Dialogue Tree: Open World Games

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All right.

Before we get started, I'm just going to grab a sandwich at Sprouts real quick before we start recording, and I'll just be right back.

Yeah, no problem.

Hey, Matt, wait, before you go, though, do you think,

is there like a place you might be able to get me coffee in between there?

Yes, there's so jet-like.

There's a coffee shop at Sprouts.

I'll get you a fresh coffee.

Awesome.

I would love, yeah, I'd love a black coffee.

Great, got it.

Yeah.

And is there like a pharmacy near there?

Because I got like this, it's a little embarrassing.

I got like a toe fungus, so you could pick up like an antifungal for me.

Uh, they might have a pharmacy section at the store, but if not, I mean, there's a pretty close front.

I can stop and get you that.

Okay, great, absolutely.

You need that right this second.

Yeah, I kind of need it.

Okay, yeah, my foot is just like itching like crazy.

I'm not going to be able to concentrate on the show.

Great, yeah, okay.

So, fungal cream, coffee, sandwich for me.

All right, I'll see you guys in the next one.

Before you go out,

sorry, I heard you were running across the street to get a sprout.

Yeah, I really need a cup for my milk.

Do you think you might be able to get me a cup for my milk?

Just a just a cup?

A cup for I can't just drink it out of the cart and

love a cup for my milk.

Okay, yeah, I'm actually going to get Heather in there a cup of coffee.

I'll ask for an extra cup so that you could have a cup for your milk.

I don't want a coffee cup.

I would love it to be a glass cup.

A glass cup for my milk.

Okay, well, there's a, you know, I guess there's a Target around here.

I'll just get you a cup from Target.

Thank you.

Hello, weary traveler.

Oh,

hello.

Rats have occupied the bottom level of the studio.

If you can bring me 12 of their hides, I'll reward you with this gold key.

Wait, okay.

Hold on.

Rats have infested the bottom level of the studio.

That, yes, like the basement level.

I don't want to spring for an exterminator, but you're here.

You've got time.

If you could just go kill 12 of them.

This is like...

Again, this shiny key is your reward.

Okay.

I don't know what the key is for, but like I do want to.

That's part of the fun.

Okay, you know what?

I'm sort of, I am in the middle of something.

I'm actually in the middle of a couple of things.

This seems like it's going to be pretty time-consuming.

Can I come back to this?

You can do it whenever.

I mean, like, you have, yeah, there's no like a time limit on it, but I would love it.

Sooner's better than me, for me.

If I come back, will you just tell me what I'm supposed to do again?

Yeah, if you forget.

Okay.

Okay, okay.

I might want to like just, you know, keep a little log or something.

I'll write down that there are a bunch of rats in the studio, and then I'll just come back and give you the hides.

12 of them?

12.

Okay, 12 rat hides for you.

Excuse me, sir.

Excuse me, sir.

What?

My grandfather just passed away.

He was so thirsty.

He needed milk, but he had no way to drink it.

Wait, no, so wait, I failed that side quest?

He had no way to drink it, and now my grandfather needs a plot in which to be buried.

Do you think you might be able to stop by a park on your way to Sprouts and see if there's an available plot to bury my grandfather.

Okay, yeah, I mean, I guess I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now.

I guess I could take the cup off the list because I was supposed to get that and it didn't pan out.

No, I would like to bury him with the cup, so please take the cup.

Okay, so still get the cup.

Get the cup.

Okay, so I'll get the cup.

And you know what?

I owe him the cup.

At the very least, I'll get the cup.

I'm getting a cup of coffee for Heather.

I'm getting a toe fungal cream for Nick.

Quest fails.

Wait, which one?

Matt, my fucking foot is so itchy.

You need me the fungal cream in time.

Everyone has something for me to do my foot off.

I'm trying to do all of it, but it's impossible to do all of it.

Well, now you don't get the shiny key.

You had a key to that?

We've all got keys.

What are they for?

Have you seen the treasure chest with 12 locks?

No, I haven't.

I didn't even, I hadn't even gone in there.

God.

Let's just do this episode.

We kill monsters and craft items and collect ingredients and deliver deliver messages and ride horses and ride motorcycles and play poker and maybe build a house for all our wheels of cheese as we discuss what makes a good open world game this week on Get Played.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

That's me, Nick Weiger, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone.

And welcome back, Bucket.

Holy shit.

You know what?

I've just decided.

I'm going to fucking bring it back permanently.

Whoa.

Permanently.

Permanently.

Here's why.

Here's why.

A listener came to a show

my final night in Amsterdam.

Also, welcome back to the United States.

Welcome back to the U.S.

I'm back.

We're all in the same person.

We're all in the same room.

Bang, bang.

bang, bang, bang.

Yeah, okay.

Bang.

Heather's really bad.

I had a listener who I think I've mentioned on the show before.

He was this guy who gave us a copy of

Kabuki Quantum Fighter.

Yes.

His name is Alwyn.

And he came to my final show in

Amsterdam, which was the night before I left.

I did a show at Boom Chicago called Time Plus Tragedy equals Comedy.

And Mary Laws actually did a monologue for this show too.

It was a real sendoff.

But in the second half of the show, we asked audience members to give stories to inspire improv.

And he was in the audience, and

he talked about how much it meant to him to hear

Welcome Back Bucket every week and how

it had made one of his worst years of his life

digestible.

That's wild.

So I'm fucking bringing it back permanently.

Welcome back.

Welcome back, Bucket.

Welcome back, Bucket.

For those of you who have joined the show in the last couple of years and have never heard this phrase,

early on when we used to play weird games or worst games,

we pulled a few catchphrases from those games and we played a game called, what the fuck was that game called?

Batom.

Batom,

which was by the maker of Katamari Demesi.

And I was quite delighted when a character in the game was introduced and on the full screen text said, Welcome back, Bucket.

And I was like, that's a great catchphrase.

And so that's why I'm bringing it back.

Was a fun game to experience.

A little slight, but I'm glad you played a little what tough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Me too.

I'm glad Welcome Back Bucket is back.

And I'm glad you're back.

I'm glad I'm back.

I brought you guys some gifts here.

Yes.

Matt, don't crinkle.

You're going to set people's mesophonia off.

You know, to that, I say, I don't fucking care.

Oh, my God.

He's doing it.

He's crinkling.

Mesophonia?

Shut up.

No, I'm just kidding.

Sorry to make anybody upset.

You used to be able to eat a fucking peanut on an airplane, and now everybody's got mesophonia.

You should just be able to crunch Cool Ranch Doritos directly into a microphone.

Now everyone's got mesophonia.

Oh God, that sounds so delicious.

It's been a while since I've had a Dorito.

Three months.

Yeah, really.

It's three months since you've had a Dorito.

I guess you were gone.

You don't have any cool American Doritos?

I did not purchase any cool American Doritos.

But what I brought back is drope, which is a Dutch licorice that is dark and salty.

Wow.

And I talked to you guys on the show about it being a little bit different than American licorice.

So I brought you both back bags of the best drope out,

UIT, out

uh and i hope you enjoy your drope it says this word world here word here uh mild zout that means mild salt mild salt okay zout is salt uh it also says klepper on here is that the brand i believe

up at the top it says that it has zonder uh which means no no gluten no gluten uh no something else no uh gelatin yeah yeah and then uh but with some kind of sea salt okay i think i just got to rip into this.

Yeah.

Rip into it.

We're going to have this now.

Yeah.

Do it now.

Have it now right on the show and give me one too because I'm so hungry.

All right.

I'm going to open this up.

You had you, how, when, what was your first experience having this, Heather?

Uh, when you go to the Netherlands and uh, you are there for any amount of time, you're like, oh, I, and I, you know, I moved there 20 years ago, so uh, my experience was pre the sort of uh food revolution.

What do you

Abaddock is laughing?

I'm laughing because the candy is the logo.

It is the logo.

It says klepper on it, and you're presented with a black diamond

indicating the intensity of this experience, like a steep ski slope.

This is a black diamond candy.

So there's things that

you're given.

And it's like, oh, eat this.

And one is a paper noten, which is like a type of cookie.

Bitterballen, which is like a gravy that's deep-fried that is the best fucking shit on earth.

That sounds amazing, it's incredible,

it's deep-fried gravy, and then uh, you know, drop, which is uh, Dutch licorice, maybe German licorice.

I'm gonna pull away from the microphone and start chewing.

All right, I'm gonna have a bite of this too.

Are we all chewing?

We're all gonna be chewing at the same time.

Are you, I'll let you two chew, and while you're chewing, I'll talk and then I'll chew for a little bit.

So, this, there's this reminded me because I saw this specific, not this specific snack, but this kind of snack cited in a New Yorker piece I read maybe last year, earlier this year, that was about the disgusting food museum in Sweden.

And there is a, it's written by a Chinese-American author, and they had their own experience.

Ji Yang Fan is the name of the author.

And they had an experience where like their first encounter with cheese, they were disgusted because they didn't have it growing up.

Like they'd immigrated to the U.S.

and never had cheese.

And when they encountered like ricotta inside a ravioli, they were like, this is fucking revolting.

But, you know, that's like a, in a lot of cultures, it's a normal thing to eat.

So I was just talking about how relative disgusting food is.

And so there's a point where they have this snack.

And let me just read this, a couple of these, these paragraphs right here.

The final item was lacris dijolfalar, a type of salmiak or salty licorice candy that is popular in Nordic countries.

Easy, I thought.

I don't love licorice, but its herbal taste reminds me of the medicinal soups that my mother fed me as a child.

One second after I put the candy in my mouth, though, I spat it out with such force that it left a sticky mark on my screen.

Whereas Ahrens, Ahrens is the Swedish person who is running the museum.

Ahren's mouth was curled into a smile.

There was a bowl of the vile confection on his countertop.

He ate two, emitting a satisfying mmm as he chewed.

It's one of my favorite things, he said.

But isn't it horribly salty and bitter?

I asked, incredulous, clutching my glass of water.

When the candy was in my mouth, I felt as if I was drowning in brackish seawater.

That's what makes it good, he said.

People naturally like foods they grew up eating.

I don't know.

It's kind of a simple sort of observation, but

I like the way this whole piece was written because it just talked about, again the stuff being so relative there's a dutch uh i'm eating it now there's a dutch and german uh cheese called quark which is like a uh yogurt adjacent food that is my favorite thing to have for breakfast it is really high in protein really low in sugar and kind of reminds me of cheesecake And it is so fucking good and you can't get it here.

There's been a couple companies that have tried to break through and bring quark to the U.S.

And maybe you can get one of those brands at Whole Foods.

But that's the thing.

When I arrive, it's my first thing I buy at the grocery store.

And when I leave, it's the first thing I miss.

Wow.

What do you think?

What do you think of drope?

I've still got a little chewing left.

It's not bad.

It is extremely salty, which I don't mind.

The licorice flavor, I don't love, and the gummy texture I don't love.

I know you don't like this gummy.

This is why this came up because gummy is ain't yummy, according to you.

Gummy ain't yummy, yeah.

I'm a gummy guy.

I'm a like, I'm a licorice guy.

