still gaining a bunch of experience by just mowing through them because there's no threat.

There's no reason you would ever avoid them.

And I found

that if you ever get out in front of the game on a level basis, the game will never catch back up to you.

Yeah.

It will never catch back up to you.

And even in terms of like just getting a lot of heroes' incense and dropping it on the archetypes I want for the better skills that I'm like, okay, this one gets that credit great skill at level six.

Fuck it, spend it, get that one, you know, yeah, and I'm like, the pace that I'm getting those at is, yeah, it's definitely outpacing the

challenges in question.

Um,

but

I mean, it, it, but it's like, this is without me particularly trying to

yeah, I know, that's my, that's my point.

It's like, I thought I was doing that like, cause I like to grind out and get a bunch of levels, And I did do that.

But

I grinded a couple, I grinded like 10 levels above

the recommended on Dungeon 4 and then never did it again.

And the game was with 40% of its remaining runtime, it was never able to catch up.

Okay.

So here, something I've said about three, P3, P4, and P5 is to me,

P3 has the best final boss, P4 has the best culprit, and P5 has the best crew.

Those are the strengths of those individual games.

Okay, well, this has the best culprit, and it has the best crew.

Okay.

Easy.

Okay.

Easy, no question.

Cool.

Interesting.

Absolutely the best cast they've ever had.

No, absolutely no doubt.

It's all winners.

Awesome.

Okay.

Interesting.

Even the only member of the crew that I'm not madly in love with is still a really good character that I like.

So far, so far, we're on track.

So far, all the pieces that I'm looking at seem to be really high contenders.

But when I compare those games together, those are the takeaways I'm kind of left with.

Yeah, it would take a lot to have anyone

surpass what Heisme is up to at this point.

Heisme is the best character.

It's kind of like.

I kind of you'll find anyone that will disagree with you.

It's kind of broken.

The cast is really strong.

Like Stroll is absolutely the best first bro guy that joins the party they've ever done.

Because he's not an idiot.

He's actually the smart guy in the gang.

He's forward-thinking and intelligent and compassionate.

But Heismei is like a full leap beyond the rest of the cast in Gravitas.

And the fact that he's a cute little Batman.

And I think, look, if we're, because you have to compare fucking Jinpei to Yosuke to

Ryuji, and Ryuji is easily like the winner of those three.

Okay, misogynist,

homophobe,

possibly closeted, homophobe.

Loud guy.

A guy who talks too loud.

Like, oh, what should he, you know?

And yeah, Stroll is not those archetypes at all.

But, well, and that's the thing, is like, he kind of.

Stroll's the main character of a fire emblem.

Okay.

Okay, sure, sure.

Yeah, but, but it's, he's kind of, he's like, you know, the, the, the naive, like, you know,

but, and, and kind of silly at times, but ultimately

simple and good person, you know.

He's, he's almost like a protagonist.

Like, yeah, like, even in the way he looks and stuff, like, he, he, he doesn't have the

he doesn't have the, like, oh, your best friend's the horny one thing going on.

Yeah, and he's not played for goofs.

In fact, Halkenberg is usually the one played for goofs.

And she's even holding, she's holding her head even higher up.

Yeah, and she's played for goofs because she's the most serious member.

So it's like, okay.

Yeah.

In fact, so far, so far, like, no one is the horny one.

I mean, well, maybe the fourth member or fifth, you know,

I don't know.

Like,

it feels as if there's a

like just increase in honor and nobility.

Um, although, yeah, my latest party member is a little bit like, ooh, you know, I mast answer

there is very

there is very

little

romantic or sexual content in this game.

Not none,

but little.

Yeah.

And you, and it's like the whole S-Link system in our brains is like synonymous with like, who are you going to date, right?

Who are you going to pick?

What's your, who's going to be.

And it's totally divorceable.

Who are you going to get to 10 with?

Yeah.

And here it's just like,

like,

ooh, are those two an item?

Nah.

No.

Not interesting.

Absolutely not.

No, they're not.

But yeah, no, metaphor is really strong.

It's an incredibly easy recommend.

I loved it.

I think the gameplay is fantastic.

I think it's brain dead that you can't fight the super boss until you're on New Game Plus.

I hate that.

I think

that

they

think the game gives you so many tools tools to break it that the game can't keep up with you if you decide to break it at all.

And like the system they built is just asking you to synergize and optimize and all sorts of shit.

Yeah, and I guess like, again, I was feeling this strength while not attempting to grind.

So like even at normal pace.

And the interesting thing, too, is like,

while you can spend time going out into areas and kind of picking fights and stuff, it feels like the least useful

way to spend your time, you know, by comparison to everything else you could be doing.

So, like, you know, Coliseum is cool and like there's some great stuff.

Oh, there's okay.

Hey, I'm going to tell you right now: Coliseum has some fucking stuff.

Oh, yeah, I realize.

I absolutely realize that.

And I've been doing that.

I'm like, great.

I want a way to get some fights in and build some XP and use my builds while getting fights that are worth it.

And that feels like the way.

But otherwise, just going out and then, you know, know running in circles just feels like a complete waste of a day um

something i noticed uh as well that i feel is a this is a more of a i guess like an overall

thing that the atlas has been doing since um

i guess p5

no

yeah p5 is probably where they began doing this and it's they've solved an incredible problem um

around p5 is when because they've always had a thing when in these games where you talk to somebody, their portrait pops up, and then you see their 3D model also doing the thing, you know?

Yeah.

But the 3D models have not always been the most expressive, right?

Like, it's only as of the more recent games where the 3D models are simultaneously voicing and are animating the discussion, the voice mouth flaps, and their face expressions and things like that are going.

I feel like thinking back to maybe like

golden or so, you kind of just got the like

vague RPG gesture.

You had

PlayStation 1 Resident Evil voice acting gesturing where they're miming.

Yeah.

Like, don't open that door.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And a lot of the weight was carried by the emotions, like the sweat drops coming off of them and stuff like that, you know?

But

yeah, when you think of like five and three reload and now metaphor, especially, the 3D models are

you can watch them the same as the art

can, and they're both just doing their jobs.

The thing with 3D models, as we know, a problem has always been that they, like with Castlevania, sometimes, fail to convey the artwork and the right expression and the right facial subtleties and details, right?

3D models will work sometimes from some angles and fail spectacularly from other angles.

I

always like,

it's a hit or miss, even when they do an incredible job.

And I feel like, so, for example, in this game, Luis, his 3D model is amazing, and you can often see great expression and detail coming off of that in-game while his artwork on the side is just

crushing it.

Showing you both at the same time covers for any situations where the 3D is kind of failing because the artwork

is going to make up for that in a way.

Do you understand what I mean?

So there are times.

I absolutely know exactly what you mean.

Yeah, so there are times where the 3D models, like, just at the, it's not the exact perfect angle.

It looks like it's okay, but it's not conveying the emotion enough, right?

Talking to Brigitta, for example, Brigitta is a really good one where, like, she has a lot, she has like her

makeup and the actual like extra lines and things that they have on her, the detail on her face.

There are some expressions she makes where she's like, you know, sad in her

in her story, and the 3D model just looks a little dead-eyed, and the angle doesn't convey it, but you see the little shift in the artwork on the side, and that carries the feeling over where the 3D model failed to do so.

It's a really great option select that they run through the entire game.

So, here's where I get to be really unfair because the standards and expectations between these two games are different, but they're so directly comparable that I must.

So, Persona 3 Reload came out earlier this year.

Persona 3 Reloads lip flaps and general 3D 3D model animation during the discussions that you are talking about right now are way better than metaphors.

Metaphor has basic lip flap talking, and like you'll see, and it's first of all, it's synced to the Japanese voiceover because like sometimes you'll see

Will's mouth go up and down when it's not correct.

Totally.

Uh, and it's not lip-synced either.

Whereas Persona 3 Reloads was like absolutely lip-synced

to whatever language language you had, and it looked much better.

And like, Reload was like doing old cutscenes, right?

And old, really old dialogue, and had, you know, they're remaking it, so it's not exactly fair.

But there is something about Reload that really stood out to me extremely strongly.

And this put me down a

like

a mental path to find out that had me checking checking out the like Josh Sawyer's post-mortem on Pillars of Eternity 2.

And it's about voice acting.

And

so in Persona 3 Reload, every single S-Link is voice acted in its totality.

And

so is every single story event.

In Metaphor, there's a shit ton of voice acting.

And then you hit the 80% mark,

and then more and more

and more scenes that are really important

just start to not have voice acting at all.

Okay, they just do the one bark at the top of the line.

Yeah.

But therefore, including like a bunch of dialogue with your party in the final dungeon of the game that seems really vital, that there it seems very important.

And

the first and last bond link are fully voice acted in Metaphor,

but the Victory Lap Bond links aren't.

Okay.

Which sucks a lot.

It's the part of the game I wanted to hear the characters act out the most.

Okay.

Okay.

I've noticed that the links themselves, like the events you go on, are a mix.

Some scenes have it, some scenes don't, you know?

Yeah, it's the first and the last one.

It's one in eight are fully voice acted.

But there's also lines or moments.

Yeah, a line here or there.

Like the it, like when you start out the,

you know, the date or whatever,

there will be a scene that has like the full lines.

And then if they go to a change of location, then it'll go into

the The lines are gone, exactly.

Yeah.

It started to get like

strange in the last month of the game.

And obviously, I'll ask chat to back me up with some yays or nays if they noticed it.

But like, just

lots and lots of interparty conversations of various levels of gravitas that I'm just sitting here going, like, I really, really wish this was fucking voice acting.

So some of that was because the actors are all great.

Front-loaded, then they kind of, yeah, I guess it staggered off towards the end.

And this led to me going back and

finding out there's the Western game equivalent of when this happened.

So

in your traditional CRPGs, like a Pillars or Baldur's Gate, you'd either have really important story moments that were voice acted and like character introductions, but beyond that, it would be like barks or like a line here or there, right?

So Pillars of Eternity 1 is like the best example.

And that gives them a lot of writing freedom because they can change the writing like super late.

You don't have to lock in super early.

And

I watched Josh Sawyer's post-mortem on Deadfire 2, and he basically describes that when Larian's Divinity Original Sin 2 came out,

that had full voice acting for literally every single spoken word in the entire game.

And it kind of ruined it for everybody because that is now the standard going forward.

Unrealistic

though, that might be.

Yeah, and so he speaks and so Pillars of Eternity 2, despite the fact that they were like more than halfway done through the game, the order from on high from their publisher came down that said, game's got to have full voice acting now.

And they went, oh, wish we had planned for that beforehand.

And now with Baldur's Gate 3, that expectation is even more

cemented.

Baldur's, for sure.

Yeah.

Like every single random character in the world's like fuck off town dialogue is voice acted.

Here's the thing, though.

With those shortcomings, as far as Atlas is concerned, though,

if they front load and then have some stuff that's crucial that's not missing later.

I feel like the approach they've taken in the with the same thing with the dual art style.

I feel like the approach they've taken has been to overwhelm you with things to look at to confirm the emotion that you're supposed to be feeling.

So when someone's saying something, you have the art, you have the, you're reading what they're saying, you have the 3D acting it out, or the 3D animation playing it out, and then you have the bark at the top of the line going, you know, like, no, or whatever, as it says, like, this can't be happening, you know?

And like, and the approach is to kind of give you an overwhelming amount of information with each line to look at or check or hear that you never stop to think like

a second.

It's absolutely adequate to understand the emotional tone of the scene, but I don't want the final time I talk to these characters to be a text box.

I want to hear Heisme's actor tell me about how Heisme feels.

And it's one of those things where, like, every Atlas game had this to some degree.

Like, you know, most of the time, S-Links weren't even voiced, right?

And it's just like, ah, only the really important story stuff is the stuff that gets full voice acting.

But after they did P3 Reload, where it's like every single thing, now I'm spoiled.

Now I'm like, oh, like I could, every line of dialogue spoken by gourmet king is voiced in Persona 3 Reload.

Are you telling me that gourmet king is more important than hearing the end of

Heisme's story about his child?

Yeah.

I think they are saying gourmet king are more important.

Yeah.

No, it's about budget.

It's about they had more budget for voice acting on reload because yeah.

And you know that there's a you know that like there's a version of the game that they have going where like all the lines are being inserted over the fact and you know they just have like the generic barks there at first and I can imagine them replacing it.

Yeah, there's times where you see the flaps desync as well and stuff.

So

yeah.

And it wasn't like me going, darn this game.

Oh, how could they be so lazy?

It's, you know, it's like, I want to talk to this character very badly.

And I want to hear what they have to say.

And you know,

it's very likely that they kind of just take that full script, they roll through it, and they go, we have

a thousand lines we can highlight for each character here to be voiced, you know, and then the rest we just can't do.

And so you're just going to pick out what you think are the emotionally resonant ones and

that'll be that, you know?

But yeah, okay.

I can see that being a bumper.

It only started to really like pop up like for real during like the last dungeon because like shit is popping off.

And I'm like, this would have been voice acted in earlier dungeons.

Okay, okay.

But yeah, for the Western games, like, yeah, Divinity, Original Sin 2, and Baldur's Gate 3 have like totally ruined it.

And like, there's no going back.

Of interest, when Josh was talking about it during his post-mortem, he said that Pillars 1 did not have full voice acting.

And one of the biggest pieces of criticism they got was that it was really hard to get people to stream Pillars of Eternity one because streamers don't like huge big blocks of text

disco fucking Elysium and as a person who despite everyone wanting me to stop streamed the entirety of pillars of eternity one

let me tell you I did not want to read gigantic big blocks of text so formatting makes a difference because disco elysium's paragraphs paragraphs rolled through on that ticker and you feel them like pages of a book and visual novel style line by line blocks appearing in this in Metaphor and in Phoenix Write, which I'm currently playing, give you a little bit more chance to digest piece by piece.

Even though you know you're doing you're in for a while, it just doesn't feel as daunting as when that full fucking dialogue list goes up on disco's case, you know?

It really is, yeah it it for streaming purposes it's you know that's not the average gamer's like like situation but like it fucking feels horrible and tiring and exhausting when you when you see it like that um

that made or break that the the voice acting added to the to the final cut oh absolutely like saved

this the the game there and it's all and it's wild because I'm like this is one of the best games ever made you know that

yeah and but you and I looked at that game and Paige looked at that game and I'm sure a dozen or hundreds of other streamers looked at that game, and they're like, well, I'd be insane not to play this on stream, but I don't feel up to being able to read all this dialogue on stream.

So I guess I'll just wait and hope.

Yeah.

And like, that turned out well for us on disco.

Also, it turns out, and not only was it voice acted, it was like unbelievably philosophically voice acted at that.

So

cool.

Okay.

What do you think your

hour count was at around?

It was 90, something 91, 92, something like that.

Got it.

I feel no desire for an upgraded version.

Well, yeah.

Okay.

But

like, no, no, like, like, Pete, like, once they started doing those, you looked at them and, like, when Persona 5 came out, you could be like, oh, I wonder what they could change and upgrade it or whatever.

And, like, yeah, you could kind of see it.

Yeah, no, the archetype system is extremely complete.

and the bonds that you have are extremely succinct and well-formed and

like very succinctly.

I can see the updates that come with these versions, though.

I could see a part of it almost being like, we can't help it.

We just see little things that we're like, wow, we can make that a little bit, you know?

Oh, there is, there is like a hole in the game.

Okay.

There is a part of the game that you get to and you're like, this used to be a full-scale dungeon with a whole month associated with it.

Okay.

And we're not going to get to do it.

Like, you can see where they just went, no,

and took it out.

If they, you know, if the promise that was made is the promise that's kept, and this is all going to be DLC and not new versions for sale, then whatever.

That's fine.

I'm down with whatever,

you know, extra stuff gets thrown in as long as it can be thrown into the existing progress I have.

Cool.

But yeah, Metaphor is a good game.

Thumbs up.

It's on sale right now on Steam, actually.

Is it?

Yeah, it's 25% off, which at least one person in my chat was like massively fucking pissed off about because they're like, I beat the game like yesterday and it's already 25% off.

It came out like eight weeks ago.

