you We're just getting so many names for lifetime Hallmark Christmas specials here. Look, they actually have a hot Frosty. Christmas movie coming out. I really need that to be Wendy's. Is that like a Wendy's drink? They got salted caramel right now. No, no, no. That's like a literal movie. Frosty the Snowman, but he's like a hot male model. Oh, not like he melted and he's a puddle and you're like, well, that was a hot frosting. That would be even shorter than a recipe for seduction.
I was just going to say, you did that review and it still sticks in my mind that KFC, Mario Lopez. I need to find that again. I have to like... I have to visit that upon as many people as possible. That is brilliant. That's one of those things that you just wake up on one day and you're like, was that a fever dream or did that really happen?
Was there a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger was pregnant? I don't know. But I think so. It was a 90s thing. Yeah. All right. Anyways, welcome back to the Massively OP podcast. Episode 400. Wait for it. 98. There we go. We're tiptoeing our way to the big 500. And today I've got not only Bree with me, but also Chris. Hello.
So there you go. Chris couldn't wait for the round table. He was just like, no, I'm special. Shove me in first. Cut to the front of the line. I kicked in the walls and just glared angrily at Justin. You'd be surprised what temper tantrums can get you at the massively OP office. It's true. Bree will let us get away with anything. If we just lie down on the floor and take a screen. Just add it to the lawsuit. It'll happen. Whatever.
it is just add it in i don't doubt you probably do have a file on us i know not my law your lawsuit against me oh that that one added to that lawsuit she allowed all you're broke what am i gonna get from you like crap servicing Bye. Please take it. One of those old pink erasers that you used to have in school. Come over and redecorate my house. I don't know what I could get from you. I'm not kidding. Anyways, yeah, we've got some news. We got some podcast emails.
mills to talk through and chris is here did you start recording with the hot frosty thing oh yeah oh no That's the name of the podcast now. Hot Frosty. That's probably where you click to go. All right, well, that's happening. Merry Christmas, everybody. That's what all the ads on our site are now going to be. Big, hunky guy, but with a snowman head. I've spoken that in. to existence and now like the auto ads will be like hot frosty adverts AI will be used for good this day
All right. Well, before we get into the news and all the other stuff, our frivolity must continue. And we must ask, you know, hey, what were we playing? at mmos lately chris we haven't talked to you in a while and other than the thing we're going to talk about so we can push that to the side for a little bit uh what have you been playing lately what's what's been your your passion your burning hot hunk of gameplay
My hot Frostian gaming has been Power World pretty recently. You do seem to talk about it a lot. Yeah, so like the... The Fae Break update that they announced at the Game Awards kind of put that game back in my brain. I hadn't really gotten terribly far. I kind of got to the mid-game before, so... So, and I just stopped for whatever reason. Some other games got in the way, projects and things like that. But I just started digging right into that and like almost immediately it took set right in.
And I've just been having a good time. I play that solo. I don't have that open in open multiplayer. So like you can customize your experience to like adjust a whole bunch of variables in terms of like.
whether your creatures suffer from starvation or not, their damage output, how much damage they take, and a whole bunch of parameters to sort of like make it my own game. And it's just... been really really nice and i'm i don't necessarily believe i'm going to be in time for the fey break update i haven't actually touched the sakura jima update that they had posted or put out i think it was in summer
or sometime maybe last year. But there's new stuff I'm looking forward to, and I'm just enjoying kind of getting lost in all the minutiae and just...
has all these little game loops that are very, very satisfying. I don't know if you've ever played a game like Satisfactory, where it's just a bunch of little chores that link up together to create as whole... just enjoyable kind of like positive feedback loop it's kind of what what's happening with me homeostasis achieved exactly yeah 100 i'm just surprised it's still
going because we started covering it well we started once it hit early access at the beginning of the year right yeah it was one of those titles i thought by summer we wouldn't be talking about it anymore because that's what happened to their other games
sure like craftopia where is that i mean we've done a couple of those chris i think has done updates on it actually i have and they and they've gotten little patches on that one but yeah by and large like pal world is their lightning in a bottle frankly yeah i'm not terribly surprised at this
where the attention goes. You know, it is what it is. Craftopia is still a pretty fun game, too. But no, Power World feels like the evolution of that. But beyond that, I've done some little drips and drabs on Final Fantasy XIV. Kind of just... doing what little things I can to kind of hit my personal item level cap for my character before the next major content update drops. And I did also...
peek back into Dauntless to my dismay, unfortunately. Oh, yeah. You got a bit of a peace out on that one. Yes, that came out today. Today as of the recording of this podcast, anyway. And, um, yeah. Real disappointed. I did not want to agree with the wider, like, Vox Populi, but... They are not lying. It's not good. And I hate to see that because I have to wait until February for me to play Monster Hunter Wilds. And I don't... I want to play a game like that now, but I...
And Dauntless was kind of like my last hope for that, and that's not happening now, I guess. It sucks. Man. Well, at least you're batting 50% there. Exactly. It's not good for Phoenix Labs, right? There's no way they're going to survive. It's all they have left. Yeah, I mean... I don't know that... I don't know that Fae Farm is doing that much. They probably get small injections when they do the DLCs, but they haven't done anything since that Cloud DLC or whatever it's called.
And that's fallen silent. And this one felt like the final throw of the javelin. And they threw that javelin at the player's wallets, frankly. But, yeah, I mean, it's okay. It's not all bad news. Like I said, Power World has really been eating me alive gleefully, and that's okay. Yeah, I'm enjoying that. What about you, Bree? Well, you will all be shocked to find out that I'm still in Guild Wars 2.
Maybe not. Maybe not. I've been doing, gosh, what did I do last week? I know I did my dailies and my weeklies because I got enough astral points to finally get a war claw skin, which is really cool. Actually, there's a war claw. It's like 1,000. 10,000? That's like the new mount from the expansion? No, like...
