you And welcome to the Massively OP podcast straight from the South Pole, if Bree's whining about the cold conditions of her office are to be believed. Oh, I like how you said I had an office. That's cute. Yeah, you know, office, house. I'm going to just keep pretending. Cubicle, yeah. Dude, I don't even have a dining room, let alone an office. It's not a big house, y'all.
no that's that's the east coast for you yeah but you make it work and that's good so uh yeah it's it's fun i should be recording before the show because you hear brie trying to figure out uh the ideal way to use her new mic and you know should she pile pillows around her this time yes i don't know
So maybe we'll do a charity drive and we'll get you like some of those big, I don't know, what do they call it? Those things that they had in gym at the end of the gym with those big padding walls things. I don't know what they're called. Yeah. We need to, like, circle you in those. My husband actually suggested getting, like, big drapes and, like, having, like, one of those shower, you know, the curved shower rods. You can just bring that up in the ceiling. And I was like, absolutely not.
I love y'all, but it's not worth ruining my entire house. I don't know how you'd explain that to all your guests. This is where mom takes her shower in the middle of the living room. Not happening. Well, welcome back to the Massively OP Podcast, episode 496. And yes, your eyes aren't deceiving you. It is December. And we're here. It's going to be a... crazy month not just in terms of MMO releases and launches we're going to talk about one of those today expansions but also end of the year
patches and oh yeah a little thing we like to call the award ceremonies and all our end of year wrap-ups of our columns and all these things that brie is standing over us with the meanest whip you've ever seen and she's just cracking down Faster. It's more like begging. Use of subjunctive right. Like, please turn it in on time because this weekend is going to kill me. It's just awful. My wife and I sat down. We looked over the calendar for this month and we went.
Maybe January will be better, but this whole month is just a write-off at this point. I hate that because I like, you know, you want Christmas to be like the idyllic parts of Home Alone, right? With the pretty twinkling music and the snow and the Christmas. But it's never that. like the chaotic you know can i point out and knocking things over and it's just awful
Can I point out, making your case here, Kevin made himself a really nice meal, sits down, and the second, right before he takes a bite into it, that's when the robbers come. He never gets to eat his meal. That's how December feels. You're right. That's December right there, yeah. Poor Kevin never eats his meal. But hopefully you're getting some time to game.
I did. You as well? Okay. I mean, no, I didn't because I read on Reddit this weekend that I don't play MMOs. So, you know, if some guy says it authoritatively and like a bunch of people who don't know me at all upvoted, it must be true, right? Confirmation bias. Yes. absolutely that's how that works why don't you play mmos why do they say you don't like girls in general or oh no this guy got banned on massively op years and years and years ago oh it's one of those grudge matches yeah anyway
I actually did play MMOs because as everybody who listens know, I do that and have been doing that for way too long, longer than some of the people on Reddit have been alive, which is, you know, a little embarrassing, but that's okay. I'd rather be old than stupid anyway. I played Guild Wars 2. I had a lot of fun, actually, this past weekend. I mean, we got a lot done. I got a lot of work done.
I try to use Thanksgiving kind of as like a catch up, like so that I can get done tons of our stuff. Like I did all of our faux awards this weekend, you know, like because we have real awards where we give them out and then we have like the, oh, remember when that crazy thing happened? my favorite ones.
Are they really? I don't even look at them until you post them. And then I'm like, I'm just delighted by them because I have no idea what we're going to be covering. Because it's incredible. And honestly, it is for me, too, because I keep track of them as we go all year. I'm like, every time we get this weird, crazy.
story i just throw it in the bin and i'm like i'll remember this in november and there are so many i know i don't i half of them end up on the cutting room floor they don't even get resurrected for the end but they don't get a lot of attention but i think they're really funny and I, I, it's a fun way to like, I don't know, to apply like a weird template, like a,
a weird filter on the history of our genre when we only look at the crazy crap that happens. I think it's fun anyway. So I got a lot of that done. That was like, what is that? 17 articles. And I cranked out on Thanksgiving. I know it's what it is. It's the 12 for the golden yachties. course they're called the golden yetis and then the five for the absolute weirdest stories
I hope they tickle you guys when they start rolling out later this month because they're fun. But no, when I wasn't actually working on MMORPGs, as I do for 50 or 60 hours every single week, Reddit, I play Guild Wars 2. And I... finished let's see i finished all my weeklies last week and i finished all my dailies in fact the weeklies last week when i sat down to do them
i was like oh these are gonna be hard i might not even do them and i ended up doing like seven and i only needed six it was like one of those things where i got on a train i think it was the desolation i got on like a somebody was doing bounties and desolation and like within like 30 minutes i had everything
none i was like how did that even happen like i wasn't trying to do them i was just like hey you know commander guy with a you know little icon over his head is like rolling around doing stuff i'll follow him and get some good loot Anyway, got them all done. That was fun. So I got my last, no, my next to last two pieces of ascended gear for my engineer. I have one more to get. I will finish it tonight when I do my dailies. I just need dailies to roll faster.
I need there to be like a way to keep farming these points, but there really isn't. So I got that done. And then when I finished that, I went back to what I was working on. Gosh, it's been a month. When I got like completely wrapped up in like award season stuff, I kind of stopped doing.
like exploration but now i'm kind of back uh back in season four is what i've been working on so i finished up um the astar to guide us chapter i had it's a jahai bluff so i had gone there like originally but i didn't really do much so this time i just swept through it, did the whole thing, did the storyline.
It's kind of interesting. The reason I want to talk about it is because since I hadn't played it before and I've long since forgotten when it came out or what Colin said about it when it came out, that's how long ago it was. I didn't realize that there was a ton of stuff in A Star to Guide Us that ArenaNet used later.
You guys remember when Soto came out and everybody was like, oh, well, the first zone is really just a mishmash of all of the other zones. It's got stuff from End of Dragons. It's got stuff from Heart of Thorns. And they're all smooshed together in this weird astral plane. And oh, there are rifts.
the rifts open and the mobs come out all of this stuff was done before they literally did this in a star to guide us they literally have a zone where you're in jahe bluffs ostensibly and suddenly there's like a chunk of maguma jungle in there and suddenly obviously end of dragons isn't there because end of dragons didn't happen yet but it was like heart of thorns
various zones popping back up and you're like what and time he's like what what's happening and then a rift opens and these um they're not the cryptist dudes they're branded dudes so they look like Jade Armory things. So they're like pouring out and you're like cleaning them up. And I'm like, I have done all of this before. I feel like I've gone through a time portal where internet was like, hey, you guys remember that chapter? Let's make that whole thing a gigantic expansion.