Well, isn't this just like a holiday, like Black Friday?

Yeah, but it's pretty uncommon for Atlas games to go on sale within their first year of release.

Oh, even.

So it's like great for everybody that didn't buy it.

Not as great for people who bought it on the first day.

I feel like holiday sale things almost don't count because it's not like a

permanent discount on the game, right?

It's like these.

Yeah, but holiday sales also exist in like a weird alternate reality.

Like Ubisoft can't make up its mind as to what Far Cry 5 should cost because Far Cry 5 is either $79.99 every single day of the year, unless there's a sale, at which point they always cut it 90% down to $7.99.

It's like, so which is the real price?

Because it's on sale for $7.99 literally every time it goes on sale.

Because, yeah, I feel like a permanent slash is one where you feel more like, ah, goddammit, you know, as opposed to like a window of time where I can, it doesn't feel as bad to me.

I don't know.

Okay.

Cool.

You know what?

I'm just thinking, because

you did the calendar event in Metaphor around Brawlhaven, right?

Yep.

That is the moment where I prepared for like a big sortie and then you didn't get one.

And

after that point, the game couldn't catch up to me because I prepped for like a big deal.

They really make it sound like you've got a fucking juice.

No, man.

Yeah.

Holy shit.

They really make it sound like, and you do expect, you know, emotionally for it to be a big deal.

You steamroll it.

And you're like, it's a joke.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

I was going to talk about metaphor as well.

So, like, yeah, that just all rolls in together there.

Yeah.

What else, what's up with you?

I just wanted to talk about metaphor right away.

I played a little bit of Tactical Breach Withards.

Tactical Bleeth With Tactical Tactical.

Tactical.

I'm going to

tactical Bleeth Withard.

I

played some Tactical Breach Wizards, and that is a fun concept

with great execution.

It really dedicates itself to the natural results of its stupid setting.

Absolutely.

So, the concept of what if A plus B, in this case, what if wizards plus, you know, like SWAT team style

tactical gear come together and you see a wand with a silencer on it, and you see a body art, you see a bullet Kevlar, and then like a knife where the shoulder knife, like holster would go.

But it's a magic dagger, you know?

Yeah.

And you're like, yeah, okay, I get it.

You hit the door, you put a rune on it, and the rune is like C4 exploding.

Breach.

Very fun concept.

So you can't just defenestrate everyone.

But you're going to try.

And then the game's like, fucking throw everyone in this level out of a window.

Yes.

So, in terms of literally, like, not just look-feel animation, like, even the model quality, it's very reminiscent of fights and tight spaces.

Oh, it sure is.

The way things get from, like, spot to spot, the pacing of which you move has a little bit of that going on with it, too.

So,

yeah, perfect information game.

You are,

you know, planning your steps ahead of time and making sure that the order in which you take out all the enemies is

optimal.

And

I really right away found it fun to be like, here's all the special challenges for like.

Yeah, which you're like, oh, they seem really hard.

And then you get a couple and you're like, oh, maybe they're not that hard.

No, but that, and those are the things where I immediately I'm like, here we go.

It's the into the breach little extra goals that become the

goal for me, you know?

A lot of fun with that.

And I want to say, early on in with the

one of the first big missions before you have a boss fight in it,

there is one where you have to knock like three enemies out of a window in the same turn and then do something else.

And it takes a lot of thinking.

I spent a lot of time on that.

That specific one.

Good.

That was a really fun one to piece together that showed, like, okay, they have...

They understand the assignment on these types of games.

So very, very fun and charming with that.

The dialogue is opt-in for Marvel dialogue.

So you can choose to say he's right behind me, isn't he?

Or you can skip that.

But it is there.

And,

you know, it's fun.

It's quirky.

But like they're yucking it up as they go through the whole thing.

And I didn't get to see it by the end of like, I guess, the, you know, first couple, like, I guess, yeah, the first couple missions in the intro chapter.

chapter, but uh,

I'm hoping for some of those fun tile swapping skills you see in these games where you're like, okay, grab someone on your left and on your right and swap places and shoot them out the other way.

Or, you know, like have a, a, uh, um,

like, swing a chain that hits somebody and then it comes back and hits the person behind you.

Or, you know, like all these fun things you can do with just the concept of like, how many squares around you do you affect in what way, and then which way are you pushing or pulling the enemies, you know?

Um, I want to see a lot of that spells.

Midnight Suns, if you like that, oh, yeah, right, because there's a, there's like an entire

like 40% of all cards in that game are knock someone in a direction that is harmful to them.

Um,

and the uh, something that I did not expect about Tactical Breach Wizards either is

Perfect Information in this case is a game mechanic that you have to activate.

Every other game shows you a little ghost

interface of like the enemy is about to step forward and swing at you and you're like, okay, cool.

Don't be there.

Here you've got to click through the plan and then simulate to see what would happen.

as the main character's ability is to like pre-cog.

And then if you like the result, you can commit to it or you can go back and change it and it's a little more work than i would want that mechanic to be because i i prefer when i can just see where things are already going um trajectory wise but because it's in

like because it's in lore reasoning is like part of what's his ability and stuff it i get it and it feels it feels fine you know i think that it gives it a really different taste so like into the breach is like perfect information is like you're gonna to sit there and

you're playing the game in your mind in a lot of cases before committing to it on paper.

Yeah.

Whereas

it's the equivalent of like doing an algebra problem in your head and then writing down the answer, right?

Whereas in tactical breach wizards, you're like, oh, I have a really good idea.

Oh, that would not work.

Oh, that would work really badly.

So all right, let's let's roll that back.

It's more like show your work and that kind of solving it.

Yeah.

And so that pacing of like trying this it failed redo try this it failed is actually unlike the you know so into the breach uh shogun showdown these are the comparisons fights and tight spaces but when you're doing that particular element that's actually a lot like what it is to play phantom brigade um yeah when you set up a you set up a your your mech and like how they're going to move an attack on the timeline and what's going to come in what direction like you try out a couple different runs before you commit to playing it out so a phantom brigade does a lot of that and transistor also does a lot of that right?

You move around in Transistor on that timeline a few times before you're like, this is the one I'm going with.

I feel like this is the best way to, you know, deal with the threat.

So,

yeah, it becomes even more like genres being pulled in here just from the pacing setup and change there.

And I still do prefer the one where I see the world coming at me, and you have to like find a way to, you know, squeeze around the bullet lines and limbo them um

but but but it's fun here you know this is this is this is definitely not too bad so uh that was a big part of it that i i thought was great and then

it has the single best cosmetic currency i have ever seen in any game ever fucking phenomenal you have to earn confidence to pull off different cosmetic looks.

How do you earn confidence?

Oh, you do those little special conditions because so you did, you acted real cool.

You feel cool enough to wear your cool jacket.

You have to do things that require confidence.

Ballsy plays in the mission reward you with confidence points, which you spend to get the crazier, wackier looks.

You know, can you pull this off?

It's incredible.

What an amazing system.

I can't believe it hasn't been done before.

Amazing.

I love that.

That's great.

That sells that, that whole concept in one shot.

So yeah, that's a fun one for sure.

It does feel, too, that when taking all these kind of

these types of games,

amongst which I'll put Slay the Spire as well to some degree with like, you know, setting up your moves and progressing roguelike.

Into the not into the breach.

Tactile Breach Wizards

is on the more

time-intense missions part of that.

So you can do a run of, you can do a stage in Shogun Shodown in like less than five minutes.

You know, you can do, you can do honestly like a minute 30 seconds to get through a level.

Here, it's just bigger.

It's more involved.

It feels like you're doing sets of stages.

Yeah, it feels like each one is going to be much, much heavier.

And I imagine, as it's a triple-A game, that's what Midnight Suns is as well, right?

Like,

no.

Really?

It's not.

It's five minutes.

Minute long sessions.

So minute.

Okay.

Well, okay.

Midnight Suns is not.

It's in the middle there.

So first of all, Midnight Suns is not a triple-A game.

That is a firm AA.

Okay.

And when you go on a mission in Midnight Suns, it is not...

So

you'll go on one stage and then come back.

Right?

So you're not doing like five little rooms in a row like you do in Tactical Breach Wizards, but your given stage is going to take a little longer than an Into the Breach map will.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

I would say

that

it is half as long as an XCOM mission.

And that is where I was ultimately going.

I realize in this discussion, too, that I'm like, huh.

XCOM is a big frame of reference for all these things, but not quite the same because in XCOM, you don't know for certain what's going to happen on the next turn.

You see,

you really don't, right?

You see percentages that you cannot trust.

So, the unknown variable means that that game is just like it's a completely different thing.

But then, second, and this is probably

part of like

it changes the feeling for me.

Like, I never really got into XCOM, you know, outside of like when we did that run back in the day and played it, um,

LPing it.

Failed all the way through, yeah.

Uh, I

I feel like my desire for shorter, quicker runs is that same scratch I have when I go like, yo, let me get on Ballotrove for a minute and get out.

An XCOM mission that takes upwards of

maybe 30 minutes, depending on the XCOM missions.

Like 20, 30 minutes, I'd say.

It's a huge commitment that I feel like I'm kind of like,

it's not a, it's, no, no, I'm framing this in the wrong way.

It's what that game is trying to do is perfect for what it's going for.

What I usually do is you can't just sit down, bang out a mission, and then walk away.

XCOM's a fucking sit-down and play some fucking video games.

And

I'm not finding myself in that mood as often these days as I am to like scratch a little itch and then come back and sit down for a few, do another thing, get back to my task.

Suns lives in a weird space where it's definitely longer than a breach map.

But like

you can, it is like you sit down, you bang out like a easier, like non-narrative mission in 10 minutes.

But the narrative missions that have like cutscenes attached to them and are way, way harder will take like 20.

Okay.

Yeah, Into the Breach could,

the bigger missions with like tons of enemies and reinforcement waves could take,

you know, 15

they could go heavy, but the fast ones are like, you know, like, yeah, five or so,

especially once you like get used to your team and you're going quickly through it.

So, um,

so yeah, into the so I feel like right now, um, Breach Wizards is landing in that like higher time investment space for

my buck, and that means that like I'll probably pick at it a little bit less for now,

um, a little bit more in the future once I'm done with like Shogun Shodown and stuff like that.

Uh, but very fun.

Um,

we also had Get Get into Fighting Games for Rivals of Aether 2.

Reggie

brought his homie Ned, who came over and was a guest to kind of teach us a bit more about Rivals of Aether.

And, hey, Rivals of Aether 1 was my favorite of the platform fighters, the Smash Clones.

And Rivals of Athens.

And how come it didn't beat Game of the Year, Fighting Game of the Year, multiverses?

Damn.

The Pope was too strong.

the aura was under was was could not be cracked um

there was not enough tithes paid

um

i feel like aether 2 is easily just running away with it as far as i'm concerned it's my favorite not smash smash style by the way all jokes aside uh even though i'm not crazy about aether

I totally agree with you that Rivals of Aether 1 was absolutely the best not Smash game.

Yep.

Part of it was like it was doing more of its own thing.

And it had its own feel that was more distinct.

So here's the interesting part.

Coming into it, like in two,

there's a lot of unique things

that are really doing its own thing applies really well to like the character kits, but the game in a lot of ways is actually just, is actually doing a lot of things that are very Smash-like, but it's just doing them exceptionally well, right?

And I think we've had to- Get real labor of love energy off of it.

Yes, it feels like

each of these games has now come out and had its different thing where it's like, how are they going to stand out?

And Multiversus had the 2v2 part of it

and being shit.

It also had that.

And then it had its other problems,

but they pushed that kind of aspect as their identity.

Hey, Wooly, hey, hey, hey, Wooly.

You might not be a fan of our pizza now, but what if we took the pizza you're eating into the back

and then pissed all over it and brought it back out for you?

How about you like it now?

I'm not going to pretend.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend I didn't have fun with Multiversus when it came out and when I was going to.

Oh, I totally did.

I totally had fun with Multiversus when it came out.

I feel like the progression of events has made that game a much of a bummer over time, but like, we can't go and make it sound like PlayStation All-Stars

held a candle to it.

You know what I mean?

Hey, you know what PlayStation All-Stars didn't do?

Go ahead and

come back, yeah.

And then come back worse.

Right.

It came out and it was bad, but Isaac from Dead Space, his rival was Zeus.

And that was stupid as shit.

But yeah, I do want to, you know, when you line them up and you kind of get those, and then you get your, you know, everything from TMNT Smash Up to,

you know, Nickelodeon and so on.

Slap City stood out because it had a clutch button, and the clutch button is really fun.

What a great concept.

That's like the name.

It's fun.

But I feel Rivals just always felt like it had the most love put into it.

And my go-to example of this is the way it treated Shovel Knight.

When you look at Shovel Knight as a guest in that game sure shovel knight has been a guest in every game and there's often a very predictable but solid move kit that he gets you know you got the down shovel you've got the fishing you've got the spinner you know you got all the things you expect to see but the rivals of aether one had so much extra love put in his his just the amount of the lengths they went to to make him as accurate as possible and have way more in there than your average like you know platform fighter would expect um

it showed yeah it showed love you know and so i feel like that goes into a lot of all these other all the other characters as well and you feel it you feel it in the amount of things they can do the possibilities and a lot of what the system has going for it um

and and it's it's just fun man uh the parry system in particular i was talking about it from trying out the demo earlier but i think that's a really fun addition to the game um that you uh

you know you can use to like call out big predictable moments and like get a nice big reward for it but you could also do like regular dodging and spot dodging and the things that you you know like if you're used to smash movement you could you could always do um it finds these places where uh these other games and smash included didn't um give you options and it says hey when you're hanging off the ledge what if you pressed your b button you could do a ledge special yeah what would happen man that's cool when you grab the someone you can hit them or you can throw them or you can do a grab special you know and like and by having the ability to like you you have the time to land one grab special and then do a toss in a certain direction you know like a lot of these things are just like oh yeah that's a more fun way to to to implement things you know um

it was it was great it was great i think it i think it stands out as as as yeah it's the best of these these not smash games and um it's not going to get the attention it deserves, unfortunately, just because that's the way it goes.

But I do feel like it's nice to as well

know that you don't have to think about, like, hey, you want to jump online?

Yeah, of course, they've got everything rolled back and working and all that set up and good to go.

You don't even have to think about it.

Yeah, we're living in a golden age in which you are now a stupid pariah for your online being weird or non-useful in a lot of situations.

And as a side note,

yeah, and as a side note, the Aether verse, you know, is a thing because there's like the card game, there's the dungeon crawler, you know, there's like all these different like genres they're kind of getting into as well.

So

shout outs, you know, Dan Fornes and

Rivals of Aether 2, man.

It's real, real good.

It's a lot of fun.

And

I...

Yeah, I think it stands out.

I think it's absolutely worth your attention.

And it was fun.

Yeah, shout out to Ned as well, who came over and kind of showed us some of the tech and some of the cool things you could do.

I've always liked Krag in that game, and

Krag continues to be really good in this one, too.

And seeing what you can do with these characters being played really well, it looks like

they look just unique and doing their own bit, and it's a lot of fun, you know?

The way you, I always like the way that like, the orca, you put the puddle down, and then you can recover by going through to that, you know, or the

maple where you put the, the, the flowers, and then you can whip to the flower.

Like, all these little bits are just kind of really fun and well thought out.

There's a new giant elephant with like an axe that like has to step in his lava, like walk on lava to like get his to buff himself and get stronger and make his some of his moves better and stuff.

And they're just, yeah, they're fun.

There's just a lot of fun and great stuff going on with it.

So, So

everyone go check that out.

I hope Aether continues to do well, or at least well enough to continue to exist.

It's one of those things I look at and I'm like,

yeah, this isn't for me.

But I'm also like appreciative of its continued quality and existence.

It is, yes.

And something I pointed out as well is that,

you know, as we do, like, as you are well aware, there are different proportions and styles of furries out there, right?

When you

have

a wide variety of that, yeah, art style changes,

the heads, the number of heads high, whether they're more like Jim Henson-esque or

going into, yeah, like however you cartoon them.

Or do you want to be like a tiny little furry rabbit in this game called Atlas that has good reviews?