Okay, so War Claws already existed in the game, right? But they were a PvP, a world versus world thing, and then the expansion added them, like, again. Like, added them as a PvE thing you could acquire from just doing Janthir Wilds. Actually, they give it to you really early. so if you didn't already have one now you do and if you did already have one now yours is like leveled it's like way better they have like extra perks so they didn't completely screw over the original you know
early adopters, but I really like the workflow. I use it a lot because it pops up. You can use it in combat.
Sometimes it has like a timer on it. So it's really great for like getting away from a fight that is completely destroying you. It's my favorite part. But anyway, I use it a lot and it was nice to see a... free in quotes war claw mount skin in there because otherwise you have to buy one they're they're kind of ugly by default so that was cool and then of course like a day later they added the plushie
I saw that. Oh my gosh. It looks like Tony the Tiger, but like a stuffed animal. I love the plushy mountains. It's so cute. I haven't bought it yet. Probably will because I have no chill whatsoever. And they added fleshy weapons. You guys should see this because Winter's Day launched last week on Tuesday, right? Winter's Day is their big...
Christmas hurrah. They do this every single year and they add new stuff every year. It's great. This year they added weapons that are also that have like little plushy animals attached to them they are so incredibly cute and they cost so much work like they're such a grind so i'm not even sure i'm gonna get one but if i did it would be the mace and shout out to sloth by the way who over on mass gave me a specific
what do you call it a mechanist build for the mace so that i could justify getting the mace and putting it on my engineer they're just uh they're so the mace has like four faces and like you know how a mace looks right it's got like four chunks like a warhammer but it's small and on each face it's a quaggan head oh no i love it oh they're all so cute they just they outdid themselves and like i i need to point out that that's not in the cash shop
this is one of those times where reading it did everybody a solid put this stuff in the game it's acquirable through grinding through you know event grinding through winter's day if you care about doing that i never do winter's day So I'll go take pretty pictures, but I never really grind that stuff. So I've been doing that.
I always think it would be really cool if, like, NPCs commented on your fashion. If you're fighting them and they're like, oh, come on, you're attacking me with plush weapons? Get out of here. Yeah, you definitely have to have the right, like, outfit to make it work. But I just think it's really cute. I know I shouldn't like this. I know it's anti-immersion. I don't care. I picked up the bundle of plushy weapons that they released as DLC for Monster Hunter Rise and didn't...
I did not regret the purchase one bit. Especially since when they sheathe and unsheathe, they make little squeak noises. Oh my god. Yeah, I think... I think a non-ridiculous immersive world went bye-bye on Guild Wars 2 a long time ago. Yeah, I do too. That's why I don't know about it. Nobody makes sense. And you can still make your own character super hardcore immersion if you want, but you don't have to. I like that we have choices. So I've been doing that.
was doing other mapping and stuff i i didn't really get back to season four i will over christmas i'm really looking forward to having some free time what's that i don't know um but i also played some uh farm together too again not an mmo or an mmo but it is like online and it's multiplayer. Chris and I streamed this, like, was that May? I think it was May. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. It's super cute. I have been playing it off and on ever since and I have finally unlocked my 49th block.
Like the map is set up where you get one block, you know, that one little area. Eventually you can expand that to 49, a seven by seven block. I have finally finished it. It took me this whole time to get it done. I finally unlocked it just in time.
for them to add a second and third map so you can actually start over if you want which i'm not doing that's too much but they also added mining which is what made me go look i wanted to see why is mining in a farming game well there's this whole thing you can go underground and it's actually really well done and cute. So I'm...
I'm really still stoked about that game. It's become my little non-MMO cozy game on the side. Everybody's got to have one, right? That one's mine. RimWorld's mine. Yeah, see? Everybody's got one. It just works for me. It works for my brain, and I am excited to see...
what this dev team can continue doing over the course of like they haven't even technically launched yet this is early access and they've done all these patches it's over 50 patches the last time I counted which is nuts and they've got so much stuff coming like even if all they did was spend like the next
year porting in everything for the first game it would be just an immense amount of content that's like just decor and animals and stuff so i'm looking forward to that and i want my rideable horses so hurry up milkstone that's that's the main thing from the road roadmap that I really really want is rideable horses instead of a tractor but other than that I'm I'm ready for for winter holidays for holes so I can have more free time to actually dig in and do more mapping in Gilgores 2
What about you? Yeah, so speaking of winter holidays, I was logging on to the Lotro Yule Fest that just started. And on the Angmar server, where I've never... done any of that and i'm like oh man i've got my work cut out for me i've got you know none of these cosmetics or anything unlocked i'm gonna have to buckle down and get into this and i did one day of it and i said you know what no
Not because I don't enjoy it. I've done it so many times before. It's because I looked at all of the outfits. I went, they're nice, but none of them work thematically with my captain. And so I don't. want any of these rewards and also this expansion just unlocked and i don't want to spend a whole month only doing you know harvest or i'm sorry winter festival stuff versus actually going through the expansion so um it was actually kind of nice it was freeing
The sleigh bell elk. You can't just not. You have to have the elk. I'm an underground. There ain't no elks down there. It's all goats and boars all the way down. So I'm happy to do that. No, I, yeah, I've been. I told you that story. I don't know if I, I told you guys in an office chat. I didn't tell on the podcast, log in a lotro one day. And the Mines of Moria expansion had opened. And I got this heart-dropping message. Your kinship has been disbanded. And I was like...
Where my mind initially went was I got kicked out for whatever reason. It was super nice, awesome kinship. Pure toxicity. You guys have no idea. Made fully of hobbits. We're just a hobbit kin. nice people and i was really looking forward to going through the new expansion with them and so you know like that that wasn't there anymore i realized i wasn't kicked out there was no kinship anymore and so i went over to discord
to our kinship discord and it was gone. That got a little hinky. So I, I put out a message out in general world chat and like, where the heck's my guilt? You know, come on. Uh, and I got some messages right away. Like. It just it poofed over. Somebody said, oh, yeah, it poofed overnight. Something happened. Here's the new discord. They're trying to get everybody back together. It turned out like our.
old guild master and his wife apparently in the middle of the night killed the guild oh no no explanation no forewarning the only thing we possibly in retrospect um We're trying to identify why is that there was a minor dispute with some of the officers over some kinship rules over pugging in raids. And that was it. I don't even read. I don't care. But I don't know why they just they. They didn't leave a note. It was not even a Dear John situation. They just laughed.
