phonograph the other day and I'm like cool. Where would you put it? They're huge. Yes, that was the sticking point. You know, I could get rid of a kid, I suppose. Trade one. Sorry, Timmy, I need your room for my 1890s technology. And then, of course, I need a room for all my old... Do you remember the size of the old PC gaming boxes?
Oh my gosh. I have thrown so many of them away. Oh my goodness. Kids today, like, obviously they don't even know, like, what the normal, like, the smaller version of the boxes are. No, they have no idea. But the big boxes, people, the big, they were like the size of a tombstone. and you would go, and they had so much, they could pack so much stuff in there, which was actually kind of cool. Yeah, because then they felt the obligation to pack it with stuff, with a map and a booklet, and yeah.
Sometimes I put a game developer in there and they would pop out like, hey, let me show you my game. I made this. It was kind of cool. And then they went to the smaller boxes. And then that was horrible if you're a collector because suddenly nothing fit on your shelf. You had like the big boxes and the small boxes. And then... Yeah. Now everything's on Steam. Yeah, it's gone. I let it go.
Organize it to your heart's content, which I guess is not a bad thing for organizers and minimalizers, but you can also minimize us. We will sit in the corner of your life for the next hour here at the Massively OP Podcast. and talk gently into your ear about video games and old-timey things. As we're in the 519th episode, I guess that's at the point where we no longer have to make sense on this podcast. We can just...
Yeah, no, if people are still here, they're invested. We could do anything. It's riot time! All right, well, we missed last week. That's totally on me. Sorry. I was literally at a theme park. I was in an amusement park with my family. Having fun without us.
having a lot of fun it was day one of the opening i'm like pretty pretty please let me go ride a roller coaster i'm so glad you guys went i'm best betting it was fun and the weather was gorgeous and yeah you would have been a fool not to no offense to everyone but you would have been a fool not to go
It was like our family and then every teenager in existence trucked in on these school buses because the teachers stopped teaching at this point in the year. They're just like, well, field trip for the next month. Uh, let's go to this amusement park. So it was weird to be surrounded by a lot of teenagers. Obviously, I don't mind. I just felt very old all day. My bones, I said as I got off the roller coaster and these kids are just looking at me. But yeah.
Anyways, hey, we miss you guys. Thanks for being patient as we missed a week. We'll try to make it up to you on this episode of the Massively OP podcast. I'm Justin with me as Bree. And Bree will make it up to you with a verse and song. Sing to her. No. Gaming. Well, why don't you talk to us about what you've been playing? I would love to because, Justin, I'm still living in Palea. I don't know who I am.
I know it's been fun and Chris is playing too so like we haven't actually managed to play together I'm not even sure how we would do that on purpose because I haven't tried this yet but so we're kind of like feeding off each other i'll be like i made it to level blankety blank he's like oh yeah well i finished the quest line and i'm like dang it chris is ahead of me
So now we're kind of like building each other up as we go. I'm playing too, but I'm so far behind both of you. I don't even want to pipe up. I think we might have no life. the cozy game I'm not sure that this was the right approach but it's so much fun that I don't care I'm still having a great time I have not seen Elderwood that's not true I actually accidentally zoned into Elderwood
But then I was like, oh shit, I'm in Elderwood. And I turned around and I left because I didn't mean to come yet. It was an accident. I didn't, it doesn't tell you like. when you get to the zone line that you're about to zone. And I was like, ooh, another thing. And no, so I left. Because I want to finish more of what's in the main two zones first. And I also haven't seen Meiji Market because I don't think it's open yet. But yeah, I think I'm level...
I think I'm 49. That sounds about right. I don't think I cracked 50, but I was in the upper 40s. You kind of don't look at your level unless you're looking at your inventory, and I don't pay a lot of attention. It's based on... how many skills you have like it's the combined total of your skills so you can guess that it slows down as you go because the skills get higher and they're harder to achieve but my my highest skill is gardening
planting farming whatever it's called and that i have made to 10. that is the only one i have hit 10 on so far Because it's one of those daily things. For me, that's like a brain loop where it drags me back. Like, oh yeah, I want to water my plants, I want to check out my plants, and then I'm going to replant everything. I actually am trying to do less of it because it can suck up a lot of the time that I have. How many plots do you have? All of them.
So you can have, what is it, nine chunks of nine plots. So it's 881. So I have all of them. I bought them right away. Because I was like, no, no, no. If I'm going to do this, I'm not going to just piddle with it. I'm going to go hard. So I bought... Go hard in my cozy game. You've got to cut down on this double entendre on this podcast because you're already over your next one. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
so yeah i have i have that and i bought i bought a greenhouse actually because i really wanted that pretty greenhouse with all the glass and stuff so i'm using that as like my craft haul So I kind of nerded out a little bit on the farming and stuff. Ironically, I don't like cooking.
Which is so funny because you guys know me. I literally have been playing a chef in Star Wars Galaxy. It's like full time, hardcore. That's my thing for what, like 21 years. So usually I have a cook in whatever the game is. I'm doing cooking because it's... lucrative like for your experience buffs but it's not really fun
Because it's all a minigame. There's no... I don't... Maybe if I do it with another... You think you have a lot of recipes. No. You have to, like, go one at a time and do all of, like, the individual pieces as they come, which... So you can't, like, dice all your potatoes. You know what I mean? You have to... Dice them when you're cooking the rice I don't even know what they are. There's a bunch of different recipes. So that's a little annoying. That's not how I cook in real life. I bulk things.
I don't know. Maybe it's better. I understand that it's like you get way more experience and money if you do this in like a cooking party, which I haven't gotten to see yet. That's probably my lowest right now just because it feels very grindy. I would say that's actually one of my negative complaints about Paleo is in general it can feel very right it is very skill oriented and you need to be leveling up your skills and
Even if you just want to focus on the NPCs and your relationship building, which I don't like, but I'm doing because it's amusing. And the storylines are actually pretty good. The NPCs are compelling, but... I don't like the relationship grind of it. You actually have to continue coming back even when you know they're not going to have anything for you. They have nothing new to say and there's no new quest for them yet.
You still have to keep going back over and over and talking to them and offering gifts. There's like a gift grind because it's one of those games. It's a cozy game where you're supposed to be loved. Is there an easy way to just know all the gifts that all these guys need in a particular week? Yes. People put it on the wiki every single week, and that can really simplify things. But I haven't found, like, one chart. You have to click through all the NPCs.
as you learn stuff over the course of the week it'll track it in your little relationship panel which is also nice but again you have to click on every NPC to see it's not user-friendly at all It's almost like they wanted us to care more about the story than the grind, but all that stuff is there, so I can't help but not look at it. You know what I mean?