That was like a weird, I don't know. out-of-body experience for me because i had long since forgotten any of this stuff was in there i didn't play it um when it came out so if anyone pointed this out when soto happened i wouldn't have noticed at all like it wouldn't have registered with me because i didn't have that that reference
so that was really fun I actually really enjoyed it apart from the fact that again it was really short which I think I said about the last couple too like the very first one the one and the one where you get the third one where you get your roller beetle those seem like oppressively long and i couldn't wait for them to be over but all of the others have been like
really short to the point where like i actually think that people have forgotten how short they were and have undervalued some of the the last two expansions like specifically where um you know people complain and they say that those two expansions are short because they come out in these four chunks and i'm sitting there thinking well the living world season only had six chunks and they're much shorter i think altogether there's significantly less content than an expansion i realized they were
they were free and putting that in quotes, but you had to have bought the other expansion anyway. I don't know. I actually, it gave me like more respect for the modern zones that they're coming up with in the expansions. the it's not like jahai buffs wasn't pretty i love it because it's a it's a path of fire stuff it's really nice i like everything about it it's right it's nestled below vabi so it's got all that byzantine kind of um moroccan look to it it's really cool but
I don't know. I feel like Jantheir Wilde, that first expansion, the first patch, words, the first zone specifically, is just massive in scale. Like, not just up, but out. And... I think people have have forgotten how shrimpy some of the old episodes were. And so by comparison, these new expansions, I feel like this is a better mesh of, you know, what we were expecting out of expansions plus the living story.
i think this works better but it's not that i'm saying it's bad it's just it's different it's much shorter anyway i'm still having fun i've got does that make it two i've got two more to go i think i've forgotten what they are I guess we have to kill Krauki, right? Because, you know, he dies. That's clearly what we're leading up to. Anyway, it's been really fun. I'm back. I never really left, but you know what I mean? I'm back like in exploration and not just maintenance mode.
But you might notice I'm not really playing the expansion. Yeah, you say that every week. I know. I log in and I'm like, well, part of it is because I... when i play the expansion like the new stuff i do it with my husband and if he doesn't have time to play with me i find something else to do in the game you know what i'm saying that's just we duo this stuff so that's part of it and if he's got something else he's we just
it's fine but also part of is that i'm just not motivated to i don't know i don't care that much like about the housing We could do a whole show on why I think that their housing is really great and yet it's not for me. You can imagine I said that with the Frodo voice. Like, I just don't, I don't know.
but like that's part of it that didn't really hold much for me compared to other stuff in the game that i have like personally newly like fallen in love with but also i know that it's just like a couple of you know little vignettes and there's no like meaty content for it i'm gonna be waiting until what february is it march whenever the next one comes out for my next crack at his own but that's okay i had fun it's good what did you do this weekend did you get any gaming at all
all the gaming yeah i had no yeah so so it's the um the paradox here not having any time whatsoever lately and yet trying to cram in as much as i possibly can so it's a lot of you know
get all my work done, get all my responsibilities done, see how much I can front load the day, balance things out, and then hopefully clear out some time by the end of the day. And it usually happens, not always, but... usually and of course i'm throwing another game on top of the pile because you know three three was not enough brie i needed four so now i'm up to four and i'm doing my three quests in each one rotation which is actually kind of
of nice it's like getting it going to a buffet and just kind of going oh my gosh How do you do this? How do you stop your brain from just thinking about one game while you're playing it? I would feel so scattered. You know what? Here's what I do. This is exactly what I do. While I'm playing those three quests or so, I take one good screenshot. and then when i'm done with that little gaming session which is you know like 15 20 minutes whatever um
I will pause and go to my blog and I'll post that picture. I have like a running, you know, post for every single game I'm playing. Yeah. And for that week. And so I'll post a picture and then write down a thought. Like usually I'll be thinking like, oh, you know, this.
observation or just a general thought about the game or you know something about this particular adventure i was on but it gives me some time being out of the game before i jump back into the next one so you know like 15 20 minutes playing a game five minutes writing black then back and you know like yeah it's it's fine i have no problem kind of cranking you know shifting gears that way i do that on the podcast by the way i save all my stuff for you that's why yeah my shower thoughts
I don't know. Sometimes my shower thoughts are just like, ah, warm water. I just want to stay in here forever. Yeah, so let me go through them really quick. I don't want to worry anybody. wow retail is fine i'm i i feel satisfied actually going through all these side quests so i'm kind of going through the last zone at this point, which is really nice. I know we've got the new zone coming very quickly, so I probably do need to maybe schedule a marathon session and just...
completely plow through the rest of the quest at some point. No, play it just in pace. Don't play it Blizzard pace. Yeah, yeah.
We'll see. It's fine. Some of the quests are amusing. It's nothing bad, nothing great. I think the problem with this character is I've gotten to the point where my gear is... good enough that i don't i'm not really getting any upgrades anymore so i'm not really challenging myself to to do delves or dungeons or raids or anything like that which is nice time-wise but also none of these quests are given me anything interesting unless it's an op.
odd like pet or a transmog piece and part of my brain at this point is just like man if housing was in the game already i bet there'd be some cool housing stuff that would drop so that's probably going to be the next year of my life in retail is just going i can't wait for housing come on housing get here already give my you know new purpose for playing yeah uh but until then you know it's fine you know nothing it's okay it's i i want to keep my foot in that in that
pond as as much as possible uh lotro i'm continuing to go through the new expansion i'm every time i log in i think this is it this is the day i'm going to be done with the first zone And I'm almost done with the first zone. And then I find a new quest cluster. And then another one. And then another one. And, you know, like...
They're not joking. Like 350 quests are crammed into these four zones somewhere. So you keep finding more and more. Wait, are you doing a completionist run on this character? At least this. Yeah. Every time I go through a new zone. Yeah. There's a really cool running... quest line it's it's not like a single quest line but keep running into this particular character he's kind of joined these guards he's moving through the zones as you are and
you kind of meet him early on and he's kind of a hot mess. Like he's just making some bad choices and everybody's just rolling their eyes at him. So you kind of take him under your wing and you're helping him out. And you, over the course of this, like he invites you after helping him to sit down.
share a hookah like you know here smoke with me all right lotro thank you i i like how you don't have the uh tobacco industry right there in your pocket or anything like that um so you spoke with him and he shares with you some of his backstory and you get to really know this character and he has kind of not like a tragic backstory but he's trying to really prove himself he has some
you know great parental figures looming over him so he just kind of wants to make a name for himself but he's got some fears he's got he's got his own hero's journey to go on and it's really nice to kind of keep encountering him again and again And help him face his fears. And learn more about him. Like there's just texture to this character. And the fact that you keep encountering him. Makes me look forward to future steps on this.