I like licorice.

I also like salt.

This is what, I know this isn't the point of the movie, but this is what I would think licorice pizza would taste like.

I'm just going to

sit with that for a second and really let that rock my world.

Like it's,

yeah.

That's really interesting.

I do, I think I do like this.

I'm not a black licorice person.

That's not like my main go-to.

I'm like a red licorice, like sweet candy licorice, basically.

There are these licorice bites at Trader Joe's that are nice and thick and they're

really, really fucking good.

They're not like this, though.

But this

are they red licorice bites?

They, well, here's the thing: yeah, they can be red.

They can be, okay.

Sometimes they have yellow, sometimes they have green.

Yellow?

I know.

I look, it's what they got there.

Sometimes they're purple, even.

Wow.

They're really doing all sorts of different flavors here.

In my mind, black licorice tastes bad.

This doesn't taste like how I thought that would.

And I,

if we're giving this snacker whack

weird system.

If we're going to make this snacker whack

I think I think this is a snack.

I think this is good.

I didn't hate it like I anticipated I might.

It is it is bizarre and specific.

The texture is doing a lot for me too.

Like it's easy to it's easy to get down.

I did like it and then it wasn't salty

upon bite,

but it was like it got saltier as I started to chew and it became sort of like a funny like salt surprise kind of.

Alex, you want to try one of these?

I wish it was more salty.

I like a saltier drope, but this is the sort of like Alex is shaking his head vigorously.

I'm living through you guys.

So that's, that's, that's it for my.

Can you tell us what about this, like, you love

the tape?

It's really salty.

It's aggressively salty.

It's not salty enough.

I've had saltier.

It's milds out.

Milds out.

It needs to be maximum salty.

But you were saying you like it with like salt crystals on it.

Yeah.

I like a saltier drope and a harder drope.

But are you like a black licorice person in general?

No, no.

No, I don't like

a regular.

I mean, I'm fine with regular licorice, but I don't like, like, it's, it was the addition of the salt that made it like, oh,

what a delicious treat.

Like, you, you don't think about it for a while.

And then,

unlike most candies, which I feel like you eat candy and then you're like,

I've had enough.

And you kind of feel like kind of gross.

Right.

Yeah.

With this, the flavor profile is such that you have one and you put it away for like five minutes.

And then you're like, man, I could go for another one.

I could go for another one of those.

Yeah.

The flavor is not like uncommon to me.

It does sort of have that, like we were talking about this before, that sort of like star anise yep, like take sure, yeah, yeah, where like black licorice

that I'm used to, I like can't place what that is, yeah, like I don't understand it.

Yeah, this I like, I do get, and I do, I did enjoy that bite.

Uh, it's a good, it's a good drill.

I also like looking at Dutch, like the language, because it looks like how English would look if I couldn't speak English.

Did you see the back where that

top word?

Yeah, Jeffel

Licketer.

Sure.

Pete ankoop van des best drop oot.

Yeah, yeah.

It looks like the text in like a prop book, like for a movie.

I just want to say thanks to all the friends I made in the Netherlands, all the listeners who came out to the shows.

I can't wait to come back to your perfect country.

Wow.

And until then, I'm going to struggle over here and try not to get shot.

Or do a pretty good job most of the time.

Or civil ward.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Heather, thank you so much for bringing these to us.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

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Well, hey, this month's We Play You Play, that's when we dedicate a full episode to discussing one game, is going to be Shadow of the Colossus because you demanded it.

We're going to be talking about that next Monday, September 25th.

Oh, about, yeah, because on Discord, I see.

I see.

Yes.

The voting happened on our Discord

and the votes retallied and people were upset.

But we're still going forward with Shadow of the Colossus.

Shadow of the Colossus.

I don't think people should be upset because this is a classic game and this will be fascinating to talk about, especially with this is Matt's first experience with it.

Yes.

And Heather, I know this is a beloved game for you and I'd love to hear.

I'd love to get to unpack that.

Is everyone playing it already?

Because I've been playing it.

What's our Colossi Feld count?

I've done 11.

Wow, okay.

I've done 11.

Nice.

I've taken out seven as of this point.

I mean, it's not the longest game.

I've taken out five, but it's mostly because I've been traveling and relocating and unpacking.

Yeah.

I'm going to have some more Colossi slang time for this.

We can change.

I'm absolutely on pace to finish it.

We're going to finish it.

We'll all finish it.

Yeah, I mean, we'll talk about it next week.

So look for that and play along if you like.

Well, in the remastered version, there's 85 Colossians.

Oh, okay, wait.

Then I'm very behind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a joke, listener.

That's a joke.

I am playing the remaster.

Yeah.

Me too.

I'm I'm playing the remaster.

Though now that I'm home, I could pop in the original and

see how it compares.

Yeah, I played the original.

I'm thinking what I'm going to do is watch a PS2 playthrough.

I don't want to fucking talk about this next week.

I'm going to talk about what we're going to do.

We're going to talk about it, but I think I'm going to watch a PS2 playthrough at minimum just to get it,

reorient myself of like, this feels like the game I remember, but I know it's not the game I remember.

So I have the fat PS3

that I don't leave plugged in and only plug in for specific retro gaming experiences where I don't want to play them on my PVM or anything.

And I feel like I could drop in Shadow of the Colossus and play it literally on the same screen as

my current PS5, PS4 playthrough and compare them head to head.

See what happens.

I should have got that original PS3.

I had one.

Get one.

Get one.

Can I get one now yeah get one off ebay or some shit like they they play ps2 games over hdmi which is the only reason to have one that you can like put a memory like a like a

there's so much shit that that original ps3 can do that nobody needs

a weird fucking system yeah like you can put in your your photo cards from your camera into it and like look at your like your sd card yeah is such like nobody was using it for that but but sony was like, this is going to be the centerpiece of the living room.

And people are going to take photos and they're going to bring them home and they're going to show their friends.

That's always so funny, like when technology sort of just like takes a, like takes a chance on other technology.

Like I had this TV for a long time that

had like a dock for an iPod,

which became obsolete within like two iPods.

Like it just didn't fit.

And then now I see there's this commercial, I can't remember what car it's for, but it has that,

it has like mag safe charging for iPhones.

And I'm like, well, that's going to be, we might not be doing that in like four years.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's just funny.

Especially with like a car, something you're going to have for like 10 years or more, probably.

Well, all of the, all of the lightning, as of today,

the new iPhones use USB-C.

That was announced.

Yes.

So all of these cars with built-in lightning connection, like that's all obsolete.

I have so many fucking lightning cables.

I am going to to say.

I'm like Zeus over here.

I am like Zeus.

I am going to say that

that was a Euro, like European courts ruling that provoked that, right?

It's so strange.

And they were just like, well, you know, it's easy.

We'll just make them USB-C.

Well, it's because

they want to eliminate waste in the EU.

They were like, guys, we got to stop making all these proprietary cables.

What a bunch of junk and garbage.

Get one fucking cable.

Cause like, it's not like.

I'm in favor of that.

I love that.

Yeah.

When DVDs or VHS or any of that shit was out, like people weren't like, well, I have, I have VHS A.

Oh, yeah, I've got DVD B.

So I need a totally different DVDB player.

Like one cable, we're done.

Well, there are attempts at that, and then one format becomes dominant.

And then they're just like, you know what?

We'll just focus everything on this one format.

You know, it's like that's the VHS beta or the,

what was the, what was the, I feel like, I don't remember exactly what Divix was, but that was a thing.

but then there was the hd dvd blu-ray that was a whole yep actual like uh defeated by the aforementioned ps3 there you go guys speaking of iphones coming out uh today in the iphone conference the new iphones have this fancy graphics chip that will allow you to play resident evil 4 remake fucking death stranding and the new assassin's creed game is the iphone a viable gaming platform not as a phone, but not

wait, what?

Not as a phone.

Like, you're not just going to hold your phone like a phone and play Resident Evil 4.

Right, but you'd snap shit onto it.

Yeah, but I, but I think the thing is, because those are additional, those are add-ons, I feel like that in and of itself, like

limits its reach, right?

Because it's just like anytime you're making like something for a console that requires a peripheral, a developer is going to be like, well, I'm not going to do this thing that requires the peripheral because that limits the, you know, the number of people who are going to be able to buy this thing.

I feel like the same thing will happen with app development.

Now, what you're saying about like, could you, will ports come to

phone and could you use phone as like a console?

I think so, but I don't think it's going to become like the dominant thing, but I could be completely wrong.

I think if

TVs, all the TVs that I've used in the last five years have been like airplay compatible,

like just built into the actual TV.

And I feel like if you could, if your phone was your gaming console and you could just toss it on the counter and Bluetooth a controller to it and then play it on your TV.

But which controller and which, you know, what are we using here?

You could use a PlayStation controller.

But then do you just have a PlayStation?

What?

I mean, I feel like people aren't buying a PlayStation controller just to have a PlayStation controller.

But they sell them at the Apple store.

Yeah, I know.

But I mean, I just feel like there's an extra step here that it's going to be the kind of people who...

I agree.

Yeah, the kind of people who are already one interested in playing these games are just going to have a console.

So I don't know.

So then perhaps what Apple should do is uh release iphone gaming edition which just has a controller in the box see that would be smart and if they do something like that i think they could make a real take a real have a real go at it but i don't know how interested they are in that because yeah like i i subscribed to apple arcade for a little bit and me too i didn't

like find any of the games to be like that yeah like fun or interesting like the fantasian was the one that i was interested in but i didn't ever play it like it's it's bundled with my Apple subscription because I have the

one thing, and I have never opened it.

Yeah.

Apple Cantation.

Apple Arcade is like invisible.

That said, all it takes is like a Ted lasso.

And the same with Apple TV.

No one ever was like, oh, friends, Apple TV, and then there's like one hit, and then all of a sudden people are paying attention to it.

Like if they had one game that really broke through, they could potentially get people onto it.

But I don't know.

I mean,

I just think like it's,

fuck.

I'm trying not to say the medium is the message, but I think that is the thing.

Like, I think the medium is the message when it comes to gaming, and your input device is such a huge part of it.

And I feel like if people don't have the same input device, that the

software that's going to be dominant on it is just,

it's going to be stuff that conforms to the default, right?

It's going to be stuff that, it's going to be stuff like Candy Crush that plays well on an iPhone.

Right.

But the other thing is,

I don't want to be playing games like that on my phone.

No, that's the other thing.

No, like, because I got the fucking, I got a controller.

I am a gaming enthusiast.

I got the

backbone.

I got a backbone and I was playing, I was like streaming games on my phone for a little bit.

And I reached a certain point.

I was like, this isn't, like, I'd rather be playing it on a Switch, like dedicated hardware or rather be playing this on a screen.

I want my phone to be my screen.

I'm like, I'm not going to be a phone.

Yes, yeah.

And like, if I get a notification, you know, I'm playing Death Stranding.

I got a freaking Amber alert or something.

Immersion broken.

I have those turned off.

So, but here,

can I do a Madden Nick joke?

Yeah.

Playing Death Stranding, your character always has an amber alert because of that BB on his chest.