I don't love that part, and yet I still like the NPCs. At this point, I think it was Brazen who said something in the comments like, the more you play, the more you realize that literally everybody has some sort of anxiety disorder and or you know crisis in their life and you're going to be helping them solve it very slowly over a long period of time and because you're doing that you end up feeling very involved in their lives and
I don't know. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm rooting for all of these people. Even the bad ones, even the rude ones. I want them to win, and I want them to turn their lives around. It's so bizarre how they get you on stuff like, or they get me on stuff like this, even as someone who hates the social grind.
I'm still like totally invested in these weird, you know, not real people. So I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm still having a good time though. I'm enjoying seeing lots of people around. Again, it's not really an MMORPG, but boy. A lot of times I feel like I see more people in Paleo than I do in LOTRO, like out in the world.
Because there are so many incentives for, like, fishing next to other people and harvesting what other people are harvesting. And there's always people in Kilima. It's... I've never seen people talk. I do! Yeah, I mean, every time I'm on, I never see anybody talk, ever. I don't know how it's sorting people. I wonder if when you go in, does it sort you to...
Servers that have people who are roughly your level or does it sort you with noobs? I actually don't know how that works or it's a completely random so I don't know, or maybe it's when I'm playing?
or maybe i i really don't know but i do see people chatting um especially when especially over in bahari because people are always talking about they're like signaling there's gold here or there's paleium here or there's flow tree here or whatever to try to get more people to come and tell people where they can come harvest. I don't know, Justin. I don't know why I am enjoying this so much. I don't know when I'll peter out. Will I peter out?
I think I'm on the very last leg of the main quest line before Elderwood and I'm kind of not doing it on purpose because they don't want to go yet because I'm nowhere near complete. I have one No, I have a bunch of people at 3 now, but I only have one that I'm romancing. I know, you can romance NPCs in this. Very fancy. But I don't have anybody at 4. which is what you need to be a Shep. That stupid Shep quest stays in your quest log, and it's been there for weeks.
I can't get rid of it because I don't have any NPCs at 4. It just takes forever. That's the grindy part I'm worried about. I would rather see more content. And I don't know, I would rather see other incentives than like having to go back and click on the NPC again to see what they have to say so that they like you again.
that really gets on my nerves but i don't like it in any game i don't like faction grinds anywhere that's what this is i don't like doing that in gorgon i don't like doing that in um in Lotro, and I really don't like it in The Sims. You know what I mean? But you feel compelled to do it anyway. But I feel compelled to do it anyway.
Because I care about the NPC. So there's some weird motivation mismatching going on there that I think might just be my brain because other people seem fine with this. The game is doing really well. I probably said this a couple weeks ago too. If you look on Steam, it kind of...
It has a lot of people just on Steam and now they're on console and Switch too. So I'm hopeful because the game really needs more content. It means a lot more zones. Like it didn't just need one more zone. It needed way more than that. to make this continue to feel like a big spread out place that I have tons of things left to explore. But overall, I'm tickled.
that one of these cozy games actually got me because most of the time they don't. Most of the time I just feel no investment in the characters at all and I don't enjoy the grinding of the harvesting so like if those two things don't work for me out I'm not gonna stick around and here they work the grinding part of the like the gathering actually is mostly fun Doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't go into Lotro and do this for fun, but here I'm doing it for Paleo.
they got some things right it's fascinating to me what and i want to see more of these things applied these principles applied i would love to see more npcs in MMORPGs that I care about. You know what I mean? Because every once in a while we'll do a daily grind and we'll ask people about the NPCs that stick with them and it's always the same like 10.
across 20, 30 years of MMOs, and we're still like, we only care about a handful of people. And most of these NPCs you don't even remember, let alone care about. That is just not the case here. Well, a lot of the time, they need memorable writing, and they need to keep bringing them back. Because when it's a one-and-done character that you met 20 years ago, you're not going to remember them so much as... Like the other day, I was in ESO and in Westfield, the Gold Road expansion from last year.
and went to a random side quest, and oh my goodness, Mizzic's back! I forgot about Mizzic, I love Mizzic! the uh khajiit um detective the private eye dude and he's so fun i didn't even know he was in the zone and that was just a it's a delight i like i like how eso really does bring a lot of these memorable characters back especially fan favorite ones but yeah you're right you're right that's they can
Definitely, I think fewer characters and more investment into them would make for better NPCs in general. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I decided to just play Paleo on the weekend. I really don't have time during the week. Please don't know LifeHit like us. Yeah, I can't semi-LifeHit. The problem is there's just too many games to play.
trying to play four games on any given day. That's too much. It's too much. Not when you have a real life and a job and a family. That's too much. Yeah, so it's fine because I can log in and usually my goal is to do a quest. And usually a quest is like a... 20 to 30 minute experience. And that's fine. Like that's, that's good. I feel like it's accomplished. I'm moving the goalpost forward there. I'm almost through Westfield. So that's. Making me happy. I like the zone. I'm
As usual, ESO I think would be a great game if they just got rid of all the zone quests, period. Just 100% side quests in this game. They're always better, way better written. I don't really like how these zone quests are just like... kind of dragging the story like just artificially inflating it so it just keeps going and going and you're just like oh I just want the resolution already you know like Oh, I beat that one guy, but you didn't beat his boss.
So that sort of thing. But whereas a side quest is interesting, they're very creative, they're able to do fun stuff, and they always have their eye on the resolution of it. So you get that full short story experience. Whereas the novel length stuff in ESO just doesn't really click as hard.
In Lotro, I'm slowly rotating through three characters I'm doing, still with my minstrel, doing the new content that came out in Update 44, which is surprisingly way more quests than I thought there would have been. By now, I would have gotten to the end of it, and it's like, nope.
It's a lot of war. It's a lot of fighting. It's a lot of, it feels like it's a lot of gearing up for the next expansion, but I'm not entirely sure where they're going with the story. So my frustration there is like, oh, is this going to be like pouring a lot of interest into a prologue?
and then I'm not going to actually get the story until, like, the fall. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so my interest isn't as high there, but my lore master is in the Shield Isles, and that's just beautiful. That's probably one of my top... Top 5, at least top 10 favorite zones in the game now. It's Tropical Isles. I love it. It's so... The vibes are just great. It's just beautiful. The questing is pretty decent.
And navigation is kind of funny. You're like swimming to the next little island, swimming to the next little island. But it's not like a giant swim. It's just a little hop and a swim. Okay. And then my mariner is going through Moria.
So I'm actually making it a point to track down every single quest in Moria. I've never done that before, and I'm finding tons I've never done, which is kind of weird. Like, man, I've been through Moria so many times, and there's all these quests I've just never done.
So that's kind of cool. Like there were these orcs that were experimenting with poisons and toxins trying to make like super orcs but really all it did was just make them all very very sick and kind of like diseased the whole place and so it felt like really icky yeah it was like weird going into this weird haunted house but they're just like killing themselves i'm like i could just stand here and you guys would fall over i don't you know you don't need me
And then World of Warcraft's been very interesting. I'm kind of more into retail these days than classic. I kind of put classic back on the back burner. But retail, it's been a question of main. I need a main character. I don't. This whole warband thing is nice. I love what they're doing. If World of Warcraft was the only game I was playing.