in this expansion. So I think that's a really good storytelling technique. Uh, so, um, not the first time I've seen Lotra do it, but it's, it's good to have that. and it's good to have you know kind of meet these there's a lot of npcs you meet them and it's just like they're all casual acquaintances you know like the second i leave you i'm never gonna see you again i i do like you when games pull them back
and have recurring characters. Oh man, Lotro is, yeah, Lotro is not that kind of game. There are so many characters. Oh my gosh, how many dudes showed back up in Gondor? Like all the rangers like, hey! And I'm like, you all look the same at this point. I can't remember you. I need name tags. okay you have name tags i need like bios yes and then the game kills some of them off and you're like i'll keep dying but there's still so many of you
I've been to so many of your funerals already. I think SSG just kind of pulls you guys back from the dead and pretend we don't know. So I'm playing that. I actually did dabble a little bit in Star Wars The Old Republic. I said I was going to because we've been doing some posts on the new patch.
kind of got in my head like i kind of miss sotor even though it's not filling any particular niche that's not already being filled by the other games i'm playing it's just hey i'm kind of miss it it's like the catchy pop song of mmos Yeah, it kind of is. You know, so dabbling, you know, again, three quests at a time, which goes pretty quick and it's kind of fun. So I made a smuggler, of course. I don't know if you heard, Skavik, not a good guy. Or so, kind of annoying.
but you know it's fun i don't know just being sarcastic again and and having those choices it's always good but honestly it's like every day i want to get you know those games are fun it's good to have time in them But I kind of want to get them done because I'm obsessed with WoW Classic. And I'm still so deep in this pool right now. And it's ridiculous. I don't know what to say about that. It hasn't been said about this game over the last...
20 years but especially vanilla there's something weirdly compelling about vanilla even though it's so slow and the classes are so janky and there's only like one build that maybe works for all these classes and you kind of want to try other things but they're not optimal and and yet everybody's having a blast like my guild is huge our guild is by the way called sorry we blew up I don't know why, but I love the title of that. It was the only guild I saw that was advertising itself as like...
We're not going to raid. We're just here having fun. And like everybody else is like, oh, we're gearing up. We're going to go raid Molten Core. I'm like, oh, dude, I don't I don't care. I just want to be part of a fun, helpful guild. And that's exactly what this is. So we just we have so much.
fun just talking i did two dead minds runs this past weekend on this character and uh they both failed no wait dead mines dead mines and you know dead vanilla dead mines is okay it's a trainee mess i i remember yeah and you know like you're just gonna die from exhaustion halfway through it anyway in your upper you're in your upper teens nobody has a build working or gear or gear or talents or like the the second run we did our tank was a druid which okay you know props to you but he has like
one taunt and suddenly you have like you know these packs of mobs coming so one at a time he's trying to taunt them off of us and of course all the dps is just going all ham and everything like that and so people are dying left and right so yeah to kind of get into a groove and really it is a slow methodical not a slog but it is it's slow progression through these but it does give you time to talk like
Like, I'm used to playing dungeons in retail. Like, the best you're going to get is, hello, GG. You know, that's it. Right. Those are the two things he say. This one, we're having actual honest conversations. We're talking about each other's gear and this dungeon and nostalgia and strategy and this and that.
i don't know like there's it's it's weird to be on opposite ends of the spectrum and going you know can't we button him uh benjamin button this you know meet in the middle can't this isn't some way to kind of recapture a slightly slower yet not agonizingly annoyingly slow pace that we kind of encourage conversation again i don't know maybe not at this point and
mmo design all that but it is kind of nice to go through this but yeah we got all the way to the last boss and we wiped and everybody's doing a run back and for whatever reason like one person just quit and then that just cascaded and suddenly everybody quit and it's like no dude we were on the last freaking boss but it was okay because you know what i got three quests done there and i thought you know
It's actually, you know, I'm going to get some good gear out of this. It's not bad. I got a blue axe, my first blue drop, which is cool. Yeah. So I have a hunter. I have a druid. I keep bouncing back and forth between them. I can't really settle on a main. I need to because there's like hundreds of hours.
had to get to 60 and it's uh it's not going to be good if i keep going back and forth so probably drew it at this point uh just for the flexibility um but i don't know we'll see so yeah that's all i've been i've been bouncing around and of course we've got you know like pantheons on the way and path of exile i kind of want to try both i think i'm gonna buy i'm i want to buy it this week yeah i was actually looking at it last night like i should just buy this because
i want to be ready which one for path of exile too okay and then i'm thinking i'm gonna literally it's coming out what thursday i'm like i am gonna be writing awards friday saturday instant like i won't have any time to play i'm just gonna be mad about it so maybe i don't know if i'm gonna buy it this week maybe next week
Maybe it will be my reward for finishing the awards. Everything I'm gaming this weekend, I'm just going to tweet you. I'm going to copy you. Oh, don't. I know I need to stay off Twitter, too. I know Blue Sky. I know Twitter. For those who... I don't know if I said this, but this is our... award weekend coming up when we do the real awards we have our debate on friday and then i spend all weekend actually putting them together so i this is probably the latest i've ever done my awards
that's because usually we have them done in like november but this year like thanksgiving was so late in november it messed everything up you know what i mean yeah it's kind of frustrating me because we do have a lot of a lot of stuff dropping in december and chances are they're probably not gonna be game changers but who knows you know like they they might have had a shot at an award but
Yeah, like, I don't know if Pantheon's really up for anything. I don't know if Core Punk is... Path of Exile 2 could be, like, we have a Nats... What do we call it? The Nats of Mass... No, what do we call it? yeah there's one for non-mmos non-mmor pgs non-mmos for a multiplayer game that it has a chance a really good chance at that actually but so does like pal world and like there's a bunch of we had a lot of good non-mmos this year so
Anyway, we don't have to talk about this. Yeah. I'm just complaining about my schedule. It's the process. All right. Well, let's go into the news. And it is a little bit of a lull.
just a little bit of one this past week as we were kind of sandwiched between two really busy seasons. And it's going to pick really up, up really fast for the next couple of weeks. And then it'll... probably get quiet again uh through january yeah so um so we just have a couple of things up the big thing this past week is as pre just said core core punk launched um and i keep wanting to say
um cyberpunk and core something else i don't know why it is cyberpunk that's fair yeah it is cyberpunky corepunk early access launch here Believe it or not, it is here after so many delays and a lot of things that were both inside and outside of the studio's control. A very beleaguered game. Never thought we'd see it cross the finish line. And it's not... really at the finish line it's just at the early access line uh but it's there it's out
in the public for you to buy and play if this is something you're looking at. There's some good strong pros here. There's some good cons, and maybe we should mention some of those that we've been seeing.