Very good.

That is really good.

I don't have any notes.

Matt, do you have any notes?

Why don't we just keep going?

Because we'll just talk about it afterwards.

Yeah, let's get the notes at the end.

If I'm being honest, I'm too mad to give a note, a constructive note.

Here's, here's what I think it is.

Because I don't think I'm articulating myself well.

But the thing about the backbone is because it's another piece of hardware that I have to detach or

remove from my phone, that in and of itself is enough of an obstacle where I don't use it.

And it's the same way as

it's such a pain in the ass to take the case off of your phone and put it back on.

It's not that much of a pain in the ass, but it's just enough work where you don't do it all that often.

This is unfortunately why I think a playstation portal almost works yeah because the for this exact reason because if i want to remote play from my phone i have to take my fucking phone case off right i got to get this thing on and smack it on my phone and then it's also not the right buttons yes yeah so then the portal has the buttons That I want and it's all one thing, but it also sucks because it's not anything.

It's just man, I think I think in the spring of next year, you and I are going to have two really funny techs technologies.

Yeah.

I think you're going to have the portal.

I think it's coming for you.

I think you're going to do it.

I'll have it by November if I have it.

And I'm going to have Apple Vision Pro.

And it's going to be so funny when June of next year, neither of us are using those things.

No, yeah, no.

Absolutely.

In the same way that like I have a dusty MetaQuest 2 or whatever it's called.

Man, we were so hyped about

VR for a bit.

I still am.

I am still hyped for it too, but it's just enough of an obstacle where I don't use it all that often.

I don't play games on it all that often.

As soon as

I Expect You to Die 3 comes out, I'm back in.

Because those games are, I love those games.

If it wasn't so blazingly hot where I play video games,

I would have a dedicated VR setup permanently because I love it.

I just want to get the racing wheel and pedals and seat and drive in Gran Turismo all the fucking time.

I'm gonna see the Gran Turismo movie.

I didn't.

I didn't see it either.

I didn't see it either.

I heard it was not bad.

My mom liked it.

Yeah, I heard it was pretty good.

My mom doesn't know that it's a, didn't know it was a video game.

She just like went to go see the movie.

It feels weird.

Like, I think, I think part of why we didn't cover it is it feels weird to be like reviewing a movie right now, a new movie in theaters, but

I should see it.

Yeah.

I'll see it at some point.

It'll be on,

you know, PlayStation VR.

It'll be on PlayStation VR too.

I'm going to watch that shit on Apple Vision.

I'm so fucking excited.

Did you guys wait, guys?

Hold on, though, because I love, this is the only place I get to talk about like technology stuff.

Two things.

One, did you see that the new iPhone shoots in 3D?

Yes, that's wild.

Yeah, I can't.

I'm so fucking excited.

And the new watch,

you, you touch your own fingers together to activate it.

It's so you don't have to touch the screen anymore because they're trying to incorporate spatial computing into like the language of how we use our bodies and computers.

Wow.

So the new fucking phone or new watch,

you touch, like if you want to open a thing, you touch your own fingers together and it opens it on your watch.

I love that.

I mean, I don't know how it'll work in practice.

I love that in theory, but that all, that just makes me think of like, I feel, I get so frustrated with futurist stuff, like futurist sci-fi when it's just like, I feel like it's lazy and like they still have just like laptops and like tablets and shit.

And it's just like, because that's not where we're headed technologically.

We're headed towards like fewer screens and fewer input devices.

It's shit like that that we're going to have in a few years.

Yeah.

And when I can like literally in just a few weeks touch my fingers together to like text somebody

without anything on my fucking fingers.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

I can't wait.

And then I'm going to have the goggles on.

I'm going to record a whole show in the goggles.

I've learned that I expect you to die three is out.

And I didn't even know.

There's not messaging for VR games in the same way that there are are other games.

There really isn't.

Like the PS VR2 is such an incredible piece of tech and you do not fucking see it.

Like nobody is pushing.

It should be on the splash page of my PlayStation every day, should be saying, hey, play this game in VR, but it's not.

Yeah, that's a weird,

it's weird because the technology is, like you were saying, it feels like there's a lot of new places for it to

go.

It's going to be explored in a lot of interesting ways.

There's already a lot of compelling content onto it.

But instead, it feels like they're trying to push everyone towards like cloud gaming.

That's instead where we're at.

I don't want that shit.

I already know about Final Fantasy VII.

Nice.

I get it.

I get it.

See, because when I position it as a joke that I would say like a Madden Nick joke, then I'm like, oh, that's okay, I get it.

You just got to rewire your brain just a little bit.

Again, we'll talk about this after the show.

Yeah, no, no, no, no.

But right now, let's talk about what video games we've been playing.

It's time for, what are you playing?

What are you playing?

Wow.

I'll start and I'll go fast because I'm still playing Sea of Stars in addition to Shadow of the Colossus.

Shortly after, just I think the day after we recorded our last episode, I got to a big plot twist and I was like, oh, okay, that's kind of nice.

I wasn't quite expecting that.

I will say the story to me is perfectly functional.

This is for anyone who

hasn't listened to recent episodes and isn't familiar with this game.

This is a throwback JRPG that came out this year by Sabotage Studio.

and it is just kind of a loving tribute to the mid-90s 16-bit and 32-bit RPGs of the era.

And it is,

but I would say the story just like gets the job done.

It's perfectly that.

And I kind of actually like that.

I was talking to a friend about this, and it was like,

I'm glad it's not like subverting like the tropes of this or anything.

I'm glad it's just sort of like, you know what?

This kind of feels like this would have been like

some game called like Sky Legends of Tomorrow from like, you know, that was never released outside of Japan from 1994.

And I like that it's just like a straight-ahead narrative.

Another thing I really like is that the animation is so good in this game.

Both the full-screen cinematics that they go to on rare occasion, they're few and far between and they're very brief, but when they do it, they're very beautiful.

But then also just the character animation animation.

Just both the boss fights, which we've talked, which I've talked about.

They're just, they're so, they're so detailed.

But also just like the sprites of the individual characters.

I mean, like a cape flapping in the breeze.

Those sorts of things just have so many frames of animation.

And

it's just such great craft.

I'm at the point, kind of the mid-game, where the world has opened up.

I have a ship, and so I can kind of like traverse the whole world and choose where to go and decide what to do.

And that's a lot of fun.

I feel like the way that your characters progress and level, it feels like each level actually feels like you're achieving something because enough time passes between leveling up and

each level feels consequential,

which isn't always the case with these sorts of games.

So, yeah, I just think it's really well executed.

I'll have some more cohesive thoughts when I finish this bad boy, which I tend to do in the coming weeks.

But yeah, see a star, sticking with it.

Remind me what.

What platform are you playing it on?

I'm playing it on PC.

It's on Game Pass.

So you can play it on Xbox and PlayStation.

It's also, or on Xbox and PC.

I think it's also on PlayStation Plus.

It is, yeah.

Yeah.

So you can, it's on everything.

You play on Switch if you want.

I played the demo on Switch.

Pretty nice.

Yeah.

Pretty nice.

Nicely done.

Matt, what are you playing?

Okay, well, yeah, I put a lot of time in on this month's We Play, You Play.

Excited to talk about that.

But I'm still playing Baller's Gate 3.

And...

Fuck, yeah, here we fucking go.

I

last last

I, with this game, for some reason, I talked about this, I think, a couple of weeks ago, where there's like periods of time when I'm playing the game where I'm not really quite sure what I'm supposed to be doing or where I'm supposed to go, but I'm just sort of like vibing, kind of, and just like kind of walking around and seeing what's going on.

And,

you know, something happens that I don't like, I just sort of reload and just kind of go back a little bit.

Not too far, you know.

But I like discovered

what I'm supposed to be doing where I'm at right now.

And I'm like,

I'm thrilled.

I'm so excited.

Wow.

But I'm worried about finishing Act Two too soon.

So I like, I sort of left what I'm supposed to be doing for a little bit and have gone

just exploring a little bit.

And

it's interesting because I like don't, I don't want to finish it.

Like,

I just like don't want to be done with it at all.

And I know that there's still a lot more to do.

But also the idea of starting a new game as like a new character and like doing stuff that I didn't do the first time, yeah, is also like a daunting idea as well.

And

like, I don't know, I want to, I want to see this game through, and I know that I'm going to want to play it again, but I like

also don't want to do that.

Like, it just seems like it's just too much.

It's a lot of game,

but I um

I just really love it.

I just, it's like, it's really such a

special game, and

I'm excited about it.

I think I'm pretty close to finishing Act Two.

And

I might decide to just press on.

Because I don't think there's anything other than side quests on the other side of what I'm supposed to be doing.

And

I found one that was kind of interesting that, you know, you're doing something and then you complete a task and you're sort of like, well, I don't even know if that was like the right thing I don't even know I was supposed to do that like if the outcome is the outcome you wanted or if it's like an outcome because you just don't know like I met this like that's like the vaguest catch-all explanation of every quest in the game sort of right where like I met this kid yeah I met this kid and he was like playing hide and seek

in like these like dark woods and I answered wrong and then he started to attack me with ghosts and I was just like well I have to like kill these ghosts and then he disappeared and And I was like, okay, well, like, where did, where the fuck did he go?

What's going on?

Like, I don't know what I'm supposed to be actually

doing.

Am I going to see this kid again?

Like, he attacked me.

Right.

So we'll see if I ever see him again.

But, like, I don't even know if I was supposed to, like, if I should have not engaged in that fight at all or what I was supposed to, you know, you just never really know if you're supposed to be doing something.

It's the kind of game you want to finish so that you can read on about everything you missed and did wrong because there's just like so much in it.

Yes, because I think it's the idea of having a playthrough of it that's like comprehensive is not possible.

It's not possible.

Right.

Like you can't do that.

So you sort of have to like let that go and

then just like kind of see what happens.

I went to a jail cell in one of the parts that I was in.

And then like it was after I like reloaded.

And I never went back there.

And I was like, I should go back there.

That was like a cool part.

But I think something else that I did made the events of what was going on in that jail cell area null.

Like it doesn't matter now.

None of it matters.

So it's just,

I just didn't think when I started playing this game that I'd still be playing it now.

Like that, not that I thought it'd be done.

Yeah.

I thought I just would have bounced off of it

by this point because it's such a big game.

It's a little overwhelming.

But I'm playing this game at least an hour a night every single night.

Yeah, I can't wait to get back to it.

Yeah.

I also am playing Baldur's Gate 3.

Wow.

Now that it's out for PS5, I can play the actual client.

And

man, that game is such a fucking vibe.

I have accidentally killed so many people.

So, like, because I'm playing a thief criminal, I'm like, well, I'm going to role play that I break into every fucking thing I can and I pickpocket as much as possible.

Problem is, you know, when you're an early level, pickpocketing, you're going to get caught a lot.

Sure.

When you break into a place, people are going to be like, hey, what the fuck are you doing?

It's early enough in the game that I think I can say, you know, in the Druid Village, I

broke into some storeroom to like see what was in there.

And there's like a

woman in there who's paralyzed.