That would be fine. I could rotate through alts. I could have many adventures. I don't have the time for that. I need a single main character. The problem is I have four characters that I love equally. and I love for different reasons, and picking one of them feels like trying to choose your favorite child. Sophie's Choice, the 2025 edition.
uh look it up kids it's it's an old thing um so i probably i'm gonna stick with my warlock and the reason why i want to main is one of my goals right now is i just wanted like fully quest out all these zones i don't know why that that that's kind of where my mind is at like scratching, you know, popping all the bubbles on a full sheet of bubble wrap, getting rid of all the quests in a zone, feeling like you just
fully did it. It's such a nice feeling to fully do a zone. I don't want to see the little exclamation marks anywhere. I just want it done. And so I just need a character to do that. And so I'm kind of settling probably on my warlock. I like gnomes. I don't see a lot of gnomes in the game. Most people don't. They play the tallies. They don't play the shorties. So... And my warlock is just, she's a beast, like her pet.
demolish stuff faster than I've seen any other race, class, whatever doing and so I just go into Delves and I'm like, yeah, you guys go attack. I'm just going to stand back here and reap all the rewards. Sounds like Justin needs a nerf. That's what I... Yeah, shush, shush, shush, shush. So what you're saying is we should go down in the comments and put a poll. and we can tell Justin which character to play.
No, I'm, yeah. Well, I love me. But every character has, like, its pros and cons, which I guess is a good sign of balance. Like, you don't want to, you know, one vastly overpowered. class but you do want like you know like my warlock i don't like her speedy movement power because it hurts her as she's using it
So when I activate her afterburners, her health starts, you know, diving down, and I'm like, ah, that's stressful. I don't need that. Yeah, I don't like those mechanics. You know, but she attacks faster than, you know, she attacks harder than anybody else, but... My druid has the better movement abilities, and I got a lot of instant flight, you know. Man, Instant Flight is the best. The best movement ability.
and you know i've got like some really nice long-range attacks and aoe attacks and i can send trees to attack people and how cool is that but my death knight has skeletons and has a lot of movement powers I know, and my chamois is really cool and has a lot of visual punch. Whatever. I'm probably just sticking with the warlock at this point. Alright. I'm writing this down, Justin. I made a spreadsheet.
For your four characters to decide? No. Oh, just in general. And for my zones, for checking off all the zones that I want to fully clear. I see. How is there not a plug-in for that? There has to be. There are plugins for vaguely for like, oh, where's all the content in the game and stuff like that, but I just want something I can... visually see like expansion by expansion here are all the zones you know when i'm fully done i can just check it off so
Yeah. All right. Well, let's move on to the news. As I said, we got a couple of weeks of news, although it is kind of late May. So I think we're gearing up to some really interesting stuff in June, but maybe not as. Crazy, awesome, huge news right now. It's just getting there. We're getting there. Summers around the corner people and it's going to be an interesting summer for MMOs and we're seeing signs of that already with some pretty big titles in the works
including one we wanted to talk about today, although Brie and I had to kind of jog each other's memories what this game was about, because it's one of those, we know it's big. We're talking about Chrono Odyssey, by the way. we know it's a big title it's it's gearing up for a beta next month and it's also one of those games that every time it comes up you're like what what's that game about It comes off kind of generic. It shouldn't but it does. I don't know what's up with that.
So Kakao is a publisher and Chrono Studio is the developer team. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure Kakao also owns Kronos Studio. I don't think it's a separate studio. Is it Npixel that's publishing it in the... the east so i don't know it's a little confusing but i'm pretty sure cacao owns the whole kitten kabang because it's like every time kitten kabang that's not a thing did i just mix up shebang and kitten kaboodle i think i just that's the new title of the podcast there we go
but yeah they've been talking about it to investors on their their quarterly reports for a long time like it's been a couple of years now and it just kept sitting there and it would sit there with archaic chronicles which first off that's confusing and right and i don't know i i i feel like in a lot of ways this game reminds me of like the hard edge version of archage in my head It's one of these,
Korean slashers. It's an action MMO. It's not all that different from something like Terra or even Black Desert, although it's not as sandboxy and it's not as cute as Terra. It's more, you know, I don't even know the word I'm looking for. I just feel like we've gotten a lot of these games, and I think maybe that's part of why it's having a hard time standing apart from them.
I don't think that they're really focusing on their unique mechanic as much as they should in the promotional materials, which is this kind of chrono detector, whatever, you're able to manipulate time in the game, which is kind of interesting. I don't think it's fully time travel but it's something there is there are time travel elements like you're able to go into the past but you're also able they say you can stop time around monsters
Which, hey, I was able to do that in 2001. It was called a laggy computer. Or you can rewind a character's time, enabling more dynamic combat. I kind of like that. Like I make a mistake and I just hit a big button and go back in time and just do a better job. But yeah, other than that, I mean, it's obviously it's... These Korean games are super pretty. Unreal Engine 5, you're not going to lack of eye candy. But they haven't been heavily, heavily promoting it.
it's just no they haven't which is kind of ramping up slowly and now we've got this june beta which was delayed from a may beta that they were going to have so it's coming up if you want to sign up for it go over there to Steam, and I just went to Steam. It said, you're not old enough to look at this page. Say it again. Say it again, Valve, please.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the information we have on this game comes from their website, which is pretty thin, or it comes from testers overseas, right? Because this thing has been in testing there for a while. Like, we don't even know what exactly is changing for our version, and I don't think we're really going to have a good clue until we get our hands on it. yeah also we want to just note that it is not just a pc game but also playstation xbox it's going to have cross
And so you'll be able to do that. But right now I think that beta is just going to be for Steam. Yes, I believe that is correct. This is, again, this is their Western beta, to be clear. They've already been testing. So, yeah, a couple of weeks away and we're getting our hands on it. That's not the one that's coming. right on the heels of June Awakening is it?
Do we not have a hard date? Oh my gosh. It's going to be crazy. That's what I'm saying. This summer is going to be bonkers. It's going to be... Pretty interesting. We'll see how that shakes out. And we got another, speaking of imports here, we got another title that we didn't think we'd ever hear from again, which is Blue Protocol. And this story is pretty interesting. So...
When was Blue Protocol officially canned? Was that last year or the year before? Because it was like one of our biggest disappointments of the year when we got to the yeah last year they announced that it wasn't coming last year and then they announced the end of Japanese service last year but I don't think that actually happened until January technically But for us, that was a moot point or a moo point if you are as old as we are.
So, yeah, we don't... We knew that this was a possibility, I'll say that, because Tencent announced fairly early on that they were working on a mobile version of the game. And then they said, oh yeah, by the way, it's only for China. And we were like, argh! But Tencent says a lot of times that it's only for China and then brings it here anyway. So I think we were all holding out a little tiny bit of hope. Lowering expectations. Yes. Over. Yeah.