So, of course, that just sent everybody into like spirals of anxiety. Where are my friends? Where's my guild? So happily, the officers swung into action. They got it. discord up right away they said okay we're going to reform they reformed that evening so it wasn't even down like a full day so it was okay uh we we found most of the people like everybody was searching all over like if you know anybody who's part of the guild
let us know. And, um, we found most people. So, uh, that was, that was really disheartening. It just kind of made me go, ah, I take for granted sometimes, uh, really, you know, when you find a really nice guild that it'll just be there and, you know, the hard work that.
officers and guild masters put in um but sometimes drama happens yeah yeah so the one thing they learn from this is don't put all the power into the hands of just one or two people disperse it and that's what they said you know like one person now has control over or a couple people have control over the discord but different people have control over the kinship settings so nobody can recreate this
traumatic event uh but other than that um yeah just having some really fun times going back through moria such a I always forget because it's always a good span of time between the last time I went through and this time. And it's so pretty. I forgot how.
good they put you know they put such work into this underground setting it's i'm always surprised to hear you say that because of the fact that like it's underground like how pretty could they make an underground it's a different type of pretty i just I don't know. It's like they, you know, you can really see that this.
theme of the dwarves taming the rock and making the rock work for them instead of leaving it in its natural state and so it just it's impressive maybe impressive impressive is a better word uh yeah something that the vistas some of the sites are just you know but you know crystals throw enough crystals in the gardens and the water and the steampunk you know there's a little bit of steampunk yeah yeah it's cool
Not everywhere. I mean, there's some places that they obviously went, oh, we don't got too much time. Let's skim through this. Still going through the new expansion, Lotro. It's really good. I finally got to a proper desert zone. It's like... Indiana Jones, kind of deserty, Moroccan style, but also a little bit Montana.
ranch style it's really hard to put my finger on it but i like it interesting and the sandstorm effects that they put in are really cool it's not overpowering but every once in a while like the sand like swirls up and The screen gets a little, little hazy, but it's really cool to see the sand kind of move back and forth. So that was that's a really nice little touch. So, yeah, I'm kind of liking that. Of course, I saw like a wild donkey critter. I'm like instantly got to have a mountain.
I want Donkey Mount in this game. I felt the same way about the kangaroo rat that I tamed in Riders of Icarus. I get it. Riders of Icarus. Wow. I don't think we have ever mentioned that game on this podcast in 10 years. Good job. That's why I'm here. All right. I'm out of here. World first on the podcast. Riders of Icarus. Oh, is that even, that's not alive. anymore, right? Doesn't Velofa run it now as like a RMT game?
I think so. We're going to have to look it up now. It hasn't even appeared in Mop Up in a long time, so that's why. Yeah, sorry. If you get demoted to Mop Up, you know. You're just a hair's breadth away from being forgotten.
Doing some Star Wars The Old Republic. Going through Coruscant on my smuggler. Having a good time. It's just a little bit here and there. Some WoW stuff. Just trying to get ready for Siren's Isle coming out next week. And probably spent the... tomorrow this week i'm sorry yeah yeah oh my gosh i don't know what week it is at this point yeah it's this it's gonna be the 17th when you guys okay um yeah so siren isle coming out we'll talk about that in a little bit and um
classics continue to just be an obsession for me. So as Power World is to you and Guild Wars is to you, this has been my mainstay. I get my other games done first and then this is my main meal. having a lot of fun i've been playing a little bit of a druid on the side but my hunter is my main and had a really good time yesterday i was grouping up i was actually starting groups because there was a lot of competition for mobs in an area and so just you know
start some groups, start some chatting, you know, it's, it's good times. And, um, I was happy to log out last night and I fully, I'd upgraded my ammo bag. Cause you remember those, I went from an eight slot to a. 12-slot ammo bag. I feel like, oh, I'm wealthy beyond imagination. And I've got this thing that's going to be obsolete in a few years. It's awesome. So, yeah, good times.
All right, well, let's chow into the news today. And we brought Chris on not for his sparkling personality, although that is a side bonus. But because out of the three of us, he is the one and only person who got their hands on Pantheon. Pantheon went into early access this past weekend after, what, eight years in development?
trying to remember how many years it's been thought it was 2014 now i don't remember maybe i'm thinking i just did a whole column on all these upcoming games i know the the number eight came up at one point but uh it's been in it's been in early development for a while. It was, of course, one of those early Kickstarter projects from Visionary Realms. This is Brad McQuaid's baby, the Vanguard EverQuest designer who unfortunately passed away a couple years ago.
realms continued took the the torch they continued to create the project um we know that there was a lot of ups and downs with pantheon namely trying to create a little weird side spin-off game that every but he so hated this idea that they were even doing it that they shut it down. 24-7, yeah. Yeah, 24-7 extraction. Just, oh, man.
And they also changed the, I know another point of controversy is they changed the art style and went to a different art style last year, I think it was. But now Pantheon's out. It's out in early access. Not complete. We talked about that previously. There's only a set number of classes. I think about like six zones.
to go through level 40 is currently the cap and the word on the street is it's decent, but it's still very much being it's under construction. If you remember the nineties, you remember early websites that under construction.
gif that you often saw that should be plastered all over pantheon but it is playable if you are willing to pony up 40 bucks or you already have a copy because you're a pledger back in the day you can jump in right now and experience a brand new throwback style MMO that's I think the best analogy would be like an early EverQuest
Or an Embers Adrift kind of situation. Which is weird, because I would have thought they would be being Vanguard more than anything. Maybe a little bit of Vanguard, too. But these are the comparisons. Yeah. But Chris, you got some time. You're streaming it. Obviously, you got to level 40. You played every class. Naturally. I'm just a speedrunner of extremely old school style MMOs. Of course.