And I'm like, this looks cool.

And then I scroll past the fact that it has an absolutely degenerate ass slider in it that has the fucking shorts right up the bunny rabbit's ass.

There you go.

And then you click on it on Steam and it's like overwhelmingly positive.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I don't know if those were, I don't know what the positive, I don't know what proportion of what positive of what part is these reviews are coming from, but apparently it's pretty good.

Well, there you go, right?

So look, Zootopia, Beastars, and My Little Pony, different styles of, you know, anthropomorphic character design here.

The

furries, character designs in the Aether verse, it feels, are like Disney's Robin Hood style.

Okay.

And those are pretty good.

So pre.

So, no.

I think those are pretty good ones.

Closeted era furries.

I mean, Robin Hood was before they knew what they were doing.

I wouldn't.

That's not the case here.

I think Aether knows what it's doing, but it just proportionally reminds me of that.

You know,

I feel like

that's what I'm seeing here.

Anyways, anyways, yeah, no, by the time Minerva Mink came around, it was too late.

By the time Minerva Mink came around, somebody walked by at the guy drawing that.

I was like, get the fuck out of here.

They're never going to let you put this fucking bitch in the kids' cartoons.

Like, yeah, you fucking bet.

I mean, you know, they knew that they were making sexy animals, but they did not know that they were sculpting a generation of young, impressionable minds that were watching these things.

Yeah, and it'll never go back.

You can't go back now.

The contagion has existed.

So

it's in the water.

All right.

So, yeah, that

is going to be pretty much my week.

We're gonna be we did some Phoenix right yesterday, schedule-wise.

That's continuing.

And tomorrow, but a bum ba bum, we are starting cyberpunk.

Hey!

So come swing over to Woolly vs.

That's on Twitch and on YouTube.

We're gonna be getting into

the first session, seeing how that feels.

And then

on Thursday,

I think I'm going to

take a look at and probably

continue through

1000 times resist.

I want to check that out.

So I was thinking about that after Phoenix, right, but I think I'm just going to start it now.

You know what?

That 1,000 Times Resist is such a great game to talk about

after the conversation we had about the voice acting because I was finishing up Metaphor and people were like, you should try 1,000 Times Resist.

And I'm like, answer me the one question, and this one question will determine if the chance of me playing it is 0%

or anything higher than 0%.

And it is, does 1,000 Times Resist have full voice acting and the answer was yes ah awesome very cool so like that made it from a well I will probably never play this to maybe I will play it stuff okay um yeah

I know as well that um

things when when we run three things it gets a little spotty on the schedule but I think um Phoenix rights should be wrapping up shortly um but uh yeah we had a slot here so I'm just gonna get that looked at.

Phoenix, right?

It's a fun game, but man, it's sometimes impossible to figure out when the fucking game is going to end.

We got them.

There's no, here's a videotape of them committing the murder and a signed confession.

How they get out of this.

Hey, look, it's some bullshit I pulled out of my ass.

I mean, I think, I think as well,

the only thing I can trust is the turnabout theme.

Because when you get cornered and then you get um

I don't know them perfectly, but there's three levels of escalation, right?

Yeah, and when you get from the first, the first one is when like, oh shit, I caught you, and the second one is like, now you're cracking.

But if you never get to the final one, you know the case is not done yet.

You know, we might go for another day, you know?

So I'm relying on listening to when I hear all three, that's when I feel like their back is against the wall, you know?

They also kind of get caught in like their their own, like, and you notice it more as the games go on.

You get caught in this cycle where you're like, well, this is the third case.

So the likelihood of wrapping this up on day one is zero.

Like, it's not, no matter how cases, because each case is 20% or 30% longer than the case before it.

So even though it looks like I got them dead to rights, I know something's coming down.

Something's going to happen.

Gonna be dramatic.

Unknown people just showing up in the fucking courtroom.

Or you hit them with the fuck with your big shot, and then they just kind of tank it and go, Yeah, and like, yeah, so fuck, we're gonna be here another day.

Just because I own the gun that shot them doesn't mean, and I wanted them dead, doesn't mean that I shot them because I have an unreliable alibi that you'll need to interview tomorrow.

I was saying it in, I was saying it when we were playing, but I'm like, I'm just getting hit with the uh fucking Joey Buttafuco situation over and over: of just like,

I could not stand my wife, she She was the worst.

I hated her.

I didn't kill her.

No.

You're like,

okay.

You know, like,

the, yeah, it was that, that, that type of vibe.

Um,

anyways, we will be checking that out this week.

Uh, Saturday, no stream, uh, but perhaps Friday instead.

So, uh, check my Twitter and my blue sky for the schedule.

Um,

yeah, that's pretty much it for me.

All right.

I got to use the restroom, and then I have a bunch more week to talk about, actually.

Be right back.

Oh, what you eating, man?

Protein bar.

Fuck yeah.

All right, let's see.

Hey, it's Pat.

What did Pat play this week?

All right, so I beat Metaphor.

That's done.

What else?

Oh, yeah.

So every new stage of development for your baby is the fucking coolest thing ever.

Until they become like kids and talk back and shit or whatever.

But you know, you just enjoy it while it's good, right?

No, I joke, obviously.

It's always going to be good.

But

the newest trick is the baby will put his hand on his mouth and go

when you, when you, when you say hello to him, he's blowing kisses.

Wow.

Ready for the the stage.

And

like,

so there's like, I love my baby.

I'm so proud of my baby.

And then there's like, you're at a restaurant with your quiet, well-behaved baby, and he looks at an old lady one table over and smiles and goes,

and you see that person just fucking

die inside.

Just, yes, implodes into a black hole.

100%.

And you're like, yeah.

got him and then

paige talked about it on her stream and i talked about it on my stream but i should mention it here that uh paige and i can confirm that we made the first

genuine

fucking mistake parenting this child like

did it and we're immediately like shouldn't have done that That that's going to come back on us real bad.

So,

you know, babies need to try new foods.

So, this means you make dinner or you go out somewhere, and here you go, little baby.

Here's a little piece of food.

Do you like it?

No, you don't like it.

Oh, you do like it.

You know, so hey, guess what?

Kids like chicken fingers and chicken nuggeties.

Fucking shocker, right?

This kid likes pickles and lemons and shit like that.

Oh, that's crazy.

Right.

But then

we saw like that

chocolate syrup that like hardens into like a shell on like ice cream.

So I've never seen it before.

Yeah, the dip the coconut.

So Paige was like, oh, you've never had that?

We got to try that.

So

we'll pick up ice cream.

We don't usually have ice cream in the house, so we'll pick up ice cream.

And so, like, we've given the kid like a little piece of cake and we've given him a little piece of this or that.

So we gave him like what was the equivalent of like a single gram, like, you know, the tip of a spoon of vanilla ice cream.

And the kid, you saw like every neuron fire up simultaneously.

And he grabbed the spoon.

And

then for like four days afterwards, he would, he would pinch his fingers like this and go, ah, ah, and hit his chin.

And you're like, do you want chicken nuggies?

Do you want toast?

Do you want a banana?

Do you want berries?

No.

He would, he would fucking like flap his arms going,

and it's like, oh, fuck he's been asking for ice cream for days

and he's getting mad that there's no ice cream now that was last week

he seems to have forgotten what the ice cream feels like right now because he's back to eating like normal okay but like there was that there was that fucking day there we're like shit yeah does this kid only gonna fucking eat ice cream now you know that monkey god damn it the monkey loves those those cucumber slices until it sees the grape go by and goes get the fucking cucumber out of my face

and so like yeah okay ice cream is off the table no more trying out ice cream that is a mommy and daddy food only

but like you know bullet dodged but grazed yeah yeah yeah right there are some there are some food pleasures that like you're gonna need to wait a little bit to hit but it's crazy because like we gave him like a little tiny piece of cake on his first birthday, and he was like, that's fine.

He didn't, you know, the sugar craziness hadn't locked in genetically or something.

No, you need to save it till you can use it as an incentive to control behavior.

That's

that's that is how you end up with a pat situation.

You don't want that.

That's how you give yourself

disordered eating

in regards to sweets.

You don't do that.

That's bad to do.

No, the good rewards that come from following and doing as you're told, you know.

So, yeah, you know what?

So, the only thing that sweets will be

for

is every time he does a good job or gets a good grade on a test, or any time he's sad,

just give him as many sweets as he can eat during those two crucial time periods.

Let's associate

feelings of success and reward

with unhealthy eating.

Bro, dude, I was so doomed.

It was so funny.

Take those two

and put a marry the concepts together.

Like, okay, I was a shy child, very shy.

So when I went out and like went out and did social things or like,

you know, did really well at like a social gathering that I was nervous about, here's candy.

Oh, yeah.

And

you open up that tub.

May have given me bad habits.

You open up that tub and you peel the foil back and inside is just the word happiness.

And you just grab your spoon and you get rid of it.

I once described, Paige asked me once, like, why do I like sweet sugary treats so much?

And I said, like, you ever like act, like you say it, and you didn't realize that it was your true feeling until it's out of your mouth and now it's out into the world.

Yeah, that happened.

I was like, oh, because it feels like happiness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There you go.

That's it.

It's you go from being stressed to just happy.

Like no matter what's happening, you can be stressed and freaked out and you just eat a candy and then you're just happy and you're relaxed.

Like, oh, let's start early.

Yeah, no.

So

no more trying out ice creams for the baby that he had the one gram and that was like crack cocaine.

So no more of that.

Let's see.

As for, And he's the most perfect angel ever, and I love him.

Someone in the chat brought up getting cheated out of the quarter piece of pie in my childhood.

Yeah, no, I'm still mad about it.

Anyway,

that pie should have been shared.

You know,

sweets are

most effective when

you learn that.

Or as long as there are still good things in the world, then you don't need those treats as much now you know sure as reality as reality starts to to starts to happen they they they they shine even brighter

now i want to eat a bunch of candy just talking about this damn it yeah you

yeah i do

hey don't don't enable shame shame on you um nigga i got diabetes what the fuck you think this is

i thought you were pre i thought you were pre-diabetes I hate the real thing.

I hated it.

That's why I have it.

You're doing this now.

Yeah, but I'm back now.

But I'm back now.

I am back.

It's true.

Yeah.

So, like, Nito, you tasted it for a little while.

It's permanent.

You came back off it.

It's permanent.

Once you have it, it's remission.

No, it's not permanent.

Nah.

Yeah.

I knew a guy, and he was diabetes, and then he got way less fat, and then his doctor was like, you're cured.

Right.

Yeah, I prestige you.

Well, well you know hold on yep let me describe that slightly more accurately

that is what that guy told me

got it okay that like that he told me that he lost a bunch of weight and his doctor said you are cured of your diabetes

I was not in the doctor's office with him at the time.

The phrase, I'm sure that's the exact phrasing the doctor used.

Probably.

Verbatim.

Got it.

Probably.

All right.

So,

did you know that the people who made Dead Cells split off into multiple developers?

There's Motion Twin, and then there's an offshoot of Motion Twin?

I did not know that.

So, I did know that Motion Twin did recently develop something I played.

Was it Astral Ascent?

No.

Was it Windblown?

No.

Okay, well, they made one of those,

and I can't tell you which one it is.

Okay.

So I played Astral Ascent and Windblown

the split-offs of Dead Cells.

Huh?

You remember how Dead Cells was 2D, but had like a weird 3D aspect to it?

Did it?

What was 3D average?

Or like there were platforms

to describe it.

I don't remember anything.

Like it was sprite-based, but it looked kind of like crunchy and fat, like it was 3D.

I don't know how to describe it.

The sprites had dynamic lighting on them in the way that the KOF 12 and 13 sprites did, but that was the main deal.

So, Astral Ascent

is

a lot more like Dead Cells.

It is a 2D scroller that you go level to level as a roguelite.

It's very pastel-based.

And you get upgrades and you will get your gadget on your L and R.

And you like, it's very much like a successor to Dead Cells.

And I don't like it at all.

Oh.

Damn.

I don't like it even a little.

And I.

Wait, Astral Scent.

Yeah, that's the right game.

Yeah.

It's 2D art is really good.

I just don't like

literally anything about every single thing the game does.

Holy shit.

Let me pull this up and take a look.

Now, that is not to say it's bad.

In fact, it's kind of like it's got a lot of quality going on with it.

What the fuck is the English language, man?

What do you mean?

What are you saying right now?

I say, hey, listen, I'm using my non-definitive language to describe my feelings.

I said, I didn't like it, not that it was bad.

For you, that's the word.

Most people use these types of words, not me.

In fact, I can, you know what that is?

That is years of learning and then correct usage of language after lessons have been learned.

I am attempting to use my words more effectively.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Somebody in the chat says pizza tower feelings.

You know what?

That might have been the fucking turning point.

Because Pizza Tower, I was like,

I bet people really like this, though.

Yeah, well, yeah.

I feel like it must have happened years before that, but that was a very strong case of like, this is not bad, but it is not for me.

Yeah.

So I don't, like, it's really floaty and it's very pastel.

And I hate it.

I clicked play, and the first thing I saw was someone floating in the air and a part pastel art style as they landed on the ground.

And

it's like all the parts of Dead Cells that I did not enjoy got split off to create their own game.

Huh.

Huh.

This looks cool.

It's a much more colorful game, certainly.

Yeah.

So

I hate it.

Wow.

On the other hand, windblown.

Art style

is pretty much the beginning and end of that thought.

No, it's art style.

It's the feel.

It's the tone.

I played it for like an hour and I was like, I don't feel any, I am not appealed by literally anything that is going on here.

I'm bored.

My vibes are dead.

I had no feelings other than like, I don't like how this controls.

Right?

Someone in the chat asked the important question: which characters did I try?

The two starting characters.

I also played Windblown, which is some of the Dead Cells people deciding that they would like to make furry Hades.

And that's really good.

The banner for Windblown has almost the exact position and and coloring as Dead Cell's protagonist, like in the foreground.

Yeah.

Interesting.

The music in Windblown is fucking incredible.

I really like its color use.

I really like its aesthetic.

It is a Hades-like

that's the clear inspiration, but it takes...

like a bunch of weird little changes to the formula that make it really interesting.

This was shown at a game show recently.

I remember watching a trailer for this at

with something.

Yeah, okay.

So

one of the things is that I've been testing this a lot lately, which is, does this game have dodge offset for his combos?

Because I'm noticing that more and more games have dodge offset, which is cool.

And to those of you who are not familiar with dodge offset, that means if you have a five-hit combo, but you dodge in between hits three and four, and you hit combo again, hits four and five will come out, so you don't interrupt your combo.

Even if you don't actually complete the previous strings.

Yeah.

So the reason why dodge offset is so interesting in Windblown is because

you have your dead cells style weapons where they all have like three or four hit combos and they'll act like Hades weapons, but you're picking them up during your run.

You're not picking up like staff and running staff the whole time and then getting upgrades for staff.

Like, no, you're getting either staff or you're getting butcher's knife or great sword, and it has the dead cells unlock progression where you're getting more and more different weapons with more and more movesets.

The most interesting thing about it is that once you unlock it very early on, is that

the game's core mechanic is dodge offset because the final hit of every combo is switching to your other weapon with a unique attack that switches to your other weapon.

Stylish.

That's cool.

So the butcher's knife is the starter weapon, which is like left slash, right slash, and then big overhead slash.

Super basic, right?

But if it's your secondary weapon and

you switch to it on the final hit of like a stav combo, it will create like a gigantic whirlwind of slashes in front of you for like 10 seconds.

Okay.

Yeah.

That will interact with all of your other stuff.

I mean, I'm seeing some upgrades in the footage here that looks just like Hades upgrades, upgrades, really.

Yeah.

Like Spinning Blade.

It feels really good.

It plays really well.

Okay.

So, what you were just describing about art style and sort of a color and things like that, it's funny.

What I'm looking at here with Windblown going, the color of this game is World of Warcraft.

Yes.

Like, no.

Like,

the color of this game is Warcraft 3.

Okay.

That's a really very tiny distinction.

The purples and blues and rainbow lighting of everything happening at all times right now is very much what I feel like watching.