That's what Scotty did on the Enterprise. Well, it'll take me ten hours to fix this. Three minutes later, well, I did it. Look, I'm awesome. Yeah, so we're not getting the older version, like the blue protocol that we were hoping to get that the sci-fi... fantasy MMO that looked really good. It was like this anime, cel-shaded, beautiful thing, and it had a lot of us excited. I was one of them. I was very excited. It was kind of disappointing that they canceled it.
And now we're getting another version of it, how much they're using of the original Blue Protocol, like code and design. I don't know. I don't. I feel like they must be cannibalizing some parts of it. It looks really similar, but I don't feel expert enough to be able to say, oh yes, this is completely insane. Because we didn't really get our hands on Blue Protocol enough. No, we never even got to, exactly.
So the point here is, yes, they're going to be bringing in a blue protocol star resonance. That's like four random words. Yeah, because star resonance is what they were calling. This is how you know they care about us. They were calling the one for China Star Resonance, but when they are reporting it here, they put Blue Protocol back in the name because they want us to know this is partly at least Blue Protocol. Alright, so it's on our way. We don't have a
Yeah, they're hoping to bring it sometime in 2025. Sure, yeah. So, you know, if your heart was set on Blue Protocol, there's still hope of a sort, and we just want to make sure that you are aware of that. Right. Oh, and this one, this one, now I'm double-checking myself. This one isn't just mobile, yes?
this is it should be for steam too yes for pc also and okay so pc steam and epic that's sorry that's what i had in my head but i was double checking it before i said it out loud which is i didn't get that impression out of the chinese version they were very clear that was just mobile So I don't know if they're changing that one also or this is just for us because they know we want both. I just hope it's not one of those
Not Tencent. What's that WoW knockoff that I'm thinking of? Terrace Land. Thank you. Oh, my goodness. I don't want another Terrace Land situation where it's like, oh, hey, they're bringing this mobile game to PC, and it's obviously just a mobile game that
should never have found a PC in their first place. I don't know what they were thinking with Terrace Land. I feel like we could write essays on Terrace Land because they talked that up and like, it was a total WoW clone. That was not just an, it wasn't an homage. It was like, No, we ripped off the whole dang thing. And then, like, as soon as they got WoW back, they were like, okay, anyway, bye.
You know, they've basically stopped communicating. They've basically stopped updating. It's completely stagnating. I don't actually think anybody's playing. Nobody was that thrilled with it to begin with. I guess. I didn't think it was bad. I actually thought it was pretty decent in beta. But there was no support.
Yeah, that fell off really quickly. I agree with that. Well, speaking of things that are falling off the radar, let's talk about poor Fractured online. Oh, my goodness. Oh, Fractured. Yeah. What's going on with Fractured? They are closing down again. Thank you guys. This is not the first time they have closed out. If you guys remember when they originally were being published by, it's a Kickstarter game by the way, but then they got picked up by Gamigo.
to be published and then like a couple of months into that once they hit early access they were like actually yeah you know Gamigo is not going to publish this anymore and we're going to close down the early access and go back into, you know, deep testing in a do-over, and we were like, oh, that sounds really bad. How many times have we been told a game is going back into testing for a do-over, and then crowfall, it doesn't go anywhere. I was just going to say crowfall. Right?
And then there's like nothing left of the Discord. They've completely ripped everything. Nothing is happening. Crowfall is not happening. It's completely dead. There's nobody working on this, right? So, like, I got nervous about that, but it turns out they were actually serious about it. They were really working on it. It is a tiny indie studio. Is it Spain or Italy? No, I can't remember. I think it might be Italy. I'm not sure about that. Somebody double check me on that.
little tiny European studio that is apparently doing a lot of this on their own time anyway they weren't making a giant profit or anything so they kept at it and they actually did bring it back online And then last year they actually launched it. I want to say it was December, right? They not only got it back into early access for their original backers, but then they relaunched it for real.
It has stayed really small this whole time. It is not blowing up or anything. It is a very small, very sandbox. PVP oriented kind of experience. So this year, They basically came out and said, actually, now we have sold the game and the company up to one of our players who was also running a game studio. He has retained the people who were still working on it after their layoffs. Anyway, they had layoffs before they got bought.
So I guess the original developer and several of the other developers are now working on the game under this new company. The person who's actually, was it Duncan Davis? Something like that. is actually communicating a lot with the community. It's putting out videos and putting out dev blogs and talking in discord about the changes they're going to make. So now this game is back.
that's what they're doing they're not just revamping the game under a new publisher owner they are pulling the game back into development and it is going offline next month speaking of things happening next month uh it'll be shut down for basically the rest of the year and then coming back at some point early 2026.
although to be fair if you already own it it sounds like you're gonna have like test opportunities over the course of the next year but this is what they did the last time too so the whole thing is sort of like an ah you can't take a launched game back into please stop doing this but on the other hand They kind of needed it because their player base was just too tiny and they just didn't have enough manpower on the game to really flesh out what is actually a pretty decent base for a game.
I don't know what these new developers are getting out of it exactly. It's not money. But they seem to really care about saving the game and actually fixing it. So I'm hoping this is not a crowfall situation. crossing fingers because monumental did not do anything with growfall when they bought out what was you know the remainder of that stuff of from artcraft But, again, we didn't really get a whole lot of
When I compare it to Crowfall, I just want to point that out. When Monumental bought this out, it basically died up. You know what I mean? Like, it dried out right away. We weren't getting constant communication from developers. We weren't getting a vision really at all. Yeah, there was no like, hey, we're going to relaunch in a year. Yeah. We're going to work on it. There was no timeline, none of that.
These guys have already kind of surpassed that. We've already got a timeline. We've already got... an idea of what's going to happen to the game. And to be honest, the fact that they've done this once before, the original developers have shut down and then opened back up once before, is a mark in their favor. Like, they actually do have that.
The desire to see this through, even though they weren't making any money out of it. Are they retaining characters and data, or is this completely white? Oh, crap. Because I'm not seeing that in the article. What are they keeping? I want to say they said they're keeping... Yes, I don't think they're keeping their characters. Okay. But for a game like this, I'm not sure how much it matters.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people will be upset. But I think they're kind of hoping for a fresh start for that without actually screwing over Kickstarter backers. Yeah, I mean...
As you said, there could be pros and cons of taking this move. It's a bit risky, it really is, because you could only need... some some friends and some followers and also just you rest them losing interest in the project entirely like true 2026 is a bit of time away and by that time a lot could happen people just kind of it just drops off their radar but it could also allow them that time to retool the game and have that additional...
new launch, which, hey, get some new headlines, and maybe they can re-promote the game in a way. I mean, there are MMOs that this is their entire... business model is like keep relaunching the game and then closing it down and relaunching and closing it down. Bless online, you know. Hey, come back. Oh my god, bless. Yes, I knew you were going to say that. I mean, it's not like intentional, but it's like these titles that keep launching and then
They run for a while, and then they're closed down, and then it's like a hot potato. Another studio grabs it. Yep.