But no, yeah, and obviously I did play it on the stream for OPTV, and I also was in one of the 24-hour open tests that they had provided. few months before that point so i kind of like i'm glad i had that foreknowledge going into this this uh early access time because it sort of like helped me like brace for impact so to speak as it is very very expectations right yeah 100 it is extremely everquest one like like base
game EverQuest 1 in terms of its feel. And that was actually kind of both... like daunting and interesting to experience all over again like genuinely experience all over again because like i was streaming it on like day one or technically day two because they give head start to like certain tiers like a day before but but anyway like the the opening area that i was in was really active and just a bunch of people milling around and and that whole
buzz that I enjoy being soaked in whenever it comes to any MMORPG, old or new. It was nice to be among that very, very hands-off, especially in terms of when you start off. It's not to say that it doesn't give you any information, like there's your usual control pop-ups that came up and how to control your character, the importance of using the check function.
which they actually mapped to a keybind this time around, where before you actually had to either type in the slash consider command or create a macro for it to work. Oh my gosh. Slash con. Oh yeah. Slash con and slash Sid. Well, you camp automatically when you log out. Oh, I saw somebody saying you had to do that to log out. Yeah, it camps you automatically when you log out. But I mean, I don't know. It's...
It's just as intriguing and interesting to try to dig into as I had first experienced when I was doing that 24-hour test. I kind of went to Hobbit because I was just sort of curious. And like immediately I was, my expectation was a little subverted because The Hobbit was less like your, you know, Tolkien style.
hobbit and more like a gremlin-y looking goblin-y annoyed kind of thing like kind of feral kind of like ritualistic almost like a druidic uh hobbit as opposed to some sort of like extremely pudgy karen i guess if you want to put it that way um and i went the safe route because i wanted to i went warrior because i was like okay well i probably want to Be careful because this is a totally new game. This is a very old school game and I want to like not really go into the caster role right now.
But even as like the tank warrior class, and I was looking ahead to the NPC that sells you ability scrolls. Because as you level, you don't... It really is EverQuest. You don't learn abilities immediately. Not good ones. You purchase the scroll from your... your class master. And there's also traits that you have to purchase too later on. But anyway, the class dynamic of the warrior wasn't necessarily just about taunt and absorbing damage, but there was some...
There were some CC tricks in there too. Like there would be like interrupts or like some debuffs that would apply at a certain point. And it just had a lot more interesting tools. I just kind of wish that I felt like I was going to get to those tools a little sooner. The leveling curve is very, very steep. It took me pretty much the entire hour to hit level two, and that was just because I was running around, getting my bearings.
attacking mobs that i knew that i could handle and some of them that i tried to attack were stuck into the ground and like i was literally like there was this one specific type of enemy model like a scorpion creature model that was constantly getting stuck in the inside of the geometry of the map that I was in.
And so when I would try to attack them, they would just automatically evade and not be able to attack me, even though they had aggro to me. So I was just sort of swinging my weapon pointlessly and still getting like... a little bit of skill XP for doing so. I was like, this feels like a bit of an exploit. I'm just gonna fight something that'll actually hit me back. But, I don't know. It's... There is...
something potentially there. And I feel like I missed some of the old school boats. So that's probably why I'm more intrigued than most. Not to say that I haven't cut my teeth on the older guard, but I still feel like it came to the genre really kind of late. So being able to genuinely experience this from the very start... is an intriguing opportunity that I would like to try to take advantage of.
That said, this really is not for everyone. I mean, Bree was recoiling in horror at the flashbacks. A little, but I'm also super excited to hear that melee doesn't suck because melee kind of sucked. All the tank classes, all the melee classes were just bad. and never quest like all the fun was in the casters and now you're telling me no that they've they've really fixed so that's how i think of pantheon is like inspired by but like without the clutch hopefully
Hopefully, yeah. I think that's a pretty fair assessment, but it also needs a lot more time in the oven. Very, very clear. So there's no rush to get in right now, right away? No, no, no. Definitely not. I would... advise only the most hardcore to experience that really really old school feeling to dive in right here and now otherwise everybody who has like patience and a little more sense so to speak or
Or not as much time to devote themselves. Because it feels like this one will sink time. It'll eat you alive if you really dig in. And right now, I don't think it's worth that much time investment. $40 is not a hard ask. I don't... think it's like a high price to pay necessarily but right now there doesn't seem to be a whole whole lot of impetus to try to get in right right now like i'm pretty sure that it's
You can wait until later when things are more fleshed out, when the leveling curve feels a little more smooth, or where there's more things to do, and you'll get plenty of bang for your buck, in my opinion. visionary realms really doesn't like to hear you say that
I would like you to buy it now, please. I'm a little nervous about that. I hope it's doing well enough that it will get the time it needs to actually finish cooking. I don't know if 2300 concurrent, which is what Justin... reported this morning is enough is it a good start is it gonna keep getting bigger through word of mouth that's that's the only thing I'm really worried about yeah I wanted to like hit the ground running in order to really really kind of like make that $40
feel like a big big value i don't like i said i don't think that's a bad price but i do think it needs more time to firm up before it's i say yeah it's an early access game but
This is like the ground floor of something potentially huge later. Yeah, it's not a terrible price, but it is... going to be a barrier for some people when it comes to early access especially if you've you know you sunk in you know i can i can take 40 bucks and on a steam winner sale buy some really good finished games and i can jump into this for 40 bucks and go what the heck you know like it's not even
finished and i mean yeah if you set your expectations fine that's it might not be quite as shocking but it might also cause some people to just get a really bad first impressions and then kind of double down on it because they did pay money and so I don't know. Speaking of expectations, if you're just ushered into a game for free or for a few bucks, you...
tend to be a little bit more tolerant of the experience than if you've actually sunk in price of a AAA or an AA game. With that said, though, it does feel like this game knows what it wants to be or who it's trying to court. So it's not like...