Wow,

when I see it.

What's also really strange,

both Astral Aset and Windblown are going for more pastel, like lighter colors.

Yes, yes.

Like they're actually really similar.

And

in

Astral, they're very flat.

And in Windblown,

they're very shaded because they have lots of lighting and lots of shadows on them.

Everything is glowing.

Everything is glowing.

Oh, yeah, every single thing is glowing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And flashing.

And to be fair,

in some cases, like, I feel like

there's that kind of Xbox 360 glow.

It's kind of like...

You know exactly what you mean.

Yeah.

What you mean is Unreal Engine 3 glow.

Sure.

Fury, you know, yeah, yeah, right.

But what they have is awesome hand-drawn

slash and hit sparks on top of these glows, and that makes them look better.

That makes them look good.

So that's a nice touch I'm seeing here.

So Windblown gets to live in the part of my Steam library where I play it for three hours and go, wow,

that's great.

On the shelf with you, early access game.

I'll see you in six to 18 months

when you're done

and hit 1.0.

I mean, it really does.

I mean, coming from the Dead Cells bones, like this is, yeah, way more Hades.

And

as whereas Astral Ascent is much more of a

Dead Cells successor in

what they're going for.

Yeah, and they both focused on different parts of what Dead Cells was about, and it turns out I liked one side of that equation way more than I liked the other one.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, I'd have to play this and get the feel for it, but I do feel a bit of

death gambit in sort of like how this is how this is playing out with

the way things are moving.

And

there's another thing that comes to mind.

But either way,

both games are just filling the screen with your abilities stacking on top of each other.

And you're kind of like,

well, you know, a bullet heaven, like

Final Form feels like

you're running around doing that on the screen

in a 2D

sense.

Okay, interesting.

So...

So the Steam sales, the autumn sales have been happening, which is why I've been trying out so many of these.

So have, Willie, have you ever, I don't know if you've encountered this, has there ever been a game that you love,

but then someone ruined it?

Or like, you know, Bad Patch or like the company was really horrible.

And then they said to you, what if you could play that game?

But instead, it wasn't like that game at all.

other than the parts about that game that you liked

so hey you know how you hate playing playing Overwatch because Overwatch sucks now?

What if you could play a new game that was not Overwatch,

but was in fact Overwatch and called it Marvel Rivals?

Actually,

right?

Like, do you see what I'm saying with that?

It's like, you know, all that fucking anger and shit and the gross development.

The direct replacement.

What if I just gave you a new Overwatch game that just didn't have the same name on it?

Right?

That

is, well, that's as close as I could possibly get to something that most people here would understand.

So, Destiny 2 is a game I put a lot of time in.

And Destiny 2 is my most hated game that I have ever put time in.

Because all the time that I put into Destiny 2, I feel like it got thrown into my face because that game was like

ruined under me.

Like just made bad.

So

I looked at a game and I said, what is this game?

It was called Witchfire.

And someone

personally edited the old XKCD comic to be like, what game is this?

Witchfire.

What's it like?

Destiny.

What is it, though?

It's not destiny.

Amazing.

That's exactly what I wanted.

And I thought, that can't possibly be

that on the nose

because the

store page says it's a first-person shooter, dark action, edgy, grim, dark,

extraction roguelike.

Many words

on there.

And then I load up Witchfire, which is in early access.

It's not done.

It's been, but it's one of those games that's been in early access for so long that you could just lie and say it's done.

You know, those kinds of things.

Sure, sure, sure.

And when people said that it plays like Destiny, I expected a game that was very similar to Destiny in look and feel.

I was not expecting a game that felt identical in feel to Destiny down to the buttons.

I was not expecting a game that is so similar to the way Destiny feels that I can see which guns got ripped off to become which guns in Witchfire.

I see, I see.

Where I look at the gun hunger and I go, that's a cross between Hawkmoon and the Ace of Spades.

And it feels, it acts like Hawkmoon, but it...

plays like the ace of spades kind of thing.

So sometimes there are games that are like,

you know, in a similar style or like thing or clones of or so.

And then sometimes there are games that are, I guess, like an an Exodus game.

Like, as you leave that, we are come here.

This is where this is the basket for you to fall into.

It is an Exodus game that you're supposed to, you are, we're waiting for you all, and everything is exactly the way you remembered it.

So, I'm going to have to go into a little bit of Destiny terminology here to get it across for the lapsed players.

But the long and short of it is what Witchfire is, is Witchfire says, go into a little open map that in Destiny would be called a patrol area.

And there are a multitude of enemy groups and chests and, you know, randomly generated type of roguelike things that you can go around, interact with, shoot, discover little hidden vaults and tombs and micro-dungeons and shit like that.

As you kill these enemies, you'll get resources and you get a little roguelike power-up system that only works

for the parts that

only does one trip at a time.

Right.

And you're playing with destiny guns.

Guns that are just stolen directly from destiny, down to the part where they have what in destiny would be called an exotic catalyst.

But here they're just like, hey, shoot 20, kill 25 enemies with this handgun.

Okay, now the handgun will stockpile power if you do headshots one after the other.

Okay, now kill 150 enemies with this handgun and upgrade it in the shop.

Now it will stockpile power for every headshot you get before reloading.

And that power will exponentially go up per bullet that you do it in a row.

And then kill 200 with this and then upgrade it a third time.

And now

it will let you keep that streak going even if you hit a body shot and just roll it.

There's a gun that you have to get the heat on and it will burn enemies to put status on it.

You know, that kind of destiny gun play weapon upgrade thing.

And also in Destiny, like the rare gun with the customization and such is the peak of what you're trying to get.

It's called an exotic in Destiny.

It's a gun that has weird properties, that does cool things and feels great.

But the point of the entire video game is to get the cool rare gun.

And so here, what they have done is like every gun that you get is the cool rare gun.

And instead, they put it into a kind of roguelike kind of thing.

And if you level up your character like in Dark Souls, then the map re-rolls itself so that enemies are in different locations and special events are in different places.

It's really cool and it feels really good.

And I put a bunch of time into it, despite the fact it's early access.

And it has a bunch of cool challenges to it.

But it also has only half the areas that it will have in the full game.

So I'm putting it on the shelf.

But if you're the kind of person who

really fucking likes Destiny but doesn't want to play Destiny, Witchfire is over there, and it's a little bit different, but I had a blast playing it over the weekend.

From the developers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, yeah, weird, huh?

What?

Isn't that fucking strange?

Isn't that weird as fuck?

That's not what I expected to see there.

Baffling.

But yeah, no, plays, plays, it plays excellently.

There's, you know, there's no story right now, and you know, there's bits and pieces missing, and it doesn't have half the levels, but it plays incredibly.

And so if you're interested, I would suggest checking it out.

It's not really on sale.

It's like 10% off on the autumn sale.

It's always funny to imagine.

I feel like I can't pull the exact examples, but

devs that make a really narrative-heavy game just go, man, fuck it, we want some gameplay.

And you just make a gameplay loop-ass gameplay thing as your second thing.

When your identity can just go in either direction.

Oh, man.

We've done walking simulators for a while.

What do you guys want to do?

Basketball game.

Fuck it.

Just

so Witchfires were the cool.

And the last game that I played this week of note is somebody sent me a code for what's called the Soul Frame Preludes, which is a fancy way of saying the alpha version of Soul Frame.

So Soul Frame is Digital Extremes's

not Warframe

incoming,

you know, action game, not quite MMO thing

that is medieval and fantasy instead of sci-fi.

Okay.

I was in fact going to, I mean, so on the docket is the

Warframe dev stream and some of that stuff.

Was this included in those announcements?

I don't know.

Okay.

I didn't even know that that happened.

So any of that stuff that's in there, I would be new to me.

I just happened to get sent to code.

The game's been available to stream for about 30 days, but I didn't have access.

It's like invite-only kind of thing.

But eventually you get your own invite to send out to somebody.

Did you play what they showed at TedOCon?

No, I don't know.

I have been off the digital extremes wagon.

Gotcha.

Okay.

For

years now, since 21.

I've been out.

Okay.

So,

but I did play a million hours of Warframe back in the day, so it's a good starting point for comparison for Soulframe.

And

what they're doing with Soul Frame is really smart.

So

Warframe is a third-person shooter where you have a button for melee and you have a bunch of,

you know, magic abilities.

You're one, two, three, four, like it's a MOBA

and

you're going out there and you're grinding and you're running missions and you're doing shooter missions.

Soul frame is exactly the same game in reverse.

So in Warframe where most of your buttons are for shooting and you have a melee button,

in Soul Frame, most of your buttons are for melee and you have a shooting button.

Okay,

so in warframe, you have slide, aim, shoot, etc., and your powers, right?

In Soul Frame, you have light attack, heavy attack, block/slash parry, and then the left trigger is for all of your abilities, which does include firing a little bit of lightning out of your hands, kind of like a gun.

But, like, the

the focus is completely inverted from guns to melee

also um

also uh i mean uh the that

yeah what i what we saw of it and yeah what i'm kind of looking at it's like not many not much grunts that you're dealing with either it seems like it's very like one-on-one no you're dealing with way less enemies but they're much stronger a lot of duels

yeah a lot a lot of like you know oh there's three guys very much more like souls, like okay, uh, and like melee bosses and whatnot.

And in its genuine, in its general like structure, however, it's actually incredibly similar to Warframe.

So, like, in Warframe, between missions, you go to the orbiter, which is your little spaceship that would fly in orbit.

In

Soul Frame, you hit the select button and your character teleports into, I don't know what the fuck to call it.

I forget the name of it, but like a mind palace that has

your your upgrade stall and your character that builds your gear and shit like that.

And when you earn a new blueprint and get the items to build gear,

it can take eight to 12 hours

in real human time

to build it.

Okay.

Because you're going to build it and then you're going to go back out there and you're going to grind and etc.

And I remember the starting area is like a fairly large open area, like a field, like a medieval type of village area.

And

I was like, I wonder how they're going to do Warframe style content, like, you know, like a defense mission or a assassination mission, you know, the types of missions that you would fly the orbiter on.

And

then my little bird waypoint brought me to a,

you know, the door to an underground labyrinth.

And then when I went into the underground labyrinth, I discovered that the underground labyrinth was completely disconnected from the overworld's internalized geography and was, in fact, a very complex tile set that was randomized.

And that is how that you will be physically traveling to little dungeon areas that will have your randomized tile sets for your Warframe Stone missions.

Are you online while you're playing this?

Okay.

Are there online features that are occurring?

I don't know.

It's the The version that I'm playing is very early.

Very early.

I do know that in the bottom left corner, it says recruiting

on a little window.

So

that means it will be multiplayer

and that there will be a chat.

But the version that I'm playing is very early.

and very early access.

Okay.

Because real world hour timers, like for online, I guess that's how those things go.

For single player offline, what the fuck are we doing?

You know, I was actually thinking about the timers and

I remembered that

I was thinking a lot about them and how people hate them so much in Warframe.

It's a retention mechanic, obviously.

It's, oh, well, I'll build this.

That means I'll log back in in a couple of days, right?

Yeah, it's mobile games with their daily usage batteries.

Yeah, and it's not about dailies, it's just about come back later, come back and play again later.

Um, and I realized that, like, when I was playing Warframe a lot, I really you only interact with the timers once ever in the entire time you play Warframe, and that's the first time you turn them on.

Because the second time you go to turn on your timers, you're picking up the shit that you set up last time.

Here's an important question: Will this game be free?

Yeah, okay, absolutely.

Okay,

If I see a timer companion that I've bought to Warframe, I'm going to lose my shit.

Yeah.

Okay.

I would say that this is much more appealing to people like you who are way more into melee combat than super fast run and gun combat.

But it is a frame game.

Like it's not called Soul Fighter or whatever the fuck it's called Soul Frame.

And it's very interesting because uh i was really impressed and it feels really good and it it has that really so you've seen warframe enough to be like it has a really weird technology look

like it's very strange and

like siberian like indigenous like technological

just like art style inspiration

yeah like like warframe's technology just looks like kind of nonsensical and

biological it looks super weird Okay.

And

Soul Frame's fantasy setting is the same exact

aesthetic, but inverted, where it's not fantasy, sorry, it's not technological with weird biological fantasy elements.

It's

fantasy biological stuff with weird technological elements.

And the proportional,

like the accent is different.

It's a slight tech accent as opposed to the slight

organic accent.

So, like, instead of a robot that has like a weird stag head on it, it's a weird deformed stag that has like one weird robot part on it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And it's really interesting because it's like it's really, really, really obviously Warframe's sister game or cousin, but, and it looks very similar despite being in the opposite setting.

It's super interesting.

And Warhammer versus 40K.

It's super weird.

What's that?

Someone said Warhammer versus 40K.

Yeah,

it's inverted in the way that, yeah, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K are inverted.

But you're hitting the similar notes.

Cool.

Okay.

And this had me into the strange situation where,

have you ever been in the situation where someone says

every single right answer to your question that gets you to rethink something?

Where, like, you're like, I don't know.

And then you ask the five questions that all need to be answered correctly and all five are answered correctly.

Does it have?

So I go, well, Steve's on this.

That'd be Steve Sinclair over at Digital Extremes.

Soulframe is his new baby, right?

He's off Warframe because Rebecca Ford, space mom, and wonderful lady and fantastic Dio cosplayer, is now head of Warframe being promoted up from community manager.

And I'm like, so this is Steve's baby.

So how's Rebecca been doing with Warframe?

Because the people watching my Soul Frame chat are going to tend to be people that know what the fuck they're talking about with Warframe.

To which they respond, oh, it's great.

It's better than it's ever been, which is always fun because

when you ask people about Destiny, you get one guy going, Destiny's going great.

And then you have like 20 guys going, no, it's not.

It's actually shit.

But I asked, how's Warframe doing under Rebecca?

And, oh, it's doing great.

What's changed?

Oh, they toned down this thing that you hate and they improved the thing that you like.

Like, okay, well, that is a good answer.

And I go, well, Enaros was my favorite frame that ever happened.

Did they ever make Inaros Prime?

Well, Pat, not only did they make Inaros Prime, but they gave him a full-scale rework, and he's better than he's ever been, and he's more fun, too.

I go, oh, okay, that's

pretty good.

And then someone said, yeah, Rebecca and Pablo have been doing really well.

I go, why are you talking about Pablo?

Because if you're not familiar, Pablo is a guy who would do reworks on some of the warframes every now and then.

And he would be of note because you wanted Pablo to be the guy who reworked your frame.

Oh, the reworking

had specific names attached that people knew, really?

Yes.

Oh, my God.

I didn't know it went in like that.

That's like, can you imagine if it was like, well, that was

Mr.

Takumi-san was the person who balanced Bison

this time around.

Oh, fuck.

Right?

Yeah, I was.

So we're getting into the this Gundam redesign was done by Hajime Katoki.

So we got

the version Ka.

Yes, the specific, yeah, okay.

Right, right, right.

So

you're like, they're like, well, Pablo's doing real well.

I'm like, well, what, what?

And they're like, well, Pablo did in Risa's rework.

I'm like, oh, oh, really?

It's like, well, Pablo's like the head gameplay man now.

Because Steve's gone.

So Pablo's running all that shit under Rebecca.

And I'm like, but Pablo was the best one.

He always did the best reworks.

And then at the end of all that, I'm like,

maybe I should go check on my Warframe account.

And so I logged in on the Warframe.

And the very first thing that happened, like clockwork, everyone that has ever gone away from that game for any length of time.

How much did you log in?

How much did you get?

And that's a 75%

off clat coupon shows up.

He's back

every time.

Initiate

all the discounts.

Initiate everything.

Give it.

Give him all the feelings.

I saw people talking about the way that that seems to happen is that your daily login bonuses will rotate when you're not logging in and it will save the highest value one.

Oh my God.

So if you were gone like I was for three years, I was actually kind of guaranteed to come back to that.

And it's a great incentive to be like, look, look at all this free money.

Well, jokes on

digital extremes because I actually still had so much free money left over from the last time I played Warframe that it'd be totally pointless to buy it now.

Yeah, but so Inaros Prime is currently gestating in my orbiter's womb.