The same studio, you know, Hellgate. No, it comes back. Hey, what's up, Hellgate? Haven't seen you for a while. Yeah, Hellgate hasn't come back in at least a year. We need to... Let's do. I feel like we're not getting... what we're owed out of the Hellgate experience if it's not reviving constantly all right so quarter one 2026 is when you should expect to see and i actually wouldn't be surprised if it happens really truly
And I think, except in the fact that they aren't making money off of this at all right now, and they definitely won't be over the next six months, like... The game really needs a revamp. And I don't think that the couple hundred players who are actively playing right now are actually going to disagree with that at their tables. You know what I mean? I think that the existing player base is so small that they're not really taking on risk here. Except that they're losing money, technically.
working on it without pay. Okay. Defiant! Speaking of relaunched games here, we're kind of balancing themes here. Let's talk about Defiance. It was a title that we were making a pretty big deal out of this Trion Worlds game. came back a month or so ago and had kind of a pretty splashy relaunch and a lot of interest
And yet a very, very messy relaunch with a lot of systems not quite working and bugs and poor optimization. And they were trying to get all that under control and then just kind of got quiet, right? and of course we haven't heard too much about, although they're continuing to work on it, and the real hope was that this team that's this sub-studio that's kind of handling it right now would bring back all the original content that
was originally in the game before it got shut down. And we got some news of that this past week where the, what is it, Castillo? Castillo. Cast that down. I know. It looks kind of stupid on paper. You're looking at it going, what is that word? That's not a real word. It's been a long time since I saw the TV show. Casties, right? That's what they call them. Yeah, why not?
Yeah, the super albino race. Yes. The alien race. They're like evil space elves. They're super pale and elegant and beautiful, but they're also like... scheming vipers. They're awful. They're not the good guys. Do they like the color white? Yes. Yes, they do. And they're like super regimented. They have like overly developed caste system. It's really not a group. You don't want to be one of them. They're a problem for the human characters. They're not shell man. No, they're not shell.
But they're back and... That's really cool. So now you can actually go ahead and not just roll up the race, but everything that's kind of associated with the cast of fans, the contracts, the pursuits, arenas, and stuff like that. Right.
so yeah but some of it so like that's that's what they said they were going to do with their dlc they weren't going to just give it all out for free but they weren't going to charge for it like they originally did i looked this up to find out it was from 2013 which makes me feel very old with the dlc for defiance
back in 2013 but yeah so some of it is some of it is freebie and then some of it they're planning on like adding into their little cash shop so and I don't think that's really a problem it's mostly like the cosmetics and stuff they're adding like the content you guys are getting for free so that's kind of nice and i know there's a couple of other dlc they still have to add in
They didn't give up on it, is what I'm trying to say. But I did want to point out, I don't know if you saw it out in the comments, and I've seen people on Discord talking about this too, but Apparently they've been having a major cheating problem. It's just kind of a mess. I don't remember if the original game had all of this. A little bit, yes. It wasn't really bad.
I don't know how bad it was, but I know that this is kind of a continued issue. Yeah. So people who were aware of that were probably able to, like, day one come back into the game. That is so wild to me. Like, why would you... You finally get back a game you loved, and you come in and act like a jackass. I don't understand that mentality, and I will never understand that mentality.
I'm not going to argue with you on that. Who are you? Like, if you remember this game, you are not a baby. You are not a child. You're not even a 20-something at this point, right? You're... You're an adult, and you have come in and decided to cheat, and this little tiny fox, I just don't understand it at all. Stop it, people. Yeah, I'm kind of concerned how quiet and how small this got. Again, I was really hoping that they were going to be able to capitalize on the excitement of the launch.
and keep it going. But this is better than nothing, and definitely adding in an old favorite race is a good move on their part. So I tried to look up the Steam charts and I just kept getting the Tryon Worlds version. Yeah. You don't need to hear me type. You hear me type. You hear me type. Okay. Oh no, this can't be right. Yeah, no, I guess they're only running it through their modified version of Glyph. I guess it's not on Steam. I don't remember. Well, that kind of blows. Yeah.
So we were saying before the podcast that Mike Morhaime's studio had kind of a double whammy of a launch week this past week or month. Yeah. And rolled out a couple new titles. I'm not sure even people caught that. that these are both Dreamhaven titles rolling into various states of readiness all at the same time. Maybe they did. I don't know. We did. Linked Banner. That's with a Y, by the way. Linked Banner of the Spark and Wildgate. Yes. Two different types of online games, but both.
within, like, at least adjacent to MMOs and definitely of interest to us because of Mike Morhaime and his studio having spun off from Blizzard a while back. so linked is kind of this roguelite or roguelife they call it a roguelife which i think is really cute i think that might actually be good term for it even if it doesn't really mean anything because it invokes it invokes exactly what it is if it reminds me of a cross between something like astroneer and
I don't even know. It's not exactly Astroneer, but you are... Co-op building your own little base and doing quests and things like that like but it's not an MMORPG just to be clear But, yeah, you're fighting like in a roguelite, but also it's very base-centric. It's very building. It's very cozy, honestly. Yeah, I like the look. It's got a very nice cultural look.
yeah um we have sent a couple of people in to look at this so far sam went to go look at it a couple months ago and now colin has gone in it was colin right i think it was colin has gone in and they both came away and were like This is true.
This is really good. Like, that doesn't happen very often. Sam and Colin don't have a whole lot in common. They don't even play the same game. Sam is our PvP columnist, right? I would not have expected him to like this, but both of them came away thinking, especially Sam was like, My kids would like this. This would be really great for a family kind of game. This is not
It's not a roguelite. It's not Diablo. It's not anything like that. But it's also not a total cozy game, something like Paleo or Stardew. It's not really that either.
it's somewhere in between and that would make it a little more challenging than something like astroneer where that's that's not the kind of content you're going to there's no roguelike stuff in astroneer that's pure survival sandbox this is survival sandbox but with the survival elements like tamped down like it's not oppressively survival And it's cute. So I don't know. Technically, this one...
That one is out of early access. That is a final full launch. It was $25. I think they had it on sale for like $20 over the weekend. I don't know how long that goes on. So it might be gone by the time you're hearing about this. I don't know how well it's doing. I wanted to look that up too. While you look that up, let's talk about the other title here that they're going into, which is an extraction RPG called Wildgate.