I think the art style and the genre, the kind of hybrid mix genre that they're going for here is a good pro for it. I think this is not... a angle like a kind of like a setting that most mmos go for and especially if you do kind of like that the league of legends style albion online camera perspective um that you know Diablo-esque, Diablo-like. Yeah, but way like words. It's not as grimdark. It's more cyberpunk where it's got a lot of neon fantasy stuff. Yeah.
Don't want over the shoulder. You want top down. And yet it's still an MMORPG, right? It's still large scale. It's weird. It's a weird hybrid. You described it well. Totally. So yeah, it's out. I mean, if you want to play it, what do people have to pay at this point? Oh, man. I don't remember off the top of my head. I'm going to look it up real quick because I think that's pretty important information.
yeah you look it up so over the weekend they actually had some outages and they were fixing some shoring up some tech stuff um they called them significant technical issues their communication has been interesting i don't want to say it's not
been present because through all of this though they were putting out regular dev blogs but like we we know they held like a bunch of stuff back like over the last couple months they basically said yeah we're like six weeks behind on our our development because we
stopped developing content we wanted to come into this launch and instead we're developing like fixing technical problems so that the early access wouldn't be a train wreck which is totally reasonable so now presumably they've got that done and then they will start
reintegrating the the stuff that was supposed to launch like the content like the zones and whatnot that was supposed to come out so it should actually be kind of a busy early access early on because of all of this content that was like sitting there waiting to go What's the other thing? Oh, the cash shop was the other thing that they finally got up this weekend. So nothing like a buy-to-play game with cash shop, y'all. And speaking of buy-to-plays. There's not much in it.
What did Chris say? Moundskins? It was Moundskins, yeah. So don't panic about that. It's $36. Okay, there you go. Which is actually kind of interesting because the... The most expensive, like, that's the least expensive of the four editions, and the most expensive is just $68. Which...
I guess I'm totally used to Daybreak and some of these studios going. The $300 packages, yeah. Take out another mortgage on your home to buy our... deluxe friends and family and neighborhood like you to buy a three thousand dollars spaceship so 68 for a super deluxe version seems kind of quaint to me but 36 is not bad that's a that's a good price point for
what this game is you know another another visual comparison that i'm kind of looking at here going through all the screenshots definitely has kind of a torchlight vibe too oh yeah no that's fair Yeah, because there's a lot of like steampunky stuff in Torchlight that you could almost imagine. If you squint, you can almost see that as cyberpunk. Yeah. A really nice lush palette. solely cartoony but definitely um
And not quite cel-shaded, but definitely kind of nodding in that direction, I think. Yeah. No, that's actually my favorite part of the game is how it looks. The vibe of the graphics and the top-down-ness. But like... the devs artificial core this is the ukrainian dev right there we didn't mention this but one of the reasons they were delayed was because they were literally under freaking attack so they had some problems in the you know um
last couple of years actually just holding their team together and staying alive so you know we have a lot of sympathy for that but on the other hand they've come out and said you know this is this is an early access we're really doing early access this is not just an early launch expect it to be
expect it to have some problems expect it to continue getting getting development so like if you're going to buy this be aware that you are still a tester that they are still going to be treating you as a tester and this is not a complete finished product this is one of the reasons i have grabbed it yet i i know it's a mess when the devs are telling you it's a mess you know it's a mess so
I think this is kind of a theme we're seeing like with this and Pantheon where, you know, here's what you're getting. It is a streamlined, stripped down version of this game that we've had to make a lot of calls about.
what we can and can't include in this launch and so a lot of it's been shoved to the side because you know it's either try to put everything in and it will all be broken and it'll all be a mess or try to narrow it down to the things that we can control and then gradually add stuff back in but you know that that process of
adding things back in and finishing up the game it's gonna i mean i'm looking at core punk if they they financially you know settle into a comfortable like sustainability i i still think it's probably a couple years out from a 1.0
um at least yeah and and a steam launch because they're not on steam which is in a way it's a good thing like they're they're racking up all of the money that they're making off this they're not they're not losing a cut to valve right there this is all but they're also not racking up bad reviews
and angry refunds and you know the kind of stuff that happens to mmos really to lots of games but especially mmos in early access on steam where everything is like visible so in a way i'm kind of annoyed because i like to know how things are going and steam does provide that window but steam can also be what was it shadows kiss that said that going to steam early access was they had a whole like a
Oh, he had some horrible name for the trap, the early access trap, right? Where you launch because you have to, but it also kills you. It's a catch-22, right? You can't not launch, but you also can't launch because that will also destroy you.
you one way or another you lose yeah they're doing here is just quietly launching it yes and coasting on their dedicated player base like the people already signed up they're already invested those are the people that they're going like yeah come along with us you're going to financially support us for a while and then hopefully
we grow with some word of mouth and when we get to a point where we can really you know like have a marketing budget or the game is at a point where we could really show it off without it being you know as you said just absolutely you know burned on on steam then we'll do it but
Yeah, it's a very delicate balancing act that they've got going on here. But in a way, not being on that marketplace, literally the steam front, makes it seem... more like a real early act like what we intended early access to be you know what I mean like like you said they're really just it's like a step between beta and
and launch instead of going to steam where it's like oh no we're open for business everybody come buy it i i hope pantheon does like similar pantheon isn't coming to steam right not right away Yeah, you're asking me like I know. No, I have no idea. I don't think so. Maybe it is on Steam. Crap.
No, I think I'm wrong. Sorry, you can hear me typing. Let's have Bree argue with herself. That's part of the podcast. I don't want to be wrong when I can look it up real quick. You think there's only two people on this podcast? No, no, no. There's three. There's always three. it's light green no it's on steam threat it is okay all right well at least we know i'm nervous now i kind of wish they weren't but maybe it'll be fine maybe it'll be good maybe every and and
Angels will come down with sugar cookies for all of us. Who knows? This could be fine. You know, this industry keeps surprising us. So making predictions in any direction is always tricky. As you know, because you just wrapped up our predictions. article for the year um all right well let's move on we got another story to talk about kind of a little you know hey
This major studio that never does anything wrong, which is, of course, Ubisoft. We love Ubisoft. They produce quality products. They never cancel delay. I don't know how sarcastic I can get with this. Anyways, Ubisoft's making... a cozy mmo what is it don't know that there's a code name here altera uh might what did you put here or elliot said according to this report the game is being put forth as animal crossing cross with Minecraft building. Yeah. And so, okay. Interesting.