It's admittedly whether that narrow netcast is a good thing or not, we'll have to wait and see. But it doesn't try to pass itself off as something else, which is to its benefit, if you ask me. I kind of get the feeling this is... now the starting pistol for the really interesting season of pantheon like it's really either going to take off or completely dissolve 100 yeah i'm looking forward to look and watching it grow one way or the other i would love to see it
I think the middle of the road would be like a Embers situation where like, yeah, we don't have the biggest crew, but we've got enough. We figure out to stay financially stable and also keep improving the game. inching forward i think that would be if this game hits an embers or like a uh a um why am i blanking out on the game the uh that indy emma gorgon if it hits that or gorgon
I think it'll be doing okay, frankly. It needs a lot more money than that. It would be great. Those games need a lot more money than they get. so yeah you know this is this is obviously not 1.0 and we have not heard from visionary realms like even estimation of how long it's going to be until they get this game fully fleshed out
but it is here and it's in time for the holiday season. If you got some spare time, 40 bucks, you want to check it out. There you go. If not, you can kind of backseat a view it, but you know, go onto the Reddit and read some other reports or you can check out. chris's stream of it and see our continued coverage here on massfully op so i think i'll be streaming it a couple more times too i i'd like i'd like to just dig i'd like to see that yeah for sure all right
Okay, well, let's move on. Next up, we're going to talk about a little bit of a surprise this week. Kind of out of the blue, at least for me, when I saw this title, Ship of Heroes set a launch window for quarter to 2020.
that's where i got the eight number from eight year old yeah yeah this was this came after is that right right who did the math on this somebody named brie royce she can't trust that i thought when you're embarrassed of these posts you just put one of us as your bylines i thought this was pretty exciting because they've they've been like hedging on a release date and like
talking about this for so long I actually went back and found like a bunch of posts like over the last couple of years where they were like yeah it's launching an X it's launching an X it's launching and then it never does actually happen so I was really glad that They're actually coming up with a date now, of course.
They haven't actually done it yet, but we'll see. I think they'll actually pull it off this time. It seems like they're kind of in a similar position as Pantheon where they just really want to be out so that they can stop dealing with the NDAs and the, you know, the private...
beta tests and then the public beta tests and that's been like our window into the game for a really long time and i'm guessing they just they want to be done with that so they can actually maybe some make some money instead of being completely reliant on donations Yeah, and start spreading the word.
farther around the MMO community. Like this is an actual finished product. Check it out. The quote I want to read here from the studio said, many parts of the game are working and integrated and launch ready right now. So we're fairly confident. in about this date right now we're fixing bugs filling in the last gaps which should take four to six months um so they think spring basically yeah so that you know again i
I'm not patting myself on the back. I'm just saying I spent two and a half hours last night going through all these upcoming games, and there's so many.
projects in the mix and it's really kind of exciting how many we might potentially be seeing in 2025 not just you know full launches but playable alphas early access or some significant development uh but there's actually a few launches that are happening or aiming to happen early in the year and this is one of them so you know if you've uh if you've loved city heroes in the past or even
right now because it's an official product and you can go and play it but you've been looking for another superhero MMO to play or maybe you just kind of want to try you know something different and here you go ship of heroes looks to be coming out early next year is i mean last time i checked in with it it's very very much an indie game i i hope that they have shorted up a lot since then
But they're ambitious. They're passionate about this project. The whole team was kind of derived from people who... were city heroes players and very very much like that kind of game um and of course when this initially was announced city heroes was completely dead so this was going to be you know pick up the flag and carry it forward so i have three other ones too right this was before
spiritual successor. City of Titans, Valorant, and that red... City of Titans... Oh, shoot. One was Heroes and Villains. Valorant is... And then Valiant's online.
Valiant. And those, I mean, City of Titans had like an update this year and a lot of it was revolving like they had a... staff member die i think it was really just not great news it's been very slow going over there valiance we haven't heard out heard much about in a really long time i'm pretty sure heroes and villains has been dead for at least five years so
Like, this is it. This is the one you're getting if you wanted something like City of Heroes, but not City of Heroes. And honestly, they've borrowed so much, so many ideas and iterated on so many of those ideas. I think it's got... so many bones in common that i'm not even really sure it's gonna feel that different i hope it's i hope it is polished i i only played the that demo that they had during the steam fest and like
Ooh, baby. That was raw cookie dough. Yes. It was not ready for a demo, let alone... anything close to like its release projection so that was a lot when was that was that last year last year yeah so it's been a very long time since i've got in there and
And that's the thing. It really does have to offer something above and beyond city heroes because... otherwise people would just go back to city you know like they'll get their curiosity stated and then they'll go like well why the question is why do why play this other than it's just new uh other than heroes like you know the that game's still getting updates
too because the dev team is working on that i mean aren't they the slowdown in in city of here's homecoming updates over the last two years has been marked um I thought you were talking about some earlier this year. That's the reason. It hasn't been nothing. It's just been very slow compared to the first couple of years after Homecoming first launched. That was like constant. And plus, we were all catching up with all the stuff that had been.
on the secret server that nobody was on right so yeah it's it's been really obvious to me especially over the last year that the ncsoft stuff probably gunked up the works and made it a lot harder to get things out and i'm sure like you know i can just i can just imagine how a company licensed like that would change what you can do because before it was like we can do whatever we want nobody's stopping us we'll push out on our
and schedule any content whatever and now lawyers IP lawyers you know what I mean can you just imagine how that must be affecting things Well, to that point, I do hope that Ship of Heroes does something unique, especially since they don't have that yoke on them either. I hope. i don't have a great deal of confidence uh but then again i again admit to coming from a very old and demo version impression so i would love to be surprised
All right, we've warmed up with a couple stories, and now we're going to pick up the pace. Yeah, we've got to charge through. We've got to charge through. So, yeah, I do want to mention Warframe 1999 released this past week. That is not a...
I initially thought this was a new version of the game. I almost never understand what's going on in Warframe, like as an outsider. No, but it's not you. Their press releases are like just completely indecipherable to normal people. You have to know the game. You know, you know. otherwise yeah so i'm like is this a new version of the game no it's kind of like this It's a new story update, so it takes place in 1999, but also kind of an alternate Earth version of 1999.