Interesting because it's more of like a sci-fi, outer space, spaceship hopping kind of game versus usually very land-based. or fantasy kind of MMO, or I'm sorry, fantasy RPG shooter kind of experience. So Wildgate, you have like a small crew and you are on a spaceship and you kind of just jumping around out in outer space trying to get.
all the good stuff for you and your team, and then get to the exit point, which is, I guess, the big appeal. I've never actually played an extraction RPG at some point in my life, I suppose I will. I feel like the stress of it would just be too much for me. Having all this stuff and going, I could lose it. I could lose it. I could lose this stuff. I didn't ever like those death penalty things where people could come and rob your corpse of all this stuff if you didn't get back there fast enough.
but it does, you know, this genre, some genre does have it. followers and... Does it? Well, they keep making new games, so somebody must be interested. None of them seems to be going anywhere. I don't know if anybody's noticed this. They are definitely trying to make it a thing. It doesn't seem like it's actually becoming a thing. You keep trying to make fetch work. Exactly. It's not going to happen.
It's so weird to me because it's not that it's a bad gameplay loop. It's that it's bad when it's the only gameplay loop. And that's like the only thing most of these games have. And it's so weird to me, but I don't... I don't know. It's like taking one battleground out of an MMO and trying to make it into a game. And I guess that actually works because it's a team sport and people like sports.
This is not really the same thing. This is like trying to take Fortnite and condense it down into a handful of people. And turn it into, instead of being a brawl, turn it into a race with people killing each other along the way. I don't understand, honestly, why they ever thought this would work as its own standalone gameplay type. But if you like that and you want to do that over and over and over and over again with really very little else to do, this seems to be like a really well-made one.
That was Andy's takeaway. He thought it was beautiful. He thought it looked like Wildstar. Visually, it does. Yeah, it's got kind of a wild start, but kind of a first-person shooter style. And he came away thinking that the gameplay felt a little empty.
the actual hands-on of your ship this is this one is you're based in a ship right as opposed to like playing on the ground some of the ones we've gone through here it's you're running through a temple or you're running through the jungle or whatever here you're you know all hands on deck on the ship and you're like repairing it and trying to keep it all afloat
Not a float, because it's a spaceship, you know what I mean? You can't float. You're trying to keep it space-worthy, I guess is the word I'm looking for. But like, it requires teamwork in a way that some of these extraction games do not. You could technically go in and be just a lone wolf in some of these games. This one you actually have to all work together on your ship.
And he was relating the story of how that did not happen and people are very bad at this and they're ramming ships and they're letting the ships blow up and they're not really very good at this part. That's something I expect will improve over time when people aren't in a test, because this one isn't fully launched yet, right? This is just, I think this was Early Access now, right? Isn't that what we said? I'm pretty sure that's true.
So, I don't know, Justin. I have concerns. It seems like this is a pretty decent one. There are some emptiness factors to the gameplay. He was saying that you're supposed to be like... doing specific things in between some of the spicier encounters, but he didn't feel like there was much incentive to do that.
So he was just kind of standing around, which is kind of a problem. But that's the kind of thing that can be worked out. They can tighten that up. I don't think there's any way, personally, to tighten up extraction game, extraction RPG. I hope that these kinds of mechanics make their way into MMORPGs. In fact, I kind of think they already are. We even made this comment last week. It was Albion, yeah.
Their new mechanic that's coming out with their patch in June, like everything else is coming out in June, has what looks to me, at least on paper, like an extraction mode. And I think an MMO is the perfect place for an extraction mode.
the keyword being mode you know what i mean like this is a good yes a thing you can be like oh i'll jump into this it's kind of a pve pvpve thing I can do for fun and then when I'm bored of it I will go back to my regular regularly scheduled MMORPG gameplay whatever that is the PvP the PvE the playing house whatever you're doing I don't think it's enough to just have that one mode
I think that was the case for most battle royales too, and I think unless you're Fortnite, you already learned that lesson also. But they're going to keep trying it. They're going to keep spinning off these concepts. Because, I mean, again, the idea of a PvPV mode is not new. They didn't just invent this out of a whole cloth, right?
a concept we've had in MMOs for a very long time. This concept of having a dungeon and you can fight people, but you're all racing toward this PvE objective. Like, this is as old as MMOs. I don't know. We haven't really talked that much about it.
extraction rpgs on the podcast like ever but i feel like we're like obligated to cover them because like you said they keep coming we've there's been so many and they all kind of came out of nowhere and none of them has like blown up which is super weird not like fortnite kind of where you hear random people talking about these type of games but yeah it does seem to be
I don't know if it's just like something where there's just a lack of innovation elsewhere and this is like the new thing. They're like, oh, wow, it's something different. It's something interesting. And maybe they could crack open like that PVP sort of feel where it's... constantly it's content you can keep dining on again and again and again and it's kind of this nice as you said it's a loop where you know
It kind of just makes it interesting because of that extra stress and the high risk, high reward factor of it. For some mentality, some gamer mentality, that might be absolutely what they want. I mean, that's why some people really love...
permadeath or why they really like one kill and you're out pvp sort of thing but yeah I definitely have not seen anything completely blow up the way and I'm worried if not worried I don't really care one way or the other but if a title doesn't really you know like manage to make this into like the next fortnight or minecraft or whatever it's just kind of going to be one of those little side things that had happened along the way in gaming history and then
you know, probably will fizzle out over time. But, you know, they didn't like Division. They had an Extraction mode. That's probably the first time. Do they? The Dark Zones or something like that. That was the first time I ever heard of. Using that word. Extraction mechanics. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they've been around for a long time, but as like a subgenre, like I don't remember hearing the word extraction RPG until a couple of years ago.
Yeah, I don't think that they were even calling it that. No, no, they weren't. And, like, we had, like, this whole sub-genre of games after Fortnite blew up that came out that were, like, trying to be game shows, and they were, like, trying to, like, make, you know, like...
what's that called running man they were trying to all be running man or hunger games or whatever pick one and they were all trying to be very twitch oriented because they think that that's the theory like that this is fun to watch right It's this combination where you're competing against the clock or competing against the end boss and you're competing against your fellow contestants.
You might notice none of those went anywhere either. Maybe the best one that's come along has been the finals. Maybe you could say that's part of that lineage. I don't know. Even that's not blown up. There's so much stuff happening on the screen if you don't have somebody parsing it for you. Oh, I didn't think of that. I can't imagine a sport, like an actual real-world sport, where... So much would be happening at the same time that it's impossible to follow.
I mean, most sports, you can generally follow what's happening because there's the ball and it needs to go there. There's the car. It needs to keep going in circles really fast. But in a game like... Um...
Overwatch or something like that. There's a lot of mechanics happening, a lot of strategy, and even if you're pulling back, you need it's really hard to follow sometimes unless you're very very well versed in the game so bringing a huge audience from the outside The game needs to be apparent like what's happening on a big scale, even if you don't understand the smaller stuff.
But when there's so many like, you know, particle effects going off and all these things happening, you don't know like, oh, that person used that skill to counter that skill to counter. Because already if they start explaining it, that's 10 seconds ago. And so much has happened in the next 10 seconds.
i i kind of wonder if like esports would have been a little bit better if they were slower paced maybe that's why like um like MOBAs worked a bit better for esports because you could follow what's happening it was kind of a tug of war you see where the people are going you see where their objective is you know and you could kind of go okay now Now I follow that as a person. Yeah.