And Ubisoft, you know, kind of always dabbling in those online spaces. But does Ubisoft have a proper MMO under its belt? Oh, if you don't count stuff like the crew and you don't count Skull and Bones. Yeah, Division, that sort of thing. Oh, Division, there you go. Yeah, I mean, those are like bubble games. They're kind of MMO-ish, but I wouldn't – I mean, they're definitely not traditional MMORPGs. Right. If you're a car and you're not in a thousand worlds –
It's not an MMORPG, but maybe your borderline MMO? Yeah. But either way, I'm not sure that this is going to be. It's not like they're completely ignorant of it. Well, right, right.
No, if there was more, nothing is popping to mind, but that doesn't mean anything. And even so, they didn't actually call it a cozy mmo i just want to we're calling it that based on the description we have i should i should clarify that they're not talking about it at all this is like totally rumor stuff you know leet stuff i should say not just rumor stuff so Who knows what Ubisoft will end up calling it by the time it's actually baked enough to be revealed.
But that's what it sounds like if you're going for Animal Crossing and you're doing what those are both multiplayer games, not maybe not massively multiplayer, but definitely somewhere in between mid multiplayer. We need better terms for this stuff.
and definitely sandboxy ish right yeah yeah this well i mean that that sounds and very casual very you know angled maybe toward like the switch audience you know where my kids are always doing these you know animal crossing minecraft i mean those two games right there are a huge part of their world so yeah but it lets them express themselves and i i don't think this is you know if this is actually something they're working on those are not too bad
sources of inspiration so it's just kind of interesting it's probably gonna get lumped into that whole category i do at the end of the year when we do the hey i'm supposed to be watching you know like these rumored projects ones we don't have a lot of information but we we strongly suspect or we know that something's being cooked somewhere so um Ubisoft maybe throwing its hat into the ring in more serious more depth here in online space but we'll see.
see yeah they've been such a mess the past couple years with the you know canning hiding basically making it possible to resurrect guild guild wars the crew one sorry i had one in my head that the game preservation debacle over the crew franchise and then
skull and bones being a mess and being so badly delayed after such a long time and then all of the chaos happening at the singaporean studio where that was made like it's just one thing after another with ub and it's exhausting it's hard to like get super excited And yet, you know, whatever random team in Paris is working on this is, you know, hopefully isolated from the Guillermo chaos. We'll see.
hopefully all right do i put it on my list of games to talk about for mmo hype train uh probably not yet no not until like we have more but more details definitely in your your most in the bin you'll do like 10 that we're really anticipating and then you'll you one that's like 50 more games just in a big list like because our list of games that we're watching is like freaking huge and it gets bigger if you include games that maybe maybe a lot of people wouldn't consider mmos but are kind of mmos
If you cut those out, it's still way too big. Yeah. Persistent multiplayer stuff like that. Yeah. Well, I have to we have to get ahead of some of these patches that are coming this month, too, because, again, there's going to be a lot of like end of the year.
push stuff out before the holiday break and so you know even if your game already had its expansion chances are you're gonna have a you know december patch somewhere in there and throne and liberty is getting one in fact it'll be a really good one because it's going to have a new weapon uh the spear is coming that's going to be the eighth weapon added to the game and so that's kind of a big deal
for this relatively new MMO that has had a strong launch this year. And so... yeah um they they talked about how spear is going to be really good for either dps or tanking which i can sort of see um i left out the picture is not a traditional like demure medieval spear this is something that has like I don't know, a small Honda hatchback attached to a stick or something like that.
It's got to be like 60 pounds of metal attached to the end of this. It looks a little bit more like a halberd or like a really fangy pike than like a spear. But I'm here for it. It's sparkling. Spears are cool. I love spears. I wish all MMOs.
had spears if you're a fantasy mmo you should have spears i think spears look cool and it's shocking how few of them do yeah i mean like new world i thought that was so cool like you actually have a whole line that's just spears i mean unless you have like a class that's like the um the dragoon from final fantasy 14 you know where it's kind of really centered around the identity of a spear spears don't
end up getting used as much or they get their like token presence you know like world of warcraft had like pole arms and yeah you sort of see one once in a blue moon but everybody goes with swords anyway so right poor spear users lotro has spears but you know who uses them i guess wardens and sometimes captains and not that often yeah i do although my captain is using a sword
I'm literally trying to think what I have. Or am I using javelins? Are you doing a warden? You have both. I've played a lot, but I literally can't remember. I must have a spear. Yeah, you have spears and javelins. Yeah. No, you're right. It's not very common in Western MMOs. It's really common to have at least one class that is the spear user in Korean MMOs especially. Yes.
so and yeah this doesn't surprise me coming out of ncsoft literally guild wars 2 just reintroduced the spear that already existed in the game but like gave it to all of the classes and it's totally meta for most of the classes right now which is a little disappointing if you really like the spear justin you should be in guild wars 2 right now
beer is like literally the best for everybody i should let me add that to the top of my pile i like it but i don't like it that much and the graphics aren't very good so yeah i'm kind of but i'm glad i'm glad thern and liberty is getting this we didn't even mention it's not just coming it's not
we knew about this because it was you know a lot of these games they'll announce it for korea and they'll get it like six months before we do and then they announce it for us and we're like yay and air horn it's not even a big deal because we already knew but they announced this for everybody it's coming
for everybody at the same time like the global has the global like version of the game has almost kind of lapped the korean version you know what i'm saying in terms of content and now like it's coming here almost
I don't want to say first because it's coming simultaneously, but it almost seems like they're catering to us more than they're catering to their own home base. Which maybe doesn't surprise you. Which maybe they should because we seem to have had a more successful release. What the heck? Than... overseas, which is not usually the case.
All right. Well, that's all the news we got for this week, but that gives us a little bit more time to dive into the mailbag. Which we have neglected so badly. So badly. We were joking before the show started that we've been trying to read Illy's...
email for like three weeks now and we never get to it so illy you're popping up every week i'm like mentally getting ready to answer this and at this point he's been he's been wanting to tell a millie vanille joke for like a month now and i keep not letting him do it
can't do lip syncing on the podcast no okay illy says i recently played some alveon which for me is a game i really want to like for no good reason it's not a game i'd usually be interested in i like the sandbox but the world feels not like a world but like a game i don't necessarily like the full-loop pvp gank box focus pve is fine at best and the combat is not what i usually enjoy
And yet, ever since its launch, I just get an itch for it for some reason. Almost every major update I'm there, play some, really want it to become my home, and then I realize why it never ends up that way. Do you guys also have games that you really want to love, but in the end you just don't?
Thanks for answering and for being my dog walking companions every week. Good dog. Good boy. Oh my gosh. This happens to me with Albion like all a freaking time. I can't even bring myself to delete it off my hard drive, even though I know.