Yeah, it has some new content, like some new modes and some new things to go see and Warframes and all that. But it is definitely integrated into the game. It's just kind of a new content update for Warframe, which looks solid. Yeah. And it has boy bands. So why not? And new romance stuff. There's like a whole... Yeah, there's a romance system, right? They're going to add the boy band members as boss fights later.
messed up i want it that way chris bye bye bye you can see mj playing it i think she played it was it Friday or Saturday. Now I don't remember which day. This past weekend. Yeah, it was Saturday. So she's got to stream up on it. And you know who else is playing it? Elliot. Of all people, he's apparently gotten sucked into this. And so he's thinking about doing some pieces on it.
Keep an eye out for those because I'm guessing finally somebody will be able to tell us what's going on in this game. We need a translator for Warframe.
Yeah, that would be an interesting list of games that are just very indecipherable for people on the outside. There does seem to be a few of those in our genre. All right, well, let's move on. World of Warcraft is getting a... like a mid-size you know kind of tied you over patch and it is actually um coming out today on december 17th so you can check out siren isle this is patch 11.0.7 and And it is...
basically a reworked island that they originally had for battle of as for azra one of the island expeditions and they took that map and they they just reworked it they added content to it and a whole bunch of interesting weird little it's like a play ground it really the more i i
read up on this i was watching some videos last night and siren isle really is kind of this goofy weird fun playground where you have you don't fly but you got jet skis and you got grappling hooks and you're doing you know fight for different factions and of course there's tons of cosmetics and all this and and that and the next thing so you know yeah there you go you got something that kind of tied you over until undermine gets here with patch 11.1 there's some new story beats pointy ear
customizations if you're human or wrathy you know or culture and so you want to like maybe style yourself as a half elf i guess oh my gosh that's so cool i actually role played my old human warrior is a half elf and everyone yeah where you always wearing hats. Doing the Spock thing. I do want to mention that the patch is also adding
It was vastly improving a lot of the racials in the game. They said a lot of racials were underperforming, so they're beefing a lot of those up. You might want to check those out. And adding cross-faction queuing for dungeons and unrated PvP. Nice. So some additional ways that you can just jump into groups with other people. Sounds pretty good. Yeah. All right. Next on our docket today is Elder Scrolls Online was kind of down for a while.
And it was not a good look for the company, not a good look for the game. What happened there, Bree?
Well, originally they said they had some sort of outage at the actual host where the servers are actually hosted. And then they were like, oh yeah, by the way, it's going to take a really long time to get it back up, which is like... i don't know what's going on but anyway it was like a good 24 hours before they started getting the servers back up and even then i think the console version was down longer than that i don't remember when it came back up um it was kind of nasty like
It's not even like the worst thing that's happened to Elder Scrolls Online this year, so it's hard to complain too much. But it was kind of random and out of the blue. It happened the very day they were actually kicking off their free trial thing. So it kind of wrecked that whole...
roll out and of course they've got a their christmas um their daily logins thing they had that threw everything off now they had to add more days to the end of it so obviously not something they really wanted to be dealing with a week and a half before christmas but
They got it fixed in the end. Yeah, I want to talk about Elder Scrolls Online on this podcast without it being a bad story, but it doesn't seem like we're getting that lately. You know what? If they have is tomorrow, I think tomorrow is the...
The roadmap reveal. Yeah. So if this were happening, you're not going to hear about it on the podcast for a while because we're taking a couple weeks off and you'll get a mailbag show in the middle. So maybe we'll talk about it in January. But of course, we'll talk about it on the site. But that would have been probably good news.
or at least interesting news. Sure. And I can tell you there was some good news last week for Elder Scrolls because their whole studio unionized. Well, not the whole studio. It was like 461 people at Zenimax Online Studios, so just the Elder Scrolls.
and whatever other secret games they're working on they have unionized they got their own straight up union this is not just the qa union that already existed this is not the union under bethsoft that already existed this is elder scrolls online good for them so there's some good news they're actually doing their best to stick together under microsoft they could really use the help
All right, and our final little news story here we want to talk about. Old School RuneScape has an interesting system coming to the game next year, and it's sailing. which i thought was kind of cool because i it's always one of those systems i wish was in a lot more mmos that you had boats and you could just go sailing places and i don't understand why i guess there's map limitations and whatnot but it's kind of cool
Like this old school game is going to be adding it. It's going to be a new skill actually. So it's not like you can just hop into a boat and start jet setting across the world or anything like that. You're going to actually have to learn how to sail. But it will add a lot more in terms of shipwreck salvaging and quests and runs and big ships, little ships. All horrible polygon models, but in that adorable way that OSRS has. It really looks an awful lot like...
Black Desert Online's Ocean stuff, but in old school style, you know? Yeah, it looks like UO to me. I was thinking Archeage. I guess that's where I'm going. Yeah, no story about boats is complete without talking about the Archeage boats in beta where you can sail them across the land and you drove them up up and down cliffs and just it was insane. but he did not have perfection.
Sway upon those ones. Beautiful. They're going to be doing an alpha at least next year. So that's just something kind of watch. But we did want to mention like, hey, sailing coming to this very popular version of RuneScape. And that's kind of cool. So there you go. Go.