And I was like, well, I want to go into the chest behind you.

And she starts screaming.

And then like all her friends descended.

And I ended up having to merc like half of the village before any of the story happens.

And then later, met like somebody else, and nothing happened.

Like, I kill all these people,

and then nothing happened to me.

And I was like, shit, did the rest of the town, were they okay with this?

No, nobody saw it.

So I get to leave that area, and then there's no, nobody's coming after me.

But then much later in the game, somebody showed up and was like, I saw what you did.

I was like, oh my God.

And I execute that person

like in the middle of the woods.

And that's a full quest that somebody else who I hadn't met was like, hey, I need you to do me a favor.

There's this person in the woods that

we really want to kill.

And I was like, well, I don't really have a choice.

I can't negotiate the morality of whatever this quest was going to be because I've already killed this person because I accidentally had to kill all of her friends in the Druid Village.

Excellent fucking game.

Another great thing, I got trapped in some cave,

set off a trap, and got barricaded in between like a wall of

bad guys

and a trap behind me that had been, that blocked the exit.

Yeah.

It took me, no fucking joke, three hours to work my way through this encounter.

Wow.

Because the things that were attacking me,

I'm so dedicated to not save scumming in this game.

Yeah.

Because it's funny.

It's going to be me.

It's so fucking funny.

I've safe scummed once, and it was when i accidentally chose the wrong choice in a dialogue tree and then i was like fuck that isn't what i wanted to say yeah uh and i didn't want to lose all of my inspiration points to get out of that dialogue so i saved scummed there but otherwise i'm trapped in this hallway there's Bugbears, like a fleet of fucking bug bears with like huge weapons.

I have to disconnect myself from my own party and hide them around corners because the bug bears could one-shot everybody.

And then I hide behind a rock and one arrow at a fucking time,

pick off through sneak attack each of these bugbears.

And each time I kill one of them, I get huge amounts of XP because I'm not supposed to be there.

And then I was still trapped and had to take all of the crates around me and build a bridge so that I could jump across a thing so that I could get out of this area I don't believe I was supposed to be in.

And I was like, this game is so fucking good

that I'm, I'm positive I was supposed to die where I was.

Right.

And I didn't have to.

And that felt free.

And I think it ties into our topic for the week: is that like

the idea of gaming freedom is so alluring.

Like the idea that like in DD, the tabletop game, you can do literally anything you can come up with to be translated into a video game with all of the DD rules sort of intact, where it's like,

yeah, okay, you can, yeah, like I can hear the exhausted DM looking at my choices in the game that I'm playing and being like, okay, you do one damage.

Look, this bug bear, it's going to take you 86 turns to kill it this way.

And I'm like, let's fucking go.

So,

yeah, I love it.

I love Baldur's Gate.

I also want to say, you know, we like product on this show.

Yeah.

We love products.

We love products.

I, after my,

my, my, my paycheck came for the comic book that I wrote.

Nice.

I immediately turned it around and I bought the Disco Elysium jacket.

Wow.

Let's fucking go.

Where did you find it?

It's on the website.

You can just buy it directly from them.

Yeah,

they were sold out.

Well, let's see if they're currently sold sold out uh hold on i'll look this up i want i want to time this out so that when you show up wearing the jacket i'm also wearing the jacket

all right let's see uh

i want to get the actually i'll get the alt one that says fuck the world on the back

all right let's see the current the the disco animal jacket is made to order now wow so you can purchase that's cool the jacket

that uh our protagonist who i won't spoil their name uh wears in the opening acts of this game.

Oh, it's his jacket.

I thought it was Kim's jacket.

No, it's his jacket.

Oh, that's cool.

It's the fucking green jacket.

That's like as hell.

So, anyway, yeah, and it has like disco Elysium

interior like textures on the inside of the jacket.

And then also that sort of mysterious square,

like raised portion of the jacket on the back.

So, yeah, I got the jacket.

And it gives you plus one to drama.

That's nice.

I think it says what the

stats are.

It says plus one to composure, plus one to electrochemistry

is the stats on the, on the jacket.

And it's, yeah, it's.

I can't wait to wear that fucking shit all fall.

That's fantastic.

But

I want you to plug your comic book because you should remind people that it's

what you worked on and

how they can get it.

Am I allowed to plug a comic?

You can plug a comic, absolutely.

Not covered by

looks like it's Harley Quinn number 31.

There it is.

Harley Quinn number 31.

I do an Evangelion-inspired short.

That's awesome.

Yep.

Yep.

And maybe I'll be appearing in a future comic book as well.

Wow.

Okay.

It looks like it.

Not me personally, but like the writing.

That's very cool.

This is an absolutely true story.

One time I was in Japan and I had my cell phone with me, but I was

following somebody around in the city and having a good time.

And then they locked me on a roof of a skyscraper because they were a crazy person.

That's a true story.

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And hey,

you're right, Heather.

That was a nice segue into our topic.

It's another dialogue tree episode where we're talking about open world games.

Hey, speaking of open world games, you got an open bag of drop right there.

Can I have another idea of that?

Of course,

go nuts.

You don't like it?

I don't know if I'm going to eat more of them, but I'm glad I ate one.

So I don't, you know, I don't know where to begin this.

I mean, hey, I guess this will be kind of like a free-flowing discussion as befitting the topic, but

my thought was to just start it off by asking what makes a good open world game in your experience.

I mean, Matt, do you have a take?

do you have a, do you have an idea of like,

or even just open world games that you've liked in the past?

Well, right.

Like, I feel like a lot of, like,

I was thinking about like when did I first interface with an open world game?

Because that does sort of feel like that is

like, it feels like it's like a newer type of game, but it's like definitely not, right?

Like, um, a lot of the like I was thinking about when would I have played one and a lot of them I played a lot of them on the PlayStation 2.

PlayStation 2 had quite a few.

And

I would even consider, I mean, it's definitely, this is not an open world game, but

because there are like, there aren't load screens, but there are load points that are hidden in the game, like in Pokemon.

Like, the whole map is accessible.

Like, and like you can, you need certain things to get through to different parts of the game, but often the rest of the town or wherever you're trying to go is behind a rock or behind a tree that you have to cut down.

Oh, sure.

Right?

Yeah, there's some gating in terms of that.

Yeah.

And that's like kind of the Metroidvania approach.

Like there's certain sectors of the game map you can't reach until you have a certain item or a certain experience level.

But like, as far as like my first

open worlds, like I'll count Jack 2.

Jack 2 was like

the Grand Theft Auto of the Jack and Daxter.

You said Jack 2, and for whatever reason, I was thinking of Jackass Number 2.

Because I was like, okay.

Yeah, Jackass Number 2 is definitely

open world up a bit.

Yeah,

especially when, you know, you got Steve Ompanius over at the Wild Boys.

No, the character action game from the PlayStation 2, the Jack and Daxter second entry.

And, you know,

there's a Spider-Man 2 game coming out.

Oh, yeah.

And I've talked about this game quite a bit, but the Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in video game is an open world,

you know, it's open New York.

They were the first ones to do this.

You go to all five boroughs.

Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

That's right.

And a certain king presides over there, if you will.

I actually think you can, you are only in Manhattan, but I could be wrong.

Yeah, I think you can only do Manhattan.

You're only one of the boroughs.

But the whole borough is there.

There you go.

And that's all you need.

It's the best one.

Fuck the other boroughs.

Oh, boy, the Bronx is going to be livid.

The Bronx is burning here in there.

J-Lo, I don't give a fuck.

All right?

What else you got?

Doug Heffernan's over there in Queens.

He's the king.

He's losing his mind.

They're not going to hear that for weeks.

But yeah, like that, like, and then obviously like the Grand Theft Auto trilogy of PlayStation 2 games are all open world.

Oh, yeah, no, yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

But

then like, I feel like those, oh, and Simpson's hit and run was a big one as well, where like the entire map all of Springfield is in there right But I feel like open world now is like a different thing where it's like it's a now it's a type of game like it's like

there's not just you don't just do what it like the story.

Those are all pretty linear stories for what you're doing.

But now open world is like Yeah, there are like there's missions there's quests or whatever you can kind of just kind of do whatever you want It's kind of become you're right It's kind of become a genre designation as a pro as opposed to hey This is a this is an RPG where you kind of have the freedom to roam or this is an action game where you kind of go anywhere.

Yeah, it's kind of like open world is kind of its own genre with its own expectations.

Heather, how about you?

I feel like the first open world game I played was so overwhelming that I was so confused.

And so it's in 1996, my parents bought me Daggerfall.

Oh, yeah.

I also played the Elder Scrolls 2, which I've just looked at on PC.

Completion time on

beat.com for Dagger Fall.

Give me a guess on the hours it would take you to play and finish Elder Scrolls to

Daggerfall.

I never came close to finishing it, and it's very bloated.

And because you think it's a high number, I'm going to say 110 hours.

Yeah, I would think it had to be somewhere in the hundreds.

I'll go the over, maybe.

I'll say 130 hours.

Oh boy, you guys are close, but off.

292 hours.

Is that the completionist or is that two?

That's completion time.

How long to be?

292 hours.

The walk time to get from one side of the map to the other is 69 hours.

It's interesting because that game and that game and arena, which I also played, we talked about Elder Scrolls, I feel like in a recent episode, but that game and arena, which I also played, were both like, they kind of felt like prototypes.

They didn't really know what the fuck they were doing.

They were just like, well, we'll just make a big empty world.

And then with the second one, they're like, well, we'll just make it even bigger.

And like sprawl was sort of like the, they, they, I don't know, this endless sprawl was kind of the innovation.

But I didn't know, like, I, like, as a kid being given dagger fall, I was like, I don't have any fucking idea what I'm supposed to be doing in this game.

And also, we didn't have a high-end PC.

So like, it chugged.

Yes.

It fucking chugged.

Like, like a monster would come up to me and it would be like five frames per second I'd be like I don't know what I'm doing but that was my first exposure to an op like a truly open world game it was also a super buggy game just that that just made me think of I had I had one interaction that game where I like either stole something for a merchant or sold something to a merchant and afterwards uh like there was like an integer era error and I just had infinite gold

so that game I don't know if you'd consider the early King's Quest games open world, but they could be because you could go anywhere on the map and you could do anything in any particular order, but you could only solve puzzles in certain orders.

I feel like,

but I feel like the classic answer here is

Grand Theft Auto 3

is when on the, on the console, when you're like, oh, I can go anywhere.

and do anything and I don't have to do this in any particular order.

100%.

And I think that is the, the modern like 3D, you know, console version of an open world game.

And I think that is like the,

absolutely the, uh,

you know, the thing that, that, that kind of led to this, this big

burgeoning of this, of this genre.

Um, I, for me,

I go back to an NES game, one of the most famous NES games, The Legend of Zelda.

Like, that is just like the most, the first time I felt like, oh, I could just go around.