I don't want to play a PvP gank box. And I know, but every time I go back, I find PvE very compelling and I really like it. I like the crafting system. I like the housing islands. Yes, plural, because at one point I was literally subbed on two characters at once because I have... no self-control whatsoever and i really liked the islands but yeah like you get to a certain point and it's like join a guild and
you welcome to the pvp game you have just joined because that's what this is now and i'm like i don't really want to do that i mean i've done that before and i don't really want to do it again I don't want to be in the guilds that hang out and I'll be on online, to be perfectly honest. If you watch chat, you'll understand. It's not a pleasant place to be. It's not the kind of culture I really want to spend my life in. So, I don't know.
Man, I just totally understand the Albion thing, like specifically the Albion thing. It pulls me every freaking time they do an update. I'm like, wow, it was so much fun to develop my character and I love how it looks. But no, I need to stop.
what what what other games like we don't have to talk about no i well i can jump on i can actually jump on yeah same sentiment different game eve online is exactly the same thing for me because and you know just stepping back and looking at the features list hits a lot of my you know want wanted things like i love sci-fi i i prefer sci-fi as a genre over fantasy so if you have a sci-fi mmo you already have like a point in your favor uh to get
getting my attention and my patronage um but also like spaceships and exploration and building building up like you know gradually gearing out your ship and building up some uh base of wealth and you know all these things that they have sound really cool and i did like
i think before world of warcraft even launched like back in the day i did subscribe for a few months like i was i i got the sense of it like it was not a bad thing i really liked the offline skill training i thought that was kind of cool to be able to you know not have to grind out your character it was time gated but it was still like i felt like even if i'm offline my character's still progressing it was kind of cool to to log back in and see what progression i had made um and you know just
The visuals look cool. The style of ships look cool. There's a lot of potential there. But at the same time, as you just said, the culture is not the kind of game I want to be part of. There's no option for me to completely... disconnect from pvp even if i you know just stay in super safe space all the time and you know i i never know like if somebody's gonna make a little suicide run or somebody's gonna i'm gonna be part of a
corporation but you know hey they're secretly scamming you because that's kind of one of those things that happens in eve online so you know i don't want to have like paranoia be a part of my gameplay experience where i'm always worried somebody's going to ruin my day and i i already have enough of that if i'm like in wow classic and
I'm going for a node and somebody else starts running over. I'm like, oh, crap. Now it's on. Now we've got to see who gets their first new runs. And I'm already resenting the other player. And I'm like, this is stupid. It's just a node. Let them have it. So I try to peel off.
just let people have these things happen to us as we get older we stop we stop giving too many f's it's just yeah you just like there'll be more nodes whatever yeah so so yes i i there have been times that like mentally i'm like yeah yeah, I really need to give Evil Online another try or to invest some time into it. Because there's just not a lot of options out there if you want a spaceship game where you make your spaceship cooler and cooler and you get...
get to live out that privateer trading style fantasy. And there's just not a lot out there. There's some lesser space sim games and there's Star Trek Online, but that's a kind of different... type of game and different types of ships so it's not really the same uh it's not really what i'm looking for and i know chris and i have lamented the fact that we have not gotten like a really good privateer style space sim
And yet, the other game that really comes to mind in terms of games I've tried very hard to make work is Final Fantasy 14. so hard i've tried to make this game like you know mean girls like stop trying to make fetch happen it's just not gonna happen justin stopped trying to make final fantasy 14 yet i every year without a shout out without hesitation i will at least once or twice a year jump back into final fantasy 14 because
there's always reasons why, right? There's, you know, you're in a bad relationship and yet you keep going back to that relationship because nostalgia, you know, time and nostalgia will erase the bad memories and just make you think, Oh yeah, I like this kind of thing. Cause I'll look at,
Final Fantasy XIV and go, oh, look at how into it the community is. And look how it checks those boxes of like a PVE, you know, MMO that's being highly developed. The dev team's really respected. There's a lot of adventure. There's a lot of story.
I like story. I like... being told stories i like going through you know fantasy realms i really like the idea of being able to switch between classes on the fly you have one character that's all the character you ever need because you can have every class in the game if you want to
But then I get into it and then I'm reminded of like all the reasons why I don't like it. I don't like the pacing. I don't like the combat. I don't really like most of the classes because there's no... divergence in any of them there's no choice you have to you're given the same skills as every other class every you know every other character who has that class so you have to play in the exact way that the game
designed you to play it so really i've often described final fantasy 14 as a game where you have to abide by square enix's rules like they have told you this is how you will play this game this is how you will enjoy it this is you know it's like a very on rails experience in a lot of ways and if you're on board with that then great you're having a good time But if not, there's no wiggle room. There's not a lot of room to express yourself creatively or to build an interesting character.
my dragoon is going to be the same as everybody else's dragoon and you know I'll have to play it the same exact way as everybody else and I just yeah I just bounce off of it sooner or later and I've tried really hard I've gotten at least through three expansions, so I put several hundreds hours of game time into that game, and yet I cannot love it.
And so at this point, I really just need to. I did delete it from my hard drive. It's not there. But that means next time I'm going to just have to load it back up and be reminded all over again why I don't like the game. Ultimately, it's just not for me. I'm not saying it's not for other people. It's just not for me.
anything else sure of you though like being able to realize that something is fine and not everything is for you and it really doesn't have to be like yeah so boring if it were you'd have to make so many harder choices if everything really were for you right Thank you. Do you have any other thoughts? If I had to throw one more out there that isn't just stealing the reader's idea, it might be New World. But I always try it and then something about it just, I don't know, just doesn't capture me.
I really like what Illy said about... worlds that don't feel like worlds they feel like games and there's something like a new world comes off that way to me even though when i'm out in the world like the adventuring part the open world the forest and whatnot it feels very worldly and then it's somehow not big enough to actually convince me
that i'm in a giant world like it always feels like oh from where i'm standing i can see the next thing over there and i can see the group of mobs i'm supposed to kill over here and i can see the shipwreck and i can see every little poi and there's something about that just to my immersion.
i don't know maybe why doesn't guild wars 2 do this to me i actually don't know because it's even more regimented in the way its pois are organized but for some reason there's something about new world it's maybe it's incongruous like the world the way it's designed
world the way the game part is designed just don't mesh very well for me like I'm looking for more of like a sandbox feel out of that world and it doesn't feel very sandboxy to me but then I want to caveat that and say just because you don't like it
right now doesn't mean you won't later like it's it's a game that's not clicking with you yet i think that's really important because i can list so many games where that happened to me for years you had to take a few runs at it before it really yeah exactly or even guild wars 1
Like, years that I would try it and I'd go, okay, I'm good. I'll go back to what I was doing. And then, you know, a couple years in, something will click with you. And that's fine. Maybe that will happen to you with Albion later. Or maybe they... They make a change or an expansion or something. Right.
or your friends decide to play or yeah who knows a whole bunch of different things could happen and it could suddenly be the one now maybe maybe i'll be on that won't happen because the main problem is that the game changes midway through right it becomes less of a pve game and now it's really much more focused on pvp so you know pvp is the part you don't like it's probably not going to fix that part because that's not considered a flaw that's not something they can patch out
or will patch out but like there are plenty of other games and new world is one of them where they could definitely soften some of the the rough edges that i don't personally click with so Never say never is what I'm trying to say. Never say never whatever you do. All right. Fievel. Okay, we can go.