But it's not and they will be done in 68 hours.

It's not that it's free money.

It's that the money you don't spend is being wasted for the bonus that you should be getting.

That's right.

So Inaros Prime is cooking.

They've got a bun in the oven.

And so we'll see how that goes.

And

I'm interested in seeing.

The three years of features from a live service game and what it's like to catch up on that.

Um,

and what's strange is like I'm not playing FF-14 at all anymore.

Like, I've completely quit entirely.

Well, until they, you know, drop new shit.

No, the 7.1 came and went, didn't even bother to log in.

That happened quietly.

Yeah, I talked about it on my stream, but I was like, I was not super happy with the way the Dawn Trail stuff was going.

But

the future of Dawn Trail.

But the number one thing, and this cannot be overstated,

that there's one thing

that Warframe has,

and Soulframe, by that measure, have over Final Fantasy XIV

that cannot be beat.

And that is the ability to pause the game when the baby gets a hold of the remote or tries to run away and get into some shit.

The ability to pause your video game

becomes the single most defining characteristic of playing a game when there is a baby.

Because

the baby's playing with his toys and you play your baby toy for your grown-up toy and then the baby starts to crawl away and you're like, well, I need to go chase that now.

So I thought it was a more online game that was like persistently online enough that you wouldn't be able to.

So, Warframe, if you start a mission in a private lobby by yourself, pause just pauses the game.

You're instanced alone, so why not?

Yeah, okay.

And

that alone

is the difference between, oh, yeah, I'll blow a bunch of time on this and not.

Because

if, you know, if baby, I have a climber.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I was

not,

I can't, I can't be like, hold on, baby, there's six minutes left of this EX roulette.

Well, so I was wondering if like the FF14 thing was like, if how much one, baby affects that, right?

And second, I also know that like they just started a new story after a real long closing arc of that last one.

And I was wondering if you kind of felt like that was a good exit point.

I was, but it was the, it was thing where, um,

what I would discriminate as my, so there's, you know, I'm a dad now, and I love hanging out with my little guy.

And if he looks at the TV too closely, I turn whatever I'm playing off because I don't want to fry his brain with screen time and all that shit.

Like, no iPad for this child, no, don't do it.

So,

my only quote-unquote unmolested screen time for dad

is

from 10:30 p.m.

to midnight,

right?

Because that's when baby is asleep, and it's not up too late before I go to bed because I need to get up at 8 because the baby gets up at 8, right?

And for FF14, I was like running roulettes at fucking 11 o'clock at night.

And

for a class I don't plan on playing, just so I could level up all my characters.

And I was like, what the fuck am I fucking doing?

I get like an hour a day

of

not having to worry about

baby eating a piece of wood he found on the ground

to do this.

And

I'm blowing it, fucking leveling up fucking tanks.

I'm not going to play.

What the fuck am I doing?

It's fucking stupid as shit.

Okay.

Well,

there's that.

And then, as you just established, there's also, well, you got to let that account cool down for a little bit so that when you eventually you do come back, you get these fucking bonuses all stacked up for you.

14 doesn't do that.

14 doesn't do that.

Oh, they don't do incentives.

They don't do a welcome back.

No, they don't do incentives.

What they do is catch up.

The first hit is free?

No, no, no.

But 14, what 14 does is catch up is that, like, if you want to grind your character out to max power in the current patch, it'll take you the whole patch.

But reaching that exact same level of character power two patches later will take one-hundredth of the time

so you can catch up to the current patch.

Gotcha.

And when the next expansion comes out, getting ready for the next expansion will take, you know,

nth amount of time, etc.

Susie says having kids cures you of FF-14.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, you see, now you have to dodge the danger patterns in real life by moving the kid out of the way of the burning spells that are flying

in lines across the ground.

When Baby Man started to move around more, you know, when he went from being potato to

slow-moving potato,

then and there, I stopped playing nearly as much FF-14 and started playing Street Fighter way more often

because I can just get the fuck up and walk away from Street Fighter and be like, what's going to happen?

I'm going to lose a match.

Who gives a shit?

Less committal in and out, for sure.

Which led to really strange matchmaking situations where I like got all the way down to like fucking 800 MR and then I'm being you know geared up.

I'm being matched up with people with 900 MR and I'm like, bro, when I'm not walking away from matches for full rounds, I'm gonna stomp your ass.

But, but, yeah, you know,

well, bad news for

that with the new patch that just happened because the disconnect match, the disconnect messages are now saying that if you disconnect too many times, you're going to be placed in basically rage quit jail, it sounds like.

Oh, I don't disconnect, man.

Oh, you idle out the controller down and fucking walk away.

Okay.

Excuse me.

And the guy on the other end gets a free win.

Right, right, right.

Like, we're in the middle of a pitched round two.

I'm like, well, gotta go.

I don't know what he's got.

What is that?

What is that?

What is that?

What is that?

Put that down.

What is that?

What is that?

Oh, it's a granola bar.

Okay.

You're supposed to have that.

Okay.

I've lost the round.

Okay.

Hold start to press the baby currently needs attention.

Yeah.

Like, taunt.

But yeah, Warframe on the flip side, I can just pause.

That's good.

And it has the same dopamine release of grind that I so desire.

The assault frame looks really good, and

to a lot of people, it's going to be very appealing to start a frame game at the goddamn beginning of it because Warframe lived in this weird place

where

it was fucking terrible for like a year and a half, two years, and then all of a sudden it got really good.

But by the time it got really good,

it had already built up just like a shit ton of stuff.

So like it was this massive, super complicated game that just seemed to come out of nowhere.

Whereas Soul Frame, it's like it's already in a way, way, way better state than Launch Warframe was.

Launch Warframe was like shit.

I played Warframe Launch.

It sucked.

Warframe also, can you play it in like, I mean, I know there's kind of those daily interactions in little bits, but can you do it in small chunks as well?

Oh, yeah.

You can you can play Warframe in fucking four-minute chunks.

Okay.

If you want.

I mean, this is literally what I was just saying about Breach Wizards and XCOM and stuff.

Like,

my life is already in a a place where I always I'm always

more prefer.

I have always have a preference towards the low commitment activity, you know, like anything that is a like, yeah, like it's a that's an hour and a half long like dungeon commitment of an action nature that it's not something I can just at least pause or take time or turns with or so.

It just, yeah, I have to clear out a moment to sit down and lock in for that.

And I depending on your progression in Warframe, you can run the diffs, you can run a mission that will last you

45 seconds

if it's an assassination mission.

So it's literally a bullet jump to the target, shoot them until they're dead, and then sprint as hard as you can to the exit

all the way up until I bet you I could do an hour of survival waves on this map

and get a bunch of good rewards

if I feel up to it.

And it's your prerogative.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool.

And I can do either of those with

people I actually partied with, auto party,

solo, any particular combination of those.

Well, I mean, if you, you know,

forgive me for being somewhat shocked, but I guess it's like,

yeah, 14 never really had a reason to have an explosive, it's all over kind of moment.

It was always a well-made addictive thing that ever since I guess the reborn

patch

was just going to be a you fade off whenever you want to.

So they've built the game like that and they have been incredibly clear in every interview.

They're like, hey, you don't enjoy it, just leave.

And then if you feel like it, come back and there'll be more stuff later.

Which I think is really endearing.

And I think important to that kind of thing.

Because like, oh, well, if you don't keep up every single fucking day, you're going to fall way behind.

Like, fuck off.

I hate that.

Everybody hates that.

No one likes that.

But you've been playing for

I've been playing since 2015.

Yeah.

FF14.

Yeah.

And

Final Fantasy 14.

So different people are affected by this at different levels.

And some people like it.

And a lot of people don't like it.

FF14 does have one extraordinary problem that I can't think of anybody else that does, where they are really consistent about the quality of their content.

And you would think, what is the problem with that?

And you don't know what type of consistency I'm talking about.

For

11 years now,

you can get together with your friends and you can predict the date of the patch down to the weekend.

And you could say, it's going to have this many bosses.

It's going to have this type of new area.

It's going to have this raid.

The item levels for the raid are going to be this.

It's going to have this many floors.

It's going to have this, this, this, this, this.

And you could, you could theory craft that shit out for like two years in advance, and you would be right on almost all of it.

Um, and you're going to grind out.

That's comforting to some people.

Yeah.

You can, you're going to grind out 450 tomes of the expensive tome a week.

You're going to grind out 2,000 tomes of the least expensive tomes a week.

You're going to have this, this, this.

You're going to run this many roulettes.

They're going to be cost this, this, this.

It has been literally unchanged for the entirety of a Rome Reborn.

Because it worked.

Yeah.

Uh, And it works.

And they have like a pipeline that is rock solid.

But it means that when you start to like

fade off,

I'm like, well, I know exactly what is coming over the next year.

Almost down to the day.

And I'm like, and then I can look back at the years that I've played the game and go, well, I know exactly the time and shit that I'm going to do in the future if I continue to do so.

And right now, it's just not super appealing.

14 has a problem that almost all MMOs or live service or ongoing games have, which is it is more fun to catch up than it is to be on the edge.

Huh.

It is more, it is more fun

to have the whole game out in front of you than it is to have done everything and be sitting around waiting for the new thing to come out.

Okay.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Like, way more.

Okay.

Way more fun.

Well, because I guess that resembles playing on regular offline RPG more, right, in a way, but

as opposed to, like, being stuck with the real calendar and whatever's going on.

Yeah, so that makes sense.

Like, you know, hey, man, are you more fun?

Are you having more fun with One Piece at volume five and you look at the 400 volumes to go?

Or are you more having more fun with One Piece hoping to get to the scans before someone spoils you this week?

right?

Like, it's just God, fuck those times.

Yeah.

Those times are every day.

But if you go with this scanslation group, they do really good color pages for the Naruto chapter covers.

But, like,

I guess the easiest way for me to

put a bow on it is like, I have more fun reading volumes of manga than I do chapters.

I mean, it's funny because soon there's going to be a decision where if you're into one piece, you can, it's like, do I watch

it or do I start the new one that's simultaneously going to be playing?

It's so crazy because I'm like, you know, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood had the decency to at least wait one, was it, year before after the other one finished before starting up or so?

Like, this shit's like, nah, no time.

Nah, simultaneous.

Two pieces, though.

Okay, gotcha.

And so this cycles back to Warframe.

It's like, hey, guess what I have in Warframe?

I have three years of content that I didn't do.

Because Warframes, when you hit the wall on Warframe and you have run out of new

content islands,

God, that game becomes boring as shit when you're all caught up.

Oh, man.

Just boring as fuck.

I mean, I know that, like, whatever, if I had a more relevant connection, it would have come up.

But I think the same part of me that, like,

you know, feels like the need to go after more newer experiences and play new games and all that, especially now given everything that comes in

versus replaying things, would not want that.

That sort of stability you're describing is not an appeal, you know?

No.

Well, so here's the funniest thing.

Back when FF14 started its new MMO journey, that stability was like, oh, what?

I can count on content for my MMO actually coming out on time?

Because the usual way of putting out releases was

the whole game is in the expansion.

There will be nothing until the next expansion,

which is like a fucking

dog shit way to do it because you would burn out in like four months and be like, well, time to quit.

Yeah, and I, and the analogy of like keeping up with, you know, seasons of like, say, Strive or SF6 DLC or so, it's like, but in those games, you don't really like catch up and be like, well, I've played all the new content, so now I'm done.

You know, you don't really know because it's just like, I want to play Bison.

Yeah, you're going to get.

Bison got nerfed.

I don't care.

Yeah.

But if you do your taunt, now you can get a big buff going.

Who is ever going to let you do that fucking taunt?

People having fun offline.

People who want to...

Anyone who lets Akuma eat those buns that wants to have a good time is going to let Bison taunt on you now.

No, I don't want to fucking have a good time.

I want to grind ranked.

By the way, so for anyone who doesn't know, now if you put a bomb with Bison on your opponent and then you do his forward taunt, he counts down three, two, one, and then the explosion happens at the end of the taunt.

And now Bison can actually do his super super Bison moves, like his crazy teleport.

He's got his teleport.

He's got his alpha

crusher.

Shadowluism, Psycho Crusher.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's great.

But that's it for Pat.

Played a lot of shit this week.

Finished Metaphor, and my baby's the best.

So that's what's going on with me.

This week, it's going to be very few streams.

Me and Paige are going to miss the Marvel Rivals and Path of Exile 2 launch on Friday because because we are going on a little road trip, a little vacay, nothing too crazy, just taking some time off.

But we'll be back on either the 7th or the 8th and get back to that shit.

But

fucking

go do something good with your life.

Oh!

Someone asked in the chat, any DD updates?

You know what, man?

I think I'm getting the absolute best Dungeons and Dragons experience playing with this group.

I talked like three, four weeks ago about like, oh, the different kind of stereotypes, how I'm kind of running into all the classic DD things.

And that was the last time we sat down to play because we've been completely unable to schedule another session for like a month

because someone's always busy or the babysitter gets sick or whatever.

And this is like the truest

experience.

Maybe, maybe

we'll be able to play next week.

Maybe.

Yeah, that's excited.

That is, in fact, it.

That would be three sessions in eight weeks.

All right.

Campaign on a roll.

Cool.

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still

using that on a regular basis on YouTube.

Oh, it's great to go watch what I want.

Um

all right,

I need to take a quick break.

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If you'll excuse me, the RB.

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Yeah.

Banana.

Into the news.

I have a banana.

I'm a little peckish, so I decided to get a banana.

Um

You know who else is a little peckish?

Oh, fucking what?

It's a stretch, isn't it?

Yeah, I don't know.

Squirrels.

Hey, check out this big acorn.

Yeah,

that's not all she's got that's big.

That tail.

Why that makes squirrel girls so fucking thick?

That tail is bushy as fuck.

It's awesome.

Hey, Marvel Rivals is coming out this week, and they showed off the launch trailer intro,

basically a music video, anime opening.

It's a very well-produced

launch trailer.

It's pretty good.

Man, that Chinese armored anime aesthetic is the fucking peak.

I love that shit so much.

I love it.

So it works

on a number of the designs.

I mean, Iron Fist is looking, he looks okay.

He's got the hair out.

I I do prefer the covering, but regardless, you know, I kind of get what they're going for with everything.

My thing, though, is

anytime I see Logan looking a little too cool and young with the bangs for the hair, I don't like that kind of Logan.

I want Logan to be a scruffy, short Canadian that's just

with the hairline almost, not receding, but I want it going up and being okay.

Well, pay them $12.

Yeah,

I suppose so, right?

Get your cosmetic going.

There's been a couple times where we've seen that kind of cool, younger-looking Logan.

And

I'm reminded a bit too of like, as much as I liked it, like the Snicket

comic from

the Creator of Blame as well.

It's just like a different kind of younger, cooler look.

And I'm like,

I want him to be a little munchkin.

I want that widow's peek into the Wolverine hair going.

So, yes, unlock your cosmetics, and then you'll be fine.

Otherwise, you're getting anime Wolverine.

Not a bit, you know what's awesome about that fucking trailer?

That's the launch trailer, right?

So, first of all, there's characters that are like brand new as of the launch trailer, like Cloak and Dagger and Squirrel Girl, right?

And you're like, wow, that's cool.

And then there's like a shit ton of characters that we played in the alpha that are not going to be there at launch.

Like a ton.

Like Thor is not fucking there.

That's really weird.

That's really weird.

Yeah.

Yeah, the

X-Men Evolution Wolverine is basically the look that I'm describing here.

Not my favorite, but whatever.

It's fine.

So, and then we saw, yeah, we saw a couple things.

So they showed off three character trailers.

Squirrel Girl, The Unbeatable, Unstoppable, Slayer of Gods.

All,

Great.

Simple line delivery.

Check out this big acorn.

Throws a big acorn at you.

What more do you want?

Squirrel Stampede.

No notes.

Perfect.

Exactly what it needed to be.

Thick with two C's, no problems with that.

Like a bushy tail.

Iron Fist,

who

is the, yeah, martial arts duelist, you know, who jumps in there.

And...

Perry God being put in a fucking third-person shooter.