And I remember being disoriented when I played that for the first time i could go back and like read the instruction manual and try to understand what this game what the goal of this game was because it only played games where i progressed through levels and so like i got to uh like i got to a pond where there's a fairy and the fairy surrounded me with hearts and i was like did i finish the level like i didn't understand what was happening but the idea that you could just kind of move around and try different tasks in different order and like you were saying with pokemon it's also like gated in terms of what what uh parts of the environment you could explore based on you know whether or not you have bombs or a raft or a ladder or what have you.

You get these items through progressing through dungeons, but you can do a lot of different things in different order and you can try to go to higher level areas before you're quote unquote ready.

So that one, and then that also, because I was looking at a list of open world games, that reminded me of another game that I also played and never really understood as a kid called Hydlide, which apparently had

predated Zelda and had some influence on Zelda.

And it's just kind of, it's a much cruder version of it, but it's the same sort of thing.

It's got more.

It's more crushed in there and stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a little bit more crowded.

It's kind of the jackass number two of NES games.

But it's got like a, it's like the combat system is more like an RPG combat system in my memory.

But that also makes me think of PC RPGs of the era.

And a big one for me was Might and Magic World of Zine, which was a game that was a really ambitious game.

It was Might and Magic Clouds of Zine and Might and Magic Dark Side of Zine

and the fourth and the fifth entries of the franchise.

And then they introduced like an expansion that let you join the two games together so you could go back and forth between the two worlds it was basically like a flat world much like our earth it was like a flat world and there was one side which was the clouds of zine side and then there were portals that would take you to the dark side of zine which was the other side of the world uh and uh you could play through the the full game both games in either order jumping between them it was like a like a really like a kind of like bold uh thing that they tried and technologically impressive thing they tried in the mid-90s uh but that that was the first time I was like, oh, I can go to the dark side of zine where all the enemies are a little bit tougher and you level a little faster.

And then when I go back to the clouds of zine, like the

you know, like progression is trivial because I can kind of like speed through things because I'm overleveled.

That was the first time I kind of encountered that.

And then and then Fallout like one and two were also like ones where it's like, oh, it opens up pretty early.

And obviously Fallout 3 and

when Bethesda takes over kind of goes in that direction as well.

But yeah, Grand The Throwout of 3 is a big one.

I think that

the fundamental defining principle of an open world game

is,

is it funny?

Not because,

not is it written to be funny, but can funny stuff happen?

Because otherwise, it's not truly, to me, an open world.

Because like stuff can't sort of just

happen.

Like Dagger Fall is funny because like people like accidentally kill themselves, yeah, it's completely broken.

Um, Grand Theft Auto 03 is funny because, like, you can see somebody run into traffic in a panic and they get hit.

And that none of that was like scripted in the game.

I feel like there's a threshold that is crossed by a game when stuff starts to get funny because the world has these emergent principles in it.

And that's part of what makes

Baldur's Gate doesn't feel openworldly to me

because it isn't funny.

Like nothing funny is happening.

Like stuff, like characters aren't doing their own thing.

They're all like waiting for you to interact with them so that you can unlock the next story section or whatever.

But

from what I can, like, but Red Dead Redemption.

like constantly people are like fucking falling off a cliff or like getting on a horse and the horse gets scared and runs them into a train.

Like

Like

in Starfield, from what I've seen of people playing it, there's funny stuff that happens because it's so free.

And that's, that's,

what do you guys think?

No, I think that's a good theory.

I think it's also like the appeal of this genre is that there's so many possibilities, there's so much player freedom that you can do things that the developers never would have anticipated.

You can create those situations.

Or even they are things that the developers

intended, but because of the nature of

exploration and discovery, you feel like it's a thing that you like, like, oh, I found that thing out, even though you were being indirectly led towards that path.

Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild, both funny games.

100%, yes.

Like, fucking goblins go do shit and then they blow themselves up, or, you know, like stuff is happening.

Yeah, you can reverse time and have a boulder roll back uphill and smush something, or you can make an impossibly long bridge by just connecting every single board you find.

Right.

Yeah, there's all sorts of weird shit that you can do.

I think that's a good observation.

For me, what makes a good open world game, and I wrote a few things down, but for me, it's too many tasks.

Like, I like feeling overwhelmed in one of these games, which is the thing that Baldur's Gate 3 does, however you want to classify it, really, really well.

Like, I like that feeling of being like, holy shit, I've got too much to do.

The feeling of discovery, which I mentioned, of just like you can just wander around, you can just go someplace and find something interesting.

And I think a bad one of these games, you know, conversely feels like empty.

It feels like I can wander for a while.

I can go to this distant part of the map or I can go to this other world.

And it just kind of feels like, all right, fucking whatever.

There's nothing here.

So Death Stranding.

Well, no, I disagree.

I like Death Stranding because I feel like Death Stranding, you constantly are discovering weird shit.

I think you're wandering all over the place.

It feels empty in a good way because it feels empty in terms of desolate and barren and like scary and isolating.

And then all of a sudden there's fucking BTs on top of you.

Or all of a sudden you find the wind farm and you're like, what the fuck's going on here?

You know, like, I think, I think Death Streeting is a great balance of that.

And I, you know, of course, obviously adore that game.

I'm thinking about this right now.

Yeah.

I don't need the BTs.

I know that we're done with the game and like we hadn't talked about it in a long time, but like My enjoyment of that game wasn't predicated on whether or not there were BTs or if I interacted with them at all.

I could have had as much fun as I did without them.

I think they're great because I think it's great that you have to hold your breath and make dangerous CD and you kind of have to sneak your way through these areas.

I don't know.

I think it's awesome.

And then also as it escalates and you start to get like a boss fight with two lion creatures or whatever, just in the middle of the muck, it's great.

Am I misremembering Death Stranding or did you have to pee?

Yeah,

you were encouraged to urinate early on.

But like if you didn't pee for the whole game, would he die?

No.

Like a kidney stone?

Yeah.

I don't think so, but you are encouraged to pee.

And I think early on, like you have your first

grenade, your grenade, I think, is a urine grenade.

You get the urine grenade at number one, or it's a sweat grenade.

You get it at number zero, number one, and then number two, the shit grenade.

And then eventually you get the blood grenade, and that's just better than everything.

You don't have to use the piss grenades anymore.

But yeah, you're definitely encouraged to piss.

Yeah, I hope when you take showers, too, like you do kind of all of it together kind of at a certain point.

I hope that in the second game, you have to pee.

Yeah.

There's not a shit grenade, is there?

Yeah.

No, there is.

There were two.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, because he uses the toilet.

Yeah.

There's also the, he definitely sits down and then they show the ad for Norman Ritas' motorcycle show.

Game's fucking chaos.

The

the but yeah, you can also like like that's a thing where you can, if the hands start to come up, you can piss on them and your urine will scare them away if you start to get grasped or if a bigger thing.

I just didn't know if it was, you had to.

Yeah, I don't know if it's compulsory.

I don't know, but you're definitely encouraged to do so.

You might have to do it to get one of those grenades to progress through something in the early game.

The other thing they say, anyway, too many tasks, feeling overwhelmed discovery the other thing i think is is appropriate density like

like you know it i feel like breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom although these are sprawling like huge maps i feel like they're appropriately dense like there's stretches of emptiness same thing with that with death straining there's stretches of emptiness um and then they're but but also like a game like yakuza zero uh which is just like one neighborhood of one city is just packed in there that also feels appropriately dense because it feels like how a city should feel yeah i guess i'd kind of like to

characterize it as the GTA approach versus the Skyrim approach.

Like, are we going to take one small, and I know there's some GTA games that have bigger map areas, put that aside.

Like,

are we going to take like one try to make one city feel super alive and populated?

Are we going to try to create a whole world and just sort of like put just a dot just enough into that to make it feel like it's lived in?

This conversation's making me want to play Red Dead Redemption more than I okay.

Yeah, that's sort of my, one of my number ones.

Next month's We Play You Play Red Dead Redemption 2.

We could do it.

And I've been playing it on

the Switch, and

it's an incredible port.

It's astounding that it's possible.

We could cover it.

Wait, no, I meant two.

I meant two.

Two?

Look, two is

way better.

And

one is, but one, like, that's how good one is.

And, like, that's how good two is, rather.

One is a masterpiece.

Are they ever two?

Another game?

I've been hearing rumors of Red Dead Redemption 3.

No, but I mean, like, yeah, but like, is Rockstar ever going to make it?

Like, they make so much money from GTA Online.

I think the GTA 6 league.

Yeah, there's GTA 6 is actively in development right now, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has

live service elements in the same way that

Fortnite does.

Have we had, oh, God, I love Fortnite.

I got to play Fortnite again in a North American server with that North American ping, and it sweet, sweet mana.

Is Fortnite an open world game?

Hmm.

Hmm.

It's funny.

It is very funny.

I like in,

well, you brought up Red Dead Redemption.

Yeah.

I like in

open world games when there's stuff that they like show you how to do, and it's sort of like, this is like here if you kind of want to do it, but you don't have to, and it's not part of it.

Like,

I never sat down and played poker.

I never did that.

It's in there.

You could play it for hours and hours if you want, and it's regular poker.

I played, I played when, because I never beat Red Dead Redemption 2.

I don't remember why.

I think something else came out.

And it's just like, you're so fucking overwhelmed.

Right.

And also, it was making me eat cowboy food all the time because

it's some of the best foods.

This is some of the best food.

And I was like, I got to eat something else.

Yeah.

You're eating salsa and tying up somebody.

Fuck.

We haven't talked about Valhalla.

Assassin's Keep Valhalla, which is like by far the most time that I've ever spent in an open world game.

God, that's almost lost you there.

Well, yeah, I was gone.

That game, boy, I love Vikings.

Anyway,

yeah, so I couldn't finish Red Dead Redemption 2 because I was eating too much cowboy food and

made me feel sick.

I'm just thinking of eating like beef ribs and like baked beans on a

time.

All the time.

That's not a joke.

Like, that's what I was fucking doing.

Yeah.

Because you'd like see them eating the food and you'd be like, I want cornbread and like beans and bacon.

And then I eat it and I'd be like, fuck yeah, let's go play more Red Dead Redemption.

But the doctor's like, you're very sick.

You got to play some Persona 5.

I played poker in Red Dead because I was like, oh, this must do something.

Like it must unlock something and it doesn't.

It's just like there to play it.

I love when that stuff's in there.

Like even like in the Arkham games, Arkham,

Arkham Asylum isn't really like open world.

No, but City is.

City

is like,

I think, well, I don't talk about the Arkham games a lot.

That Arkham City, I think, is like one of the perfect games.

It is so fucking good.

Those Rock Study Batman games are really good.

Look, I'm, and this may just be that I have more affection for it.

I really liked Asylum.

I just like the design of it being like, we're so confined.

And I think probably because it was my introduction that Combat Engine, I have just so much affection for that game.

But yeah, it's also hate driving in the Battlefield City.

And finding the Riddlers

clues or whatever the fuck is that.

That's an example of something that I'm just never going to do that.

I'm never going to get all of Peter Parker's fucking backpacks in the Spider-Man games either.

I'm just not doing that.

Will Hines,

our friend,

has 100%,

has platinumed the Spider-Man game like four times or something.

And he's just always, he's just doing all that stuff all the time.