Somebody named Chris, who is not our Chris, but is nevertheless a righteous Chris, says, Hey guys, I love the show and I look forward to it every week. Now, if Standing Stone were to offer a new lifetime sub for Lord of the Rings Online, would you buy it in 2024, 2025? What if they upped it by $50 more than it already is, or already was, I guess? I think Star Trek Online and DDO also had a lifetime sub offering at 1.2. Are there any MMOs that you would buy a lifetime sub for?
I don't know. Do you remember what they originally... I should have looked this up. I think Lotro way back in the day was $200. $200. Oh, wow. That seems really cheap. All right. It might have been 300. I remember really trying to convince my wife. This game just came out like, peace. But you know what? It also was coming out at almost the same... and also had a lifetime sub, Hellgate London.
And that was trying to sell people on a $200 or $150 lifetime sub. And that was the worst investment you could have possibly made in it. I had a Gilly who did it, though. There's always somebody with... too much money and not enough sense. Elta, I'm talking about you. I'm just kidding. I love Elta. Not a week goes by in Lotro that you don't hear that conversation come up in general chat where people are like either bragging about...
having the foresight to buy the lifetime subscription or the regret of never having, you know, like, Oh man, I wish I had. And now I don't have that option, you know, like that. Yeah, you would have paid for the game and over and over and over and over, you know, like save so much money and, you know, even gotten free expansions if you saved up all your points and stuff like that. So.
But yeah, kind of going forward, lifetime subs are a risky proposition for both players and studios. And I want to start with studios first because... The reason why they used to do this more and they don't do as much now is because they used to do it kind of kind of I think this was a bit of an insurance gamble where they said, OK, if we can sell people on a lifetime sub.
We're getting, say, 15 months worth of... subscription fees out of them and most you know like the actuarial tables or whatever you know mmo marketing teams have go well you know an average player is only gonna play like four or five months and they're gonna drop off so we're gonna bet that these people
We'll drop off and we'll end up getting more money out of them. Now, if this is starting to ring a bell for you, no, this is like what World of Warcraft does with its year-long subscriptions. That's right. So it's not like it's completely dead, but this mentality of a lifetime. sub you know trying to get a big chunk of uh you know year one infusion of cash
That's a big thing. So year one, Lotro made a big amount of money through these lifetime subs. But then they were facing the fact that their most dedicated player base wasn't leaving. Right. There's no risk for us or for risk for hardcore.
players who stayed right there and they're not going to be contributing a lot of money and this was you know that was before of course they went free to play and now free to play offers some alternative ways to milk lifetime suburbs which you know it's it's still
has you know it's still can charge with expansions and stuff like that but yeah it's a risk for the studio because once they kind of burn through that cash and burn through those lifetime subs then you know what do you do now now you're asking a reduced player but you know paying uh
player base to pay subscriptions and you have a huge chunk of your player base that's just showing up but they're not actually giving you money i mean they're contributing in other ways but so that's a risk risk for the players of course is does the game go belly up like hellgate london or does my interest go belly up if either one of those is yes then you have lost money um and that's not a good feeling it's really not a good feeling especially when we're talking several
hundred dollars worth of you know a buy-in for a game that you haven't really probably played that much if it's you know on launch day or they're offering it right around the launch period you have to make that decision pretty quickly and so At this point now, it gets really interesting down the road because Cryptic came back several times with its titles and said, oh yeah, we're going to bring back the Lifetime sub and here you go. You can buy into Star Trek Online for $300 or whatever.
is and so people go okay well the game's been around for a while star trek's a pretty proven ip you know i'm sure nothing bad will happen to cryptic oh no so yeah there's but i think a lot of those people earlier you bought in the more value you got out of that so you know so a lot of people had to make that call like do i want to jump you know i've been subbing to this for years what what benefits do i get do i have that kind of disposable income
will brie front me my salary for the next few months i don't know we'll see so you know like there's yeah i but but to answer this question and then i'll shut up and i really want to hear what you have to say about it um
I would be very hesitant to buying lifetime subs. Even in Lotro, even in games that I know have... run for a very long time and probably, you know, as long as circumstances continue to stay more or less the same, probably will continue to run and be developed for a good amount of time in the future. my financial approach these days is I would rather have money now than, uh, put money aside. and invest it in stuff that I'm not going to enjoy until the future. And like, what I mean is like,
I don't buy Steam games anymore with the mentality of, yeah, I'll get around to it eventually. Like, they're on sale, so I'm going to pay for this thing. I'm not going to enjoy it now. So I'm really paying for future entertainment? No. rather have the extra you know money now that i could invest in you know groceries or you know things that i need now or i will enjoy now so it's it's a very like in terms of an entertainment budget is really what i'm focusing
on it's it's what i will be enjoying within this month if i'm not going to be enjoying it within that month then i probably don't want to buy that i think i've been bitten so many times with like extended warranties and subscription plans and stuff like that that you're just like oh wow you know like i'll end up getting a lot of my money back and i get my money
is worth if i really still you know like go the distance and a lot of times you don't and you have that buyer's regret and it sucks so yeah i probably wouldn't buy a lifetime sub now and i probably wouldn't advise it i just wouldn't Wow.
That was really well thought out. Like, I'm not even sure I should argue with it. No, I feel like I didn't even get to my point, but I want to hear your thoughts on this. I mean, I think I'm glad that you caveated it with entertainment because entertainment is...
flighty like I'm thinking we just we just bought a microwave we needed a microwave in the next couple of years but if they're gonna get more expensive like in the next year and so we went ahead and got one and literally sitting in our basement Because we're not going to be installing it until summer because it's going to be a whole thing. We got to put an event. Basement. I know. Microwave.