That was just kind of a random thought. I don't think that's random. I think it's worthwhile. Because all of these are really just game modes that have spun out of the MMORPG genre. All of them. With the exception of shooters, which existed for us, right? You know?
I don't think there's a harm in looking at what they do right and reincorporating that back into our genre. I would really like to see that. I think all of these modes belong with us and that the MMOs that neglect them have similar problems. People don't want just one game loop in MMOs either. They don't want to just quest. They don't want to just raid. They don't want to just grind. They want a lot of things all at once so that they have variety.
Yeah. Variety is key. My kid, the other day, he asked me in the car, he's like, Dad, if you could only have everything from one store that never you know like never decayed never went away but you could only shop at one store for the rest of your life what would it be i'm like
probably a super walmart as much as i don't really like walmart but if you had to pick just one it would have to be one with every and that's kind of like why and then i started thinking that's kind of one of the reasons i like mmos i don't think that they do any one thing super better than all the rest other than bringing a ton of people together and giving us a lot of options and a lot of game loops. Right. But they may not all be high quality.
You're taking some hits to quality there in exchange for the ride. Obviously, we think that's worth a trade-off, right? I mean, we wouldn't be here. It keeps us in that game far longer than the more specialty titles, but... It doesn't mean you can't, you know, of course, date on the side. I don't have to just go to that one store, so, you know. Right. Fortunately, we can shop around. All right. This has been brought to you by Walmart. All right. No, no, no.
Let's move on in the mail. Well, Matthew has a letter for us because he would like to troll us on this. fine Memorial Day. He says, how do you think AI could be used to enhance and replace traditional NPC interactions and MMOs, and what potential benefits or drawbacks might this bring to the gaming experience?
I'm playing around with AI chatbots for work. This question was generated from an AI chatbot. There's a typo in that sentence, which is hilarious. With a specific question, give me a question for the Massively OP podcast and have it relate to AI. I just like that the AI spit out a question for you that had an error in it, which is so emblematic. of, of gen AI these days. Okay, so.
let's talk about ai justin yes we have we have time right yes we do seven hours later i don't think you're gonna get a favorable answer out of justin and me who spent the first an hour before this podcast ranting about planned obsolescence and the degrading of technology over time.
rant about ai and i'm not going to go into it i don't want to sound like that guy but i don't the more i see it the more i just it makes my skin crawl in a way like i've almost never felt before hate AI and I understand like there's parts of it that can be used like tools for very good things.
But when we're just like liberally applying it like paint to every single thing in technology and the internet when Google is just spitting an AI answer at me. That is wrong. Most of the time. That's usually wrong. And I figured out the other day how to. kind of reprogram chrome so that it doesn't do that anymore it's really nice
Better yet, you could just never use Chrome again. And also, just get rid of Google search and use something else. I've been using DuckDuckGo lately. It's not as good as Chrome when it was good. but it also isn't stupid which is a help i mean as far as search engines go
This was not sponsored by DuckDuckGo, by the way. I'm just pointing it out that it's becoming a problem for journalists, for example, trying to find information, which is the opposite of what it's supposed to be doing. Okay, continue, Justin. No, I lost my all-trans last time.
yeah so I just don't like how it's being liberally applied to everything and I'm getting a little nervous because when it starts to encroach on things I care about like hey MMO gaming I don't want none of that in my gaming thank you very much I like It kind of reminds me of procedurally generated
you know like content in mmos which is something that they tried for a while that this was going to be a thing this was going to be the next savior of not just mmos but also online games that you know just an infinite number of things that the computer would make it would free up all this developer time and players wouldn't know the difference except we totally do totally do yeah you know you can sort of make it work exhibit a no man's sky it can work
It obviously doesn't feel the same as handcrafted content. And we just kind of know it. And I still feel that way with almost everything AI. So I don't want suddenly AI to be marching into the game saying, hey, I'm your new AI NPC. follow you around and spit out weird gibberish that's not going to make much sense or I'm going to make you a zone or some new content. I'm not super excited about that. The last time I was really excited about
kind of like, you remember Story Bricks and EverQuest 3? Yes, and Lamar, yes. i don't think that's really ai but it was kind of a more of a scripted approach to NCCs and gives them a lot of variables, how they would act in certain situations. And I loved that idea so much. I have no idea.
If that was feasible for them to pull off, I really liked the idea that they were going to try. And I wish I could have seen the result of that because I would love to see MMOs be more... lifelike um you know i know one of my complaints with like paleo going back to paleo is that these npcs won't stop moving they got a day night cycle and the day night cycle is really quick so they're just they're just never stopping they're just always
going around the place and I have to track them down, which is okay. I need to put some of those bungee cords on them like you do with little kids. and their little bungee cord backpacks, and just get back here. You get used to it after a while, and their routines imprint on your brain, and then you kind of form, okay, I'll leave it this time, and I can hit most of them in one thing. There's only so many. Yeah, yeah.
But I would love to see some, you know, maybe non-super essential NPCs, like more flavor characters traveling the world and doing things. There's a character in Lord of the Rings Online. I forget what the name is. But it's a traveling character that kind of travels from zone to zone and has as a vendor has some things on it But it's kind of interesting because you can be in one zone and kind of just see him walking across and going to another zone and then to another zone.
And it just brings to mind like how many of these characters are kind of nailed to the ground or they have a very small little loop or they only say the same things to you again and again. Could AI or something be used to enhance? the npc flavors of the world maybe if they're not super essential um and done in a way that wouldn't creep me out but
I'm so leery in giving AI any sort of foothold. Not that it's up to me to say that, but I don't want to give them any sort of foothold in my MMO lest it turn into... just incomprehensible nothing you know where that devs go well we no longer have to make the content because now the AI is doing it so we can just sit back and counter money and not do work. I want you to do work devs. I would rather have human created stuff than AI stuff.
Hopefully, end of rant coming, three, two, one, that we kind of get over this as a fad of trying to shove AI in everything. We put it in its place, we keep it in its place, and then we make all the other space. AI free so that we can continue to focus on human creativity, ingenuity, and bespoke content. I like how you phrase that, though, as if...
It's people who want this. The vast majority of people don't want this. When you actually do surveys on this, people are like, no, this is not helping my life in any way, and it really can't, and we all know it. It's being shoved in from the top down. So they're not going to quit until it's absolutely that house of cards falls and everyone knows they can't make money off of it right now. There are still people who think they can turn this into the next.
sneak oil so they're going to keep doing it or when we run out of power in the world because there's the next problem yeah that's without even getting into ethical problems this is just a utility problem that right with that matthew's asking about and yeah i i like how justin you separated it because there's AI means such a huge giant bucket of things.
that it's like really easy to straw man it you know what i mean and pretty soon suddenly you realize you're accidentally arguing against like cancer research like that's not really what we meant to do like machine learning has like been around for decades it's not new that stuff
people have been using and now we're getting better at it because computational power is increasing blah blah blah so i i have no problem with that i feel like the stuff that is being directed towards singular scientific research purposes is brilliant because fancy calculator good But the stuff that is being used to try to replace basic cognition, the plagiarism machine, bad. Okay? This is really simple division in my head.
that everything can be divided into one of these two categories. And there really isn't a whole lot of room. Like if you're trying to replace something creative, forget it. The machines can't do it. They'll probably never be able to do it because that's just not how creativity works.