And I'm like, that's it's impressive to me.

I just can't, I can't do that at all.

Yeah, I rarely 100% an open world game.

Yeah.

I don't know if Dredge would be considered an open world game, but I did want to read that my mom caught 122 of the 138 fish by the time she beat Dredge.

Oh, wow.

I didn't even know she was playing Dredge with us.

Yeah, she was playing Dredge with us.

She texted me this morning

and was frustrated by the ending.

She hadn't listened to our episode yet because she likes to beat the game before she listens.

But she caught 122 of the 138 fish.

And I was like, Jesus Christ, that was not something that I was interested in.

I mean, I'm interested in hearing that from my mom, but me personally, while playing the game,

I think

something about open world games that I think is important that maybe we haven't talked about that much is traversal.

Yep.

I think good traversal goes so far in a game like this.

Like in Red Dead Redemption, I feel like the horse, riding a horse is a home run.

It rocks.

Is there a horse?

Can you kill it?

Does it upset people?

Ghost of Ksusima, also great horse and also just like a great to just like get around the world because you also have grappling.

You have that in, you know, and that's super fun to move around.

And look, gotta...

Gotta shout out Elden Ring in just in terms of

navigating and traversing the map.

Ruben is so great in that.

Great horse.

Everything Everything is so great.

Yeah, but great horse, great way to use the horse.

And just also, just like,

how do I get up there?

Like, figuring that sort of shit out is so satisfying.

Yeah, Elden Ring is good.

And it's good because it just thinking about the game evokes a time in my life,

which, which also,

these large games, these open world games, you end up spending so much of your actual life playing them.

Like, an MMO is an open world game.

and I played God

like so much of Final Fantasy XI because I was like, oh, I'm, I, this, I buy one game, I'm broke.

Yes.

I'm just going to play this game all the fucking time.

Um, but it evokes a feeling of a time in your life.

And same with Elden Ring and same with Vike or Valhalla.

Yeah.

Uh, for me, like, Grand Theft Auto 3 feels like post 9-11.

Like, it feels, they all feel like time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I do think about Elden Ring a lot still.

And just I'm like, I do miss, I miss that daily grind.

Elden Ring also is funny.

Yeah.

Because like fucking a monster will get on an elevator and die.

And you're like, that's funny.

Yeah.

Or like, you know, you could just decide to kill all the merchants and, you know, can keep their bells.

And then you don't have to, you don't ever have to go see them again.

It's not funny to me.

It's funny to invade.

Yeah, I mean, that stuff is funny.

Like, I don't know, like, I don't know.

Like, well, yeah, traversal, like, I don't think the horse, horse doesn't always feel good.

I don't love riding a horse in Tears of the Kingdom or Breath of the Wild.

I don't think it feels good to me.

But, like, the horses in Red Dead and the horse in Ghost of Tsushima feel good.

Yes.

Torrent feels amazing.

Great horse.

Elite horse.

And, you know, maybe I'll have stuff to say about the horse in next week's game.

Yeah.

But is that an open world game?

Yes.

Yes, very much so.

I honestly would, we might, I think that's part of the reason we're talking about this topic.

Yeah.

Because it's like, that's like, I think so much of the progenitor of so much of what happened.

I mean, you can't really, well, we'll talk, we'll talk.

I don't want to get it.

I'm going to get into it.

I don't want to get into it.

We'll talk about it next week.

Let's talk about cyberpunk.

I have Cyberpunk on my list.

Okay, so Cyberpunk is one I would say that like,

I really, look.

We all like Cyberpunk 2077.

We all finished it.

I enjoyed it.

Platinumed it.

I don't know if I love that as an open world game, just at least in the initial release.

I know they've done a lot of patching.

I think

that's a good thing.

I think we should play Phantom Liberty as one of our WePlay You Plays.

I 100% want to play Phantom Liberty.

Yeah, I'm in.

I think that's October.

But I was going to say, like, we were.

So that's next month?

Because

it comes out.

In like two weeks from now.

Okay, so maybe

we'll figure it out.

Oh,

I do want to play that.

I do really like the aesthetic of that world.

I do think it's a really fun world to live in.

But as an open world game, I felt like when I'd stumble upon shit in that game, at least in the initial release, it would be things like, you know, a police action in progress, and it would just be some condoming, some, some, uh, um, some combat encounter with some random threads.

I said condom encounter.

I was going to try to run past it.

I said, uh, it was some combat encounter with some random thugs.

I mean, you had condom encounters in that game, too.

You did, yeah.

If you got that.

Exactly.

The fun toys, what were they?

I can't remember the name of the prostitutes.

Anyway, so like, but I would just go into like a random combat sort of thing or just like some like it would just start some quest.

I just never found that satisfact that aspect of it satisfying.

Yeah.

Even though I found the actual narrative design pretty good for the main story.

It was not a very good open world.

No.

But it did

and it also wasn't emergently funny.

No.

Like because the NPCs weren't like

real.

What was funny was like how broken the physics engine was.

Yeah, like it was funny when a car would fall from the sky.

Well, yeah, that's the thing.

I feel like I somehow played the worst version of it because like none of the funny stuff happened to me.

I only saw like the funny stuff online.

One of my glitches was that I get, I died and it would auto-save as I was dying and it would, you know, restart me from the previous auto-save.

Oh, yeah.

And I was just stuck in this loop where I was dying over and over again.

Yeah.

But

and also traversal in that game is bad.

And my biggest wish for that.

No, no.

Yes, it is.

No.

Double jumping, like fucking good.

Double jumping is good.

It's so far.

Like you can, you can get into areas that the game is not designed to have accessible.

You can jump over fences and shit.

No, the traversal in that game.

That game is bad.

We've talked about the driving in that game.

I didn't like that.

The driving was bad.

That's so good.

The driving is bad.

Again, a lot of this stuff has been patched.

I want them to patch a third-person mode.

That's my biggest wish for it.

Because if I'm picking my clothes, I want to see those things.

Right.

Yeah.

I want to see that thing swing when I'm running.

You You know what I'm saying?

I mean, you pick penis too.

You might as well see that thing in action.

Yeah, yeah.

Come on.

I picked it.

Why did I pick it if not to see it all the time?

Off.

But like, yeah, there's something about like, I just think about the horse traversal a lot in games.

Like, and a lot of games have horses.

Um, and, you know.

They're some of our most beautiful creatures we got here on planet Earth.

Horses are great.

Ride the horse into town, get off the horse, execute the horse.

Everybody opens fire on you.

That's not how it would go.

No.

Everybody would go inside.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're like, oh, this guy just killed his horse out there.

I better leave.

But like playing Red Dead Redemption on the Switch and playing and riding around the horse and then also playing Tears of the Kingdom on the Switch and riding the horse.

The horse in Red Dead Redemption is better.

It is just a better.

It's a better horse.

It's a better horse.

I've heard rumor, by the way, that the Switch 2 was shown behind closed doors at Tokyo Game Show.

I heard this as well.

And that they had an upgraded version of Tears of the Kingdom playing.

And it was

4K, 60 frames per second.

Making both of them

per second.

Well, this is the thing, and this is the thing that I'm like, I can't, I can't do that, and I can't abide, and I will do it.

And

I'd be like, I can't, I'm so done with that game that I won't go back to it.

I'm, I'm not, I think I might not finish Tears of the Kingdom.

I think, I think,

it did not sink its teeth into me.

I'm more like, I'm more excited to play Phantom Liberty than I am to finish Tears of the Kingdom.

I'm more excited to.

You missed the window, I think.

I think if you had to, if you had put more, like, if you had finished more of it in the window when it was like the thing that everybody was doing, everybody was talking about it, you would have finished it.

But I'm going to finish God of War, which I, you know, I started playing Ragnarok over the last few weeks because I have Viking madness, and I

am going to finish that game.

And this one, Ragnarok has more of an open world.

Nah, not really, because you do have to go through the realms and you walk through that sort of like, it doesn't have a load screen, which is cool, but

it's a playable load screen, basically, that you're hiding behind.

A side note, really,

this is going to sound like the dumbest complaint I've ever had on the show and inconsistent with my character.

Yeah.

I don't like how often they say fuck in that game.

In which game?

And they got War Rising.

They say it maybe a little too much.

I don't like it.

It feels like it breaks the immersion for me.

I don't feel like gods should be like, get the fuck over here.

You should wait until later on in the game when Kratos calls

Atreus.

Calls Atreus mid.

Does he really?

No.

He's like, you're being sus right now.

And he puts his two fingers on his veins and goes,

it's the Final Fantasy 16 slash Logan,

the Wolverine movie problem where it's just like, oh, we can kind of say fuck, so we're going to play that card too often.

Which is a shame because the funniest version of fuck is

the PG-13 fuck.

Yeah, it's so funny.

It's when a character says it in a movie that has no other fucks, it's really funny, especially when it's get in the fucking car.

Yeah.

And there's

it's like a, it's like a, it's, it's not a cheap, it's, I guess it's kind of a cheap laugh, but it's a reliable cheap laugh because it always is funny.

But it's a meta laugh also because often it'll be used in a way where it's like, we get our one fuck and it doesn't, we're using it in the dumbest way.

Yes.

There's a great one with Wolverine in X-Men First Class.

Tells young Xavier and young Magneto to go fuck themselves.

It's great.

It's really funny.

It's also the Anchorman one.

I feel like the Anchor Man one.

Oh, yeah, go fuck yourself, San Diego.

Man, Anchorman's so funny.

Dream is very funny.

I like it.

I like it too.

I love it.

I legitimately think it's extremely funny.

Yeah, it makes me laugh.

If I went home and watched it tonight, I'd be like, this is the best night of my life.

I'm laughing so hard.

Damn kind.

Throwing a burrito out the window.

It's a, yeah.

Can I just say one thing I don't like, I don't love about Open World games?

Because A, I kind of have gotten exhausted by them.

Like, like, I'll say a couple of things that I feel like I've gotten that are why these games, I like, they really have to do something to kind of pull pull me in.

And sometimes that's something small like Ghost of Tsushima just having the birds and the foxes that you're following and the wind to guide you towards objectives.

Like, it's like that was just new enough where like, I am interested in this.

But

I don't like a mini map that's fucking full of icons.

That to me is just like, I'm so tired of that.

I'm seeing it too often.

I had too many waypoints, too many question marks, too many exclamation points.

And also, I don't really love, and I know it's so tough to figure figure out the right approach design-wise, but I don't really love level scaling.

I don't really love where, like, wherever I go in the world.

I know this is oftentimes the Bethesda approach, wherever I go in the world, the enemies will be the same level as my character.

Bullshit.

Yeah, I don't love that.

I fucking hate it.

Yeah.

Because as a person who really likes going to a place where I'm not supposed to be in a game, it deletes the challenge.

Like, if I, if I can manage to get somewhere that I'm not supposed to be and those characters are so much higher level than me, let me enjoy enjoy that.

Like, yeah, and let me go back after I've beaten those guys and fucking clean a house in a low-level area.

See, that's more the thing that I like.

The second thing you say is more what I like: I like to feel OP in these games.