All right, that's all the news we've got, but that is not the end of the show because Chris has kicked and screamed and demanded we do some mail, and we have to do that for him. Yeah, we blame Chris. It's not us. It's not the fact that we have 14 mail. You better get to it soon because that bowl of ramen. noodles you gave me is almost done and i'm gonna get cranky again he's slurping it up
All right, all right. First one is from Luna Ronin, and he says, it seems that most MMOGs have forgotten about the mid-core gamer. Quoting a definition here, a casual player plays a game when the time presents itself and will not participate in difficult content. A mid-core player...
arranges his or her gaming around his or her daily schedule and will attempt at least some difficult content but not optimize for it, whereas a hardcore player arranges his or her schedule around gaming and optimizes for difficult content. But it seems to me that many developers have decided to...
cater to the casual player by making leveling content extremely easy and solo friendly with no challenge. And on the other end, they also cater to the hardcore player by continually making rewarding ending content extremely difficult, if not punishing, and reward optimizing character builds for
said content. Meanwhile, mid-core players are left with little to nothing. We get nothing. The leveling content at MMOGs is now too easy and too solo-friendly with no challenge, while the hardcore players who engage in endgame content insist on meta or bust. Am I wrong on this? If so, how would you guys recommend that developers go about fixing the mid-game, or is he wrong?
Mid-game. I think we're actually talking to three mid-core players here. Yeah, 100%. I've never used that term in my life, but I'm going to now, I guess. I agree with the assessment. I'm definitely falling to the mid-core because I'm definitely... not the bleeding edge, but I also feel like I'm not quite as...
casual which is not a which is not a bad thing yeah no no there's nothing wrong with being casual there's nothing really that wrong with being hardcore either like you're everybody's going to be hardcore it's something for some people it's going to be gaming
Yeah, so, I mean, look at Final Fantasy XIV is my immediate first thought, right? So, you know, that game does have some raid content and harder tiered dungeons, but like... for the most part as raid content goes it's definitely the most approachable but they also still add like the unreals or the extremes for those who want to be on bleeding edge
or if all you care about is just doing some basic stuff, like, here's some MSQ, one or two dungeons, and, you know, oh, by the way, we're going to have some goofy little... Quests about a near-invincible gentleman of inquiry. So, you know, it is possible. It really is. It's not hard. It's time-consuming, I'm sure.
And, like, you know, Square Enix has a budget, so that most assuredly helps, but it's not, it's totally possible to feed the mid-core gamer, but it is definitely important, I would agree. Yeah, I think going back to what you were saying there, Bree, about the hardcore and they're not necessarily bad. I don't think anybody has beef with the hardcore. I think it's mostly beef with studios that some studios that only catered to certain segments.
of the population and they you know kind of had their day you know so you're popping into a game and all you see is the developers you know really loving like say pvp or really loving raids or maybe everything is so nerf friendly that you know there's it's super accessible to casuals, but there's just no meat for anybody who wants to really challenge themselves.
Yeah, you get a little resentful of that. So obviously this kind of highlights a challenge that MMOs have for developers, which is you need to develop for multiple audiences in mind and multiple play styles and multiple levels of not just time, but skill. and interest areas so you know how how do you do that especially um
getting away from this false myth of, you know, the end game is all that matters, which is another, another problem because I think at least if I'm now, I'm apparently the elected leader of the mid cores. And so now I can speak. speak for them. As long as we don't put him in charge of the guild, because he is... No, not at all. He'll shut it down. No. But as a mid-core, I can say...
don't really care about the end game as much as I care about the journey. And I feel like the, the journey gets lost and the journey could be there for everybody. It's just, it's either an afterthought or it has been.
like streamlined to the point of like world of warcraft where you just sneeze and suddenly you're level 60 and you're in the newest expansion and the levels don't even you know the journey doesn't even matter you've just you know bypassed almost all the content in the game and that's um that that's not fun that's why i like going back to classic and i'm getting kind of a different i'm being fed differently in that game than i am in retail there's things i like in both but in
I feel like, yeah, if you're casual, yeah, you could get to level 60. You're not going to do it perfectly. but you can do it. But if you're hardcore, yeah, you can zip up there pretty quickly and now you're raiding. But for the middle road of the road, there's a lot of content in there and a really nice leveling journey. So my answer to this would be...
I mean, the one thing that pops into my mind is optionable, electable difficulty settings for landscape. Let us... set our own level challenge and give us higher rewards as you know we do that you know so obviously like ddo does it in all almost all of its dungeons uh lotro introduced this a year or two ago and it's been a huge success i mean
People really appreciate that. I think that there needs to be more rewards tied into it. But some people just love not one-shotting everything left and right. We want to...
kind of find that sweet spot where fights and journeys are tough but not impossible, but also not laughably easy. I think there's – and each one of us might have a bit of a different – target for where that is so letting us have a a slider or something to kind of set that would you know i think be a really good answer if your game could do that and i know that's something especially eso players have been asking for for years and zenimax has been ignoring that for years
Yeah, maybe that would be more fun to talk about the games that suck at this. Yeah, I'm sure we can find a few. Yeah, Guild Wars 2 does not do a good job at this either. Everything is either too easy or too hard for the average player. I don't like that. I'd much rather see your, it doesn't even have to be landscape either. And you were talking mostly about landscape difficulty sliders, but they can, if they can't do that, there's no reason they can't do that in.
dungeons and borrow the city of heroes thing it's totally possible to be a total sweat lord in city of heroes and like jack your difficulty up so high that no one can touch you but there's a whole range in between i'm bringing my defender and i suck and you know sweat lord there's there's like a ton of difficulty settings in between that you can tweak and keep things challenging for whatever character you're on or whatever you feel like doing that day that's
I feel like that's like required at this point and it needs to be solo friendly as well as group friendly. There's no reason not to have that if-
If New World can freaking have solo dungeons, then you can do, right? If Amazon can do it, there's no reason that everybody else can't pull this off. And that just, that's like... it's not even about like satisfying your mid-game population your mid-core population it's just about offering more content types this just seems like such a no-brainer you're not actually
doing different content you know what i mean that you only had to really build the dungeon once everything else is on a sliding scale and in a spreadsheet there's there's no real reason you can't do this and now you've satisfied everyone
i'm not saying the balance is easy balance is never like super easy but it's not like you have to build a new dungeon for every possible content type it's the same dungeon right you're using the same assets the same map that that's all i'm saying and there's no reason that they can't do this
I'm actually kind of flabbergasted that games like Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 top of their class, right? And don't really have this... I would love ESO so much more if they had a difficulty slider. Like, seriously. It's just...