Can they continue to go through gigantic data arrays and find patterns that humans would take years to find yeah no they're way better at that because that's like the one thing we built them to do so of course they can do that we need that that's not a bad thing
can they do that with language i mean not yet and i don't think they're ever gonna so no i don't want to see this in my mmos i don't want to see this at all i don't want it replacing people i don't want it replacing thinking that's a big problem is that people are using this for stuff that they should not be using it for i don't want it influencing our searches i don't want it influencing what people think is true i don't want it
adding garbage to our own model, not just the data model for the AI, but for us. I don't want this filling the internet with trash and getting in the way of real things. I think there's something to be said for... Like you said, bespoke content. And I don't just mean MMOs. I mean everywhere.
I think most people would rather pay for the nice thing than get the cheap mass-manufactured junk. And I think fundamentally most people know this. And if they're willing to use it, it's because they think it'll give them a shortage. They're using it in email because it makes it faster to type. No, for the most part I don't think that this
will improve MMOs. I feel like this actually circles all the way back to the original Paley discussion because it's the handcrafted content that is actually roping me in. It is actually causing me to be invested in the NPCs. whom I am meeting in the game, right? You know what I like? I'm just going to interject one question.
I love getting mail from NPCs in Paleo. Like, I walk it, and suddenly my mailbox is like, four or five things that they're following up on some activities i did the previous session like that's really cool i know you know star wars the old republic sort of does that too as story epilogues and
i don't know why i just i like that yeah it's funny all the games we like are doing things like this right and it's not as if a dev is sending that right that's that's scripted that's meant to trigger on certain activities in the game But a human decided to do that. A human decided to set up that script. A human decided to make that quest path. And that's why it's good.
And if you look at what most gen AI is putting out, it's trash. It's bad. It's not actually good. Or it might have the nugget of something good, but the nugget was already in your prompt. So I find it very frustrating. I don't like this question and I don't like you ask us this question. Everything about this is bad. And I don't think it's wrong to play with them because I feel like most people who mess around with a chatbot start to realize how bad they are and how...
unconvincing they are and how useless they are. We just had this story last week about Fortnite, right? Where they put a Darth Vader chatbot. Now there's a whole other question about the voice acting and whether it was
you know, ethically okay to use poor James Earl Jones, the late James Earl Jones voice. I know it was legally okay, but ethically is another question. But the problem is that people immediately started asking him stupid questions, and he started giving stupid, offensive, in some cases, answer.
which is often what happens with chatbots on these your mercantile sites right if you go to like buy shirts but you need to talk to the ai the ai is nonsensical or if you go to your own doctor's website guarantee they're going to have some dumb ass chat
on there that's going to give you bad incorrect information because it's only as good as the information the humans put in it which is often wrong because humans are not that great at this ah my head hurts just even thinking about how awful this is Alright, have you wound down? I'm not wound down. I don't want to see NPCs. Spamming random things it would be a waste of everybody's time because people don't want this now people do want Justin is right people do want the
simulation. They want to feel like they're in a world. Which is why having NPCs on scripts that move around and do random things, seemingly random things, they don't have to actually be random, is so compelling and convincing and why people put this into their games when they have control over modding them. I do this myself. I want more Sims in my Sims world. I want more NPCs hanging out in Vivek City in Morrowind. So I make that happen, right? What about mobs?
like moving and you know that was one of the coolest things about like say Rift is when they did the invasions and seeing like small armies of mobs moving across the zone and suddenly you're like, oh, no longer are the mobs, you know, like fenced into a particular area that they're actually roaming and that they could actually bring the danger to me. It was really interesting and compelling.
i don't disagree and i don't disagree with with the idea of progen being useful either like i i understand like if you try to make all of the quests procedurally generated that sucks because again there's a creativity element there that is
Humans just see through it. That's just something we're really good at But if you're using progen to like develop terrain if you're using it to develop, you know Have trees that all look slightly different using similar texture like that's it's really good at things like that and there's Nothing to be gained by having a human do all of that manually one by one, pixel by pixel. That would be stupid. That would be a huge waste of everybody's time. Humans can't tell the difference.
You can start with having it generate a landscape, and then a human goes in and tweaks and modifies. Which a lot of people will say that with ChatGPT, too. They'll say, well, I'll have it create my whole screenplay, and then I'll just go through and touch it up. It doesn't work because all it's got is what's already out there and it's not very good at creating, of transforming it into something that is uniquely creative for anybody. That's why most of that stuff comes off like slop.
That's the problem. And I don't think it's ever going to improve, especially since we're almost out of training data. We've already got everything that these... These MLs can learn on. There's only so many books out there, so much text out there that it can slurp up. And once it's got it all, now people are... They're not incentivized to continue making more, which means it can't keep learning. It's only learning off of more slop now.
This is a whole separate incident, a whole separate issue of the problem with AI, but to drill this back down to actual AI chatbots in an MMO, I would be insulted. Genuinely. Because that's not just taking food off the table of narrative designers and narrative writers for MMOs and I want them to have work and I want to pay them for their work. But it's also so freaking lazy.
I would be so mad. I would stop clicking on the NPCs. I wouldn't play that game. That's really what it boils down to. If I thought that was happening and if I could see that happening, I would not waste my money on that game. So, no, please don't. Alright, well, I'm going to go cook up some hamburgers and hot dogs today for Memorial Day. Yay! We did this yesterday. Okay, enjoy some.
Yeah. so hopefully you guys are having a good shorter work week or school week there and enjoy playing some more MMOs along the way and let us know what you guys think about the topics we talked about today Of course, you can always send us in some new topics to talk about. Don't use AI. Just use your own voice, your own thought. It's all good. Just to be clear, I don't want to insult Matthew. This was a good conversation worth having.
I just don't want it to be a continuation. Yes, I don't, and yeah. Thank you, Matthew. We do appreciate you sending that in. You can use the show notes to send us in additional questions or topics you'd like us to talk about here on the podcast. For future weeks. We'll be back in June. That is next week. Oh my goodness. Oh my god. What happened to this year? Yeah. I'll be a whole year older too. So this is it people. I'm at the brink.
There's only a couple more shopping days left for my birthday, so go ahead. You don't have to give me anything. Just your love. Just be nice on the website. That would be really cool. We love seeing you guys on the MassVOP community having some really fun, lively discussions in the comments. Keep up the good work. Have some fun playing games this week and we'll see you next week. Later everybody!