I like to end up in the area where I'm like, I'll just fucking clean everyone's clock and just sort of waltz through here because that's part of what's fun about them.

Yeah, like the most fun of cyberpunk is jumping over a fence, hearing that brank as everybody gets upset, and then like, like, leaping from body to body executing people the way the way that you should if you were full of tech yeah that was killing you yeah i um love it

in in pokemon scarlet and violet that is sort of like their first uh open world game and it's like worse for it like it like they're trying to just do too much And I don't know, like,

those games don't have to look like a certain certain way or anything like that.

They can just make it how they've always been doing it.

Honestly, I think they should go back to 2D.

Like, they got, like,

they're doing too much in the 3D space and it's not working.

Let's go back to what worked.

It's a shame because Pokemon is such a no-brainer for what it should be in your head.

Like, what, what, like,

the density of

Like if you actually translate the amount of encounters that you have with Pokemon in the 2D games into a 3D environment, it would be like walking through a zoo without cages.

Yes.

Like it should be fucking Pokemon everywhere.

Yeah.

And it should like the an infestation of Pokemon.

Yeah, the the the cities also are weirdly vacant.

Like if I go like if I go into a Pokemon City, it should look like Detective Pikachu's Pokemon City.

Yes.

Like fucking Pokemon

everywhere.

Yeah.

And it seems like such a it just seems like so much money is on the table.

Like, because I didn't buy whatever the last, the last Pokemon game was, because I was like, this looks like shit.

Didn't they release two last year?

What was the other one?

They did Pokemon Legends Arceus as well.

Yeah.

That actually was at the tail end of

2022.

And then

I think a few months later was

Pokemon to from software.

Honestly, like, I'd like to see somebody who would actually make it interesting give it a try.

I don't think the Pokemon company is

very interested in making the game good.

But this is the thing, and I know it's kind of like a weird sort of

second party sort of middle ground, but like Nintendo is so fanatical about quality control of its biggest franchises, like Mario and Zelda.

Not that they always succeed, but the goal is always to have a super polished,

super good-looking version of

aesthetically lives up to the expectations of the franchise

in gameplay-wise for Mario and Zelda, and they have not done that with

the Pokemon games.

This is a good place to interject something that I think is going to be a

not a hot take, but spicy.

I don't like Elephant Mario.

How dare you?

This is

fucking bullshit.

Don't like him?

You don't like Elephant Mario?

Well, guess what?

It's Elephant Luigi, it's Elephant Peach, it's Elephant Daisy, it's Elephant Toad.

They're all the same kind of elephant.

I find elephants off-putting.

Wow.

You're going to say that in front of God.

You're going to say that.

No, no, let me rephrase.

Real elephants,

majestic, perfect animals.

Some of the smartest ones we got.

Incredible.

Cartoon elephant, never want to see it.

All right.

You don't like Babar?

Nope.

No, Babar.

No Dumbo.

No, I don't want to see Cartoon Elephant.

Wow.

Real elephant.

Canceled.

Real elephant crossing the street, getting in front of the sugar cane truck.

Fun.

And then getting some sugar cane.

What about the elephant that puts a paintbrush in its trunk?

Oh, that I don't like because that makes me sad because that animal's being abused.

Yeah, I don't like that either.

That animal paints the same picture of an elephant every day, and they are like, it knows what it looks like.

That elephant has no fucking idea what it's like.

Does they stop the elephant before it starts writing free me

on the paper?

elephants have uh you know funerals yeah yeah they're they're incredible yeah don't want to see mario as an elephant mario also becomes a ghost in this one so like he dies kind of and it's also a strand game but we'll talk about that later um

uh something else about

oh well okay

in open world games dude like i in in the realm of there's bullshit in this game that i'm just never gonna do in the most recent in in the in the most recent pokemon entries and i guess dating back to like probably the DS ones, they've added stuff like beauty pageants and making curry and sandwiches and stuff.

And it's like, this is not, I don't need this.

I'm never doing this.

There's like a minimal stat bonus you get for doing stuff like that.

But it's negligible because you don't need it to beat the game.

It's just there.

It's just part of it.

And I feel like a lot of open world games have stuff like that.

We're in terms of like crafting or whatever.

And like, you sometimes need to craft.

Like in Tears of the Kingdom, you have to craft like weapons and other types of things that help you on your journey.

But you also

almost don't need to either.

Yeah, Yakuza Zero, I think, is like you can ignore so much of the side content, but also the abundance of the side content.

Again, going back to density, I think is so much of what makes that game such a magical experience of just like you never have to go to the batting cages or to go bet on women's wrestling or, you know,

or go to the bowling alley.

Or run a real estate business.

Or run a real estate.

Well, you do have have to run a real estate business, but you don't have to go all the way to the end of the real estate questline, which I did, which involves getting to a certain point of dominance in each neighborhood and then defeating the overlord of that neighborhood in a physical fight, at which point they will join your real estate company to work for you.

That's the type of shit that I'm just like, video games rule.

Yeah.

It's really good.

Well, the difference between what you guys are describing is that one of these is fun and the other is not.

Like, cooking your fucking Pokemon food is not fun.

No.

Cooking in Final Fantasy XV is fun, mostly because of the absurd level of graphical detail of the dish that arrives when

you've gotten your dish.

Yeah.

Because, like, the reward of the cooking stuff in Final Fantasy XV is, why does this look this good?

Why was this made?

Like, that's fun.

Yakuza Zero games, fun.

Cooking side quests in fucking Pokemon games, not fun.

God, so much of Yakuza Zero.

Just like you go to like a restaurant and you order something.

It's like, it's done.

Think about playing another one of those games, but I want nothing more than to play another one of those games.

They're so funny.

They're really.

And, you know, Jather's point,

everything in that game is funny.

Yeah, but that, but that, but, but it's,

I think that's a different, because I'm not saying that the jokes in Yakuza,

it's extremely funny, but the stuff that's happening is funny on purpose.

Whereas an open world game has tons of stuff that's funny not on purpose.

Right.

It's emergent stuff that you'll see like clipped and it will be like on a subreddit or on Twitter or whatever, on X rather, and then you'll watch it and be like, it'll be a 15-second clip of something going horribly awry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think I get the distinction.

I think that in the way that Baldur's Gate is open worldly for me in that way, is that you can load up a ton of bombs or boxes or whatever and bring them to an area where that is not the intended way to do an encounter.

Yes.

And then do the encounter that way.

But

the creatures aren't going to be like falling off shit or like doing stuff on their own.

Well, I have retold the story I think you told on the podcast about pushing a goblin off a building and triggering a cutscene.

Yeah.

And then you had the dialogue with him.

And then it died.

Yeah.

That to me is funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then,

I mean, maybe to,

I don't know, maybe to wrap this open world discussion, all these open world games, too, they're too fucking long.

They're all too long.

They're so long.

They're all way too long.

Too much.

No.

Too much.

Too much going on.

Nope.

Nope.

Heather says no.

Elephant bad.

Open world long good.

We're in different planets.

Wow.

That's like, cause, I mean, I like, I like a meaty game.

I, I'm liking that.

I'll probably, by the time I'm done with Baldur's Gate 3, put 100 or so hours in it.

But

it's too much.

No.

It's too much.

It's all too much.

The most frustrating part of Assassin's Creed Vallehala was that it didn't continue to just be bigger and bigger.

How many hours did you have in that ultimately?

I don't know.

I said it on the show.

Yeah, it was in the hundreds.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was.

Yeah.

It was, it was maybe sub-200, but pro, like, up above 100 hours.

I think I would say I bet it was 130 or in that neighborhood.

And the only reason I stopped playing it, it was because I ran out of towns to conquer.

Like,

I wish that they'd been like, surprise, we've added the entire map of Europe.

Didn't they?

And then I was like, yes.

Didn't they add DLC when you left?

They added Paris, I think.

Soccer Blue.

And I was like,

I guess I, but also lately, I've thought about dipping my toe back in.

I kind of want to get in there a little bit again.

I think we're,

this is that I'm kind of coming to understand something right now, which is just like in the same way that you can put hundreds of hours into an open world game, and to me and

Matt as well, it seems like that seems kind of exhausting to try to get through everything.

I can put the same amount of time into a roguelike, just running endlessly, and I don't get tired of it.

Whereas I think that might be the sort of thing where you'd kind of feel like that was pointless.

But like FTL, like I put like 200 hours into that game, and that's just running, doing the same run over and over again and trying to optimize.

Yeah, I put no.

I put so much time into Hades.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah.

Just like hours and hours and hours into Hades.

I put in like one hour into Hades.

I was like, this is not for me.

It's good.

It's all combat.

Yeah, it is.

It's all fighting.

It is, but it was like

something felt off about it to me.

Too horny?

No,

Baldur's Gate's horny.

Not horny enough.

By the way,

turned a corner on my boy Asterian.

Yeah.

Hated that dude.

Remember last time we checked in?

Hated that dude.

Then I found out his secret.

He's my best friend.

Yeah, he's my guy.

I was a little harsh on Astarian last week, and I do want to walk it back because I had an interesting encounter with him.

Heather's going for her third piece of drope.

Well, Nick doesn't like it.

And I want to go away.

I can't imagine having another one right now.

Yeah, no, yeah.

I'll tap out of one.

Yeah.

But yeah, I'm sort sort of back in on Astarian, but he's still not in my party, but I'm nicer to him.

When am I going to play Baldur's Gate 3?

We're going to do Phantom Liberty next month.

When are we going to play these games?

Well, I mean, look.

I'm playing Sea of Stars.

You're playing Sea of Stars.

That's sort of your main thing right now, it sounds like.

I'm not...

I bounced off of Armored Corps 6 to play this month's We Play, You Play, but that's going to be a game.

that I don't feel pressure to beat because it's just, I can pick that up for like a few minutes and be like, this is the most fun I've ever had.

Yeah, Armored Core, Armored Core was the game I had to bounce off of in order to make room for Boulder's Gate and for Viking Madness.

Yeah.

But, and, you know,

I guess, look, video games

at large, too long.

Too long.

Everything's too long.

No.

No.

If I, if, look,

no.

If there's a game that you like, I think all games should be

the option of hundreds of hours.

and it's only our love of that game.

Because the worst thing in the world is, I don't want to beat a game.

Like, if Baldur's Gate was 10,000 hours, if you wanted, and you could dedicate that much time, or you could be like, okay,

I'm done.

And I don't want to play any more of this.

Well, that is like, I often will just mainline the main story.

I'm not really always getting in there and doing side quests,

except for like the optional, like the mandatory side quests they make you do to like let you know that there are side quests out there.

I'm not usually doing anything like that.

I'll often just be mainlining the like the main story.

And that still will take like, you know, 50 or so hours to get done.

But I'm rarely putting in 100.

I think

I got close to 200, I think, when we did Elden Ring because I was just playing that and getting my ass kicked 10 hours a day.

uh but you know i think i i do appreciate a a short game but i think you know sometimes with open world games there's not enough to me there's not enough story to justify the length of what's going on but you know that's me yeah that that to me i think is just is is another way that that one of these games can just feel kind of empty it's like okay to what end am i doing any of this yeah uh all right

we got to do a segment we're going along here we got to do a segment and

I'm going to see if Nick and Heather can guess the game based on the reviews alone.