It just would reinvigorate going through all those quests. I mean, they have great story quests and they're fun. The world is really cool. And I would really like to play dungeons where I'm not feeling like I'm being tugged by a leash because somebody has been... Exactly. Stealing all your mobs. I maybe get one spell off, but the guy who has 5,000 champion points is already steamrolling forward. Yeah. That makes you feel like you're being babysat.
Yeah, and they're not having a good time either. They're also grumpy that it's so easy for them. I got to believe, right? I don't want to be a load, and I want to contribute, but at the same time, they don't. they're just doing this because they're clearing their daily and that's that sucks well i think i think we could maybe squeeze in the next one okay from ozzy this is a short one what is a player ability you love so much that you take it into every mmo if you could
I have an easy answer for me. Diablo III's Corpse Explosion. Love that ability. My goodness. Oh, and like... And there's like a gem, I think, or some modifier that like, if a corpse explodes and you're another corpse, that corpse explodes. And like, it just turns into a chain reaction of horror. And it's so good. That was one of my... it was the ability that made me love the necromancer class in that game i love corpse explosion and like and necromancers are like you know
raise the dead watch your enemies wither i'm like no i want some heavy metal necromancer let me like whip out some like knife some bone knives and cause things to explode in gore like i would love that that's that's the necromancer i want to play oh man so if i had to pick one that's actually like a like a skill like that it would probably be like bubbles from city of heroes like any of them i just love
bubbling people putting on like the big giant sonic resonance bubble that like fizzles it has like this weird electric energy on it i love it but that's not what i was gonna pick i my brain went to like other things other than like character skills i'm thinking of the teleport
to friend or from like or the ability to teleport people to me or the ability to teleport to people in my guild or in my group or whatever there are lots of games that have this city of heroes has the teleport your friend to you guilders to trove has the teleport to your friend i just feel like this is such an obvious way to get people fast quickly to wherever they want to be like to their actual friends where they actually want to play you're not really bypassing anything other than walking
It drives me crazy when they lock these things behind cash shops, because that's technically what Guild Wars 2 has done. And it drives me crazy when they don't have them at all, when they're like, no, you must walk up. kill both ways or really earn your like that's dumb just get people with their friends connect them as fast as possible so they can play your game that's the game you know the thing we're paying to game together crazy right yeah right that's what i want in every game
yeah i think i think that should be default that's really good and that's certainly not game breaking or anything um yeah there's there's a few answers like there's skills i mean i i love any game that lets me addle the mind of a mob to turn them... to my ally for a few seconds or a little bit of time. It's just really satisfying to me to turn an enemy into an ally and just like, yeah, you go attack your friend for a while and see those friendships dissolve.
fred why are you hitting me i thought we were besties we were gonna go see the hockey game this weekend it's not gonna happen uh yeah yeah there's um double jumping of course is just it's just fun yeah i mean where my mind goes is a lot of exploration or movement abilities I think are just once you've experienced them going back to games that don't have them it's a little bit painful and
You know, especially if we're going to kind of push back, I'm not saying we have to, but if we're going to push back against flight being kind of a standard in a lot of MMOs, but offering... Other, you know, movement abilities and ways to explore the world. My number one pick for this would be climbing.
and so few mmos let you just climb things and it's really frustrating to me that you know i go up to a place i'm like okay i need to get there and it's 12 feet up but now i have to you know start circling around this place trying to find this little invisible path or whatever obviously i'm not working out any aggression against lotro right now no obviously not
You'd love Pantheon then. You can vault anything there. I was going to tell you that Ultima Online had ladders in 1997 and you were going to mute me. So it's... Yeah, well... Poor Justin. I think, like, doesn't Paleo have climbing? i think he has climbing genshin impact got climbing our world's got climbing this is not nice i yeah i think it's a good especially it has an avenue for maybe improvement like you know you have a level one climbing skill you can only climb a little bit and then you
you fall but the better you get at it you know the farther up you can go or maybe you can start making those amazing cliffhanger kind of daring moves and jumps and i don't know i think there's a lot of potential for this i know it's got to be a bit of a difficult system to program in but i'm kind of tired of looking at the landscape like it's a series of impassable obstacles that the developers are always trying to corral me into certain places i i want more freedom to go
um and i think climbing would just be a nice you know never never let me i think that's the one thing i really liked about guild wars 2's mounts is that i knew no matter where i went i could always pull out that dumb bunny and that bunny would hop me up really high And then I could use my glider to go down. And so I never felt stuck someplace if I got too far down. And some MMOs, I feel really stuck if I don't have flying and I'm just down in a place. I'm like, oh, now I've got to.
find my way back or use a waypoint so yeah i'm gonna bring justin with me to dragon stand so he can feel frustration all over again most of the zones are really good but that one is not Yeah, I think I've been in Heart of Thorns maybe once, and I went, no mushrooms, no thank you. There are a lot of invisible walls is what I'm trying to tell you. It's not good. Yeah.
All right. That's all the time we've got for today's show. And this is it. This is the last normal show of the year. Well, I'm using normal. No, this wasn't a normal show. Yeah, we're normal. I mean, I was here. It was definitely not normal.
But in terms of our format, it is the last one that we'll be doing for 2024. We do have, as Bree said, we're going to be taking a week off and we're going to then have a mailbag show. So you're going to hear a lot more opinions and discussions on things you guys want to talk about.
So it's a fun way to end the year. And then we'll begin 2025 with the 500th episode roundtable here for you and your enjoyment. So there's some exciting things coming up, but we appreciate that you are totally cool. You're cool, right? With us. taking a week off i hope you are you understand like we would like to be with family and you know also play video games one or the other maybe both who knows uh so
Thank you guys so much for listening to us here in 2024. Thank you to Chris for taking the time out of his schedule of eating ramen noodles and coming on the show with us today. We really do appreciate it. My pleasure. Truly. I always enjoy being able to come in. So thank you for inviting me. And Bree, thank you for just being you. You're astounding. Amazing. I'll be my fifth one after you. All right, take care, guys.