So he looks like he has like a healing, like, yeah, ability to, like, meditate and heal, or, like, put up a, uh, kind of like a, you attack me, and I, and I heal while I'm glowing.

So he has a parry and a, and a full, like, meditate, heal.

And he also has a quadruple jump.

Yeah.

And a wall run.

The jump and wall run mobility stuff looks really good with him.

The melee stuff, it looks cool, but it's not as impactful as I was kind of hoping.

I like when there's a nice big hit with that stuff, especially as you're moving through a game.

And

when things kind of feel a little like just kind of tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, light.

It's not as satisfying.

For example, when you play as Iron Fist in Marvel,

and he goes into the level three with the one-inch punch, you get a nice big, ah, boom, you know, You get these massive, like, quick combos into a big stomp, step,

big hits, you know.

So, feels like that's not really what's going to be the case here.

But you need to make a character that obviously works in a

team shooter and make his kit work make sense there.

So, he looks like the

kind of fast multi-hitting

version of

what is Black Panther's medium-sized and then Magic's heavy-sized melee stuff.

And

then they showed off Black Widow, who's, hey, she's got a sniper, she's shooting heads.

It's Black Widow.

You know?

Hey, gentlemen, it is up to you to be good enough to cause this character to get horribly nerfed.

Yes, we will see.

We will see.

This is an archetype that requires a fine touch because it can be just ruinous or worthless.

And it's real thin.

Squirrel Girl might be the Hanzo, maybe?

Or slightly Hanzo-ish.

So we'll see how that works out.

But yeah, you can't nerf skill.

And if a headshot is one shot, one kill, then that will always continue.

I think her alt, just making it so that anyone she hits with it

can barely move.

So headshots are really easier is super filthy.

It's super dirty.

Have we seen the Hawkeye trailer yet?

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

I missed that one then.

He's Hanzo.

That's more Hanzo.

Okay.

All right.

Fair enough.

Somebody, I think it's Bouncy Night07 in the chat, made a very

important distinction where they pointed out that Marvel Rivals is launching with more characters on day one than Overwatch 1 did the day it died.

The day it died being the day of Overwatch.

That's right.

Yeah, okay.

Of Overwatch 1's shutdown.

Okay.

That is an unflattering comparison.

Well,

as we were talking about with your Exodus games,

hey, check this one out.

It's in third person.

You can see your characters doing cool stuff.

You know what?

I bet I would love to see like some kind of like statistical breakdown of can I see my character versus can I not see my character on the purchases of cosmetics.

Because I fucking bet being able to see your fucking character matters when people buy skins.

Wow.

I wonder.

I wonder.

I feel like that's a, that would be interesting to see.

I mean, for me, it's literally the will I buy the game or not, you know, or will I start playing the game or not?

It is a much more dire metric for me, but

yeah,

if it's just you know, if you if you can see it at all times, certainly, I'm sure that's an that's a high incentive.

Um,

and

uh, did we was there a Wolverine trailer too?

No, no, okay, so that's probably gonna come out the day before the game launches.

Okay,

um,

any word about I didn't see anything about the

micro, about the mini-bys yet.

We're all going to find that out together.

We'll find out.

The gameplay is.

That being said,

the game's free, so.

No matter how bad it is, it doesn't matter.

No.

There's no upper limit

on terrible.

No, what I'm saying is if the characters are free, it becomes a completely different discussion than if you're buying characters and there's also cosmetics.

Yeah.

Then it just becomes a a matter of like discipline, I suppose.

It becomes like

whining instead of complaining.

Justified whining.

Justified whining.

Right.

But

damn it.

To like,

each costume is fucking $20.

Like,

you know, like, yeah.

Absolutely justified, but still the base game and its and its

components are all there, I suppose.

Yeah, because like, you know, they're going to come out and the fucking things are going to be be $12 or $15 or some fucking nonsense, right?

And

then you're like, fucking Overwatch charged you full price and then also

charged you the same cost for the costumes.

And it's like, yes, this is frog-boiling nonsense, but it's like, take a win as small as it is, no matter where.

I feel like I have

an internal, like, if I'm playing a free game and I'm enjoying it, and I'm enjoying it certainly past the point of like, you know, like a full purchase, I feel like I have a, oh, I'm willing to spend what I care about this thing threshold I hit, you know?

Absolutely.

So I'm like, yeah, if this game would cost whatever and I'm like just opting in on what I care about, then yeah,

I don't mind.

But I, but I'm a tip jar.

Yeah, and the thing is, too, is if you're able to kind of be like, I'm just going to focus on the few things I care about, as opposed to to trying to you know wail for the whole set or whatever then that makes sense well from the way that it the store was built out on the last alpha it looks like it's do you want this costume then fucking buy it

which is as far as mini buy

uh

formats the least evil

um i hope that it there's you know it there isn't a case of like grind this battle pass into the dirt and then quadruple grind it and you get this icon, and then after that icon, you get this one-time like hope.

Okay, well, you know, I would like you to do me a favor.

I would like you to hold out your left hand up

and keep that hope in there.

And I need you to shit in your other hand, and I would like you to see which one fills up first.

Okay.

I have a, I have a, I have a counterpoint.

Counterpoint.

If the Venom skin from Marvel vs.

Capcom

is not placed in that slot, then I'm good to go.

If the things that I want

are available to me now,

then I'm happy.

Wooly, do you want

my most dire of predictions?

I bet you...

So where was that available, the blue Venom?

On the beta.

Okay, that will never be accessible ever again.

Yeah, that could have been a beta-only thing.

I got it.

I got it.

I did that, by the way.

Yeah, yeah.

So you got it.

But I bet you that thing will never be back ever again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm.

So, and I already got it.

So I was, I mean, I'm not actually literally talking about that one.

Yeah.

But I'm like, let's say it's like, okay, what, how badly do I want classic Magneto?

Pretty bad.

It's not the end of the world for me, you know,

but I would like it.

It would be cool.

I would probably dig a, like,

maybe classic Magneto helmet off would be, like, a

bigger sell.

But I'm not going to play Magneto that much, really.

So, you know,

not, you know, same like, it's like, if I don't play them, if they're not part of my main rotation or so, then I just, I don't think I'm going to end up carrying that much, too.

So I think it'll be okay.

But

I mean, we'll see.

Yeah.

But then I was going to say, but what if they got the fucking NYX colors on or they get the, you know, straight up again?

They're like, they just keep doing Marvel versus Capcom references with some of these costumes.

I'm like, ah, fuck.

All right.

It'll be really interesting

to see, because we don't know a lot about how they're going to do the microtransaction or the cosmetics.

Because

there's always the possibility that they do the two-stage cosmetic, which is colors

and costumes are separate distinctions.

And then there's the worst version, which is

costumes with different colors are also different distinctions, but I don't expect that either.

Iron Man has the potential to fuck me up.

Different levels of awesome Iron Man outfit do have the potential to ruin me, depending on how cool they are.

You know, if you're going to make a mini-buy game with characters that have costumes, these Marvel characters have a multitude of different looks already.

One might say

literally hundreds per character in some cases.

This is the strength of the brand that was chosen.

Anyway, that's looking cool.

So,

oh, if you

know what?

Mini buy watch,

I guess.

I don't know.

Sure.

But on the same day that Marvel Rivals comes out, Path of Exile 2 is coming out,

which is a proper sequel to Path of Exile.

And they are doing something really interesting.

Anything you have ever bought for Path of Exile 1 will carry over into Path of Exile 2, including all the cosmetics they've ever released.

Wow.

That is very consumer-friendly.

That's awesome.

And

any like account upgrades or bank space or whatever the fuck,

it's all carrying over.

And if you fucking spent more than like $480,

you just get all of the fucking fancy pants backer early access rewards from the highest money amount.

Nice.

Fucking nice.

That's great.

It is great.

Because it means that the absolute crazies will get rewarded for being the absolute crazies.

And like, good for them.

It's nice when the things you've bought continue to be available to you into the future.

That must have been a lot of work because the game looks different.

Like, it is an upgraded game.

So, like, to carry all that shit forward must have been fucking ridiculous.

Now, every once in a while, companies might think to themselves, uh,

nah, though.

How about the thing you bought you don't get to keep?

What?

Who would say that?

What kind of dumb, stupid bitch

would say that?

Warcraft 1 and 2 are being delisted from GOG

as the remasters are being dropped.

However, Good Old Games says that they're going to preserve them anyway,

handing out a discount and announcing a new policy for preservation of all delisted games on the platform.

So, carrying this analogy forward, the anthropomorphized version of Good Old Games that exists for the purpose of the story said, I'm not a bitch.

You can keep your shit forever if i sold it to you i promise as long as you buy it before their obligation cut off date to deli to delist it exactly so

literally can't do anything fucking right like they showed off those warcraft remasters and they said that they were gonna go back and re remaster warcraft 3

and it was like yeah you know what

That's uh that's good.

And now it's like by the way, you know, if you bought it somewhere else, you can go fuck yourself because you've got to get it on the Battlenet Launcher.

Yeah.

So, you know, obviously getting people over to the Battlenet Launcher or to spend, you know, 40 bucks on the remaster or whatever the case is.

Your incentive to go to good old games has been the ability to buy the original version of the game without DRM and

pretty straightforward with its installation and the the way it more or less was, you know, back when you first got it.

Um,

so Blizzard is basically, you know, announced that, yeah, delisting that shit, making it so that you can't get access to it unless you go over to, again, to the remaster or to battlenet.

And this is one month after those remasters dropped.

And so good old games, which preservation and shit has been their

MO for a while, basically went, okay,

well,

as of December 13th, you're going to have to, you're not going to be able to buy the games anymore from GOG Galaxy.

So

use the discount code Make Warcraft live forever, and you'll knock $2

off of the already $15

for the Warcraft 1 and 2 bundle.

And

that'll be specifically for getting it before the delisting day.

And then you will be able to play whatever you get from them, even if it gets delisted forever.

And then they also, with that, have announced a policy

for the preservation program that's basically trying to make sure that anyone who buys something from the store, the process of getting it delisted does not affect what you own and your ability to play it no matter what.

They will always be supporting stuff that was once listed, if it's owned by anybody, even long after the company in question no longer gives you access to those things.

So that's awesome as fuck.

And in particular, it's like, you know, I prefer Steam in general, but every now and then I go and buy a game on GOG specifically because I want a locked-down offline version that will never, ever, ever be fucked with ever again.

Like I bought Dragon Age Origins on good old games because that's the best place to buy it.

And you don't have to worry about EA

coming in and

shitting all over the fucking thing with some bullshit.

Because it'll always stay that version forever.

And there will always be incentive for said publishers to come along and snatch away the shit you've bought as we go forward in time.

Like that'll, that's not going away anytime soon.

So putting something like this in place to just make sure that like, yep, once you have it, you fucking have it

is good and important.

And also, unfortunately, fucking mandatory in a world where it's not treated like physical, where if you have the disk, you have the disk, and that's the end of that, right?

Digital is being abused now, and we're seeing things where

there's agreements changing terms where you no longer are like, you don't own what you bought digitally.

In fact, you own the license to access that thing as long as we say you can and whatever the fuck.

So, all of this coming from one of the

storefronts for PC games and for digital ownership is pretty good as far as just like a push back against the fact that fuck you, you don't own what you bought is becoming the norm now, you know.

Um,

uh, good shit to GOG.

GOG is the best.

I love them.

Like, I've re-bought some of their games on Steam just for convenience, but like,

like, I'm very happy that that is a storefront that I can buy games from.

And I tend to use it for its like stated purpose, which is, I can't get this old bullshit to fucking work.

Oh, the GOG version works fine.

Oh, great.

Fantastic.

And then there's the part of it where it's just like, the shittier you get about this stuff and the less options people get, the more they're going to be like, okay, fine, fuck you then.

I'll figure it out.

You know,

we're also in a place.

It's like, okay, let's say your game has Denuvo and it's super locked down and it's super pirate friendly.

um it's not 1994 anymore where there's like five good games that are coming out on the super nintendo that year right there there are there are

so so many fucking games that are coming out help me help you i help me help you i want to buy the thing let give me the a way to do it don't don't make this harder it's like we're past the point of like oh i'll just pirate it we're we're now at the point of like fuck it then i guess i'll just ignore it

assassin's creed there's other shit coming that could you my time is is could be spent on

yeah

um

no play only remember

nintendo

uh yeah so good stuff to that

um

I am

I am a a fan of a term that has popped up for the first time

across my desk

in a new scrub quote.

A new, like a new genre of scrub quote?

A new genre of scrub quote has occurred to me.

I don't know how long this has been a thing in the respective community that it comes from.

All right, what community is this?

This is Call of Duty.

Oh, I know what this is.

Have you

been...

Have you heard of skill-based damage before?

Wooly,

I have heard of.

Oh my god.

I have not.

Skill-based damage is new to me.

What the fuck?

So, yeah,

we got scrub quotes, a little Twitter exchange going back and forth from a COD warfare forum and some poster.

And,

you know, it seems like the poster is being salty about

being bad.

And

the COD Warfare forum account is basically being like, nah, it's on you.

Stop playing bad.

Play good.

And then

poster says you do realize there's a thing called skill-based damage, right?

I'm not the only person that goes through that, which is like,

wait, what?

Do you want to know what skill-based damage is?

Well, fortunately, there is

an article that's breaking down Call of Duty Black Ops skill-based damage theory, and it gets into what players are

fighting.

Like, they're theory crafting.

Players are reporting

that their their damage is being adjusted to accommodate for their high skill.

So

I thought here that copium was a gas, and it turns out if you concentrate it hard enough, it can become a solid.

It can become a thick block solid of copium that you can fucking that's you know just undiluted

where you believe

that

you're so good.

You're so good

that you are now, according to the servers and the game's design, you're going to do less damage per bullet in each of your matches because your skill

is so far beyond that of your opponents.

And your opponents are so bad that their bullet damage is being boosted.

All weapons damage across the skill level, apparently.

Oh,

um.

So

when the fucking thing is, so

there is something that goes on with first-person shooters specifically that leads to this type of mental mistake.

Is it

AI matches that you onboard with?

No,

there's a technical reason for this

perception error.

Okay, because that and

fucking the Gears of War super account when you're new are

setting up.

No, it is a technical situation.

So

there's a lot of different variabilities, but one of them became very popularly known due to the way that Rainbow Six Siege works.

And it is a concept known as Peaker's Advantage.

Are you familiar with Peaker's Advantage?

No.

So,

fighting games are new to Rollback, but first-person shooters have been using Rollback and Hit Detection and all this shit for ages.

And what Peaker's Advantage is,

is that

if I am staring at a corner and you, Woolly, are coming around the corner and you peek around the corner on your screen, you have the time

in between the server sending your movement movement to me to see me

and shoot

before I can see you and shoot,

therefore, giving you an extremely tiny perceptual advantage.

Okay, so are you talking, first of all, are you talking about using like a peak lean button, or you mean just no, literally, literally anything, literally, just walking.

Like, when I am unmoving and you are moving,

you are moving through because I'm stationary, the server is going to display me as stationary, but your movement has to be sent to accommodate.

So you will get that tiny time period where you can see me.

I can't see you even though you are actually visible beyond the corner.

And if we fire at the same time, if we both fire within one millisecond of seeing each other, because you actually saw me slightly earlier, you get peakers' advantage.

So this is really popular.

This is really prevalent in Rainbow Six Siege because people die instantly in that game.

And you're peeking around corners all the time.

And so it becomes this thing where staring at a wall defending, you are at an active disadvantage to the guy

poking his head out to try and see if you're there.

So that is the Peaker's version.

Sorry.

No, like in anything rollback related, it continues to guess what it thinks you are doing based on what you were doing.

Yeah, and so if you're stationary, it doesn't have to guess that you're locked in.

Right.

And so in Call of Duty, where everyone's flying around all over the place,

if the server tick is a little off or whatever, you can get situations where you're like, you know what?

You did totally shoot that guy, but the game said he killed you

because your like client-side experience did not quite line up.

And if you're a baby, you'll go, they're out to get me.

That, that, that wasn't a bug or just like a mishap.