It's time for blind item reviews.

Wow.

Just a reminder, here's how it works.

I have some negative, mixed, and positive reviews for some beloved and critically acclaimed games.

And based on these reviews, it's up to you to decide what the game is.

If you lock in a guest, I feel like we tried to, like, I don't remember what we did.

Okay.

I felt like at one point we tried to rebalance this game, and I don't remember how or why.

But, like, if you get it in the negative round, you get three points.

If you get it in mixed, you get two.

And if you get it during positive, you get one.

That seems cool.

That might be the rebalance.

That might be the rebalance.

It might have originally been like four, two, and one or something.

Maybe it was something like that.

Yeah.

Here we go.

Here's the first negative review.

Just like all other standards.

But before you begin, do these have a theme?

They do.

It's open world games.

Okay, got it, got it.

Here we go.

Matt loves his themes.

I love my themes.

And I was going to, I didn't care.

I wasn't going to mention it.

Yeah.

But it's like, it's not going to help.

It doesn't help.

Well,

it does narrow the scope a little bit.

Sometimes the theme is like kind of emergent as we go and we're like, I don't know.

I figured it was like

it was like open world.

We're talking open world stuff.

It felt like a good, just to get some of these ones out here.

This is a negative review.

Okay.

Just like all other sandbox games, it's fun for a few hours and then the novelty wears off and you're left with this crappy story.

There is no challenge there.

Just because

this isn't a game.

It's a movie shoehorned into a simulator.

Trust me, it's not as fun as it sounds.

I'm going to guess first.

I'll say that's a Grand Theft Auto V.

That is incorrect.

A movie shoehorned into a simulator.

I'm going to guess Death Stranding.

Also incorrect.

Moving on to the mixed review.

I have to admit to being prejudiced against sandbox games at times.

I think Fallout 3 was done well,

but the Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown games don't appeal to me.

I doubt I would have tried this game except for the theme.

People praise the story and voice work in this game, but I don't see how the story compares to an epic saga like Bioshock, Halo, Uncharted, or Mass Effect.

Okay, so we can definitely sort of infer some things from the other games that are cited in terms of era.

This is feeling like an early 2010s game or late aughts game.

Hmm.

Is it just Skyrim?

That is incorrect.

Hmm.

Yeah, movie shoehorned into a simulator feels like a clue.

I'm going to guess.

That's a big clue.

Assassin's Creed

french revolution i forget what that one's called that is incorrect moving on to the positive review nothing short of their finest work and an example to all other games out there this is master this masterpiece took a brave step introducing the west back to a different generation of people and it succeeded heather heather heather heather uh red dead redemption that is correct heather gets one point

heather we don't have that clearance you can't do that

no we don't have clearance for for that.

We're bleeding money now.

We can't do that.

Sorry, man.

I got to scat.

No, you guys, stop.

You know we love jazz.

Guys, I don't.

I don't fucking care if you love jazz.

Sorry.

Stop.

Scoop up.

The comments.

Matt was actually mad.

Matt was so mad they started scatting.

And I guess they can't afford to do that.

And then they're just sending me and Heather like Miles Davis records.

I think you guys will like this one.

You heard a John Coltrane?

You guys should watch La La Land.

Okay, here's the next one.

Negative review.

Let's take the Witcher 3, but make the terrain hard to traverse and get rid of interesting side quests.

Yeah.

And let's take Shadow of Mordor's combat, but get rid of all the melee features except for swing spam and make every enemy take 30 arrows or more to kill.

Crafting's is popular right now.

Throw that in, but don't actually make it have any depth.

This game is an amalgamation of every single bland open-world game to ever exist, but somehow even more boring.

All right, so this is pretty contemporary.

Uses a sword.

I'm just going to guess it.

I don't think that I don't know if this necessarily, because a crafting thing feels like a little bit of a mislead, but there's a I'm going to say is this breath of the wild

incorrect

sword

using a sword

ghost of tsushima that is incorrect moving on to the mixed review really enjoyed the first couple hours but then it got a bit repetitive could have used a bit more weapon variation and a bit more attack options nice to look at

Nice to look at world, but it's mostly empty and I found I got trapped a lot to the point of having to restart.

It reminded me of Monster Hunter, but without the co-op.

Reminded me of Monster Hunter, but without the co-op.

And his sword.

Is this Elden Ring?

It is incorrect.

A sword that reminds you of Monster Hunter.

Hmm.

Can you tell us the platform?

Uh, no.

Why not just give you the answer, huh?

Would you like that?

No, we're looking.

We're looking for some clues here.

Batman over here wants our answers.

A sword at Monster Hunter.

I don't know, man.

Like, I got nothing for this one.

Move on to the positive review.

Okay.

Really enjoyed everything about this game, but it specifically had such an enjoyable combat and the best console graphics ever.

It takes everything good from open world action games like Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Shadow of Mordor, and many others, and

none of the bad.

It's the pinnacle of this incredibly fun and popular genre.

A true exclusive.

and an absolute system seller.

Okay, a true exclusive and a system seller.

Talking about the aesthetics, this makes me think that this is a big boy PlayStation game.

I'm going to guess one, and I'm going to guess it might be the other one, but I'm going to guess

it's Horizon.

Care to continue that guess?

Zero Dawn?

That's right.

Wow.

It has a point.

It's tied up.

At one a piece.

Wow.

We're doing great.

I didn't say one piece, okay?

I said one a piece.

I knew Horizon Forbidden West was part two, and I knew there was a zero in Horizon, but I I couldn't remember what the rest of it was.

Horizon Zero Dawn.

Horizon Zero Dawn.

Zero Dawn.

Here's a negative review.

Tedious comes to mind, as do exhausting,

laborious, unsatisfying, drawn out, bloated, broken, unfinished, excruciating, and more.

This game.

Seen as a thesaurus.

This game at times is beautiful.

Well, for a computer game, and I mean, at times, some other times it looks awful.

The world you become immersed in soon dissipates when you come across clunking animatronics and badgers flying in the sky.

Badgers flying in the sky.

It's so general.

Badgers.

Badgers flying in the sky.

Badgers.

Computer game is used, which I guess it could be a multi-platform game they're playing on PC.

But that also could be in the way that somebody describes video games as Nintendo.

Oh, yeah.

So this could be written by somebody's grandpa.

Yeah.

Got it.

Yeah, it doesn't like the game.

Computer game.

Don't like it.

Don't like Atari's computer game.

The other day, my girlfriend was on the phone with her mom and she said, Matt's just playing the computer.

I was like sitting on the couch.

I was like, what do you think?

What?

Badger flying through the sky.

Badger's flying through the sky.

What does that even mean?

I'm going to say,

I'm going to say cyberpunk just to get my turnover.

That is incorrect.

We were just talking about something.

It's so hard for me to think of games that we didn't discuss as the issue here.

So I'm trying to

open up to other open world games.

I can move on to the mixed.

I'll take a guess just in case it's Skyrim again.

It is Skyrim.

Wow.

There we go.

So Nick has pulled ahead pretty far.

With two points?

With three points.

Oh, right.

So now he has four points, and Heather has one, but it's still anyone's game.

Still anyone's game.

It is anyone's game.

Here's a negative review.

Can you read that?

Can you read the

one of the more obvious reviews of Skyrim just so we can...

Yeah, I'll read the positive review.

Yeah, there are glitches, but that doesn't stop this game from being an absolute masterpiece.

After only three hours of play, I realize it's probably the most engrossing game I've ever played.

It's amazing how much content is packed into one game.

The game extremely addicting.

The sound is amazing.

The fucking graphics are absolutely phenomenal.

Because that game has been out for like 13 years or whatever, however long now, and it's been on so many platforms, like you forget that like it was a buggy mess upon release, as those games, as Starfield kind of is.

And now you can play it on the screen in your Tesla.

Here's a negative review.

I personally find the game to be overrated.

True, the world is massive and vibrant, but the gargantuan amount of bugs almost rendered the game unplayable.

Missions cannot be unlocked.

Gold medals are impossible because of glitches.

The graphics.

Gold medals.

And I understand that it's technically a last-gen last-gen upgrade, but if they released it for current-gen consoles, then I'll judge it like a current-gen game are absolutely terrible.

Last-gen upgrade.

Ah!

Forza.

Forza Horizon.

That is incorrect.

Fuck.

Boy, that would have been good because that is kind of an open world.

It's an open world.

Yeah.

Gold medals released for a last-gen.

Give us a mixer, you.

I give this a lower than high score because I simply don't see how it deserves a 10 in so many places.

The game has a lot of content, looks great, characters are good, not great, and that's about all it's got going for it.

For me, it almost felt boring.

This game has so much happening that it never really nails anything it's trying to do.

Everything is playable, but nothing for me is it all that fun.

All right, so a lot of content, but kind of feeling generic.

It's not Starfield, is it?

That is incorrect.

I'm going to pass.

Here's the positive review.

While the story feels short and less complex compared to others, it's a game that you enjoy from minute one to infinity.

Thanks to all the possibilities of its open world, it's driving and be able to take control of multiple protagonists.

Heather.

Heather.

Grand Theft Auto V.

That is correct.

Oh, there you go.

Heather has another point.

So now we're

two to four.

Are there gold medals?

I guess there are gold medals in Grand Theft Auto V.

I'm trouble remembering it.

And actually, I just told a big lie a second ago, and I want to apologize for my big lie.

I said it was anyone's game.

That was the last question.

So Nick is our winner.

Wow.

Nick has won blind item reviews.

I'll take it.

Hey, that's this week's Get Play.

It's our engineering is by Alex Gonzalez, dead or Alex G, and on social media.

And also check out our paywalled show, Get Animate.

Heather,

where?

Actually, where are we?

What are we watching right now?

We're watching FLCL.

That's right.

Which is the early 2000s anime mega hit once popularized on Adult Swim in the United States.

It's FLCL, six episodes, three podcasts about those six episodes.

The show has six episodes.

We're doing three episodes about it.

So come along, check that out on patreon.com slash get played.

We can listen to that and all of our other get animated episodes.

All our stuff is there.

It's pronounced similar to foodie-cootie, but you F-L-C-L is how it's written out.

And there you go.

Hey, well, we're going to be talking about Shadow the Colossus next week.

So

get ready to hop in on that and keep on slaying Colossi if you're playing along with us.

And guys,

it was nice to come back here.

What a treat to be in studio.

What a treat.

Watch you guys get played.

Oh, shit.

Fuck.

Hi, I'm Alana Hope Levinson.

And I'm Dan O'Sullivan.

And this is The Outfit, the new podcast from Higher Ground and Headgum.

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Every week, we're going to bring you a story about a mobster.

Some you've heard of, some you definitely haven't, but all of them are going to help explain why America is like this.

See, the mob explains all sorts of things: from milk expiration dates to why we got into Cuba to Las Vegas, gay bars, who knew?

Who knew?

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