What are you kids doing down there? There are some things where it's smart to buy now, even if you're not going to use it yet. But like for video games, like. they're not that expensive that i really feel like you should be nickel and diming and buying too much early you know what i mean and to play it later i kind of agree with that even though i don't always follow it there are definitely some steam games i pick up when when they're like deeply
discounted i'm like well one of the four of us in this household will freaking play this and it's worth it because i don't want to pay you know four times as much for it when someone gets the hanker in later but like for mmos Yeah, I would generally say no. Generally, I would say no to lifetime subs for new MMOs that are untried, untested, where the studio can't be trusted. You have no idea what's going to happen. Definitely not. Sorry, Elk.
that was a mistake but like when it comes to like games that you're already playing and you have been playing for years and you're relatively sure have at least a couple more years on them I think it might be a good idea. If they put one up for 200, low trail, put one up for 200, 250, they will not do this by the way. But if they did, I would seriously consider it just because I know I'm already paying $10 a month just to keep my regular sub.
going right so gives you the freedom to come back and leave whenever you want it does That would actually be a good call. And I really am I going to have that for two years? Maybe that's a good idea. I do the same thing with phones. I keep my phones for five years and I'm thinking, you know, OK, well, I'm looking for one that will give me the longest amount of. of return on that and i'm okay with paying a little more upfront if i get all of those years out of it i'm not gonna
be like frivolous and wasteful about this. So I would think about it the same way. But there are very few MMOs where I would even consider this. Lotro is like, maybe the only one? I mean, Yildur, she doesn't have a sub. so like most of the games i play either don't have subs or they're like emulator they're rogue servers so they don't have that kind of payment scheme at all lotro is like the only sub i'm consistently paying right now so
Yeah, it's really a special case. There's almost nothing out there. Like maybe WoW. Maybe WoW if I were playing WoW. I could see that. I mean, with the exception of like WoW and WoW. final fantasy 14 and a couple others there's there's free to play options for most of these games too right that yeah so it's not like you you know it's a or b there's a b n c and d a lot of choices so Yeah. Yeah.
It's a good question because it really makes you think about how much money you're putting in. Should I be paying $10 a month in LOTRO when I'm not actively playing the whole year? I mean, maybe that's stupid. Maybe that's the problem is I shouldn't be doing that. But I think of it as...
worth it because i do play intermittently and i'm getting a huge stipend off of that like every single month and that if the stipend is i don't know how much does the coin how much do the points actually cost it's it's the majority right of the the subs so i'm really only paying you and i'll use those eventually when i do come back they'll be all stacked up for me and then i get to keep my house It seems worth $10 a month. I pay so much more money a month for way dumber things.
That I don't want at all. Like you said, subscriptions to all the crap that modern life demands that we have subscriptions for. Hell, I pay for an allergy app that shows me what the pollen is today. I'm just saying. There are some really nice. There are some nice benefits to having lifetime subs, you know, like accruing a ton of currency that you can come back. Or like in Lotro.
I never had to worry about losing my house because I always have an effective sub and it's just always there. Of course, if you get a premium house now, you don't have to worry about that either. I would have done it in Ultima Online when I still played a lot. I mean, it's been like five years since I played, but...
they had offered something like that i would have grabbed it would have been worth it yeah back it back in the day back in the middle of the day i don't mean like the 90s i mean like the the teens right the 20 teens that would have been worth it for me But most games, it's just not worth the risk.
unless unless you're the kind of person who only plays like one game at a time and you play it hardcore and you know you're gonna play for four or five years before you move on if you're one of those people maybe it would be worth it for you but most mmo players do not play things that way and most mmos aren't designed to be
played that way so you're meant to come back and forth you're meant to play guild wars 2 in chunks and leave and go play final fantasy when they've got a thing and play that chunk now go to world of warcraft and play their new patch and move around you don't have to sit it's it's I think people are still stuck in that mindset from the early aughts, right? When people sat, you would sit in games for years before moving. Yeah.
because we didn't have that many to pick from if you're if you're flush with cash i mean right this is not even a consideration like budgets you're just like whatever you know i can splash a good chunk of money on a hobby then No more power to you. That's fine. Whatever. I definitely wouldn't buy a Star Trek online right now. I would wait. No. That was not like... That sucks. A year ago, two years ago, I would have said absolutely.
Now I would sit on it. I would wait to see what happens with DECA. Yeah. I actually have two lifetime subscriptions. What's the other one? A DDO. Oh, you do have a DDO one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you play a lot of DDO, that could be worth it, too. It's not bad. I have so much currency in DDO. It's ridiculous. Because I come back and it's like, hey, you have 27,000 DDO points. I'm like, oh.
Can I buy a car? I could use a car. Can you buy expansions and stuff? Yeah, you can. They don't cost any money. No, you still have to buy the expansions. You do, okay. But, you know, they're not that much. Anyways, okay. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Again, we're going to continue to put out the call for even more mailbag. We really need some more questions, topics, opinions. We have some really good ones.
We're racking them up. But I'll take more. In a couple weeks, we're going to be recording our end-of-the-year mailbag show. So, you know what?
Just letting you guys know, you can put any question you want, but short, concise questions are always beautiful things to behold. So, you know, getting to the point, it's not a bad thing. So what I'm saying is if you have a quick question and you're like, oh man I don't want to bother them with that that might actually be a great thing to drop so those are the best I don't have to edit those
I don't really mind editing. Honestly, I like to read what people want us to read. But we don't always get to enough mail. But I like reading them. Yep, it's good stuff. So we want to thank everybody who continues to send that in. And thank you for your patience. You go to the queue. You have to sit in the queue. It's longer than any queue you've ever been in. But sooner or later...
It'll come up. Your day will happen on the podcast. You will hear your name ring out as Bree says it with awe and reverence. Mispronounce it, probably. That's me. I'm on the podcast. And it'll just be amazing. So, all right, that's all we got for today. Check out our Patreon program on the right-hand side of the site. Stay in touch with us here at MassivelyOP. We are on Blue Sky and Twitter and Mastodon and a couple other places. So definitely want to keep following us.
We've got a YouTube channel and streams and there's a little bit of a website going on too. So we want you to check all that out. And yeah, as Bree said, we're going to be kicking off the award season here and just kind of a year round. That's what really all this is, is kind of wrapping up an entire year's worth of MMO news and MMO experiences. And we've got a lot to share from not just Bree and I, but the entire staff, which is really cool.
time for the whole staff to come together and shine and we've got some really great minds and some interesting opinions and people coming from these games from all over the place. So it's also a good time if you've been waffling or you don't have a game to play right now and you're looking for suggestions, this is a good time to click. check out some of our articles our perfect tens our awards just some of our discussion it actually might spark some ideas of games you might want to go check out
So it can be a help. Yeah. That's the approach I'm going to take. All right. That's it for today. And we'll see you guys again next week. Later, everybody. you