That's on purpose.

And why is it on purpose?

Because I'm just so good.

Okay,

okay.

See, I also heard about skill-based fall damage where

people were effectively self-reporting because an anti-cheat system was if you fall from

small distances, you die irregularly.

That's awesome as fuck.

And people who called that out were just clearly cheating.

But

finding

ways to do that.

There's all sorts of versions of this.

In FF14, there's a version of this exact problem, but it's not called peak advantage because you're not doing PvP or shit.

It's called the latency shuffle.

And it means in order to guarantee that the game recognizes you as having moved to the safe location, you should wiggle around in the safe location.

Oh, man.

So you make sure to ping the server with your movement from your current location.

Because sometimes you lag and it still says you're in danger.

And it'll be like, well, I counted them moving.

And so now they're moving off the edge is where I say they are.

God.

get like, yeah, that classic get eating a flash kick and then flashing back to nope, it was blocked, you know.

Yeah,

um, um, yeah, that's the latency around.

I see, I see, okay.

Um, and people, people, there are people in the chat right now that are like, is that why I see people do that?

Yes, that is why you see people do that, and the worse your latency is, the more pronounced the problem.

Well, um, fuck those clowns with these particular issues.

Uh, uh, um, not fuck those those actual real confusing issues.

These clowns are bad and are actively

blaming.

They're living in a fantasy world in which the only way they could lose is if there's a concerted effort to undermine them.

Again, copium in solid form now being sliced and served on a plate with a knife and fork is.

I can't believe it.

This is wild shit.

Good stuff.

Incredible.

Love to see it.

Yeah.

We touched on it a little bit earlier, but yeah, Street Fighter VI,

the change list came down.

It's a minor patch.

No, it's not.

The wild part is they chose to do this in the middle of Street Fighter League.

So

there are events that just passed and upcoming events that are.

I watched a goddamn, I co-streamed the Pagoda Snack Champions College college fucking tour last night which was hours after the fucking patch went live yeah that's it's kind of nuts to have official events like that soon because you i i would expect that they'd try to clear a space around anything official at the very least nah fuck them from one day to the next the game has changed adapt or die

changes now

um

so it absolutely ridiculous it is interesting to see as like okay so akuma got touched.

Bison.

Bison got toned down a little bit.

Yes, you don't get free meter drain off of that knee anymore.

That's fine.

That's fair.

Every time you do a stomp and

you're getting out of there, if you fuck it up, you should be able to be punished for it.

You don't get free escape for going for a trying to stomp.

And then we get shit like, Ed, go fuck yourself, Ed.

I mean,

you're fucking backdash.

Ed, Ed at highest levels was, again, considered, was being considered top one by, like, by, you know, the best players because of a lot of shit.

What's wild is inconsistency, though, because things where Ed's level two,

they'll take away its ability to like generate meter, you know,

while it's active.

So he puts the fireball out, and then, you know, they've nerfed that.

And

across the board, that makes a lot of sense.

But for some reason, Rashid can put out his level two tornado.

You know why?

You know why?

Because Pablo was fucking nerfing Ed, and Jimmy was not nerfing Rashid.

Yeah, Reggie was talking about the Rashid meme continues of just like, he will never get touched.

Rashid gets to do whatever the fuck he wants from day one from Shoe Fighter 5 forward.

They made a change, like a system-wide change that specifically nerfs Geef.

And, well, Geef and I think Jury, where

you could start a jump and then cancel your pre-jump frames.

So as you're starting to jump, you become throw-in vulnerable.

And then he could cancel that into

his SPD.

And Jury, I think, can do something else as well.

Where they made it so that, no, now you don't become throw-in vulnerable there.

You get thrown.

So that's

consistency is good, right?

And then you get weird shit like, you know what?

Jamie can just fucking heal his drive gauge whenever he fucks.

So that's wild because Jamie they've been trying to fix for a long time and it's like let's give him some more.

Let's give him some more.

And each time they've done it.

Just give him more and more and more until he has enough.

But the thing is that the Jamie players are like, but the sober Jamie is the problem.

And they're like, drunk Jamie is even better now.

And they're like, but, oh, it's, you know, no, it's more like now that you can, when you're drinking, which you're going to be drinking, you have more drive gauge to defend yourself and to drive rush.

And before you used to only get that after you were fully drunk, and now you get it right away.

So he he just

sober Jamie is stronger

because you don't give up your okie as bad.

That's really good.

Drive is so important and the fact that he gets it back every time he gets a sip is nuts.

And

Kimberly just getting a full just right across the board upgrade of just about everything.

She was struggling for a bit too, so I can see how they went and they went, all right, we want her to be competitive as well.

Her and Ryu are seemed like the winners of the patch that are eating the best.

Yeah, Ryu in particular, they just made Donkey Kick like a whole lot better.

Marissa

been waiting to see what they're going to do.

I'm like, surely they know the problem.

Surely they know there are issues here.

Surely they know that her damage doesn't mean anything when others can do that same output and now she's just got the downsides.

No reversal, etc.

And yeah, they gave her better

charge buttons.

So if you do the bigger, slower hits, you get better results, whether it's you know, um, retracted throwability on one on wow, that doesn't address that problem at all, or juggle or, or plus, you know, frames on, and especially on Superman Punch, they made it a better move overall.

But no, her anti-air is what she needs, and she still doesn't have it, so nope, doesn't really fix the problem.

Um,

eh, you know, it is what it is.

This is, this is what's happening.

I, I, I, I, if Kimberly can go some four or so patches without, uh,

finally getting this around, then maybe Christmas comes next year.

Who knows?

I think, yeah, Blanca just got like a little touch to his double knee, so they kind of left him alone overall.

But

it feels like they're really going like, okay, it'll take a couple rounds of patches before we,

they're like, let's give it a little bit.

Let's give it a little bit.

And then after three or four, they're like, they're still not doing shit, Captain.

Like, all right, fuck it, juice it.

Kimberly's got a million things now.

She can can go nuts.

I feel like that's kind of the Jamie situation where they're just going to buff Jamie

every six months until complaining stops.

Until Morale improves.

Yeah, like, yeah.

So Terry, for example, Terry Bogart is kind of going through that.

Like, he's currently, he's just not good enough to compete with, you know, the

even the middle of the game right now.

So they're like, all right.

That sucks because I love playing as Terry, but he's, he's bad.

So they're like, all right, let's start here.

He's got

He's got his Fierce Punch, which now goes from being minus one to plus one, right?

And it acts the same on block or hit, which is the really weird part to me.

But if you're in burnout, he can terrorize you, you know?

Giving someone...

More like Terry Rise.

Giving someone

like a...

I mean, this is getting granular or so, but Kimberly as well got some changes of stuff that went from being plus two to plus four.

And that means she can do new combos essentially that you could do.

Yeah, that's a that's a big difference.

Anytime you give somebody the ability to just do brand new combos that they couldn't do before, like that's a huge change.

So

we'll see how things shake out.

But I appreciate the willingness to, you know, have these DLC characters come out and be all like, ah, party time.

All right, party's over.

Yeah.

Now

we have to roll them.

Okay, everyone bought them.

You bought them?

Okay, let's tone them down.

Let's tone them down.

And hey, you bought Terry?

We're going to work on it.

Hey, come on.

And important to note, too, that

for all the winners and losers of these patches,

it's still fucking the best launch version balance of the final game ever made.

Absolutely.

Fantastic.

So, in conclusion, balance is important, and designing your game around the way it's played optimally is a good thing to consider, especially when you're going to have official tournaments for it.

Well,

wait, hold on.

Why would you have,

I mean, after everyone saw what happened with For Honor,

why would you have official money-having tournaments for a game that you, at the development level, know to be a completely broken piece of fucking shit?

Because I think if you acknowledge deep inside in your corporate heart that it's a broken piece of shit,

there's something inside that's like,

but then how do we market and get the excitement going, you know?

Like.

Dragon Ball fucking sparking zero is like letting people bet money on a fucking Harlem Globetrotters fucking game.

I mean, God bless.

I will repeat the praise I gave for its awesome menus, the fact that every Goku you could ever want is there, and all the love and all the detail and every single version of every character in your Goku toy box simulator.

It's incredible.

Absolutely.

It's incredible.

That's what it is.

You can pick every Goku and you can put them in the sandbox and watch them go.

And then you can.

You don't have to use your imagination because the voice actors are there and it looks great.

And if for some godforsaken reason you decide to hold an official tournament for this thing,

you can't act surprised when people play the optimal way

when the optimal way turns out to be to fucking not play at all.

So

in Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, a couple of characters, I think it's 18 and 19, the androids,

can get a life lead and just literally run run away for, what is it, like 10 fucking minutes?

Just fly straight up, straight down.

About 10 minutes.

About a little, yeah.

And there's no timer when the match starts, mind you.

You only know when it's down to like the last two or three.

Yeah, you got to go nine minutes before you see anything.

So God bless, you know, Tyrant and the other commentators.

There's a point

where the matches are playing, and the way that you're optimally

seeing the grand finals go down is just shoot a little pew-pew and then fly up and fly down.

And if the other player approaches you to attempt to fucking fight, nah, run away

at Dragon Ball speeds and get the fuck out of there.

And then occasionally pew pew for

13, 14 minutes or so.

I see someone in the chat saying that the France match was fucking 16 minutes long.

Yeah, I remember I, so I, there was a, I checked on the timeline and I watched a match that started at like, it was like, whatever, like 2.33 and then went up to like 44, 45 or something.

Like, just like it just for one, for that one game, because you also have multiple

teammates that you can tag through as well.

And the commentary, they just stop.

Yeah, well, what are you supposed to fucking say?

They just straight up stop, but they're clearly being professional.

And God bless, because when it cuts back, when the time is over and the match is done, it's like,

and there you have it uh there's your winner and uh stay tuned for more action

you know like what are you supposed to say man so what do you think is happening on the dev side do they not know or do they think people people don't know well any moment that was spent perhaps you know going like how to balance this feature or so was is fuck off fuck off put another goku in because we can get more in there cram one in there and the wild part it's that like the two funniest things are that like this is a system where when you go through the tutorials, there's so many systems that have evolved over the series' lifetime.

And in the tutorials, you learn about tons of counters and setups and ways to cancel strings and dash and follow up and teleport.

Like, there's all these subsystems that they built over the course of these five or however many games it's been, and none of them matter because it's just not built for real actual competitive viability.

Like, it's the battle, like, none of that is being considered.

You have characters that can fly anywhere, and you have no way to force them to be close to each other.

Flying anywhere and teleporting and doing the shit you're doing to feel like a Dragon Ball episode is the goal, and they've accomplished that goal.

And please don't put a bracket or money on the line when you know that that was your only goal.

This was a mistake.

Yeah, the players,

there's like things of chat log, of Discord logs where players are like, the producers came in and the TOs were like,

you're going to have to switch.

You can't play like you have to play for real.

And like the rule changes were coming in

off stream and stuff.

And it's like, you can't just fucking arbitrarily like, what, you know?

Like.

You have to play for real?

I am playing for real.

I won.

It turns out this is the way to play to win.

What are you supposed to do?

You know?

No, make it fun, though.

So you do that.

Make the game now.

Make the game so that this is not a thing then.

How about that?

Right?

Know what you're fucking putting out there.

It's wild.

um i love my favorite part though

is that the tournament is called tournament is called dragon ball sparking zero dramatic showdown

i missed that i didn't know that oh that's good

oh that's good

the dramatic showdown baby yeah

Yeah,

it's it's fine.

It's fine.

Know what you are.

Know what you're meant to be.

And don't try to be the thing that you're not.

You know what I love about stories like this?

Like, absolutely, I'm just, it gives me like a warmth in my heart and like a flutter in my stomach.

Is this

someone's fault?

Like, this embarrassment can, at some point in the process, be boiled down to someone who either said, it's fine, don't worry about it, or

should have said, hey, man, that sucks actually, and didn't.

Well, because a bunch of this is also, again, sticking shit on the wall, you know, and seeing what happens.

Gadjirobi could heal himself forever with the Senzu beans.

They nerfed that because they saw that happening when the game launched.

But they didn't see this happening, you know, where the androids don't use key and therefore they can just stall it out forever.

Stupid shit forever.

You know, and and it's like, yeah, the whole game is not, it's like they, when you have that many characters and that much shit going on, like, it's never going to be balanced.

It's not that.

You know, why try to do this?

Or, or make a commitment to actually fucking, you know, I mean, for that part of a real fighting game developer making a real fighting game and actually balancing it.

And that, that game ended up insanely fucking unbalanced.

But at least you could fucking watch people play it.

You can play it.

You can play it.

That's it you know it's just it's whatever the lay the lesson here is it's just know what you are if you want to be like

not at if gameplay is an afterthought then cool be that thing but then don't put on a fucking bracket here see this outcome and then go hey no stop it you can't do that you made it this way they're doing what the game allows them to do You made a system that incentivized this behavior.

Why are you mad at people for doing that behavior?

Yeah.

You know, and

you give these types of games long enough, and eventually the players have to come up with their own

Smash Brothers rule set for what's viable and not viable.

You can only run for 30 seconds.

So that means every single person is staring at their fucking watch while running to stop at 29 seconds, throw a single hit, and start running for 29 more seconds.

And for what it's worth,

when there are bugs in games that allow somebody to stall out forever and such, there are rules that are considered where they go, yeah, that's actually not allowed.

You can't fucking stop that.

Anyway.

But Crosstekin comes back.

It's back, baby.

Fucking lame it out like crosstek and fucking get that mega man.

Like, it's even the same fucking thing with fucking box art mega man floating into the sky.

It looks like Android fucking shoots you in the 19.

Yeah.

Shoots the same fucking thing.

your opponent and float away to win.

That's it.

Unstoppable.

Oh man, yeah, that's that's great.

That's great.

So, if you have put that into your game, you have massively fucked up on a huge level and you need to take it back to the drawing board.

But it's accurate to the source material.

It is not accurate to the source material.

Is he not called jump and shoot man?

He didn't jump like that.

Okay.

Well,

that's all fine and dandy.

The only other thing was that there was a dev stream for Warframe where they talked about new game mode, big updates, and Warframe 1999.

So I don't know what the fuck 1999 is.

Apparently, I thought it was going to be like a separate thing, but it's not a separate thing.

It's like an expansion, and it's going to have shit from that version come into the goddamn future or some shit.

I don't know.

That shit's weird.

Ben Starr is there.

Okay.

And so's Neil Newbon.

There's a new mode called Face Off.

That's like PvP VE.

What?

Not PvP, but...

I'm so, I'm so

shocked because Warframe PvP is the worst thing that's ever existed.

And I remember you saying that, which is why it's like, okay, so

another crack at it.

4v4, fighting waves of enemies.

Oh, someone in chat says it's PVE, but it's a race.

So that's how they do it.

Okay, okay.

So

smart, actually.

That Dino game that came out the other day.

Yeah.

Right, okay.

What the fuck was that called?

Dido Crisis?

Dido Crisis Evolution?

No, Exo Primal.

But I only knew that because someone in the chat chat said it.

There you go.

I did not remember that.

Ubisoft just announced that X-Defiant is shutting down and two studios are closing.

Wow, it's all coming up roses for Ubisoft.

Put a pin in that.

I feel like that docket point is going to continue across

a couple weeks.

I love

how long

the conversation between you and me has been going about Ubisoft both on and off this podcast?

It is funnier and funnier every week.

It's just,

it's not often that you see stories happening from different angles entirely that all kind of just position, you know, like you see, like, oh, look, here's a story about the wolves are now outside the door.

You know?

Yeah, here's, here's, like, it's always this fun thing.

There's a leak in the basement, huh?

It's the situation where it's like, here's the version that's in the newspaper.

Here's the version from Jimmy's next-door neighbor.

Here's the version overheard at the grocery store 10 days later.

And you know, and then they all converge into like, oh, this is co-not good.

Not good.

Sell your stock if you own any.

That's my advice.

I mean, I anxiously await the final story.

That is, they have found a new bunker to move all the sexual predators to

as the final bastion.

We're out of places and offices and studios to move people around to, so we've created the final protective bunker.

We've sealed off the basement of the Rainbow Rainbow Six Siege developers, and we're just going to have the sex predators fight each other down there.

It's bringing a new meaning to peak advantage.

Let's take some letters.

Oh, before we do that, actually, there is a piece of news that we missed.

So you know how I've made jokes in the past about when's the good time to start a computer role-playing game, such as Path of the Righteous or Baldur's Gate.

Did you see the Baldur's Gate news?

Oh, no.

I'm sorry.

A Thunderdome?

It just becomes an Obisoft Thunderdome.

The Oobidome.

Oh,

oh.

No, tell me more.

So Baldur's Gate,

Larian, said the patch 7 was going to be the last patch, and then they said, Fuck you, we lied.

The next patch is going to have cross-play, photo mode, and 12 more subclasses, one for every single class in the game.

That's a lot.

That sure is.

It sure is a lot.

That's 30%

more classes in the game.

Jesus Christ, man.

Is that an expansion?

No, that's patch eight.

At what point

at what point do people start going, okay, guys, guys,

hold on,

hold on, right?

Just the

just your plate is

just more food coming from, whatever that picture is of like the person with all the food and just more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It just, like,

what?

How many runs do they expect

one to do?

Well, is New Millennium in the chat?

Because he could tell you.

I think he's up to 14.

He's got a sickness, though.

Well, okay, but, like,

you're also.

20?

You're on 20, you fucking freak.

Stop it.

Okay, but, like, this is at like very clear decision to not play anything else, right?

All other things are just not happening, right?

Why not just play Baldur's Gate?

It's got a season pen.

Oh, Jesus.

Sorry.

What the fuck?

What are you doing?

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

What the fuck?

You're just done with this podcast today?

My finger

hit the button.

Sorry.

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

Anyway,

that's what Larian Larian should be doing.

That's what they should be doing.

Wrap it up, guys.

It's too much.

Oh, fuck.

Anyway, yeah, no, that's crazy.

That's a crazy.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

And a bunch of those subclasses are ones that people were asking for.

I'm like disappointed that they never made it into the original release.

Like Hexblade, Warlock, and Giant Path Barbarian and shit like that.

I mean, it is a design philosophy to take your product and basically go, we are making this as if no other game exists.

So I think what's happening is that

the narrative people are all on pre-production on their next game because this patch isn't going to have narrative stuff.

It's all technical or gameplay stuff.

So those people want to do something.

So they're like, fuck it, why don't we just throw a dozen more classes into the game?

Okay, well, okay.

I mean,

in this type of industry environment, if you can find new work and your thing is making money and everything is going well, then by all means, find ways to keep busy and quality of life the shit out of whatever you're doing.

I will say, though, that they

Larian.

Earlier today, I talked about how Josh Sawyer talked about Larian with Divinity made it so that full voice acting became the overnight standard for all of these types of games.

And

there was an article right when Baldur's Gate 3 came out.

It was like, you can't use this game to set a new standard for RPGs, and everyone mocked it.

And that article has now been retroactively proven super accurate because nobody is going to be able to put out a game like Baldur's Gate 3.

I don't think Varian will be able to put out a fucking game and support it like they did with Baldur's Gate 3.

Well, we just got finished saying this with Elden Ring, right?

Like,

and coming off of a studio that's being really successful with their previous releases, and people are used to more bite-sized morsels by comparison, which were also really big.

If you're going to go forward like this, I guess it's almost like, all right, these games are going to release as platforms that exist for

you know MMO lengths of time and just get treated as such, even though it's a single-player game.

You know?

Because they, yeah, I don't know if you remember, but there used to be like this thing with Baldur Skate 1 and 2 and Planescape where there'd be people that replayed them every single year.

Because you'd roll a new type of class and you'd go through it and it's a classic and blah, blah, blah.

And like they've recreated that situation in like one year

where people are replaying a fucking 150-hour long RPG

back to back.

And then by the time they're done, dude, I know people that beat that game twice before the epilogue came out.

Yeah, well, you're talking, I mean, shit, during the early access, even, right?

Like, yeah.

I just, but yeah, when you describe, you know, the person who's on their 20th, it's just like, okay, so, like, well, that person's sick.

Well, it's just like, you know, what we're doing here, trying to keep up with hundreds of games coming out every year.

Yeah.

There's no way you're doing that.

You can't argue with that value, though.

Holy fuck.

Yeah.

I remember I was describing to Reggie some time ago about like the feeling of

the person that you're talking to on the internet that knows everything about the game that they know.

And you not knowing about that thing means that that's a blind spot for you, but you can't see all the other things they don't know because they're just locked into that one.

Dude, okay, I had a perfect example of this where I was talking about how I really like the changes that I'm not going to go into the specifics, but I really like the change that the Path of Exile 2 is making compared to the first one.

Because, and I said, as a new player to Path of Exile, I never spent more than 20 hours in it, re-speccing in that game was really hard.

Right?

It was very punishing.

The skill tree was very extreme.

To which person in chat said, actually, it's totally easy.

You don't know, talking to me, what you're talking about.

I have 35, 40 hours.

To which I go, I don't know if that's true.

To which people who put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it go, no, you, that guy, don't know what you're talking about.

Respecting did used to be really hard.

It's just not hard now.

And you don't know that because you only just started playing.

And just this circling fucking level of

varying expertises

just all bouncing off of each other.

Oh my God.

And so

you can in our chat who's beaten Baldur's Gate three 20 times says, oh, you could get a playthrough down to 40 hours easy.

Yeah, bro.

You don't even look at the dialogue anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and you and only you can experience that from the seat where you're seeing it from every direction, you know, in each different genre and each different thing.

It's a wild one.

But yeah, no, we had a big talk about that.

All right, let's take some letters.

If you want to send a letter in, send it to castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

That's castlesuperbeastmail at gmail.com.

All right.

We got one coming in over here.

No name.

Okay.

Yeah,

don't mention my name because I'm not sure this information information is public.

Last episode about Gold Masters reminded me of a story that

was mentioned.

Okay, so

Coffee Stain Publishing was talking about Satisfactory

before it was announced, and this must have been around 2019 or so the reason they got into publishing to begin with at all was because they released a previous game uh perhaps sanctum 2 um that it had a publisher for the console versions uh they had multiple issues but it all culminated in the publisher sending the gold masters for ps3 to the wrong address delaying the release of the game

It was mailed into the wrong fucking building.

They were so incompetent that they just decided, fuck it, we're going to be our own publishers after this point.

You know, that's crazy.

This is a little out of date, but I remember a long time ago, back in the early 90s, gold masters were often not sent in the mail at all.

Someone would get and put it in their car and drive it over.

Yes, yes.

If you were, if that was possible, that was a thing.

Because it would also just be faster if you were

within driving distance versus going with the mail, you know.

But, like, it also gave you the certainty of like safety.

Did you put it in the guy's fucking hand?

Yes.

Yes.

Courier can do the job, but sometimes you just

would do it themselves 100%.

That was that's a thing.

That's a really good reason to create your own publishing arm.

That's a bunch of bullshit.

Oh, man.

All right.

Alculator says, Dear Wat and Pooley, I've met multiple people that say that they don't re-watch movies or TV shows or re-read books because they already know what's going to happen.

My first thought is always: do they not re-listen to songs?

My theory is that they're too proud to admit that they're getting a worse attention span.

You two are normal consumers of meteor.

What's your

opinion?

Yes, the most normal media consumers.

We are highly, highly atypical media consumers.

So, I mean, I've talked about the fact that I don't re-experience a lot of media, especially these days.

If I did in the past, it was more minimal, but now it's like very, very rare.

And that just comes from the fact that this atypical career has led to me.

like every week keeping up with what's going on releases so on and so forth and all and with every um with the overall keeping up with the industry means trying to keep your finger on the pulse of so many things.

So when I replay something, if I'm replaying something or choosing to go back over a particularly long game that I know I enjoy, I feel like I could be better spending that time learning more about a new thing.

or re-experiencing something or experiencing something that I haven't or uncovering something else that

I

am curious about or that people have recommended.

I love 13 Sentinels.

I really think that's a highly recommended game that I would

tell a lot of friends to play.

I can't think of a time when I'm ever going to do it again.

I think I highly prioritize some new shit and seeing how that goes.

So,

Woolly, you and I both have elements particularly strongly in one or the other that would lead to this type of scenario.

I'm obsessed.

I am like a proud member of the cult of the new.

I am just, I want the newest.

I want to see it because it's now, because it's soon, it's, it's immediate, right?

And you have a

general, like you just stated, like, uh, well, why, why not, you know, have a new experience rather than redo an old one, right?

But at the end of the day, I feel like when you talk to somebody and go, well, why would I re-watch that, reread that, or whatever, I know how it ends.

There's like a bunch of things going on and they can be all of them or they can only be a couple.

The number one thing that I see,

and it feeds into spoiler culture and it feeds into the insanity that is like hyper-specific anti-spoiler.

And I have to talk to everybody about this within minutes of it coming out, is that shock and surprise for many are the primary desire they're trying to get out of their media.

And media has reflected that to become way worse with stuff like Game of Thrones and shit like that, where it's like, we have to surprise the audience.

Like, how about you have the audience enjoy themselves?

Shouldn't that be the primary thing?

Surprise and shock are disposable.

So, like,

a lot of the same people who are like, well, why would I re-watch this?

I already know what it has are the same people that are fucking going on to social media within minutes of a TV show ending so that they can argue about who they're shipping in the finale of Arcane and spoiling it for everybody that happens to follow them.

Because

going through that, because that's the real goal is actually just talking about it and talking about how surprised you were rather than actually

engaging with the media at all.

And look, sometimes, you know, my approach is not perfect and obviously there's going to be flaws in it.

One of which that people will

⁇ that

I will be glazed forever over is like something like Transistor, or I forget too much of that for something that I really enjoyed when I played it.

Well, if you forget all of it, then fucking just go back.

And then that would be a great thing to go and replay.

So it's not a perfect strategy or solution, nor is it great for everybody.

But regardless, I think that

the job and the way we go about this is going to kind of leave me often seeking out new experiences as a priority just on instinct in a lot of cases.

And every once in a while, I'll,

you know, maybe pop something in or so.

But I even find times where I'm like,

well, okay, games where I'm trying to rest and I have like a period of downtime that I want to relax in is where comforts come into play.

But,

yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Like, I'm like, I'm hearing enough good things about a thousand times resist that I'm like, okay, here, let's go, let's, let's throw that in, let's see what's going on.

Um,

and then there's your, yeah, there's your, your mouthwashing style game where it's like, this I'm never going to play, but I will certainly recommend it to somebody and sit through them playing it, you know.

Um, that's I'm probably going to see that game again, watching a friend play it or two, you know.

All the stuff that I said before, like, I think it all combines into

there's a certain genre of person, and I believe that is like half or more of all people, who feel no desire to engage with any of the media that they're ever watching or interacting with in any way whatsoever.

People are watching

serialized television dramas with the same level of emotional investment that my mom watches house flipping shows on HGTV,

where it is something to watch and pleasantly tickle the neurons and relax, and have no actual meaningful involvement in your front of your brain at all.

Just all lizard brain, all back here.

Because if you have no desire to ever even think or talk about something after it's done, well, because I know what happened,

that means you're not actually interested in the thing you just experienced at all and you don't really have any follow-up thoughts

um because you didn't actually

care about it when you were going through it at all

i have friends that kind of consume media like that and it

it's

it's okay you know what i mean to like just kind of it's a personal choice and it's not worse or better it's just it's just less involved yeah that's that like that's it like i mean it's your personality will determine whether or not you give a shit about these things and, or you're like, I spend my time doing other things and stuff.

And they're like, that's okay.

Like, for me, I'm going to watch a fucking

David Lynch shit.

And I don't want to walk away from David Lynch shit going, oh, weird.

And then go about my day.

I want to go back and look at some of the weird shit and be like, what the fuck is going on in this?

What was he thinking?

And I'll go and read fucking interviews or watch interviews with Lynch and be like, what the hell?

What is he getting at?

And I'll look at the scenes around it and be like, because

I want to take all the little pieces and appreciate them.

Instead of just going, oh, the baby was deformed.

I would also argue as well, not even argue.

I had a thought that is our parents, who

are the people who kind of consume things this way.

Because

we grew up in a generation where like media consumption had already been a normalized thing and the newer generations are also more and more experienced to that.

So like how to watch something, quote unquote, and what to think about while you're doing so was something that, you know, if you were around when the TV came into existence,

you know, you don't know how to think about these other things.

You're like, the medium, the medium and everything associated is kind of being figured out as it goes.

So, I feel like,

you know, when I think of my parents watching, like, you know, the sitcoms they grew up with and then like movies and stuff like that, like,

there was a

framework of analysis that was just like, okay, well, you look at books with that level of like specificity.

That's not true.

But that, well, for them, for them,

there was a feeling that, oh, no, books deserve this, and maybe even old plays or so, but not TV and movies, and certainly not video games.

You know, it was just a norm to not look at it as a medium worthy of that type of

dissection.

I think

my parents

fulfill like a really good example criteria for the various steps on this.

My dad would watch a lot of movies, but most of the movies that he would watch were old movies because they reminded him of watching the old movies.

They were nostalgic and they were relaxing to him, and he was tired because he worked a lot.

And one of the things he told me was like one of the most insane, he has the weirdest, most insane subtitle take I've ever encountered in my life.

My father hates subtitles

so much that despite the fact that he does not speak Italian or German, he would rather watch a movie in Italian or German because he knows like four phrases rather like entirely without reading the subtitles because that's preferable to him.

And as a result, he would never ever watch any like Asian cinema that had to have subtitles or anything like that.

I mean, like in fucking Game of Thrones, there's scenes where they're speaking high Valyrian, a fictional language.

Oh, yeah.

and it's just like yeah i just want to hear the noises yeah um

and then i think about my mom and my mom is like a stereotypical suburban mom when watching movies and it's like fucking get that pause ready Because every scene will be accompanied by the questions.

And the questions are the things that just occurred in the scene.

And what's happening is my mom isn't actually just paying attention.

She's just not paying attention.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Other things are.

Like, There's a bunch, there's a couple things that she would watch that she'd pay like rapt attention because there were things that she was interested in.

But like most of the movies that my mom watched, she was just watching it just to watch it.

But then she would get lost because she wasn't paying attention.

Other priorities.

So you would have to have the fucking mental cheat sheet of who that guy is.

I've watched a friend of mine in particular struggle with

trying to resist the phone during any movie or anything that's like over an hour, you know, or at least an hour.

Like, and just like,

and it's like every 10,

and just like, and she's gotten better at it, you know, which, and it's a bit more, it's also like ADHD kind of related as well and stuff, but there's an element of like, like, the,

the, that,

even when you're thinking, oh, I wonder what's going on, it's like you've already disc, you've already disconnected with whatever is happening on the screen, you know?

You know, it's funny, there is one thing when I'm watching a movie that will

overwhelm me like intensely.

And I will have to pause it and pull out my phone.

And it is, who the fuck is that guy?

Oh, the face I recognize.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know that guy, but what's his fucking name?

Yes.

What did I see him in?

Who is that guy?

Do you know who that guy is?

Oh, it's Ray Fiennes.

I was Ray Fiennes.

Ah, it was.

All right, actually, you know what?

Like, that has happened like two or three times, and it has been rafier.

Yes, that's why I say I like it specifically that fucker.

I don't know why it's specifically him.

Yeah, yeah, he's got one of those faces.

All right, and we got one last one here coming in from Julian.

Hey, Batman and Robin,

Ed was trained by Balrog.

Hard R, soft A.

Does he say it?

Does Ed say it?

No.

I'll do you one better.

No.

Balrog would just beat the

bricks off him.

No, no.

Here's what I'm saying.

Balrog

absolutely let him say it.

He did not curtail that one bit.

And then,

one day, Ed came home with blood on his knuckles after a fight that he won as a kid beating up an adult and went, yo, what the fuck?

Why didn't you tell me?

And Balrog just went,

That's pretty good.

And now he doesn't say it.

That's canon.

Yeah, okay, I can see that.